The Earthly Hell of the Stateless Subject
“Hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy: it is something as real as houses, stones, and trees. Apparently, nobody wants to know that the age in which we live has created a new kind of human being: those placed in concentration camps by their enemies and in internment camps by their friends.”— Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” (1943)
In Dino Buzzati’s short story The Seventh Floor, an ordinary hospital building becomes the setting of an unnoticed transformation. The story follows a man who enters the hospital with a mild illness and is gradually moved to the lower floors under the pretext of a “temporary arrangement.” His descent is determined not by his illness, but by procedures. At each stage, explanations such as “the rooms are full” or “the doctor can monitor you more easily here” change the man’s position while simultaneously disregarding his status and autonomy.
On the surface, no one is cruel and no one appears to be pursuing evil. Yet within this calmness, the subject is administered, revealing how an individual’s rights, autonomy, and human status can gradually disappear in the modern world. Arendt’s observation that hell is no longer mythological but is constructed within earthly institutions becomes clear here: a person does not transform all at once, but through silent displacements and the rhythm of apparently reasonable procedures. He becomes a “new kind” of human being—a bare subject whose decisions are made by others and whose rights have been suspended. Each downward movement in Buzzati’s story offers a miniature model of this transformation; modern hell becomes a mechanism that operates not through noise, but through order.
Arendt’s claim that “hell has become earthly” reveals the procedural forms of power through which modern bureaucracy renders human beings stateless. The slow and silent reduction of the individual to a “bare human being” is a form of existence produced not only by totalitarian regimes, but also by ordinary institutions. Buzzati’s The Seventh Floor can be read as a literary miniature of this transformation.
I. The Loss of Citizenship and the Camps
Arendt wrote these words in 1943, at a time when millions of people in Europe had awakened to a world in which they suddenly belonged to no state. The nation-state system recognizes a person’s rights not because they are “human,” but because they are a “citizen.” Therefore, a person who has been separated from citizenship and has become a refugee may legally remain human while effectively ceasing to be the subject of any rights.
The figure Arendt calls a “new kind of human being” emerges precisely within this intermediate region. Such a person is neither a protected citizen nor someone explicitly placed in the category of the “enemy.” Trapped between these two positions, the individual falls into a legal void.
Concentration camps and internment camps are the spaces of this void. The concentration camp is a place in which those declared enemies are destroyed; the internment camp is established by supposed “friends,” yet remains a space of unlawful confinement. In both cases, the human being ceases to be the subject of rights and becomes the object of administrative procedures.
Arendt’s description of hell as being “as real as houses, stones, and trees” is therefore not merely metaphorical, but almost topographical. Hell has become a part of the world whose location can be identified and which is defined by regulations, records, fences, and barracks. This historical context clarifies the two central ideas within the quotation. The “new kind of human being” is the subject whose status has collapsed and who has ceased to be the bearer of rights, while “hell” is the institutional and spatial form of this collapse.
II. The Architecture of Modern Hell: The Ontology of Procedure
Arendt’s statement that “hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy” but something as real as houses, stones, and trees becomes an almost material topography in Buzzati’s hospital. The comparison with Dante’s Inferno is not limited to the similarity between their descending levels. Both structures are organized around an authority that determines the individual’s fate.
In Dante, this authority is God. Sins are separated according to the categories of divine law, which determine how much each soul must suffer. The descent therefore becomes the spatial logic of a moral order.
In Buzzati’s hospital, however, this authority is replaced by the dispersed but functional bureaucratic machine that Deleuze and Guattari describe as an assemblage. Room numbers, nurses’ routines, regulations, registration forms, and administrative formulas such as “the rooms are full” or “the doctor can monitor you more easily here” are individually innocent. When combined, however, they produce what Foucault describes as micro-power.
The individual’s movement is determined not by the will of a single agent, but by the internal rhythm of the system itself. While Dante’s sinner is classified according to divine law, Buzzati’s patient is classified through the loss of status without any moral justification. His descent signifies not guilt, but disappearance.
