Why The Name
States of Exception: A Colloquium at Washington and Lee University
What is a State of Exception?
Our colloquium takes its title from a phrase popularized by modern Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. A state of exception, most simply, is the selective suspension of law. It's a political maneuver rooted in a perceived (or manufactured) emergency that aims to protect "authentic" citizens from "dangerous" others. People whom authorities deem dangerous are subject to the law but not protected by it. They are "'absolutely under the law'" but also abandoned by it: their actions are circumscribed but their lives undefended. Thus the state of exception can both protect life and authorize a holocaust.[iii]
The Nazi concentration camp was "the pure space of exception"[iv] where Jews, Roma, the disabled and others - though having committed no crime - were first "taken into custody" to safeguard the German populace.[v] Then to more fully purify the nation, camp inmates were "exterminated" exactly as "Hitler had announced, 'as lice.'" In states of exception, authorities define some people as non-citizens: less than human, part animal, or even pathogens. Rights afforded to full citizens will - to water, to adequate food, to marry, to have children, to live free from harm or to live at all - are selectively withdrawn.
To explain the "pure space of exception," Agamben looks to the work (1920s-1940s) of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theorist who described a "sphere in which every law is suspended" and inside of which "anything could happen as long as it was held to be de facto necessary according to circumstances."[viii] Anything could be done to Jews, "Gypsies," or "idiots" when they were imagined as pollution threatening the German social body's health.[ix]
In states of exception, discretionary powers can have enormous scope and effect. The police, border patrol agents, school principals, teachers, prison guards, asylum administrators, bureaucrats, and citizens at large can assume profound power. With the "normal order" suspended, "whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense" of those "who temporarily act as sovereign."[x] Life and death hang in the balance as these agents subjectively decide on people's fates.[xi]
Far from being unique to Nazi Germany, states of exception emerge in many other times and places. The ancient Roman iustitium is one example. Somewhat like a modern-day declaration of martial law, through the convention of the iustitium the senate could issue a decree calling on leaders and citizens "to take whatever measures they considered necessary for the salvation of the state."[xii] In such circumstances, ends justified means: personal liberties and lives were sacrificed for imaginings of a greater political good. The defensive right to resist was not recognized,[xiii] but offensive actions against people considered "threats" could not be illegal because law was suspended. The iustitium left "the magistrate or whoever acts for him entirely free to act as he sees fit, or even not to act at all."[xiv]
The state of exception, Agamben emphasizes, is not "an anomaly belonging to the past."[xv] Indeed he sees it increasingly as "the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.">[xvi] The state of exception may begin as a temporary suspension of rule necessitated by civic emergency, but Agamben says that a sense of national crisis has "become the rule" in our times. [xvii] Because we're living in seemingly endless national peril (e.g., the interminable "war on terror") citizen rights can be indefinitely suspended or wholly eliminated. We need to examine historic and contemporary dynamics, as well as relations between the two, to understand how human beings can become deprived of their rights.[xviii] Doing so will enable us to recognize states of exception "in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live."[xix]
Virginia: Colonialism, Slavery, Eugenics
The state of exception seems to be a particularly useful way of thinking through ways that lives of Virginians have been differently esteemed, past and present. The appropriation of land from its original inhabitants was an early manifestation of race-based practices that came to dominate lived experience for centuries. Archaeology suggests that indigenous groups had lived in what's now Virginia for at least 12,000 years, but "if you ask Virginia Indians how long our people have been here, they will probably say, 'We have always been here.'"[xx] Anthropologist and member of the Monacan nation, Karenne Wood, explains:
When the English colonists arrived in our homeland in the spring of 1607, perhaps 20,000 Algonquian-speaking peoples were incorporated into several paramount chiefdoms such as the Powhatan and Patawomeke, or into independent tribes such as the Chickahominy and Rappahannock. A similar number of Siouan-speaking people were located to the west, in the piedmont and mountain regions of Virginia, members of a loosely confederated alliance that included the Monacan, Mannahoac, Saponi, Nahyssan, Occaneechi, and Tutelo (Totero) tribes. There were also Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee in the southwestern area, as well as the Nottoway and Meherrin tribes south of Powhatan's domain.[xxi]
Little by little, European colonists and their descendants diminished the freedom, land holdings, and wellbeing of native people. In 1677, for example, many tribes signed treaties with colonial officials making them subjects of the King of England and landholding subject to patent of the Crown. Settlers repeatedly violated agreements and seized Indian land.[xxii] In following centuries, indigenous people continued to be displaced, policed, and impoverished. By the 1920s Virginia had passed and was enforcing the Racial Integrity Act that prohibited marriage to whites by people of color, including Indians.[xxiii] In these and countless other ways over hundreds of years, European settlers worked to cast indigenous Americans into states of exception: rights unrecognized, full humanity denied.
