bare life and many scattered thoughts

1) Agamban begins his essay, "The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern" by introducing the camps as being born out of the state of exception and martial law and reminds us that we are still living in its space. This is a profound statement, and relates in many ways too, to the gradual disinheritance of space and of the commons and to the creation of a sort of spectral figure perhaps, expendable or surplus. Bare life and biopolitics.

In the concluding lines of his essay he cautions, "And in a different yet analogous way, today's democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life" (180). Again, this ties into much of what we've already read.

 It seems to me he's looking at the bare life of the camps not as a rupture in history but as something that shows signs of other forms (Cuba, Boers), a device of the state. Arendt sees no parallels to the concentration camps on the other hand (or am I oversimplifing it?). Both of them talk of the control of the state over the political and physical body of the individual, and the enclosed existence where man is ultimately reduced to a thing. Guantanamo Bay, prisons in general, and Palestine come to mind.

I am interested in learning how to talk and trace the way in which Agamban comes to the state of exception and how Arendt comes to it. 

2) I'm also wondering how to think of the two "peoples" that Agamban refers to and the different ways we can talk about this split. Can we say there are more than two or perhaps that does not matter? Can we say that the loss of the commons was also a step towards the politics of the bare life? I'm sorry, I am not coherent today, and don't know why I keep thinking of the commons.

3) There is so much in Arendt's book that I don't know where to start. I think her analysis of the secret police and the formation of the state of lawlessness and shapeless body of the state is terrifying, and yet I can see many examples now of such spaces we live in.

4) I am a little unclear about the sentences below. I think she is saying something very important and I want to make sure I understand her.

"But as we know today, murder is only a limited evil. The murderer who kills a man - a man who has to die anyway - still moves within the realm of life and death familiar to us; both have indeed a necessary condition on which the dialectic is founded, even if it is not always conscious of it. The murderer leaves a corpse behind and does not pretend that his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces they are those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who loved his victim; he destroys a life but he does not destroy the facts of existence itself" (442).

By "facts of existence" does Arendt refer here to history, memory, the material body, the ritual of death (as in burial, etc) or is there something else I am not getting to or at?