At this point, a Derridean reading reveals the absence of justification hidden beneath the appearance of justification: what the procedure says does not produce meaning, but it does produce movement. As the patient is taken to lower floors, no one explicitly tells him that his condition has worsened. Nevertheless, the combination of space, instructions, and explanations pushes him toward the “new kind of human being” described by Arendt: someone who appears legally to remain a subject, but who has effectively ceased to be the subject of rights.
This condition occupies a central place in Arendt’s analysis of refugees. The individual no longer belongs to a community, but neither is he entirely outside it; he becomes a subject suspended between two states. Buzzati’s patient is a miniature model of this same suspension: he has a floor but no status, a space but no place; he is the object of procedures but not the subject of anyone’s decision.
This comparison demonstrates why Arendt’s secularization of hell acquires historical concreteness. In Dante’s hell, punishment possesses meaning because it forms part of God’s order. In modern hell, meaning has collapsed. The person does not know why he is being punished and may not even realize that punishment is taking place.
As Deleuze’s analysis of control societies suggests, modern power no longer operates only by prohibiting. It relocates, producing and erasing identities by moving the subject from one position to another. Buzzati’s descent is not simply a punishment, but a technique of dispossession. The patient is displaced by an invisible procedure and gradually pushed beyond the boundaries of the political world, much like the refugee figure in Arendt’s analysis.
Buzzati’s hell is therefore more radically cruel than Dante’s. Here, suffering is produced not by the weight of sin, but by the absence of status. Hell is no longer God’s order; it is a space in which order itself has become divine. What judges the individual is no longer a moral law, but a functioning procedure. Arendt’s quotation points toward this transformation: modern hell is no longer the space of guilt, but the space of statelessness accompanying the loss of rights.
III. The Psychodynamics of Status Loss
The patient’s gradual positioning “lower” within the hospital is not merely a spatial shift. In Lacanian terms, it is a recoding of his place within the symbolic order. The upper floor represents the condition of being “ill but still a citizen,” whereas the lower floor represents the transition into the order of the objectified body.
Here, the subject’s right to speak is taken away, while language and authority are transferred to the procedure. Byung-Chul Han’s approach to self-surveillance helps explain the patient’s silent obedience. Rather than questioning the position assigned to him, the patient feels that he is expected to adapt to the procedure.
This voluntary compliance can also be understood through Žižek’s conception of ideology. The patient focuses not on the injustice of his descent, but on the supposed necessity of the system. Ideology operates here not as punishment, but as normalization.
From Baudrillard’s perspective, the lower floor is not merely a physical location; it becomes a simulacrum. The patient’s loss of status is a form of social death reproduced under the appearance of medical necessity. The individual remains biologically alive, yet is symbolically erased from society.
IV. The Politics of Silent Descent and the Absence of an Agent
There is no identifiable figure of evil within the story. Evil is embedded in the functioning of the system itself, stripped of explicit intention, as in Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. The nurses who move the patient to the lower floors possess no personal hostility toward him. Yet it is precisely this ordinariness that allows evil to become normalized and invisible, recalling Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil.
Žižek’s concept of objective violence becomes visible here as a form of violence that no one consciously applies, but that everyone reproduces through everyday practices. From a Derridean perspective, its source can be located in an abstract structural order. The individual’s fate emerges not from personal will, but from the system’s own language and automatic logic.
As Foucault’s concept of the dispositif suggests, power does not reside solely in individuals. It inhabits the fabric of arrangements, norms, documents, and records. The patient’s descent is therefore not the outcome of a single decision, but the result of an apparatus.
Agamben’s concept of “bare life” further clarifies the situation. The law continues to exist, but it no longer protects the individual. The person is simultaneously inside and outside the law. Han’s concept of the violence of positivity points toward a similar mechanism: although no one appears to be actively harming the patient, he is silently consumed by an endless demand for adaptation.
From Baudrillard’s perspective, this process can also be read as the disappearance of violence through simulation. Behind the neutral image of the hospital, a genuine process of destruction continues, but everyone believes that it is merely “procedure.”
Evil therefore arises not from hostility or malicious intention in the classical sense, but from the functioning of a machine without a visible subject. The suffering produced by the modern world does not necessarily originate in individual people, but in a structural order that can be understood through Deleuze’s conception of the machine.
