GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE
NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
by
Claudio Minca
Minca, C., 2006: Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical
Nomos. Geogr. Ann., 88 B (4): 387–403.
ABSTRACT. In this paper I reflect on the progressive normali-
zation of a series of geographies of exception within Western de-
mocracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new bio-
political power that is progressively affirming itself in our every-
day lives – and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, se-
cret, ontology of the political.
I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and,
specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins
his theory of sovereign power.
Starting from Agamben’s spatial conceptualizations, I explore
his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the
contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the
crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt de-
scribed as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the
definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had domi-
nated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the
lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century
which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some
key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular,
the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel’s grand geo-
graphical project and the Geopolitik experiment.
What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geo-
graphies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital
that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil
the arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which
turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo-biopolitical machine.
Key words: biopolitics, Agamben, Nomos, history of geography,
camp
Introduction
On 7 July 2005, five suicide attacks rip through the
heart of London, striking its Underground in par-
ticular. The attacks leave fifty-four dead and count-
less wounded. On 22 July, two weeks after the at-
tacks, a suspected terrorist is shot down by a police
anti-terrorist unit after having been captured on the
Underground. The suspected terrorist is, in fact, a
Brazilian electrician who, allegedly seeing himself
followed by plain-clothes police, decides to flee
and, once reached, is killed with five shots to the
head. His behaviour and clothing (according to the
agents, much too heavy for the warm London tem-
perature), rendered him an homo sacer (Agamben,
1995), a suspected terrorist who can be deliberately
killed without committing homicide. In the days
that follow, the police forward their apologies to the
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
family for the unfortunate error and reassure that
they will do everything in their power to prevent
similar mistakes in the future. At the same time,
however, the official communiqués insist that the
preventive measures which consent shooting to kill
suspects in the head (the so-called ‘Operation Kra-
tos’ – see la Repubblica, 2005a), introduced in the
days after the July attacks, are absolutely necessary
in order to avert other suicide attacks and to assure
the protection of London’s citizenry. Jean Charles
de Menezes, apparently marked out by his heavy
clothing, was killed to protect the body of the popu-
lation/citizenry – of which he, in that specific time
and place, suddenly ceased to be part of. The coun-
ter-terrorism measures transformed, in place, the
electrician into homo sacer, granting the police
agents absolute sovereign power over him: the
right, that is, to define, within the instant, the con-
fine between a life worth living and a life that does
not deserve to live (on some of the controversies re-
garding the police’s behaviour that have emerged in
the subsequent months see Cowan, 2005).
This sovereign power is only in part a function
of the identities of the actors involved in that ma-
cabre scene; it is, above all, the product of a space
of exception – the London Underground – that
granted the agents that extraordinary, arbitrary, de-
cisional power. In theory, any of us acting like the
Brazilian that day could be killed without a crime
having been committed. In a regime of exception,
all of us can become potential homines sacri for the
very fact that we travel on the Underground; for the
fact that we enter into a vast and extraordinary
space of exception – extraordinary precisely for its
apparent normality. Within this space of exception,
the norm and its transgression are decided in the
moment; they straddle a mobile confine that we, as
citizens, are not consented to know, but that re-
quires us to be ready to die to save ourselves (Cav-
alletti, 2005). A confine with respect to which, at
any moment, can be decided the threshold between
our life worth living – and that which can be sup-
pressed without committing homicide.
A few months later in Milan, the Italian courts
387
 CLAUDIO MINCA
open an investigation into the activities of twenty-
two CIA agents, charged with having kidnapped
and deported an Egyptian imam in February 2003
(la Repubblica, 2005b). The accusations are fully
substantiated and an arrest warrant is issued for the
agents, causing the Italian government considera-
ble embarrassment, as the activities were carried
out in violation of Italian laws and, indeed, Italian
national sovereignty (la Repubblica, 2005c). Just a
few weeks before, Le Monde (Chambraud, 2005)
had unveiled a series of other similar ‘kidnappings’
that had taken place in other European countries
over the past couple of years, as well as countless
‘secret flights’ that had transited with their human
cargo through the airports of the Old Continent, en
route to undisclosed locations (Leser et al., 2005;
see also Amar et al., 2005; Staglianò, 2005). The
exception to the norm, to the juridical order in ef-
fect within the national territory, thus becomes not
only systematic, but part and parcel of a veritable
strategy of intervention implicitly consented to by
European governments (Leser et al., 2005, p. 25).
In the light of these events, we should ask ourselves
if we are today witnessing a definitive paradigmatic
break in conceptions of the relationship between
juridical-political order and territory; if we are fac-
ing the creation of an enormous space of exception
within which each and every one of us – in a tem-
porary and arbitrary suspension of the norm – can
be potentially whisked away to a secret prison, sim-
ilar to in the panoptic nightmare imagined so well
in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
This paper will remark upon the progressive nor-
malization of a series of geographies of exception
within Western democracies and, in particular, the
relation of these to the new biopolitical nomos that
is progressively affirming itself in our everyday
lives – and that appears to be imposing itself as the
new, secret ontology of the political. The writings
of Giorgio Agamben in these past years have fur-
nished a formidable body of reflection regarding
the deep nature of exception in contemporary pol-
itics. In particular, Agamben’s notions of homo sac-
er and nuda vita (bare life), fundamental pillars of
his theory of sovereignty, have stimulated count-
less disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates and
form today key reference points for discussions of
the political grammar of modernity (see e.g. others,
Edkins et al., 2004; Norris, 2003, 2004a, 2004b;
also the special issue of Paragraph edited by Dil-
lon, 2002). Yet, despite the enormous impact of the
Italian philosopher’s work, little has been written
thus far about the spatial architecture of his
388
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
thought. It is my firm belief that Agamben’s theo-
retical edifice should be conceived of, above all, as
a grand spatial theory; or, better yet, that one of Ag-
amben’s most important intuitions is that there is no
politics, and thus no political analysis, without a
theory of space (it is not by chance, in fact, that two
of the principal referents in the elaboration of his
biopolitical theory of exception are Carl Schmitt
and Michel Foucault). The concept of the space of
exception is, indeed, key to Agamben’s theoretical
apparatus.
In the pages which follow, I will try to demon-
strate how, starting precisely from Agamben’s spa-
tial conceptualizations, we can begin to explore his
attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordi-
nates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a
nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive
demolition of that which Carl Schmitt (1998, pp.
161–265) described as the ius publicum Europae-
um. I will note, moreover, how the definitive disso-
lution of the geographical nomos that had dominat-
ed the two centuries preceding the First World War
(as described by Schmitt), and the lack of a new, al-
ternative, geographical nomos in the century which
followed, can also be grasped by critically re-read-
ing some key episodes in the history of European
geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the
work of Friedrich Ratzel (and, in part, that of Karl
Haushofer). Indeed, both Schmitt (1998, p. 84) and
Agamben (2003, p. 48), albeit in different fashion,
make reference in their writings to the work of the
putative father of political geography. What I will
try to demonstrate here is that to understand the
deep nature of the geographies of exception that
arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think
in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil
the arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre
around which turn the wheels of the macabre bio-
political machine; a biopolitical machine that to-
day’s new global political grammar is perhaps,
once again, attempting to bring to its extreme con-
sequences.
I cannot hope to tackle the entire spatial archi-
tecture of Agamben’s thought here, for such a task
would require a book; a book which, I believe, it is
geographers’ task to write. What I will try to do
here, rather, is to hint at some of the key spatial
questions raised by Agamben’s work, with some
brief allusions to Ratzel’s grand geographical
project and to Haushofer’s Geopolitik experiment.
I will argue that not only should geography engage
with Agamben’s spatial theory, but it should also
interrogate the production of a new implicit global
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
nomos, a new Atlantic nomos that risks translating
itself into a terrifying biopolitical caesura of the
body of the nation and of our individual bodies – as
the new danger evoked today even in the very banal
decision to travel on London’s Underground ap-
pears to portend.
The end of the European nomos and the
triumph of exception
Agamben’s considerations on the state of exception
take as their starting point the paradox of sover-
eignty as presented by Schmitt. According to the
German legal theorist, the sovereign is he (sic) to
whom the juridical order grants the power to pro-
claim the state of exception and, thus, to suspend
the order’s very validity. The sovereign, Schmitt in-
sists, is at the same time both outside – and inside
– the juridical order (see Agamben, 1995, p. 19;
1996, p. 84; 2004, pp. 33–34). Agamben remarks,
in particular, on that which he defines as the implicit
topology of the paradox of sovereignty; that is, the
mechanism by which the sovereign, possessing the
legal means to suspend the juridical order, places
himself (legally) outside of the law. This observa-
tion is key both to understanding the spatial theory
implicit in Agamben’s own work but it is also a vital
starting point for my own attempt to rethink in ex-
plicitly geographical terms the spatial nature of that
which has been defined as the new biopolitical era.
I will begin, therefore, by briefly considering the
two key spatial-ontological devices that structure
Agamben’s theory of exception – the camp and the
ban – to then move on to a discussion of the sup-
posed dissolution of the geographical nomos de-
scribed by Schmitt, suggesting some ways in which
an understanding of this latter point can help us to
better decipher the geographies of decision that ap-
pear to guide American geo-biopolitics today.