People of African descent brought to Virginia also faced socio-legal categorizations as less than wholly human. As early as 1619, captain of the English ship the White Lion docked at Point Comfort (near Hampton) and sold "20. and odd Negroes" in exchange for food. At least some of them were taken to Jamestown "where they were sold again, likely into slavery."[xxiv] Laws passed by Virginia's General Assembly trace the creation of a state of exception:
1662: Any child born to an enslaved woman will also be a slave.
1669: The "casuall killing of slaves" will not be considered murder.
1692: Slaves do not have the right to a jury trial for capital offenses. Enslaved individuals are not permitted to own horses, cattle, or hogs.
1705: Blacks, free and enslaved, cannot testify as witnesses in court. All black, mulatto, and Indian slaves are considered property.[xxv]
Subject to the law but rarely protected by it, African Americans in Virginia's post-bellum years continued to suffer extraordinary prejudice and extrajudicial violence.[xxvi] Between 1880 and 1930, scores were lynched: seized by public mobs, tortured, and killed. Perhaps a jury would have found some guilty, but many innocent people were murdered for imagined social infractions. The "Shenandoah Valley region had the fewest lynchings during that time period (two), while Southwest Virginia had the most (twenty-eight)." Most "were carried out by mobs of more than fifty people, suggesting that these events were intended as messages from the majority white community to African Americans." [xxvii] The perpetrators of lynchings did not face social or legal consequences. Indeed, newspapers often applauded their actions; sheriffs either approved or looked the other way. Thus from slavery to Jim Crow, African Americans have often occupied states of exception. Their killings were not murders; their killers were white citizens who seized popular sovereignty and took any action they imagined necessary to protect the community founded on white supremacy.
Many people of European descent in Virginia also fell subject to powerful impulses toward social purification through the eugenics movement (late 19th to mid-20th centuries). Eugenics was an attempt to "purify" society by eliminating "the unfit," most commonly in Virginia through compulsory sterilization. Nazi policies had intimate ideological ties to Virginia eugenics. Virginia's 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity and other legislation aspired to eliminate the "unfit" - people of color, the disabled, and the poor - from future generations. In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and almost immediately saw to the passage of a "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring."[xxviii] Like many Virginia authorities, Hitler criticized his country for allowing the procreation of "'monstrosities half-way between human and ape'" and championed a policy preventing "defective people" from "propagating equally defective offspring."[xxix]
At Western State Lunatic Asylum (later "Hospital") in Staunton, Superintendent Dr. Joseph DeJarnette worried that the Germans were "beating us at our own game" by more effectively cleansing their population.[xxx] At the Lynchburg Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,[xxxi] Dr. Albert Priddy characterized his charges as a "blight on mankind" and warned of a coming emergency unless "some radical measures are adopted" to keep the unfit from procreating.[xxxii] His successor in 1934 praised "the principle of genetic control" and called for federal law, based on German example, extending "not merely to institutions but also to the country's entire population."[xxxiii]
