The growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction … [it] is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities. The camp is the fourth, inseparable element that has now added itself to – and so broken – the old trinity composed of the state, the nation (birth), and land.

Let me turn … to the contemporary acts of state before returning to Foucault, not to ‘apply’ him … but to rethink the relation between sovereignty and the law that he introduces … With the publication of the new regulations, the US government holds that a number of detainees at Guantanamo will not be given trials at all, but will rather be detained indefinitely. It is crucial to ask under what conditions some human lives cease to become eligible for basic, if not universal, human rights. How does the US government construe these conditions? And to what extent is there a racial and ethnic frame through which these imprisoned lives are viewed and judged such that they are deemed less than human, or as having departed from the recognizable