According to Schmitt, there is no norm applica-
ble to chaos. To obtain juridical-political order, a
‘normal’ situation must be created. At the same
time, however, any such order is senseless without
territorial grounding – and without the meaning
granted by such grounding. In this optic, the occu-
pation and denomination of territory thus become
the foundational ontological gestures, from which
all rights emanate and within which space and
right, order and its localization, come together
(Schmitt, 1998, p. 26). All rights, all laws are thus
applicable only to specific ‘territorial situations’ –
and can only be suspended, with respect to such
specific ‘situations’, within the exception. Sch-
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
mitt’s theory of exception is therefore premised
upon the recognition of the necessity of a funda-
mental spatial ‘measure’ of the Earth – of a spatial
theory – starting from which both order and the sus-
pension of order gain meaning. And what has al-
ways been the preoccupation of geography and
geographers if not the spatial measure of the Earth
– a measure which, at a certain point in time, came
to be termed ‘geographical space’ (see Farinelli,
2003)? Indeed, has not the implicit and explicit def-
inition of territorial order always been an essential
task of geography? In this sense, Schmitt’s Das
Nomos von der Erde reflects in many ways the spa-
tial ontologies of the Ratzelian project – a project
strategically misread by twentieth century academ-
ic geography. The Schmittian theory of exception
upon which Agamben’s reasoning draws is thus
firmly rooted in geographical theory.
The essence of sovereignty, Schmitt continues
(1988, evoked by Agamben, 1995, p. 20; 1996, p.
84; 2004, p. 47), is not the monopoly of sanction or
rule, but rather the monopoly of decision. The ex-
ception, which makes sense only when clearly de-
fined in spatial terms, reveals this deep nature of
sovereign authority. In proclaiming the state of ex-
ception, the German legal theorist concludes, sov-
ereign authority demonstrates that it does not need
law to create law. The exception is thus more inter-
esting than normality: ‘this latter proves nothing,
while the exception proves everything […] the rule
lives only within the exception’ (Agamben, 1995,
p. 20). However, to ‘live’, the rule requires a spatial
theory, a ‘measure’ of the world that grants it ma-
teriality and meaning. The juridical order ‘does not
originally present itself simply as sanctioning a
transgressive fact but instead constitutes itself
through the repetition of the same act without any
sanction, that is, as an exceptional case’ (Agamben,
1995, p. 31; 1998, p. 26; see also 2004, pp. 44–49).
Such repetition of the exception must, necessarily,
be spatialized, for its very existence depends upon
its (concrete) location outside of the juridical order,
beyond the ‘measure’ that translates space into
norm. The law, Agamben argues (1995, p. 31; 1998,
p. 26; see also 2004, p. 54), is rendered into norm
not simply because it commands or prescribes but
because it must first create its sphere of reference in
‘normal’ life, it must normalize it. The repetition of
an act without sanction necessitates a where; ne-
cessitates a topography that allows for the ground-
ing of the (exceptional) act. Such grounding in a
concrete space aims at making possible an impos-
sible coincidence between the norm and its trans-
389
 CLAUDIO MINCA
gression, placing them in a zone of indistinction
where the exception gains form, meaning and le-
gitimation. It is here that inhabit the sovereign and
the homo sacer – and it is within this terrain that we
find the roots of today’s geographies of exception,
geographies of exception that risk transforming all
politics into a pure biopolitical task.
The exception is, thus, a kind of exclusion, ac-
cording to Agamben (1995, pp. 21–22; 1998, pp.
17–18), but what truly characterizes the exception
is that what is excluded in it is not, for this reason,
without relation to the norm: indeed, what is ex-
cluded in the exception remains in relation to the
norm in the form of the latter’s suspension (2004,
pp. 47–54). Agamben terms relation of exception
the extreme form of relation within which some-
thing is included only by its exclusion: ‘the situa-
tion created in the exception has the peculiar char-
acteristic that it cannot be defined either as a situ-
ation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead in-
stitutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinction
between the two’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 22; 1998, p.
18). From a political point of view, this threshold
represents not only the cardinal point of any geo-
graphy of exception, but also a fundamental pas-
sage in the production of the body of the nation, a
passage that can never be complete(d). This thresh-
old constitutes, in fact, the most fundamental cae-
sura between nascita (birth) – and life – of an in-
dividual and nazione (nation); that is, the necessary
– though always incomplete – translation of the in-
dividual into a member of a greater, biological-ter-
ritorial body: exhaustive, totalizing, yet always in-
complete. I will say more on this point subsequent-
ly.
In the sovereign exception, Agamben (1995, p.
23; 1998, p. 19, emphasis added; see also 2004, p.
47) continues, ‘what is at issue … is not so much
the control or neutralization of an excess as the cre-
ation and definition of the very space in which the
juridico-political order can have validity’. It is in
this sense that the exception becomes that which
Schmitt terms the ‘fundamental localization’ (Or-
tung), a spatial device that ‘does not limit itself to
distinguishing what is inside from what is outside
but instead traces a threshold [the state-space of ex-
ception] between the two, on the basis of which
outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos,
enter into those complex topological relations that
make the validity of the juridical order possible’
(Agamben, 1995, p. 23; 1998, p. 19). The ‘spatial
ordering’ that constitutes for Schmitt the sovereign
nomos is not, Agamben (1995, p. 23; 1998, p. 19)
390
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
adds, merely ‘a “taking of land” (Landesnahme),
the determination of a juridical (Ordnung) and a
territorial (Ortung) order – but above all a “presa
del fuori” [a “taking of the outside”], an excep-
tion’. And such a presa del fuori is performed,
again, on eminently geographical turf; that is, the
territory and its spatial ‘measure’.
The entire edifice of Das Nomos von der Erde is
founded, in fact, upon the analysis – and prospected
demise – of the European nomos; that is, of a global
spatial order founded upon the existence of an
enormous space of exception, the extra-European
one; a space where the European order was sus-
pended, but at the same time with respect to which
it was constituted and found its meaning. The
threshold of exception is, then, presented by Ag-
amben since the opening pages of Homo Sacer as
the focal point of an exquisitely geographical the-
ory. The space of exception constitutes, for Agam-
ben, the original nomos, the founding gesture of the
political space of modernity, the ontological device
that lies at the roots of the modern nation-state and
its potential translation into a biopolitical machine.
The camp is the paradigm of this political space;
the structure of the ban its translation into geo-
graphical terms.
The camp
In its archetypal form, the state of exception is
therefore the principle of every juridical local-
ization, since only the state of exception opens
the space in which the determination of a cer-
tain juridical order and a particular territory
first becomes possible. As such, the state of
exception itself is thus essentially unlocaliza-
ble (even if definite spatio-temporal limits can
be assigned to it from time to time).
(Agamben, 1995, p. 24; 1998, p. 19)
Here lies the geographical arcanum that any con-
temporary theory of exception must take into con-
sideration – and that Agamben’s reflections finally
bring to light. The nexus between the localization
(Ortung) and ordering (Ordnung) that constitute
the ‘nomos of the Earth’ for Schmitt (1998) con-
tains within it ‘a fundamental ambiguity, an unlo-
calizable zone of indistinction or exception that, in
the last analysis, necessarily acts against it as a
principle of its infinite dislocation’ (Agamben,
1995, p. 24; 1998, pp. 19–20). This explains why,
‘when our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a per-
manent and visible localization, the result was the
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
concentration camp’. The camp is thus the space
that is opened when the state of exception begins to
become the rule and gains a permanent spatial form
(Agamben, 1996, p. 37).
The camp as a space of exception is, in fact, a
portion of territory which lies outside of the jurid-
ical order – but is, none the less, not simply a space
external to that order. As Gregory (2004a, p. 258)
rightly notes, in the camp ‘the external and the in-
ternal are articulated not to erase the outside but to
produce it as the serial spacing of the exception, for
ever inscribing exclusion through inclusion’. The
political system thus no longer orders forms of life
and juridical rules in a determinate place but, in-
stead, contains at its very centre what Agamben
terms a ‘dislocating localization’ that exceeds it
and into which every form of life and every norm
can be virtually taken. The camp, as ‘dislocating lo-
calization’, may thus be seen as the hidden matrix
of modern politics:
the birth of the camp in our time appears as an
event that decisively signals the political space
of modernity itself. It is produced at the point
at which the political system of the modern
nation-state, which was founded on the func-
tional nexus between a determinate localiza-
tion (the territory) and a determinate political-
juridical order (the State) and mediated by au-
tomatic rules of the inscription of life (nascita
or nazione), enters in a lasting crisis, and the
State decides to assume directly the care of the
nation’s biological life as one of its tasks.
(Agamben, 1995, p. 197; 1998, pp. 174–175)
The transformation of the state of exception into a
permanent spatial order thus corresponds to the
definitive rupture of the territorial nomos that had
produced – and had been produced by – the modern
European nation-state. And while the aim of Euro-
pean bourgeois geography1 of the nineteenth and
early decades of the twentieth century had been
precisely to describe, inscribe and legitimize this
very political-institutional-territorial structure
(Agamben’s triad of state-nation-territory), the dis-
solution of the European nomos, of the European
global order, and the accordant abandonment of
any attempt to link life and right to a comprehen-
sive spatial theory, will result in a violent emer-
gence of the biopolitical. The attempt to cancel the
ambiguity of the original spatialization becomes,
indeed, the supreme biopolitical task of the nation-
state. The space of exception thus remains unloca-
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
lizable so long as its nature as a threshold is not
made explicit within a concrete zone of indistinc-
tion – within a geography of exception – with re-
spect to which the hidden matrix that lies at the or-
igin of the camp is transformed into a permanent
suspension of order and, paradoxically, becomes
the norm. Finding the language to describe this per-
manent suspension and the almost mystical nature
of its original spatialization is, I believe, geogra-
phy’s most pressing task today.