As in other states of exception, the tide of the "unfit" was vividly depicted as a civic crisis. Those threatening the polity were imagined as less than human - subject to law but not protected by it - and a wide array of actors assumed powers over them. Physicians, professors, lawmakers and others described the disabled as profound idiots, "a helpless, speechless, disgusting burden"[xxxiv] and even as "'social excreta' that 'should be placed beyond the possibility of contaminating the body social' through euthanasia."[xxxv] The feebleminded were "'a perpetual menace, a constant source of trouble and danger.'"[xxxvi] DeJarnette decried those who invoked "'the so-called inalienable rights of man'" to protect "'the syphilitic, epileptic, imbecile, drunkard and unfit.'"[xxxvii] The "menace" of the unfit, others agreed, "'rises above a question of altruism and becomes a question of self-preservation.'"[xxxviii]
Dr. Harvey Jordan, UVA Professor of Anatomy and Dean of the School of Medicine, often urged his fellow citizens to overcome their "traditional fetishism of 'personal liberty' and 'equal rights'" to defend the "race."[xxxix] Between the 1910s and 1930s, Jordan frequently claimed that there was "'no issue so vital to this nation today as the rearing of the human thoroughbred,'" and that it was "'incumbent upon the patriotic, and the strong and intelligent, and especially those in positions of trust, influence, and responsibility to use every means, to search every resource, to make any sacrifice, and to go to any reasonable extent to ameliorate, and if possible eradicate, this human woe.'"[xl]
Jordan and other scientists understood themselves as the "nation's eugenic sentinels"[xli] facing "'an increasing army of defectives.'"[xlii] Decision-making powers were widely dispersed among them, but rights were suspended for others. Virginians confined to the Lynchburg Colony were sterilized without their consent or that or their parents or spouses.[xliii] Superintendents of workhouses designed to "reform vicious women" - often those who'd given birth out of wedlock due to sexual assault - patrolled "the line between 'normal' society and 'deviant' behavior." As gatekeepers they "decided which inmates could be 'paroled' back into society and which were 'incorrigibles' who needed indefinite segregation."[xliv] In 1909 Virginia teachers received a checklist for diagnosing "backward children" who were "deemed 'unfit for education in public schools'" for deficiencies including "blinking, inco-ordination, spasms ... cold and clammy hands and excessive pallor or blushing; slight malformation; drooling; carelessness, indolence, inattention, unreliable memory, obstinacy and either passion or stolidness [and] imperfections of speech, sight, hearing."[xlv] Many such children were committed to and eventually sterilized at Western State and the Lynchburg Colony. The scope of "deficiencies" was extraordinary and not limited to children. UVA Dean Jordan and other eugenicists also correlated left-handedness with a lack of fitness in adults. Harvard alumnus, author, and educator Edwin Tenney Brewster purported to have found c. 1913 that "'a disproportionate number of left-handed adults among criminals, insane persons, imbeciles, epileptics, vagrants and social failures of various sorts.'"[xlvi]
Asylums Yesterday, Prisons Today
A main goal of the "States of Exception" colloquium is to more fully recognize yesterday in today: to show how inequities of the past extend into the present or have re-emerged under different guise. It's tempting now, for instance, to feel secure (if not superior) looking back on the horror of early 20th-century "lunatic" asylums where patients were compulsorily sterilized and where, having been admitted for slight disabilities or mental illness, frequently died of disease. If grounds for admission included intemperance, sexual disorder, dissolute habits, and derangement of senses, common causes of death were tuberculosis, dysentery, and diarrhea. Many patients incarcerated for years died of marasmus - a form of severe malnutrition and protein deficiency.
