States don’t really mind their citizens dying (provided they don’t all do it at once): they just don’t like anyone else to kill them 
Malcolm Bull
- State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell Buy this book
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben does not want his fingerprints taken and, unlike like most European critics of the evil empire, he has been willing to forego an academic visit to the United States in order to prevent it happening. What is at stake, he explains, is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state’. Fingerprinting makes ‘the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity . . . the body’s biological life’ part of the system of state control. And though it is hard to see how fingerprints, as opposed to the monstrous Other in a passport photo, might constitute an aspect of anyone’s subjectivity, Agamben’s unwillingness to share this information with the American state is still a significant refusal.
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Malcolm Bull is the head of art history and theory at the Ruskin in Oxford. His books include Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality.
Other articles by this contributor:
Hate is the new love · Slavoj Žižek
Ultimate Choice · Thoughts of Genocide
You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife · Hardt and Negri’s Empire
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