Today’s war on an unlocalizable terror is loca-
lized with ‘intelligent weapons’ and the appearance
of (more or less) invisible prisons – prisons that cer-
tainly exist somewhere, though their exact location
and inhabitants are unknown (Gregory, 2004a). It is
for this reason, perhaps, that the rendering explicit
of the Guantanamo experiment (see Butler, 2002,
2004) is a fundamental starting point from which
we can begin to decipher the nature of a new nomos
that struggles to affirm itself as something more
than mere force/action rendered into norm; a
nomos unable to think itself as spatial theory and
which, for this reason, produces the conditions that
allow for the localized transcendence of biopolitics
into tanatopolitics. This transcendence is usually
presented by sovereign power as an error, a failure,
a ‘crack in the project’ while, in fact, the contem-
porary camp is the boundary between the inside
and the outside of the new order and, as such, must
be translated into geography, must be territorial-
ized. So is what we are witnessing, indeed, the at-
tempt of the new nomos to inscribe itself upon the
Earth? If the aim of the permanent state of excep-
tion is, indeed, to impose a new global nomos, can
it do so without a new spatial theory, without a new
‘measure’ of the Earth?
The ban
We have thus seen that while the exception consti-
tutes the ‘deep’ structure of sovereignty, it is also
‘the originary structure in which law refers to life
and includes it in itself by suspending it’ (Agam-
ben, 1995, p. 34; 1998, p. 28). Agamben, following
Jean-Luc Nancy, terms the ban this potenza2 of the
law ‘to maintain itself in its own privation’, to apply
by ‘(dis)applying’ itself. For Agamben, ‘the rela-
tion of exception is a relation of ban’; that is, an em-
inently spatial relation:
He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply
set outside the law and made indifferent to it
but is rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed
391
 CLAUDIO MINCA
and threatened on the threshold in which life
and the law, outside and inside, become indis-
tinguishable. It is literally not possible to say
whether the one who has been banned is out-
side or inside the juridical order.
(Agamben, 1995, p. 34; 1998, pp. 28–29,
emphasis in the original)
The werewolf – the threshold figure that Agamben
adopts to explain the geography of the ban – is, at
its origin, the figure of the man banned by his com-
munity. His life, torn between the forest and the
city, is not ‘a piece of animal nature without any re-
lation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of
indistinction and of passage between animal and
man, between physis and nomos, exclusion and in-
clusion’ (1995, p. 117; 1998, p. 105). The state of
nature that this latter embodies is not, therefore, ‘a
real epoch, chronologically prior to the foundation
of the City, but a principle internal to the City’
(ibid.). The decisive factor here is that the werewolf
does not only metaphorically inhabit this threshold
of indistinction; he inhabits and moves through real
spaces, spaces which, with his very presence and
his hybrid nature, he contributes to producing. It is
here that Agamben situates the ‘survival of the state
of nature at the very heart of the state’ (1995, p.
119; 1998, p. 106), but it is also here that is rendered
explicit (by means of an original and thus hidden
spatialization) the confine between bare life and a
life worth living. Agamben’s werewolf is thus a
subject torn not only between life and death, but
also between place and its ‘measure’ (space) – ex-
cluded by both but, at the same time, constitutive of
both.
The Brazilian electrician shot down on the Lon-
don Underground, in those few, decisive seconds,
was thrust into the condition of the werewolf; a
condition generated not by his culpability, but by
the exceptional nature of the (real, urban) place
within which he happened to find himself. Here we
come, again, to the hidden matrix of the geogra-
phies of exception. What defines the condition of
the homo sacer, as we have read in by now count-
less articles that adopt this term (see, e.g. Norris,
2004b) is ‘the double exclusion into which he is
taken and the violence to which he finds himself ex-
posed’ (1995, p. 91; 1998, p. 82). The homo sacer,
for Agamben (1995, p. 92; 1998, p. 83), represents
the ‘originary figure of life taken into the sovereign
ban’, so far as ‘the sovereign sphere is the sphere in
which it is permitted to kill without committing
homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and la
392
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
vita sacra (sacred life) – that is, life that may be
killed but not sacrificed – is the life that has been
captured in this sphere.’ I do not have the space here
to further develop this key point of Agamben’s
analysis; what I would like to highlight, however, is
that the structure of the ban prompts the Italian phi-
losopher to rethink the myths of the very founda-
tion of the modern city, arguing that
we must learn to recognize this structure of
the ban in the political relations and public
spaces in which we still live. … It is the sacred
nomos that conditions every rule, the origi-
nary spatialization that governs and makes
possible every localization and every territori-
alization. And if in modernity life is more and
more clearly placed at the centre of State pol-
itics (which now becomes biopolitics) … this
is possible only because the relation of the ban
has constituted the essential structure of sov-
ereign power from the beginning.
(Agamben 1995, p. 123; 1998, p. 111)
When the territorial state of the ancien régime
reconfigures itself as the modern, bourgeois nation-
state, this latter, in its attempt to render possible a
compromise between its initial revolutionary im-
petus and its subsequent seizure of power, is this
very structure of the ban (which becomes, with this
passage, constitutive of all the political categories
of the modern) that consents to think of the popu-
lation as a body and its members as citizens; as bio-
logical parts of the greater organism. The nation be-
comes the necessary spatialization of this body, and
geography, together with medicine, provide the
cognitive tools for the description, identification,
organization and management of its parts and its
confines. But this is nothing particularly new. None
the less, the structure of the ban reveals how the
translation of subjects into citizens is produced by
the reduction of their bodies into numbers, figures,
necessary (or not) fragments of the political body
of the nation (Cavalletti, 2005). These bodies be-
come potentially killable, since they are reduced to
mere elements of a superior, vital organism whose
preservation and purification become one of the
principal tasks of modern politics; indeed, the
struggle between the life worth living and the life
not deserving to live of those citizens is decided
along the ever-shifting confine defining the body of
the nation. As Agamben reminds us, this is the de-
cisive confine between zoé and bios, between
nomos and physis, Ordnung and Ortung – a confine
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
whose definition was assigned by the nascent mod-
ern state to that which Farinelli (1992) terms ‘bour-
geois geography’, often presented as the ‘science
of synthesis’ par excellence (Capel, 1987).
To understand fully the conditions that allowed
for the affirmation of the structure of the ban, Ag-
amben suggests that we look back to the Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 as the
moment which, according to the philosopher, sanc-
tions the political passage of sovereignty to the na-
tion-state: with the Declaration, the principle of all
sovereignty comes to reside in the nation ‘precisely
because it has already inscribed this element of
birth [nascita] in the very heart of the political com-
munity’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 141; 1998, p. 128; see
also 1996, p. 23). The nazione (nation), that derives
etymologically from nascere (to be born), thus
completes the circle opened by the nascita (birth).
Birth itself, in this regime, thus marks our entry into
the nation and our subjection to its sovereign pow-
er. Bare life is thus inscribed within the nation’s po-
liticization of the corpus of its citizens (Agamben,
1995, p. 143; 1996, p. 24). The nation-state, by dis-
tinguishing between an ‘authentic’ life and a bare
life – a life stripped of any political value – trans-
forms the fundamental question ‘what is French
(Italian, English…)’ into an essential political
question; a question that, with Nazism, will come
to coincide ‘immediately with the highest political
task’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 146; 1998, p. 130).
In his (sic) ascent to power, the modern bourgeois
subject thus mobilizes the idea of nation as a crucial
spatial-ontological device and also, thanks to the tri-
umph of positivist geography and the failure of the
Erdkunde project (see Farinelli, 1992, 2003), ends
up conceiving of this very (nation) space as given, as
natural. The mystique of the nation, once spatial-
ized, allows for the direct intervention into the bio-
politics of the bodies of the citizens; citizens who,
with their bare life and their political life, make up
the body of the state. The nation-state thus becomes
a mythical biological combination of nature and cul-
ture. The conditions for the production of the defin-
itive relation of indistinction between life and poli-
tics were thus already in an embryonic state in the
geographical conception of the bourgeois nation-
state. The fatal compromise between a cartographic-
geometrical theory of space and the parallel empha-
sis on individual rights that formed the ideological
basis of the nascent state would have, however, been
impossible to sustain for long, based as it was upon
a special effect, upon a metaphysics of power that
would, sooner or later, inevitably reveal its most
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
purely biopolitical nature. The fragility of this im-
plicit compromise would emerge with virulence af-
ter the Great War, transforming – also with the aid
of ‘normal’ positivist geography (see, e.g. Demat-
teis, 1985) – all citizens into potential homines sacri.