Those asylums are now closed or closing. Mid-20th-century reform moved funds from large institutions to smaller, community facilities. The latter, however, are rarely sustainable - lacking benefit of scale - and families are often unable to find help, particularly inpatient admission, for loved ones in extreme psychological distress. The Virginian-Pilot recently released a study of mental illness in American prisons, finding that hundreds of people incarcerated for minor infractions related to their established schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression soon died behind bars. In New York, a mentally ill homeless veteran was arrested for trespassing and then "baked to death in a jail cell," meaning that he succumbed to dehydration or heat stroke.[xlvii] Another man was arrested for disturbing the peace. "His father pleaded in vain to jail officials for him to be given his medications for severe mental disorders. Less than two weeks later, [he] died from a bacterial infection after his own excrement got into cuts that he received from being beaten and put in a restraint chair."[xlviii]
Mental health advocates, sheriffs, and jail staff usually have few resources. As one advocate explained, "The mental health system has nothing to offer; social support systems have nothing to offer." The ill are subject to the law but abandoned by it; they are confined and their needs starkly unmet. "They are seen by others as people to be afraid of rather than as friends and neighbors."[xlix] In a state of exception, they become threats, not citizens or full humans.[l]
Immigrants and Citizens
Like prison and mental health reform, immigration has been and remains a significant issue with implications for people cast into states of exception. Eugenicists like geneticist Dr. Ivey Foreman Lewis, dean at the University of Virginia (1934-1953), was a staunch opponent of both desegregation and immigration from "undesirable" countries. Lewis lectured, "''The one clear message that biological investigation has brought as its gift to the thought of the twentieth century is that the idea of environment molding something out of nothing is sheer nonsense.'" The notion of "'the great American melting pot, into which one can put the refuse of three continents and draw out good, sound American citizens' was 'simply and perilously false.'"[li]
Lewis and others feared that "healthy Nordic immigration would give way to hordes of degenerate stock feeling the desolation" of war-torn Europe."[lii] Refugees from communist and eastern European countries were thought to have a "genetic proclivity toward anarchism": their very "genes harbored the seeds of future revolt." Eugenicists urged selective immigration restriction and "selective breeding among 'Old Stock' Americans as the only bulwarks protecting civilization."[liii] These themes resound in today's headlines. Politicians have recently "balked at an immigration deal that would include protections for people from Haiti and some nations in Africa," asking why the US should "accept immigrants from 'shithole countries' rather than from places like Norway." (Over 80 percent of Norway's population is ethnic Norwegian, according to a 2017 C.I.A. fact book, making the country overwhelmingly white.[liv]) Various iterations of a "Muslim ban," as well as references to Mexican refugees as rapists, criminals, and animals repeat eugenicists' assertions that whole nations are essentially toxic: their emigrants less-than-human and sure to poison the American nation. Donald Trump claims that unaccompanied children from Central America seeking asylum in the United States only "look innocent" but are in fact future gang members. Like refugees from eastern Europe at mid-century, these migrants are imagined to contain irrevocable, virulent seeds of our national destruction. Much like Japanese Americans during the Second World War, undocumented Latinx youth are sequestered in detention centers to "safeguard" the nation.[lv]
Anthropologist and MacArthur Fellow Jason De León notes that many migration researchers adopt Agamben's state of exception model, "the process whereby sovereign authorities declare emergencies in order to suspend the legal protections afforded to individuals while simultaneously unleashing the power of the state upon them."[lvi] Undocumented migrants enter border zones that "exist outside the bounds of normal state or moral law." These border zones are "states of exception - physical and political locations where an individual's rights and protections under law can be stripped away upon entrance."[lvii] In his book - The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail - De León explains with graphic poignancy how undocumented immigrants on the southern US border are abandoned to heat of the desert, to wild animals, to bandits, and to torturous deaths from dehydration. The "so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of the rights belonging to the citizens of a state."[lviii]
In states of exception, not all humans are guaranteed human rights, and citizens are not always assured of citizenship. In Europe between the 1920s and 1940s, laws were passed for the denationalization of citizens.[lix] Belgium and France "revoked the naturalization of citizens who had committed 'antinational' acts," while Italy issued an "analogous law with respect to citizens who had shown themselves to be 'unworthy of Italian citizenship.'" To protect "German blood and honor," citizenship in the Reich became not a right but a privilege to be earned: "something of which one had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question." Jews, Gypsies, and others considered unworthy of the regime were denationalized - stripped of citizenship - as a preliminary step toward their assignment to camps.[lx]
