This paper revisits a key concept in political geography, the space of exception, and what it continues to reveal about the spatial technology of the camp. Deriving from the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, this concept speaks to the conference theme in heralding a break with the notion of coexistence as a founding principle for society. For Agamben, the modern nation-state is founded on the capacity of the sovereign to identify and violently exclude certain groups from that political community; in other words, to negate their right to coexist through their abandonment in spaces of exception, of which the Nazi camp was the exemplar.
Agamben’s analysis of historical concentration camps (specifically Auschwitz) along these conceptual lines has been critiqued for its apparent failure to engage with the complex spatial and power dynamics of actual camps. Inspired by these critiques, this paper reconsiders the relationship between coexistence and negation, by analysing the camp not as the mere location for those who have been excluded from society, but instead as primarily a space of carefully managed coexistence oriented towards the negation of its target population. Coexistence is thus conceptualised not as a state that is negated but as a spatial process that actively negates.
Following Agamben’s empirical precedent, the paper examines how the camp was adopted by the Nazi regime as a site that could enable the proximate coexistence of prisoner groups who were targeted for violence as biopolitical ‘exceptions’, and SS perpetrators responsible for inflicting that violence but at a certain distance that would protect them from the scene of their own degenerate violence. By positioning Auschwitz as a space of exception from which the authorities were themselves to be excepted, the paper reflects on the complex geographies of coexistence in camps past and present.