The First World War, according to both Schmitt
and Agamben, marks indeed the definitive rupture
of the ius publicum Europaeum and with it, of the
nomos of the Earth, of the grand spatial project that
lay at its origin. The nexus between the juridical-po-
litical order and territory that sustained the original
spatialization – the arcanum of sovereign power – is
thus broken and the repressed scarto (rift) between
nascita and nazione is dramatically revealed, losing
its original self-regulating function (Agamben,
1995, pp. 42–44; 1996, pp. 24–29). It is thus that fas-
cism and Nazism appear: biopolitical regimes par
excellence (together with the state-socialist ones
which would follow) which render explicit, in the
most violent of fashions, the place of bare life in the
constitution of the nation-state. The spatio-temporal
confines of the (juridically bare) space of exception
are definitively breached and come to coincide with
the ‘normal’ order, within which literally everything
becomes possible (ibid.).
It is here that the grand project of the bourgeois
nation-state reveals all its shortcomings; above all,
that of the fictitious compromise upon which its ter-
ritorial myth is founded, a myth destined to suc-
cumb to its own biopolitical matrix. The reproduc-
tion of the ‘biological body of the nation’ thus be-
comes the supreme task of the state, and the nor-
malization of exception its most immediate
political grammar. This ‘biological body’ is also,
however, an inescapably geographical body that
renders inseparable the national territory and the
individuals who inhabit it, now transformed into
mere ‘population’. Institutional geography has
long struggled to give form and meaning to this
body; it has long been its task to furnish it with sta-
ble and reassuring representations (Dematteis,
1985), and it is here that Friedrich Ratzel’s lesson
is particularly instructive. Ratzel’s legacy can, in-
deed, tell us much about the definitive passage
through which the world produced by the bour-
geois nation-state, having abandoned the global
spatial theory that lay at the bases of the ius publi-
cum Europaeum, entrusts itself to an order without
localization – to the abstract space of the economy
– yet without including this latter within a new, al-
ternative nomos of the Earth.
Ratzel, as we shall see, is perhaps the last geog-
rapher to think in terms of a territorial nomos, and
393
 CLAUDIO MINCA
his failure tragically reflects the definitive transla-
tion of the nation-state into a biopolitical machine
– in force but without significance, that cannot but
assume as its supreme task the control and manage-
ment of the biological life of the population and its
members. The definitive disappearance of the
‘Subject of geography’ (echoing Farinelli’s (2003)
arguments) thus coincides with the disappearance
of the separation between nascita and nazione, be-
tween physis and nomos, between life and the map.
In this way, the nation-state will be able to extend
sovereign power over both nomos and physis. A few
years later, Vidal de la Blache’s new Géographie
Humaine (1903, 1922) and Passarge’s Landschaft-
skunde (1919) will aim to provide this passage with
a new language and a definitive legitimation. The
implicitly cartographic logic that guides these two
projects, and the disappearance of the geographer
as the explicitly political subject that characterizes
both, serves to definitively translate the (notion of)
territory into a mere container for objects and peo-
ple, thus contributing to naturalizing the ius soli as
a natural – and no longer political – order.
From that moment on, the biopolitical machine
will spin around a centre that is no more, rendering
the purification of the body of the nation its ulti-
mate immanent task, a task that, at this point, can-
not have limits; a task that, rather, rests upon the in-
finite and arbitrary mobility of such limits. Modern
spatial-geometrical conceptions of state and socie-
ty and the cartographic logic that guides them thus
become the ultimate expression of a project based
upon a purification without content, upon a space
without a nomos. It is so that the map comes to rep-
resent, still today, a mitologema (mythologeme), an
ideal – to be reached though always unreachable –
territorial political form; an illusory reign over the
Earth, to borrow Schmitt’s (1998, p. 15) words.
In such a regime of/in force without signifi-
cance, the biological becomes immediately and
necessarily political, and geopolitics and biopoli-
tics become confounded, become one and the
same: ‘the police now becomes politics, and the
care of life coincides with the fight against the en-
emy’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 163; 1998, p. 147; see
also 1996, pp. 83–86), the concept of population, a
spatial device (Cavalletti, 2005), while the defini-
tion of bare life, pure, unmediated biopolitics. And
when life and politics, ‘originally divided, and
linked together by … the state of exception’, come
together, ‘all life becomes sacred and all politics
becomes the exception’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 165;
1998, p. 148).
394
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
Lebensraum
… In the history of Western science, the isola-
tion of … bare life is a fundamental event.
(Agamben, 2005, p. 393)
In L’aperto (2003), Agamben highlights how the
research of Jakob von Uexkull, considered one of
the founders of modern ecology, followed by just a
few years the pioneering work of Paul Vidal de la
Blache (1903) on the relations between popula-
tions and their environment, and the research of
Friedrich Ratzel (1897) on the concept of leben-
sraum. The work of Vidal and Ratzel, as Agamben
notes, was to ‘profoundly revolutionize the disci-
pline of human geography’ (2003, p. 48), contrib-
uting to transforming, in fundamental fashion, the
traditionally conceived relation between living be-
ings and their environment-world. Agamben’s ref-
erence to these important turning points in the dis-
cipline expresses his conviction that there exists a
direct relation between the evolution of geograph-
ical thought and the rise of the biopolitical state.
Recalling Ratzel’s theorization of the state’s leben-
sraum, Agamben notes how this conception would
find its echoes in Nazi geopolitics, while in the Vi-
dalian project he envisions the first formalization of
a certain understanding of the relations between en-
vironment and society, an understanding that ac-
cording to him was to furnish a specific, ‘ecologi-
cal’ vision of life, allowing for its eventual total ex-
clusion/inclusion within the politics of the state.
Andrea Cavalletti, whose 2005 book La città
biopolitica is largely inspired by Agamben’s
work, is even more forceful in tracing the links be-
tween Ratzel’s spatial theory and the emergence
of the biopolitical state. In his reading of the Ger-
man geographer’s work, Cavalletti stresses how,
compared to the cosmological speculations of his
predecessors Humboldt and Ritter, Ratzel (1897,
1907, 1914) ends up radicalizing the idea of total-
ity: what matters, for Ratzel, ‘is the [idea of] ter-
restrial space as both generic and limited vital
space, as the totality of the necessary relation
proper to every living being, a totality to which he
will give the name of oecumene’ (Cavalletti, 2005,
p. 205). Cavalletti notes, indeed, how in Ratzel’s
thought emerges the contrast between the ‘ebb and
flow of life, which knows no rest’, and the un-
changing spaces of the Earth. It is from this fun-
damental contradiction that the ‘struggle for
space’ is born, as described in this well-known
passage from the geographer’s work:
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
…life subjected itself to the Earth, but once it
reached its confines, it ebbed back … onto the
path already taken. Since then, everywhere
and without respite, life struggles with life for
space. The much-abused expression ‘struggle
for existence” signifies, above all, the struggle
for space. Indeed, it is space that grants norm
and measure to all other conditions of life.
(Ratzel, 1907, p. 718; emphasis added)
Life, in this case, is biological life, Cavalletti (2005,
p. 206) insists, which is defined as such in contrast
to the inert, to non-life – and which acquires its spe-
cific spatial character at the moment in which, hav-
ing touched the insurmountable limits of the Earth,
it ebbs back into itself (Ratzel, 1907, 1914). It is
from this moment on that the link between life and
territory is no longer presented in the traditional po-
litical-geographic understanding, but is read, rath-
er, in geo-biopolitical terms: space becomes ‘vital’
– and life becomes spatialized (Cavalletti, 2005).
Traditional interpretations of the history of mod-
ern geography have long emphasized the influenc-
es of a certain strand of Social Darwinism on Rat-
zel’s theory of the state. These interpretations high-
lighted, in particular, his idea of the survival of the
fittest, strongly marked by evolutionary biological
theories popular at the time: an idea which envi-
sioned the state as an organism that (as all other or-
ganisms) must struggle to survive. The adoption of
an ecological-evolutionary perspective brought
Ratzel (1897) to affirm, moreover, the ‘temporary’
nature of all state boundaries, since subject to the
ongoing struggle for space between competing
state actors. The notion of ‘moveable frontiers’ – as
these interpretations of Ratzel’s opus intimate –
was most strongly associated with the idea that
large states will ‘naturally’ expand to reach their
necessary lebensraum, often into the territory of
surrounding ‘weaker’ (smaller) states.
Here, Cavalletti’s reading does not diverge much
from the tradition. His analysis suggests, indeed,
that while Ratzel’s work purports to transcend
empty metaphors, in practice the German geogra-
pher enacts a grand representation of the vital or-
ganization of the Earth: in his Politische Geogra-
phie, the notion of state ‘necessarily mimics … the
constitutive and unproblematized relationship be-
tween an organism and its environment’ (2005, pp.
206–207). The state, however, does not allow itself
to be bound within rigid confines: ‘The diffusion of
men and their work on the surface of the Earth has
the characteristics of a mobile body that, depending
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
on its ebb and flow, expands and contracts, binds
new ties, breaks the old and, in doing so, takes on
forms that resemble those of other sociable beings’
(Ratzel, 1897, p. 3).
Cavalletti’s and Agamben’s considerations on
the importance of Ratzel’s contribution – and, more
generally, on the vital role played by geographical
knowledge in the constitution and legitimation, as
well as the functioning, of the biopolitical machine
of the state – are certainly to be appreciated. I
would be more critical, however, of the reading giv-
en by both to the influences of Ratzel’s work on
Nazi geographies of exception – and, by extension,
of the new, ‘Atlantic’ regime of exception today.