In this sense, The Seventh Floor completes Arendt’s warning: contemporary hells are mechanisms that no single person has fully planned, but that everyone helps to operate. What oppresses the individual is not merely the open cruelty of other people, but a system whose functioning even its participants do not completely understand.
V. The New Kind of Human Being and the Anatomy of Symbolic Death
Arendt’s idea of a “new kind of human being” was developed particularly through the experience of refugees: individuals who are displaced, stateless, deprived of legal status, and never fully recognized by any institution.
Because these individuals possess no “place” in the world, they fall into what Arendt understands as a tragic void of status. The refugee ceases to be the subject of rights and becomes the object of the system. Statelessness is therefore one of the conditions in which the human being becomes most radically vulnerable: belonging fully to no institution, being unable to exercise any right completely, and existing only as the object of administrative procedures.
Buzzati’s protagonist is a dramatic example of this statelessness. He is ill, but has not been fully diagnosed; he is a citizen, but his rights have no force; he speaks, but his words produce no effect. His descent to the lower floors represents the gradual destruction of his status and his transformation into an object. The mechanisms through which the modern world renders the individual invisible—reducing a person to a category, a number, or a room—become visible here.
Yet the same phenomenon is interpreted in an almost opposite manner by Deleuze and Guattari. Their concept of deterritorialization describes the subject’s release from fixed codes of identity and opening toward new forms of becoming. For Arendt, the loss of belonging signals political death; for Deleuze and Guattari, it may contain the possibility of a creative rupture.
The position of the refugee therefore lies at the intersection of two different theoretical interpretations. Modern bureaucratic structures, however, rapidly transform the Deleuzian potential for liberation into an Arendtian collapse. The creative dimension of deterritorialization becomes trapped within statelessness under the security-oriented logic of states and institutions.
The refugee’s mobility or capacity to escape established codes is immediately rewritten as “irregularity,” “absence,” or “deprivation of rights.” Buzzati’s protagonist’s descent is the literary counterpart of this dialectic.
Movement does not create liberation for him. On the contrary, each new floor becomes another “nowhere” in which the subject is positioned. Deterritorialization cannot produce a creative rupture here; instead, it becomes a form of procedural erasure and remains only a theoretical ideal.
The liberating flows imagined by Deleuze and Guattari become trapped within Arendt’s politically vulnerable figure of the bare human being. In the modern world, deterritorialization therefore creates a dialectic between possibility and threat: the subject may be freed through the dissolution of codes, or may be excluded from every code and thereby rendered invisible.
VI. Lines of Flight
Deleuze and Guattari argue that every system contains a line of flight. In Buzzati’s world, however, this line remains merely a theoretical possibility and does not exist in practice.
The patient cries out, “Do not move me down,” but his reactions do not produce a rupture capable of disrupting the system. They are only desperate attempts to negotiate with it. He needs the hospital just as Arendt’s refugee needs the state.
Escape appears possible: the door and the window are open. Yet escape itself offers no solution. Outside the hospital, the patient remains ill and is unable to heal himself. If he escapes, he will die; if he remains, he will also die.
This creates a condition reminiscent of Beauvoir’s analysis of freedom and dependency. Instead of rejecting the authority that oppresses him, the subject speaks within its limits because he depends on it.
From a Žižekian perspective, ideology operates here not through silence, but through the illusion of choice. The patient believes that he can leave, yet no place outside the hospital can offer him a “world.” From a Foucauldian perspective, the true crisis emerges when even questioning one’s assigned role is insufficient, because no alternative community exists to protect the subject or recognize his claims.
Real escape in The Seventh Floor is therefore impossible through the simple act of leaving. As with Arendt’s refugee, the “outside” is no longer a place. Statelessness may appear as liberation within a Deleuzian framework, but in an Arendtian framework the subject without rights has no other structure in which to seek protection or refuge.
The line of flight appears to exist, but the subject’s material conditions make it unusable. If you have no place in the world, escape is only a change of direction, not liberation. In a historical condition in which both the inside and the outside have simultaneously closed, the line of flight remains nothing more than an abstract possibility unless it is supported by a right.
References
- Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” The Menorah Journal, 1943.
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
- Buzzati, Dino. “The Seventh Floor.”
- Dante Alighieri. Inferno.
- Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”
- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus.
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish.
- Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
- Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.
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