Mark Twain is, apocryphally, said to have observed that history might not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Questions of who merits citizenship, and conditions under which it might be revoked, are again in the news. Soon after his election, Donald Trump tweeted, "Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!" (3:55 AM - 29 Nov 2016). Trump recently suggested that NFL players should be prohibited from kneeling during the national anthem: "You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn't be playing. You shouldn't be there. Maybe you shouldn't be in the country."[lxi] Other national leaders have "called for stripping citizenship from and deporting any Muslim who believes in sharia law."[lxii]
Revoking American citizenship has long been "a rare and relatively drastic measure by immigration authorities, reserved for foreigners who commit egregious crimes or acts of fraud, or pose a threat to national security." Now, however, thousands of old finger-print records are being investigated to "determine whether foreigners made false or fraudulent statements in their attempts to obtain legal residency in the United States."[lxiii] Journalist Masha Gessen explains that a new federal task force itself is "undoing the naturalization of the more than twenty million naturalized citizens in the American population by taking away their assumption of permanence. All of them-all of us-are second-class citizens now. The President calls immigrants 'animals.' The Attorney General presumes that everyone crossing the border-or at least the southern border-is a criminal." A naturalized citizen himself, Gessen observes
that over the years, the applications for both citizenship and permanent residence have grown ever longer, filling with questions that seem to be designed to be used against the applicant. Question 26 on the green-card application, for example, reads, 'Have you EVER committed a crime of any kind (even if you were not arrested, cited, charged with, or tried for that crime)?' (Emphasis in the original.) The question does not specify whether it refers to a crime under current U.S. law or the laws of the country in which the crime might have been committed. In the Soviet Union of my youth, it was illegal to possess foreign currency or to spend the night anywhere you were not registered to live. In more than seventy countries, same-sex sexual activity is still illegal. On closer inspection, just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar
and thus find themselves in the crosshairs of denaturalization and deportation.[lxiv]
Back to Virginia
These issues will not seem, to colloquium participants, remote in time or space. Some attendees are working with incarcerated populations and undocumented migrant children being held in a Valley juvenile detention center. Others are researching families forcibly displaced from their homes to make way for Shenandoah National Park. Former residents were heavily stigmatized (poor, backward), and some were committed to Valley asylums. Several colloquium attendees are investigating continuing reverberations of eugenics in southwestern Virginia. Others are tracing the legacies of enslavement, lynching, Jim Crow, and segregation in persistent housing and wealth inequalities. Still others are interested in ways that war, poverty, sexuality, gender, and religious affiliation influenced and continue to act on prospects of safety and wellbeing in southwest Virginia communities.
Some are considering evolving notions of citizen rights: is access to information a need or a privilege? In Virginia's past, enslaved African Americas were legally prohibited from learning to read, and during Jim Crow they often had to migrate for education beyond the primary grades. Today, can lack of access to internet resources or to mobile phones deprive individuals (of any ethnicity) critical information, skills, social networks, transportation, or education?[lxv] Similarly, we've seen that thousands of poor Virginians, black and white, were sterilized because authorities considered them "unfit" to reproduce, but still today debates flare about who "deserves" to have children[lxvi] or healthcare.[lxvii]
Colloquium participants include civic and religious leaders, journalists, media specialists, directors of nonprofits, and scholars from fields including history, sociology, environmental studies, poverty studies, archaeology, and anthropology. We share concern for circumstances in which residents of southwest Virginia have been denied, or had to struggle for, recognition of their full humanity. Many of us are especially interested in experience of people who were cast into painful states of exception, and how such stories might alter popular visions of people suffering in the present. Perhaps engaging heart and head through true stories from local history will help engender greater empathy for "others" now in southwest Virginia. In this day-long workshop, we hope to find ways to pool our experience and knowledge of the past to serve the present and future.
