Enforced disappearance as biopolitical practice. Nazism and tanatopolitics

Abstract

In this article, I maintain that Nazi concentrationary model was not the par excellence place of modern biopolitics but rather mainly expressed the tanatopolitical face of biopower. For this purpose, I take up Hannah Arendt’s analysis, that articulate antisemitism and imperialism to explain the concentrationary phenomenon as the nucleus of Nazi totalitarianism. From her work, as well as from testimonial texts by survivors, I deduce that Nazi concentrationary mechanism attempted to reduce human life from bios to zoé, in a clear biopolitical exercise although, at the same time, by heading towards the direct and selective extermination of certain population groups, responded more to “making die and letting live”, typical of sovereignty power, rather than to “making live and letting die”, which characterizes biopolitics. Therefore, it had a primarily tanatopolitical dimension. Finally, I recover the possible replications and mutations of the total concentrationary phenomenon, in the presence of current biopolitical dangers.