For while it is certainly true that Ratzel is widely
considered to be the father of twentieth century po-
litical geography, his legacy is much more complex
– and ambiguous – than most standard accounts al-
low. According to Franco Farinelli (1992, p. 110):
the publication, in 1897, of Ratzel’s Politische
Geographie, does not only mark, as is com-
monly thought, the birth of what we now term
political geography. At the very same time –
and, alas, this is not a paradox – [Ratzel’s oeu-
vre] marks the end of geographers’ recogni-
tion of the political role of every geography.
But this is not Ratzel’s fault. Quite the oppo-
site, for his geography of the State proffered
itself, unique in the history of geographical
thought, as the only true alternative to state
geography 3; a geography that, having silently
re-emerged from its ashes in the second-half
of the 1800s, would dominate the entire disci-
pline until well after the Second World War.
For Farinelli, then, Ratzel should not be seen pre-
dominantly as the founder of the academic political
geography that would develop in the successive dec-
ades but, rather, as the last bourgeois geographer
able/willing to admit the inescapably political na-
ture of his cognitive enterprise; the last to render ex-
plicit the nexus between his conception of space and
his organic theory of the state. The deterministic in-
terpretation of Ratzel’s work, Farinelli insists, is in
fact an ‘invention’ of French sociology and historio-
graphy (2003, p. 108); the adoption of the notion of
lebensraum by Nazi geopolitical thought is, on the
other hand, a degeneration of the spirit that guides
Ratzel’s work, a tragic reinterpretation of the rela-
tionship between spatial theory and politics, a re-
interpretation that would render explicit the political
nature of modern geography in its most virulent and
395
 CLAUDIO MINCA
violent terms. Cavalletti’s and Agamben’s assess-
ment, while recognizing, in part, the geographer’s
complex legacy and resisting facile characteriza-
tions regarding his determinism, still falls into the
trap of most conventional readings of Ratzel. In-
deed, the relationship between the Ratzelian gesture
and what we may term the ‘biopolitical turn’ of the
European nation-state may be read in a different op-
tic altogether. In particular, Franco Farinelli’s (1992,
2003) theorizations of the nature of bourgeois geog-
raphy and its state of permanent crisis can offer
some interesting interpretive avenues which allow
us to investigate the links between Ratzel’s opus and
the dissolution of the European nomos that so trou-
bled Carl Schmitt (another of Ratzel’s devoted fol-
lowers, who thanks the geographer on numerous oc-
casions within his writings).
Much has been written about the ways in which
bourgeois geography – in its role as state geography
– adopted a geometric concept of geographical
space in order to reduce the complexity of the world
to the measure of its own language, and to profess
the innocence of its representations (see, e.g.
Farinelli, 2003; Minca and Bialasiewicz, 2004;
Pickles, 2004). It is this very conceptual architecture
that allows it to first forget – and to make forget – the
ideological thrust of Ratzel’s political theory of
space and, later, to take advantage of the tragic leg-
acy of the degenerate adoption of Ratzel’s theory by
Nazi geopolitical rhetoric (though not practice), to
reinterpret the scientific method of Ratzel’s geogra-
phy as though this latter were part of the same pos-
itivist tradition from which twentieth-century ‘state’
geography largely drew its inspiration. Ratzel thus
becomes, in the official narrative, one of the found-
ers of geographical determinism. Ratzel thus be-
comes, in the interpretations of many, the fount of
imperialist theories that would justify, on the basis
of a misreading of his concept of lebensraum, terri-
torial expansion and an evolutionary reading of re-
lations between states and nations (for a critique of
such readings see Bassin (1987a, 1987b) as well as
the proceedings of the conference on the centenary
of Ratzel’s Politische Geographie: Antonsich et al.,
2001).
Certainly, the past decades have brought new
critical impetus to interpretations of Ratzel’s
work. For instance, geographers have noted that
although Ratzel’s understanding of the territorial
state as an ‘organism’, marked by its own ‘needs’
and ‘demands’, was undoubtedly influenced by
evolutionary biological theories of the time, this
understanding also had much older roots. Indeed,
396
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
German idealist philosophers such as Hegel and
Fichte had also regarded the state as a having a life
of its own (Agnew, 1998; Heffernan, 2000). Oth-
ers (see e.g. Bassin, 1987a, 1987b; Dijkink, 2001)
have stressed that Ratzel’s work can in no way be
conflated with purely materialistic (and biologi-
cal) theories of the state. For others still, Ratzel’s
work was not only to be seen as an original reinter-
pretation of the intellectual legacy of many of his
contemporaries, but his very conception of the
‘state as organism’ should be viewed part of ‘a
broader modern personification of the State’, driv-
ing the emergence of nationalist ideologies in the
late 1800s (see Raffestin et al., 1995, p. 25). Ac-
cording to this interpretation, for Ratzel, as for the
early theorists of nations and nationhood, the state
was a whole, a whole that acts as one ‘body’. This
body was a physical, geographical body – but it
was also the state’s ‘human’ body: indeed, it was
the decades of Ratzel’s writings that also wit-
nessed the emergence of notions such as the ‘so-
cial mass’, that witnessed the ‘birth of the crowd’
(Raffestin et al., 1995, p. 25); wholes conceived of
as humanized aggregates endowed with a life of
their own, as well as a certain degree of conscious-
ness and autonomy.
Although it is useful to note such continuities, it
is also important to note that the body of the Rat-
zelian state was characterized by mobile/tempo-
rary confines, placing the geographer in clear con-
trast with the prevailing nationalist ideologies of
his time. Ratzel would insist, in fact, that states
were and could only be fluid historical entities.
Moreover, while Ratzel strongly believed that geo-
graphy determined state behaviour – in particular,
specifying that, often, a state’s ‘success’ was deter-
mined by its location – this equation was never ex-
tended to human subjects. This distinction is vital
to understanding Ratzel’s collocation in the history
of the discipline, as well as vis-à-vis the evolution
of geopolitical thought in the century that followed,
marked by more or less faithful interpretations of
the geographer’s opus. Ratzel’s work, in fact, never
justified a racial determinism – for the Leipzig geo-
grapher it was space (and the struggle for space),
not race or nationality, that was the driving force in
international relations (see Parker, 2001).
Farinelli (1992, p. 131), in particular, has re-
marked how Ratzel was perfectly conscious of the
impossibility of any social subject to claim knowl-
edge without first affirming his (sic) legitimacy as
a knowing subject. Ratzel, according to Farinelli,
was well aware of the necessity of a ‘theory of
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
knowledge’ able to reconcile science and ideology,
and that this would form the basis of any theory of
geographical space. For Ratzel, as for Humboldt
and Ritter before him, ‘discourse precedes writing
and commands it, because knowing signifies, first
of all, establishing relations between objects based
on hypotheses that precede any map/text – and that
no map/text is able to represent’ (1992, pp. 134–
135). In this sense, Ratzel’s conception of space
distinguishes him profoundly from positivist geog-
raphy, despite his often being presented as one of its
most influential advocates. For Ratzel, space re-
mains, in fact, a form of intuition:
[For Ratzel], the initial task of the geographer
is that of “understanding the conditions”
(which may, indeed, be “objective”) under
whose “influence space becomes a subjective
form of intuition for us”; the conditions which
produce our individual conceptions of space.
Conditions which, if conceived … specifically
with respect to geographical space … refer to a
much broader and general vision of the world
and the role of the science of geography within
it – to Ratzel’s mind, … coterminous with the
attempt to rationalize the sphere of the politi-
cal’.
(Farinelli, 1992, p. 135)
For Ratzel, geographical space becomes something
essentially supra-local, something abstract, seen as
the product not of an unchanging (and thus meas-
urable) relationship between immobile physical
objects, but rather the result of a web of relations
between dynamic (albeit physically determined)
political entities (Farinelli, 1992, p. 136). For this
reason, Ratzel bemoans the dependence of geo-
graphical representations on cartographical ones,
and contests the reduction of material, historically
produced, lived spaces to the pure geometries of the
map: ‘it is indeed the polemic against “geome-
trism” as an overtly reductive and schematic inter-
pretative model of geographical space that best
characterizes the Ratzelian oeuvre’ (Farinelli,
1992, p. 137).
Ratzel, Farinelli (2003, p. 125) sustains, is quite
conscious of the fact that the ‘geometrical’ grammar
is but a rhetorical tool – as effective as such a tool
may be. He is aware of the fact that the world is not
orderly, and that scientific knowledge is simply an
orderly/ordering way of knowing. This is why he
dares to propose an organic theory of the state – and
a scientific theory of geographical space to sustain it:
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
with Ratzel, for the first time ever, bourgeois
geography would serve not as society’s critique
of the State but, rather, it would be the State,
conceived as “the greatest of man’s works upon
the Earth”, the culmination “of all phenomena
of the diffusion of life”, that would, as supreme
subject, claim all of geography … Ratzel tries,
in fact, to legitimize the existence [of the State]
in scientific terms; he does not deny the politi-
cal function of geographical knowledge, but he
seeks to adapt this role to the requisites of the
new bourgeois order, requisites that now coin-
cide, tout court, with those of the State itself.
(Farinelli, 1992, p. 141)
The complex history of the Ratzelian conceptual
universe reflects, indeed, a formidable tension. It is
a tension between the efforts of twentieth-century
academic geography’s implicit paradigm to affirm
its epistemologies as coinciding with the ‘deep
structure’ of geographical space, on the one hand,
and its concurrent attempts to mask (to the point of
forgetting) the political impetus of such an opera-
tion. The translation of Ratzel’s thought into ‘nor-
mal’ geography (and, more specifically, into ‘po-
litical geography’) rendered possible the isolation
of a geography entrusted with ‘the political’ (polit-
ical geography, that is) and the remainder of geo-
graphy, conceived of from that moment on as neu-
tral, scientific, ‘a-political’.
