TRATTENUTI E TRATTAMENTI ESISTENZE E SPAZI FRA PENALE E NON PENALE

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the experiences that can be traced to the notion of "withholding” (or trattenimento according to the Italian more precise way to literally describe this phenomenon). By this term I refer to those physical spaces of social inclusion and exclusion within which existences are held without an apparent (at least at the beginning) normative justification. I consider these situations inherently anomic but surprisingly recurring in our century and the latter part of the previous one. The coercive restraintment in well-defined spaces, brought by the breach of a rule of criminal law, defines a new status of existence, that of "withheld” (or trattenuti). The reality of this (relatively) new form of life has been the main subject of my research as direct product of the obsession for securitization. Withholding is presented to the researcher as a sort of permanent state of exception.The heterogeneity of the places of withholding of existences has been studied from the point of view of the geographical location. From this analysis I have been able to underline the global nature of the phenomenon and, thanks to the concrete forms of execution, to legitimize the image of continuity with the experience of the internment camps, mentioned above. For the withholding process, in some cases, a whole geographical space is directly used: islands, archipelagos and enclaves. Other times it uses urban structures: I am referring to ghettos (from the Parisian suburbs, or banlieux, to the ghetto of Shanghai) and even to boundary walls. Walls and borders carry an inherent exclusion, but sometimes their meaning is much more profound. The story of the Berliner Mauer is, from this point of view, absolutely paradigmatic. Behind the justification of action and preventive safety, the lives and rights are deleted. Even the name periodically returns with the strength of the model and example, although negative. It is the "wall of shame", the wall of Tijuana that separates Mexico from the United States, the wall that separates the Western Sahara territories Moroccan domination from those of Arab domination, the separation wall between Israel and the West Bank. In other cases withholding takes place in constructed and ad hoc delimited situations: like centers of temporary stay and assistance (CPTA), today CIE following the intervention of the EU law; the safety devices terrorism in national and international transport (waiting rooms in airports and train stations); the "red zones" at the summits of heads of state and government of the world (not least the Genoese one in 2001). We can observe, together with Foucault, the mutation of the police apparatus in a system of "governmentality". But places of withholding are not just a European experience. I’m thinking about the internment camps in Libya or Palestinian occupied territories. They have now really assumed the form of an anonymous “archipelago – gulag” of segregation and detention. Especially after the second Intifada, the territories seem to have taken almost spontaneously the structure of the internment camp, while the freedom of movement of Palestinians fades, the principle of detention seems to appear with ever greater clarity. We are really confronted with the genesis of a biopolitics of progressive isolation of the Palestinian territories; the confinement of a people in a dimension of functional enclave of control. A state of emergency becomes a form of government. Looking to withheld existences, the common feature seems to be the rejection of normalization of difference. We are dealing with lives or threatening, social pathologies that power must identify and separate. The referent is mainly represented by minorities (ethnic-racial, linguistic, religious, political) deserving, if not elimination, of some concealment. Screw deviant, but also, and especially meaningful in the sense that has been indicated above, anomic as stolen from the ordinary processes of criminalization with the intervention of the criminal law. It is a “sacred" existence in a process of reflection that starts with Jean Marie Guyau, passes through Emile Durkheim, and finally comes to Giorgio Agamben. Withheld’s lives are worthless, according to Hannah Arendt' "exemplary human being reduced to the most elementary reactions, the model citizen of a totalitarian state, a city that can be produced only imperfectly outside the camp." A distinction, however, seems possible and reasonable, in light of the observations made so far. According to Bauman withheld can be divided in outsiders and insiders. The first earn their subjection to detention just because they come from another jurisdiction which makes them extra-national (stateless) or, more generally, foreigners; while on the other side we look at that surplus of native humanity who, unable to be violently amputee, should be at least hidden or fenced, building spaces of anti-city in cities. The last part of my research is dedicated to an ethnographic study of these dimensions, a qualitative research carried out in many centers of detention and "reception". Empathy has been one of the most important instruments in the interviews in order to understand. to verstehen, in a weberian way and approach, the existences and spaces between criminal and non criminal Law. Ethnography is always the writing of difference, but with the aim to make closer words that seem to be only apparently far from each other (especially in terms of understanding).