Naked Life Analysis

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Displacements, migrations and exiles have been recorded throughout all eras of the history, especially in consequence of wars, armed conflicts, economic reasons and climate change. Displacement has been the subject of vigorous literary texts and diverse subdivisions of art. Nonetheless, in recent years, the concepts of migration, refugee and asylum seeker have come to the fore in the world especially just after the migrations generated by ongoing war and armed conflicts in the Middle East. Whilst this migration wave introduced to be the biggest one after the Second World War, this human flow from the East to the West has perceived as a crisis. All manner of international agreements and security measures are included to the subject of bio-politics …show more content…

According to Agamben, the distinction between naked life (zoê) and political existence (bios) is the distinction between natural existence and the individual 's legal existence.7 It is the same naked life that becomes a decisive political criterion for the suspension of individual rights. The figure of Agamben 's ancient Roman law, the Holy Person, is excommunicated by the political-legal society, so he appears only to be physically present, and therefore exempted from the punishment of killing him. Agamben traces the "holy man" from Roman deportations, from people excluded by society in medieval times to the detainees in Nazi camps. Therefore, the examples of today 's "naked life" can be seen as asylum seekers, immigrants and refugees and also the societies that are living in authoritarian systems and nation-states but are from different ethnicities and belief systems. Their common characteristics are that they may stay out of legal protection, be applied to humanitarian aid, or be reduced to a "biomass" status. In popular visual culture, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees are abstracted from their true identities by being visualized as needy, victimized and passively coded bodies. In these images there is no trace of people 's previous lives. The new identity that visual culture has built for them is 'the asylum seeker ', 'the refugee ', 'the immigrant ' and 'the others '. The mass bodies in the boats, the bodies waiting in the borders for transition, the bodies behind the wire braids, the bodies living in the camps are examples of "naked life", and they are identified with a number of objects symbolizing them. These are orange life jacket, life belt, foil blanket, barbed wire and tent. These orange-colored objects, which are presented to the spectators in the printed and visual media, are now

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