‘Ratzel is geography’s last individual’, Farinelli
(1992, p. 140; emphasis added) insists, ‘an individ-
ual, nonetheless, who is the first to claim a role not
only vis a vis society but also the State; [but] any
such individual is, constitutively, in crisis’. Ratzel
is marked by this crisis, and it is perhaps for this
reason that his legacy passes down to us in the form
that it does. Vidal de la Blache – a state geographer
par excellence – is the first to aliment the myth of
Ratzel the determinist, a myth that will simply be
reproduced across the paradigms which travelled
throughout twentieth-century geography. It is with-
in the shadow of this myth that ‘geometrical’ geo-
graphical space has colonized our ways of conceiv-
ing the political – and even the critiques to this form
of knowledge. However, as Farinelli (1992, p. 147)
reminds us, the experience of the Nazi Geopolitik
tragically demonstrates that ‘a high price is paid for
the expulsion from geographical memory of the
problematic nature of the nexus between science
and ideology; the price of the reduction of geo-
graphy to an immediate and declared ideology’.
And of the reduction of geopolitics to biopolitics.
397
 CLAUDIO MINCA
The ghost of Geopolitik
Even though Cavalletti is careful to note that Rat-
zel’s Politische Geographie should not be conflated
with Nazi biogeography or simply reduced to those
Ratzelian passages adopted by ‘Hitler’s geogra-
pher’ Karl Haushofer, he none the less maintains
that accusing Ratzel of determinism and national-
ism because he links a people to a given territory is
much too simplistic an interpretation. Ratzel, ac-
cording to Cavalletti (2005, p. 208), ‘did not write
Politische Geographie in order to translate geo-
graphical concepts into a national(ist) project be-
cause his biogeography was already political: the
notion of the state as living organism was already
present in [Ratzel’s conception of] the oecumene’.
If this is true, what relation can we envision be-
tween such a contested inheritance, and the affir-
mation of the modern state – a state lacking a geo-
graphical nomos and intent on taking to its extreme
consequences the constitutive ambiguity of its
originary spatialization?
The Geopolitik experiment is illustrative here
(Haushofer, 1925). According to Farinelli, Haush-
ofer is the direct heir to – and most faithful inter-
preter of – the positivist geography that becomes
consolidated in the final decades of the nineteenth
century. Haushofer is, indeed, ‘the first to reveal its
forgotten and hidden nature. All the while, howev-
er, without being aware of doing so, for awareness
necessitates memory; a memory of which geo-
graphical knowledge had been stripped by the pos-
itivist Geographie’ (Farinelli, 1992, p. 241). This is
a key passage in understanding the relationship be-
tween the dissolution of the geographical nomos
identified by Schmitt, and the emergence of the
spatial architecture of exception theorized by Ag-
amben. Reading Haushofer as heir to the bourgeois
geographical tradition signifies, indeed, locating
his confused geographical theorizing firmly within
the womb of the political culture that produced the
definitive indistinction between geopolitics and bi-
opolitics, nomos and physis, zoé and bios. Perhaps
the most scathing critique of Geopolitik dates back
to 1929, writes Farinelli (1992, p. 235), and it is that
of Sigfried Passarge:
who defined it as “the circus of linguistic ac-
robatics”. In this definition we can see the
scorn of an academic geographer … for the
amateur that is Karl Haushofer. Although Pas-
sarge’s judgement may have been correct, it
was founded upon a mistaken assumption:
398
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
that [his] academic geography was a scientific
enterprise, while Geopolitik was an ideo-
logical activity – as a motivated and thus false-
ly objective knowledge. [And] it is precisely
the separation between Geographie and Geo-
politik that is the result (and, in analytical
terms, the reflection) of the definitive aban-
donment, in inter-war Germany, of all of geo-
graphical knowledge to the realm of ideology.
And it is when geography definitively affirms itself
as a political practice that it lays open the doors to
the camp, allowing Geopolitik to enter and the most
violent and decisive subject of geography (and the
political) to emerge.
If we agree with Farinelli’s interpretation,
Haushofer’s geography no longer appears as an
ideological and pseudo-scientific degeneration that
marks a break with the evolutionary progress of
modern bourgeois geography. Quite the contrary:
Haushofer’s Geopolitik becomes simply another
product of the dissolution of the European territo-
rial nomos; an attempt – albeit doomed to failure –
to grant a theoretical-geographical veneer to the
tragic revelation of the rift between nascita and na-
zione, between physis and nomos, that the Nazi bi-
opolitical machine would quickly take to its ex-
treme consequences. The grand project of the Geo-
politik was nothing other, therefore, than the ex-
treme (and thus tragically banal) expression of
bourgeois spatial ideology that here lays bare its in-
escapably political nature – but that in doing so,
comes to coincide with the political tout court,
spawning a monster that still today we struggle to
recognize as our own. Haushofer’s geopolitics,
Farinelli (1992, p. 237) insists, was above all a re-
search agenda (as fallacious as it may have been).
While for Rudolf Kjellén geopolitics was nothing
other than ‘the doctrine of the State as a geograph-
ical organism or spatial phenomenon’ (in other
words, that which Ratzel prescribed as the task of
political geography), for Haushofer, Geopolitik
was something entirely different: it was to become
‘the science of the forms of political life existing
within vital natural spaces; a science seeking to un-
derstand such forms in their relation of dependence
with terrestrial manifestations … and historical
transformations’ (Farinelli, 1992, p. 237; on Kjel-
len see also Holdar, 1992).
Not by accident is the word ‘Politik’ preceded
by that little prefix ‘geo’. This prefix means
much and demands much. It relates politics to
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
the soil. It rids politics of arid theories and
senseless phrases which might trap our politi-
cal leaders into hopeless utopias. It puts them
back on solid ground. Geopolitik demon-
strates the dependence of all political deve–
lopments on the permanent reality of the soil.
(Haushofer, 1925,
p. 33; emphasis added)
Combining the Social Darwinist ideas of his intel-
lectual forefathers Friedrich Ratzel (an influence
that was, as I have argued above, far from direct)
and Rudolf Kjellen, together with the theorizations
of Mackinder (whom he greatly admired), Haush-
ofer argued that in order to ‘survive’, the German
state would necessarily need to achieve its leben-
sraum. More importantly, Haushofer himself never
promoted the racial determinism that distinguished
Nazi ‘science’ (on this question see especially
Bassin, 1987a, 1987b; Heske, 1987, 1988, 1994).
In Haushofer’s Ratzelian understanding, it was
space, not race, that was the ultimate determinant
of the destiny of the nation, and throughout the
1930s and 1940s the Munich geographer published
many articles that were critical of Nazi racial re-
search. Indeed, within the original vision of Haush-
ofer’s Geopolitik, ‘it was not ideology … that de-
termined our ways of thinking space but, quite on
the contrary, spatial realities that shaped our ideo-
logies’ (Farinelli, 1992, p. 238). Here lay the theo-
retical innovativeness of the Geopolitik project; it is
thus that it attempted to legitimize its distinct form
of scientificity.
Farinelli does not deny the influence of Ratzel’s
political geography on Haushofer’s thought; an in-
fluence without which the spatial theory that lay at
the heart of Geopolitik would have simply not been
possible. None the less, he notes that the ways in
which Haushofer adopts the organic theory of the
state, as well as Ratzel’s scientific understanding of
space, do not represent an evolution or elaboration
of the Leipzig geographer’s thought but, rather, its
falsification if not degeneration. For Ratzel, the
struggle for space and position are the ‘essence’ of
the state, not the object of its dominion, as they will
become for Haushofer and the expansionist geog-
raphies of the Reich. Haushofer’s spatial theory is
not only antithetical to Ratzel’s conception but also
much more ingenious and simplistic; and despite
its professed dynamism, essentially static in its
conceptions (Farinelli, 1992, p. 244).
Haushofer may be Ratzel’s illegitimate heir, but
he is also – if not above all – the offspring of nine-
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
teenth-century bourgeois geography, a rebellious
offspring who chose to overturn the established or-
der between politics and knowledge that had
brought about the triumph of cartographic reason.
Haushofer’s Geopolitik is born at the moment in
which ‘the scienticism of [academic] Geographie
… shows itself utterly incapable of furnishing pop-
ular opinion with the necessary ideological refer-
ence points that would allow for the mobilization of
[national] meaning exacted by [state] power’
(Farinelli, 1992, p. 248). Geopolitik becomes just
that: the first form of bourgeois geography ‘de-
claredly and exclusively dedicated to providing ide-
ological support to political power’ (Farinelli,
1992, p. 249; emphasis in the original).
In this optic, it becomes impossible to reduce the
Geopolitik experiment to simply an episode, the
fruit of anomalous historical-political conditions. It
is Haushofer’s geography, Farinelli insists, that re-
establishes the relation (abandoned by nineteenth-
century state geography) between physical, mate-
rial space and the geometries of geographical
space, spaces made to coincide in order to sustain
the political and ideological needs of the nation-
state. The Geopolitik experiment, in its arrogance
reflecting the power of the Reich, actually ends up
re-establishing the primacy of the subject of knowl-
edge over its objects: ‘having disappeared from the
Geographie, submerged by the weight of the ob-
ject, all that remained to the subject was to force-
fully re-affirm itself (in ideological fashion)
through the Geopolitik, a veritable “revenge of the
subject”, [whose] geopolitical virulence was di-
rectly proportional to its geographical silence’
(1992, pp. 243–244).
