It is a recent habit of the American Right to wage war against abstractions. Whereas Lyndon Johnson intended “war on poverty” as a metaphor for progressive redistribution, the neoconservative “war on drugs” and “war on terror”¹ mix allegory with actuality² and are thus contradictory from the very outset: a turbid blend of symbolism and realpolitik, rhetorical obfuscation and dramatically direct violence. It might be fair to give this the dyslexic moniker “unclear war,” for it is neither truly war nor truly peace. Rather, it is Janus-faced, an embodiment of both. In one major regard, this is reminiscent of the Cold War in its juxtaposition of “hot” battles, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, with prolonged ideological campaigns contra both internal and external “enemies.”

In the current “war on terror,” the American military facility at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay is the most spectacular, and publicly debated, theater. I briefly attempt to examine here the consequences of this institution and its broader juridical framework for thinking in political geography and, conversely, the impact of political geography for understanding the war on terror. As we will see, it is both a suggestive and an elusive object. This essay is constituted of two parts: the first is critical, examining the theorization of Camp Delta from the standpoint of political exceptionalism; the second is more speculative, an attempt to access this refractory subject through an alternative framework of spatial and institutional practice.

Guantánamo as State of Exception

It seems, increasingly, that any serious consideration of Guantánamo must confront the recent arguments about the so-called “state of exception.” Although this notion originates with Carl Schmitt’s Dictatorship (1921), it has been recently revived and popularized in Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (2005), as well as his earlier Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). These have had a great impact on recent thinking in political theory—perhaps for reasons that have to do with the anxieties of the current moment.

The term state of exception describes a temporary suspension of constitutional statutes by executive force, such that “the law” may be preserved in the longer run; under its terms, in other words, emergency powers are invoked in order to safeguard the legal order. In France, for example, exception was articulated in the law of August 9, 1849, which held that “a political state of siege could be declared by parliament (or, additionally, by the head of state) in the case of imminent danger to external or internal security” (Agamben 2005: 12). Napoleon III took advantage of this law on three occasions, having redesigned the right to declare emergency as a supreme prerogative of the head of state. In the United States, emergency powers were first officially exercised in 1861, at the outset the Civil War, by Abraham Lincoln (Schmitt 1921: 136). They were subsequently expanded by Woodrow Wilson in the course of the First World War, during which many European nations were suspended in an indefinite state of exception, and again from 1942 to 1945. As Agamben notes, exceptional powers are often associated with military action; in the upshot, the “metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed” (Agamben 2005: 21).

Within the state of exception, the sovereignty of the executive becomes absolute and unreferenced, without need for external justification. It requires neither “legality” nor “legitimacy” (Schmitt 2004: 93). This self-evidently gives rise to a paradox, wherein law, through its own suspension and violation, comes to be preserved by something beyond its control. Schmitt identified this paradox in his critique of the Weimar constitution and the extraordinary powers given to the chancellor under Article 48 (Agamben 2005: 6; Schmitt 2004: 67). The Nazi seizure of power under that article is the central paradigm of exception and, for Agamben, its telos: Auschwitz is described as its juridical and spatial apotheosis, where biopolitical life (zoë) was subject to absolute power and reduced to “bare” existence. This will to purify sovereignty is, for both Schmitt and Agamben, a central tendency of liberalism, as well. In the Weimar case, it was exacerbated by contradictions within the German constitutional system, but the antidemocratic impulse arises generically from a “crisis of decision.” Liberalism, with its “romantic” tendency to evade decision, to encourage debate and consensus and approval, inevitably also leads to a hunger for direct, political action (Schmitt 2004: xv). In his introduction to Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Tracy Strong notes that the exercise of sovereign or executive power attains something of a miraculous or religious character within the state of exception. This is the definition of “political theology”: law comes down like a force of nature or an act of god (Schmitt 2004: xiv). It is only a quasi-divine entity that can redefine law through its seizure and suspension.

This tendency toward the authoritarian is thought by many to explain the peculiar conditions of Guantánamo, as well as, more generally, the autocratic proclivities of the George W. Bush administration. In a widely read commentary, Slavoj Žižek has written that Agamben’s is “simply the book for all those who do not see in 9/11 a mere pretext for patriotic mobilization.”³ Art historian Malcolm Bull likewise has suggested that Agamben’s work is “seemingly designed for the current situation” (Bull 2004: 3). Camp Delta is an analogue, here, of Auschwitz, in kind if not degree: it is a nonjuridical space wherein unmediated power is exerted over captives. As Martin Puchner (2004) observed, the terror of Guantánamo lies precisely in the possibility of a permanent state of exception, where, as he puts it, “the exception, in other words, becomes the rule.” In this context, the Commander in Chief becomes the “ ‘absolute sovereign,” an “executive unencumbered by other branches of government and human rights conventions, free to make emergency decisions” (7). “Bare life” returns in the gaunt bodies arranged on the floor of Abu Ghraib. In Auschwitz, these wraiths were called the musulman (or “muslim”): they were starving, denuded, and marked by their vacant aspect. Here, ironically, it is the figure of the Muslim himself. Agamben describes the musulman as the typical inhabitant of contemporary biopolitics, an inhabitant of the space that is opened when exception becomes rule. This conclusion begins to sound like hysteria, if not bourgeois conceit, in Bull’s restatement: “We are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantánamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated” (2004: 3).

But can we conscionably locate Guantánamo—and with it the state of contemporary American politics—within a state of exception? Does Schmitt’s paradox correctly capture the nature of Camp Delta or of Abu Ghraib as political spaces? In point of fact, it has limitations that, themselves, point toward a more useful conception of Guantánamo and of the executive and legislative armatures that underpin it.