Works Cited
Giorgio Agamben (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Giorgio Agamben (2005). State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Judith Butler (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
Mijin Cha (October 31, 2013). "Poor People Do Not Deserve to Have Children." Demos http://www.demos.org/blog/10/31/13/poor-people-do-not-deserve-have-children
Colonial Williamsburg (n.d.). Slavery and the Law in Virginia. http://www.history.org/history/teaching/slavelaw.cfm
Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Thomas Kaplan (January 11, 2018). Trump Alarms Lawmakers with Disparaging Words for Haiti and Africa. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/us/politics/trump-shithole-countries.html
Jason De León (2015). The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Photographs by Michael Wells. Oakland: University of California Press.
Gregory Michael Dorr (2008). Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Brian Fung (March 8, 2017). The Luxury of Telling Poor People that I-Phones Are a Luxury. Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/08/the-luxury-of-telling-poor-people-that-iphones-are-a-luxury/?utm_term=.0f329a79d61b
Masha Gessen (June 18, 2018). In America, Naturalized Citizens No Longer Have an Assumption of Permanence. New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/in-america-naturalized-citizens-no-longer-have-an-assumption-of-permanence
David A. Graham (November 29, 2016). The Republican Vogue for Stripping Citizenship: Donald Trump suggests it as a penalty for flag-burning, although the Supreme Court has ruled that it's protected speech. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/the-republican-vogue-for-stripping-citizenship/508979/
David A. Graham (May 24, 2018). "Maybe You Shouldn't Be in the Country." The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/trumps-double-standard-on-free-speech-and-the-nfl/561119/
Gary A. Harki (August 23, 2018) Horrific deaths, brutal treatment: Mental illness in America's jails: A comprehensive Virginian-Pilot investigation. The Virginian-Pilot https://pilotonline.com/news/local/projects/jail-crisis/article_5ba8a112-974e-11e8-ba17-b734814f14db.html
Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry (1998). Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Paul A. Lombardo (2008). Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Martha McCartney, Martha (June 26, 2018). Virginia's First Africans. Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_s_First_Africans#start_entry
Nick Miroff (June 13, 2018). Scanning immigrants' old fingerprints, U.S. threatens to strip thousands of citizenship. Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/scanning-immigrants-old-fingerprints-us-threatens-to-strip-thousands-of-citizenship/2018/06/13/2230d8a2-6f2e-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.c8f27f713c33
Edmund S. Morgan (2003[1975]). American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Jake Pearson (March 18, 2014). Mentally Ill Veteran 'Basically Baked To Death' In His Jail Cell: NYC Official. Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/mentally-ill-veteran-basically-baked-to-death-in-his-nyc-jail-cell-2014-3
Rachel Roberts (May 2, 2017). Republican Congressman suggests poor people don't deserve healthcare for not leading "good lives." The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/republcan-congressman-mo-brooks-poor-people-no-healthcare-good-lives-subsidised-alabama-a7713371.html
Alicia Roth (2018). Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books.
Brendan Wolfe and Laura K. Baker (2016). Lynching in Virginia. Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lynching_in_Virginia#start_entry
Karenne Wood (2008). Virginia Indians: Our Story, pp. 12-23 in The Virginia Indian Heritage Trail, second edition, ed. Karenne Wood. Charlottesville: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
[i] Agamben 2005:4
[ii] Agamben 1998:58, referencing Jean-Luc Nancy
[iii] Agamben 1998:3, referencing Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
[iv] Agamben 1998:134
[v] Agamben 1998:167
[vi] Agamben 1998:114
[vii] "The transformation into a werewolf corresponds perfectly to the state of exception, during which (necessarily limited) time the city is dissolved and men enter into a zone in which they are no longer distinct from beasts" (Agamben 1998:107).
[viii] in Agamben 1998:36
[ix] In this intellectual genealogy, Agamben (1998:8) also explores the notion of Homo sacer: a "sacred man who may be killed and yet not sacrificed." In ancient Rome, "'The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide. ... This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred'" (Agamben 1998:71 citing Pompeius Festus). The term seems to challenge many modern understandings of sanctity, but for purposes of this colloquium, it seems appropriate and adequate to adopt one definition Oxford English Dictionary of "sacred" as "set apart." Homo sacer occupies a state of exception because (s)he is set outside of both civil and divine law - truly abandoned, belonging to and protected by no one (Agamben 1998:32).