Haushofer’s Geopolitik overturns, indeed, even
the bourgeois common sense that preceded Ratzel:
the assumption of the essential futility of official
geographical knowledge for political power. For
Haushofer (1945), rather, geopolitics is driven by
the need to produce images of the world that can be
useful to – and used by – leaders called to shape the
political destiny of their people. It is this shift in
perspective that, following on the heels of Ratze-
lian organicism, produces a cognitive monster: a
form of geographical knowledge that, on the one
hand, justifies itself by appeals to the ‘objective ev-
idence’ of scientific discourse, a discourse which,
as we well know, reduces everything to the same
measure, that is, to the horizontal geometries of
geographical space; on the other hand, a geograph-
ical knowledge that marries such pretences to sci-
entificity with the celebration of a people and its in-
399
 CLAUDIO MINCA
exorable destiny, translating Ratzel’s theorization
of living space into a cultural and political state-
ment affirming the superiority and right to exist-
ence (as a world power) of the German nation. It is
here, indeed, that Geopolitik’s crucial contradic-
tion lies:
having affirmed the respect of the natural and
historical attributes of certain spaces (calling
for the re-unification of a greater Deutschland
as a morphological, cultural-linguistic and ra-
cial whole) in order to sustain the expansion-
ary aims of the state, [while this latter] as an
imperialist state necessitated instead the total
annulment of such attributes within an ab-
stract and absolute space – the Ratzelian
Raum.
(Farinelli, 1992, p. 246)
Haushofer may speak of space, but he thinks of
places, Farinelli concludes, and it is within this la-
tent contradiction that the root of his failure lies, as
well as the violently biopolitical root that opens the
doors to the camp, to let in the normalization of ex-
ception. The violent return of the subject in Haush-
oferian geography – precisely because of its con-
tradictory and hidden bourgeois matrix, because of
its pretences to scientificity – vanishes into the Nazi
tanatopolitical vortex, into the macabre triumph of
the spatialization of the structure of the ban, ren-
dering itself, at the end, essentially futile. The mo-
bile caesura that cuts through the German nation
can thus later be explained, justified as a degener-
ation – and not as the rotten fruit of a structure of
exception inaugurated already by the modern bour-
geois state which, at a certain point in its history,
abandons its role in granting meaning to the world;
that is, its very spatial ontology.
Towards a new Nomos?
The day after the revelation of the tortures inflicted
on the detainees of Abu Ghraib, Massimo Cacciari
(2004), Venetian philosopher and current Mayor of
the city, writes a brief editorial on the Italian daily
la Repubblica entitled ‘Il male radicale’ (‘Absolute
Evil’). In his piece, Cacciari comments on the banal
nature of the ‘evil’ that is being revealed in those
days to the eyes of all in such a scandalous fashion
and urges not to consider the Abu Ghraib episode
as something unthinkable, as something somehow
removed from us. The exception has become the
norm – this is my reading of his argument – and in-
400
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
habits our houses and our streets, insofar as the per-
manent state of exception that the War on Terror is
attempting to enact corresponds to a multi-scalar
geography of national and individual bodies. The
where of the tortures thus becomes a key factor in
understanding the biopolitical regime of exception
(Gregory, 2004a, 2004b).
We should therefore ask ourselves whether the
tanatopolitical machine put into motion by the new
strategies of pre-emptive war of the current Amer-
ican administration – and by the explicit biopoliti-
cal transgression of the norm – marks the emer-
gence of a new sovereign subject, set on imposing
a new Geopolitik, a geopolitics of ‘facts’ and ‘de-
cisions’, free of the bourgeois hesitations that
brought about the failure of Haushofer’s grand
project. Is what we are witnessing today, as Agam-
ben appears to argue, the affirmation of a new bio-
political nomos, made possible simply by the ex-
istence of sufficient force to impose it and, moreo-
ver, a political subject willing to adopt it, willing to
produce a permanent zone of indistinction between
the spaces of the norm and the spaces of its suspen-
sion, of its (dis)application? Reflecting upon
American geo-biopolitical exceptionalism today
can perhaps provide us with the opportunity to fi-
nally come to terms with our disturbing proximity
to the Nazi project, to find the courage to confront
it once and for all and, especially, to ask, together
with Giorgio Agamben, ‘how can we avoid the cat-
astrophic results of this proximity’?
In La potenza del pensiero, Agamben urges us to
read Kafka’s short story Der Bau, in which the writ-
er describes the obsession of an animal occupied
with the construction of an unbreachable den; a den
that, as time passes, reveals itself to be a trap with-
out escape. ‘But is this not precisely what happened
to the political space of Western nation-states’, Ag-
amben (2005, p. 327) asks himself, within which
‘the homes (the patrie) that these latter have strug-
gled to build have become, at the end, for the “peo-
ple” that were to inhabit them, simply deadly
traps?’ For the Italian philosopher, the triumph of
the biopolitical dimension of this ‘trap’ marks the
demise of Western political space. In the modern
era, Agamben (2005, p. 371) argues, Western pol-
itics conceived of itself as the enactment of a col-
lective historical mission or task (an opera) on the
part of a people or a nation. Such a political task,
such an opera, coincided with a metaphysical task;
that is, with the fulfilment of man’s (sic) purpose as
a rational being. But the problems intrinsic in the
determination/identification of this task emerge
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS
with increasing force with the end of the First
World War, when the nomos of the Earth which had
guided the political enters into a fatal crisis, and the
European nation-state begins to realize the empti-
ness of its historical mission. In the impossibility of
defining a new purpose, the nation-state ends up
claiming the reproduction and control of biological
life itself as its ultimate and decisive historical task.
For this reason, it is a fundamental misunder-
standing to conceive of the grand totalitarian exper-
iments of the past century as simply putting into ac-
tion, albeit in extreme form, the declared missions
of the nineteenth-century nation-state: namely, na-
tionalism and imperialism (Agamben, 2005, p.
328). As I have tried to argue throughout this paper,
the dissolution of the nomos of the Earth has cor-
responded not only to a political crisis but also to
a crisis of the nation-state project tout court. In this
sense, the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century
constitute truly the other facet of the Hegelian–Ko-
jevian notion of the ‘end of history’: ‘Western’ so-
ciety appears to have reached its historical telos and
all that remains is an inevitable depoliticization of
the social, enacted by the unstoppable forces of the
economy – but also by the reconfiguration of bio-
logical life itself as the supreme political task (Ag-
amben, 2005, p. 329).
In such an understanding, modern totalitarian-
isms may be conceived of as the instauration, by
means of the state of exception, of a legal and per-
manent state of civil war; a civil war that permits
the physical elimination not only of political ene-
mies but also of whole categories of citizens who,
for one reason or another, cannot be integrated into
the political system. It is thus that ‘the voluntary
creation of a permanent state of exception … has
become one of the essential practices of contempo-
rary states, even those popularly perceived as
“democratic”’ (Agamben, 2004, p. 11). The state of
exception thus tends to increasingly present itself
as the dominant paradigm of governance in con-
temporary politics, as a fundamental and ever-fluid
threshold of indeterminacy between democracy
and absolutism.
At this threshold, the sovereign does not only de-
cide the exception: ‘he (sic) now, de facto, produces
the situation as a consequence of his decision on the
exception’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 190; 1998, p. 170;
see also 2004, p. 49). The permanent state of excep-
tion is thus not a dictatorship but simply a ‘space free
of law’ (2004, p. 68), and it is for this reason that Carl
Schmitt, already in the 1950s, warned against the
risks of the exception becoming the norm – and ex-
© The author 2006
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
plicitly accused American foreign policy of having
always treaded the ambiguous line of exceptionality
and exception, thus contributing to the progressive
dismemberment of the European nomos without, at
the same time, proposing/imposing another, pre-
cisely with the intention of maintaining a global spa-
tial order based within ‘force without significance’,
an order without territory.
What we witness today is not a new ius publicum
Americanum, based within a new American nomos,
because the aim of the permanent state of exception
is precisely that of not defining a stable relation be-
tween political-juridical order and territory but,
rather, of always keeping open the possibility of
playing at the threshold of indistinction between
the norm and its (dis)application. The ‘localized
dislocation’ that marks the political paradigm of
modernity of which Agamben speaks is thus in-
scribing a geography with a void at its centre, a geo-
graphy lacking any spatial theory; a geography that
continually produces and dismembers spaces with-
in which everything is, literally, possible. In these
spaces, not only is everything allowed, but the re-
lation between norm and exception is based upon
the event, not the order – as on London’s Under-
ground that warm July day – thus leaving an enor-
mous, previously unthinkable space to sovereign
decision, a decision able to move, at will, within the
confines of the (dis)application of the norm.
Notes
1. My adoption here of the concept of ‘bourgeois geography’
echoes Franco Farinelli’s use of the term to refer to the Erd-
kunde tradition (see Farinelli, 1992) and, more specifically,
to its critical rendering of modern spatial theory.
