Lazarettos as border filters : expurgating bodies, commodities and ideas, 1800–1870s

Abstract

Overlapping solid land and fluid sea, lazarettos marked the countries' borders operating, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would put it, to subordinate the immense maritime 'hydraulic force'' - considered as the foremost liquid carrier of contagious disease - to the powers of the territorial state. These quarantines, intended primarily as prophylactic institutions came to constrain, regulate and sanitise the movement and influx of individuals and merchandise of every sort. They became increasingly important for the state during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, at a time of rapid technological innovation in transport and communication - especially with the coming of the steamship - which intensified speed and human movement, travel and trade, creating greater interconnectivity between all areas of the Mediterranean and beyond. At the same rate, this also accelerated the transmission of contagious disease from one part to the other of the region and between continents. To properly operate in this way, southern European lazarettos had evolved into complex institutions specialised in governing the porosity of the territorial borders.' Such control was achieved through a systematic filtering instrument which selected, separated, disinfected and disciplined alien or returning embodied subjects before these entered the country. This chapter seeks to explore in some depth how this filtering-purifying institution functioned. Rather than accept the conventional description that lazarettos were merely public sanitary institutions protecting society from epidemics, which of course they were, this study adopts a multidimensional perspective, in line with the more recent and innovative historical works. To be able to take on such analysis, this study critically engages with an influential historiographical current of a Foucauldian matrix, not least by drawing from it the key concept of 'dispositif'. More specifically, it employs Giorgio Agamben's more recent articulation of this concept as an apparatus which can be described as a 'machine of governance',' in the sense that it has 'the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings' . Careful employment of this notion helps us investigate, describe and explain more thoroughly the multiplicity of functions effected by the lazaretto according to shifting epidemiological circumstances.