[x] Agamben 1998:99 on line version
[xi] Agamben 2005:34
[xii] Agamben 2005:41
[xiii] Agamben 2005:10
[xiv] Agamben 2005:50
[xv] Agamben 1998:166
[xvi] Agamben 2005:2
[xvii] Agamben 1998:12
[xviii] Agamben 1998:171
[xix] Agamben 1998:111
[xx] Wood 2008:12
[xxi] Wood 2008:14
[xxii] Wood 2008:16-17
[xxiii] Wood 2008:20
[xxiv] McCartney 2018
[xxv] Colonial Williamsburg n.d.; see also Morgan 2003(1975)
[xxvi] Some white Virginians were also lynched.
[xxvii] Wolfe and Baker 2016
[xxviii] Lombardo 2008:202
[xxix] Lombardo 2008:201
[xxx] Lombardo 2008:209
[xxxi] Currently called the Central Virginia Training Center.
[xxxii] Lombardo 2008:15
[xxxiii] Lombardo 2008:208
[xxxiv] Lombardo 2008:15
[xxxv] Dorr 2008:113 citing Dr. G. Frank Lydston (1909). Lydston continued: "The executioner" should become "the 'social surgeon' who removes 'the social cancer'... quietly, humanely, and unexpectedly ... with a secret pipe for the admission of a deadly gas.' The scope of this 'social surgery' should extend beyond the executioner's chamber, to the asylum and nursery. Euthanizing the disabled seemed to Lydston to be the greatest mercy, because ... 'Being born in sometimes a calamity.'" Compare jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche's concept of a life unworthy of being lived, adopted by Nazis to rationalize the holocaust. The term a life not worth living "'applies first of all to individuals who must be considered 'incurably lost' following an illness or accident and who, fully conscious of their condition, desire 'redemption' [death] ... More problematic is ... the second group, compromising 'incurable idiots. ... [T]here is no ascertainable consent to die; on the other hand, their killing does not infringe upon any will to live that must be overcome. Their life is absolutely without purpose, but they do not find it intolerable.'" Agamben (1998:138-139) comments that even in this case the authors see "no reason, 'be it juridical, social, or religious not to authorize the killing of these men, who are nothing but the frightening reverse image ... of authentic humanity' ... [T]he determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of 'life devoid of value' (or 'life unworthy of being lived') corresponds exactly ... to the bare life of homo sacer."
[xxxvi] Dorr 2008:122
[xxxvii] Lombardo 2008:121
[xxxviii] Dorr 2008:22; Lombardo 2008:17
[xxxix] Dorr 2008:63. Here as in much Virginia eugenic discourse, the white race and the American nation were one. Social purification required the removal of African Americans through eugenics, strict segregation, and/or "re"patriation to Africa, along with the elimination of white people exhibiting behaviors considered hereditary, including "'criminality, pauperism, degeneracy, idiocy, insanity, and various forms of maladjustment.'"
[xl] Dorr 2008:62
[xli] Dorr 2008:91
[xlii] Dorr 2008:114
[xliii] Dorr 2008:122, Virginia's Board of Charities and Corrections (BCC) was to "'register, examine and commit the feebleminded to institutions where they would be segregated from 'normal' citizens' and to 'see that such moral, medical and surgical treatment'" as superintendents may "'deem proper shall be given such patients.'"