2. Usually (problematically) translated as ‘potentiality’ – on
this question see Minca, 2005.
3. The claim that Ratzel’s ‘geography of the State’ provided an
alternative spatial theory to that advanced by (positivist)
‘state geographies’ that dominated the discipline during a
large part of the XX century is one of Franco Farinelli’s
central claims in his critical re-reading of the history of the
discipline. This is not to say, nonetheless, that the Ratzelian
vision was the only such ‘alternative’ understanding – those
years also saw the emergence of other understandings that
fundamentally challenged the orthodoxy of the discipline,
most notably those of Elisee Reclus (1894, 1905–08).
Claudio Minca,
Department of Geography,
Royal Holloway,
University of London,
Egham, Surrey,
UK
E-mail: claudio.minca@rhul.ac.uk
401
 CLAUDIO MINCA
References
AGAMBEN, G. (1995): Homo sacer. Einaudi, Turin.
AGAMBEN, G. (1996): Mezzi senza fine. Bollati Boringhieri,
Turin.
AGAMBEN, G. (1998): Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare
life, translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. Stanford University
Press, Stanford, CA.
AGAMBEN, G. (2003): L’aperto. Bollati Boringhieri, Turin.
AGAMBEN, G. (2004): Stato di eccezione. Bollati Boringhieri,
Turin.
AGAMBEN, G. (2005): La potenza del pensiero. Neri Pozza, Vi-
cenza.
AGNEW, J. (1998): Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics.
Routledge, London.
AMAR, A., GRACIET, C., CHADI, T. and JAMAI, A. (2005):
‘Maroc Poubelle de la CIA’, Le Journal (17–23 December):
24–31.
ANTONSICH, M., PAGNINI, M.P. and KOLOSSOV, V. (eds)
(2001): On the Centenary of Ratzel’s Politische Geographie.
Europe between Political Geography and Geopolitics, Soci-
età Geografica Italiana, Rome.
BASSIN, M. (1987a): ‘Imperialism and the nation state in Frie-
drich Ratzel’s political geography’, Progress in Human Geo-
graphy, 11 (4): 473–495.
BASSIN, M. (1987b): ‘Race contra Space: The Conflict Between
German Geopolitik and National Socialism’, Political Geo-
graphy Quarterly, 6 (2): 115–134.
BUTLER, J. (2002): ‘Guantanamo limbo’, The Nation, 274 (12):
20–24.
BUTLER, J. (2004): Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning
and Violence. Verso, London.
CACCIARI, M. (2004): ‘Il male radicale’, la Repubblica, 7 May.
CAPEL, H. (1987): Filosofia e scienza nella geografia contem-
poranea. UNICOPLI, Milan.
CAVALLETTI, A. (2005): La città biopolitica. Mondadori, Mi-
lan.
CHAMBRAUD, C. (2005): ‘Des pays européens accuses de col-
lusion avec la CIA’, Le Monde (18 November): 7.
COWAN, R. (2005): ‘Met chief to face inquiry over De Menezes
killing’, Guardian, 29 November.
DEMATTEIS, G. (1985): Le metafore della Terra. La geografia
umana tra mito e scienza. Feltrinelli, Milan.
DIJKINK, G. (2001): ‘Ratzel’s “politische geographie” and nine-
teenth century German Discourse’, in ANTONSICH, M.,
PAGNINI, M.P. and KOLOSSOV, V. (eds): On the Cente-
nary of Ratzel’s Politische Geographie. Europe between Po-
litical Geography and Geopolitics. Società Geografica Ital-
iana, Rome.
DILLON, B. (ed.) (2002): ‘Giorgio Agamben’ (special issue),
Paragraph, 25(2): 1–126.
EDKINS, J., PIN-FAT, V. and SHAPIRO, M.J. (eds) (2004): Sov-
ereign Lives: Power in Global Politics. Routledge, London.
FARINELLI, F. (1992): I segni del mondo. La Nuova Italia Sci-
entifica, Florence.
FARINELLI, F. (2003): Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli
del mondo. Einaudi, Turin.
GREGORY, D. (2004a): The Colonial Present. Blackwell, Ox-
ford.
GREGORY, D. (2004b): ‘The angel of Iraq’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 22: 317–324.
HAUSHOFER, K. (1925): Why Geopolitik?, in O’TUATHAIL,
G., DALBY, S. and ROUTLEDGE, P. (eds) (1998): The Geo-
politics Reader. Routledge, London.
HAUSHOFER, K. (1945): Defence of German Geopolitics, in
402
Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
O’TUATHAIL, G., DALBY, S. and ROUTLEDGE, P. (eds)
(1998): The Geopolitics Reader. Routledge, London.
HEFFERNAN, M. (2000): ‘Fin de siècle, fin du monde? On the
origins of European geopolitics, 1890–1920’, in DODDS, K.
and ATKINSON, D. (eds): Geopolitical Traditions. A Centu-
ry of Geopolitical Thought. Routledge, London.
HESKE, H. (1987): ‘Karl Haushofer in His Role in German Geo-
politics and in Nazi Politics’, Political Geography Quarterly,
6 (2): 135–144.
HESKE, H. (1988): ‘Und morgen die ganze Welt…’ Erdkunde-
unterricht im Nazionalsocialismus. Focus Verlag, Giessen.
HESKE, H., (1994): Karl Haushofer, in O’LOUGHLIN, J. (ed.):
Dictionary of Geopolitics. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.
HOLDAR, S. (1992): ‘The ideal state and the power of geography
in the life and work of Rudolf Kjellen’, Political Geography,
11 (3): 307–323.
la Repubblica (2005a): ‘La polizia: “Estraneo agli attentati l’uo-
mo ucciso nella metropolitana”’, 23 July, http://www.repub-
blica.it (last accessed: 10 January 2006).
la Repubblica (2005b): ‘Sequestro dell’imam Abu Omar: chiesto
l’arresto per 22 agenti Cia’, 23 December, http://www.repub-
blica.it (last accessed: 23 December).
la Repubblica (2005c): ‘Sequestri Cia, Berlusconi insiste “Lo
ripeto, non sapevamo nulla”’, 7 December, http://www.re-
pubblica.it (last accessed: 7 December).
LESER, E., NOUGAYREDE, N. and STROOBANTS, J-P.
(2005): ‘Sur la piste des activités caches de la CIA en Europe’,
Le Monde, (9 December): 24–25.
MINCA, C. (2005): ‘The return of the Camp’, Progress in Human
Geography, 29 (4): 405–412.
MINCA, C. and BIALASIEWICZ, L. (2004): Spazio e Politica.
CEDAM, Padua.
NORRIS, A. (2003): ‘The exemplary exception’, Radical Philo-
sophy, 119: 11–40.
NORRIS, A. (2004a): ‘Giorgio Agamben and the politics of the
living dead’, Diacritics, 30(4): 38–58.
NORRIS, A. (ed.) (2004b): Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Es-
says on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Duke University
Press, Durham NC.
PARKER, G. (2001): ‘Ratzel, the French School and the birth of
alternative geopolitics’, in ANTONSICH, M., PAGNINI,
M.P. and KOLOSSOV, V. (eds): On the Centenary of Ratzel’s
Politische Geographie. Europe between Political Geography
and Geopolitics. Società Geografica Italiana, Rome.
PASSARGE, S. (1919): Die Grundlagen der Landschaftskunde.
Friederichsen, Hamburg.
PICKLES, J. (2004): A History of Spaces. Cartographic Reason,
Mapping and the Geo-coded World. Routledge, London.
RAFFESTIN, C., LOPRENO, D. and PASTEUR, Y. (1995):
Géopolitique et histoire. Payot, Lausanne.
RATZEL, F. (1897): Politische Geographie oder die Geographie
der Staaten, des Verkehrs und des Krieges. Oldenbourg,
München-Leipzig.
RATZEL, F. (1907): La terra e la vita. Geografia comparativa.
UTET, Turin (Die Erde und das Leben. Eine vergleichende
Erdkunde. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig, 1901–1902).
RATZEL, F. (1914): Geografia dell’uomo. Antropogeografia:
principi di applicazione della scienza geografica alla storia.
Bocca, Turin (Anthropogeographie oder Grundzuge der An-
wendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte. Engelhorn, Stutt-
gart, 1988).
RECLUS, R. (1894): Nouvelle géographie universelle: La terre
et les hommes. Hachette, Paris.
RECLUS, R. (1905–08): L’homme et la terre. Librairie Uni-
verselle, Paris.
© The author 2006
 GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND THE NEW BIOPOLITICAL NOMOS

SCHMITT, C. (1988): Le categorie del politico. il Mulino, Bolo-
gna (Politische Teologie. Dunker & Humboldt, Berlin, 1922).
SCHMITT, C. (1998): Il nomos della terra. Adelphi, Milan (Das
Nomos von der Erde. Dunker & Humboldt, Berlin, 1974).
STAGLIANÒ, R. (2005): ‘“Una Guantanamo in Kosovo”. La
denuncia del commissario UE’, la Repubblica, 26 Novem-
ber, http://www.repubblica.it (last accessed: 10 January
2006).
VIDAL DE LA BLACHE, P. (1903): Le Tableau de la géogra-
phie de la France. Hachette, Paris.
VIDAL DE LA BLACHE, P. (1922): Principes de géographie
humaine. Colin, Paris.

© The author 2006 403

Journal compilation © 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography