Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-23-2023

Publication Title

ÍMPETU

Volume

10

Abstract

The refugee camps in the south of France after 1939 and their testimonies suggest that these camps were a test for the Nazi death camps. This essay analyzes the personal experience of the Catalan writer Agustí Bartra narrated in his first work during his Latin American exile: Cristo de 200.000 brazos [Christ of 200,000 Arms] (1958). From the biopolitical analysis of the novel, based on Giorgio Agamben's concepts of state of exception and homo sacer, this essay will observe how the camps are represented in Bartra’s novel in order to understand how they functioned. In addition, based on Bartra’s experience, "without reproducing it or recounting the circumstances with fidelity" (Codina 272), how the author describes life inside the camps and the relationships between eachother and with the outside. This essay will also pay attention to the boundaries of the camps, what they implied, if they could be easily crossed and what consequences prisioners had if they succeeded. The dehumanization of the individual appears in this essay from the “killable” concepts proposed by Agamben, the homo sacer. The French camps are the perfect setting to observe how the Agambian state of exception is applied, and how these become spaces of segregation and violation of the most basic human rights. This essay seeks to give a twist to the analysis of the literaturization of Bartra's testimony during his imprisonment in the French concentration camps. The second objective focuses on observing how those who were sheltered between the barbed wire fences and the beaches were dispossessed of their basic rights.

First Page

79

Last Page

99

ISSN

2660-793X

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