[xliv] Dorr 2008:119
[xlv] Dorr 2008:113-114
[xlvi] Halttunen and Perry citing Brewster (1998:87) [xlvii] Pearson (2014)
[xlviii] In 2016, an 18-year-old named Marc suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. His father "took him from treatment center to treatment center, looking for a bed so his son could get help," without success. Someone called the police at one treatment center, and Marc was incarcerated by himself in a small cell with no toilet or sink. "Day by day, Marc's condition deteriorated. On March 5, he was no longer answering questions. On March 6, a doctor noted that he'd slept less than 30 minutes in the previous two days. By March 7, the fifth day of his confinement, he was smearing feces on the walls and rolling on the floor naked. Staff made no effort to get him mental health treatment or remove him from isolation. Staff noted on March 10 that Marc had not had food or water for several days. ... On March 11, having not had anything to eat or drink for at least six days, Moreno died in a cell. He was covered in his own waste." Suffering from mental illness and arrested for misdemeanors, Marc died on his eighth day of incarceration. (Harki 2018)
[xlix] Harki (2018) quoting Laura Usher, a mental health advocate and the former senior manager for criminal justice and advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness
[l] Journalist Alicia Roth begins her 2018 book - Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness - with mention of Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey's narrator recalls hospital official leading teachers on a tour and "boasting of how far things have come from the 'old-fashioned cruelty' that used to reign in such places. ... 'What a cheery atmosphere, don't you agree? ... Oh when I think back to the old days, on the filth, the bad food, even, yes, the brutality, oh, I realize ladies that we have come a long way.'" Roth notes, however, that "as Kesey's novel makes devastatingly clear," this "new-and-improved institution simply offers the same old abuse in a different package." Roth makes a similar case for nonfictional institutions for the mentally ill and disabled today. Asylums like Western State and the Lynchburg Colony were drastically downsized or closed beginning in the 1960s, and "because there was no place else for them to go, they moved, more or less directly, into jails and prisons." She finds that "the only real difference between Kesey's time and our own is that the mistreatment of people with mental illness now happens in jails and prisons."[l] We have re-created, Roth says, "much of the same dysfunction that pervaded the asylums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the very abuses we sought to end by shutting them down. Overcrowding is common, oversight is poor, and abuse is widespread," largely because correctional facilities are "hopelessly ill-equipped for the job" of serving as "de facto mental health care providers." She notes that "nearly half of the people executed nationwide between 2000 and 2015 had been diagnosed with a mental illness and/or substance use disorder in their adult lives." As in past decades and centuries, "We still lock sick people away from the rest of society. We still keep many in solitary confinement. We still fail to provide adequate treatment for them." Not only is this treatment abysmally ineffective, Roth observes, but also "locking up vulnerable people in inhumane conditions is fundamentally immoral." (Roth 2018:1-11)
[li] Dorr 2008:75
[lii] Dorr 2008:107
[liii] Dorr 2008:108
[liv] Davis et al. 2018
[lv] Central to the state of exception is the power to decide or "deem": to determine subjectively, in the absence of any infraction, that some segments of the population are undesirables threatening to the polity. As both Agamben (2005:3) and theorist Judith Butler have pointed out, this process continues to play out at Guantanamo Bay. Those interred are neither "prisoners nor persons accused, but simply 'detainees,'" a category that "radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being." They are detained indefinitely, not because they've committed a crime but because US administrators suspect they might do so if released. In the "name of a security alert and national emergency, the law is effectively suspended in both its national and international forms. And with the suspension of law comes a new exercise of state sovereignty ... though an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have the ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not." This "license to brand and categorize and detain on the basis of suspicion alone, expressed in this operation of 'deeming,' is potentially enormous. We have already seen it at work in racial profiling, in the detention of thousands of Arab residents or Arab-American residents, sometimes on the basis of last names alone; the harassment of any number of US and non-US citizens at the immigration borders because some official 'perceives' a potential difficulty; the attacks on individuals of Middle Eastern descent on US streets." (Butler 2004:51-76)
[lvi] De León 2015:68
[lvii] De León 2015:27
[lviii] Agamben 1998:126
[lix] Agamben 1998:99 on-line version
[lx] Agamben 1998:132
[lxi] Graham 2018
[lxii] Graham 2016
[lxiii] Miroff 2018
[lxiv] Gessen 2018
[lxv] Fung 2017
[lxvi] Cha 2013
[lxvii] Roberts 2017