figure of abandonment – yet another dissertation outline

Introduction The Figure of the Refugee: Abandonment, Mobility and a Coming Politics 

The binding theme of this dissertation is the imagining of a politics beginning with the figure of the refugee, rather than the figure of the citizen, or the worker. Navigating through the past, present, and future, the chapters undertake several projects that are bound together in the figure of the refugee, a binding that will become clear in the ways the refugee actively un-binds all that we usually find stable in the political.

The figure of the refugee is a figure we should be troubled by, as both a figure that is indeed the effect of real-world processes of violence and emergency and a figure that is becoming evermore the de facto foundation of political membership today. However, what this dissertation argues is that this figure of the refugee has indeed been central to the political as it has been conceived and constructed, at least since early modernity and certainly by the era of state-formation inaugurated with the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. The entire nation-state system is predicated upon an abandonment of particular bodies and subjectivities.

To some extent, the logic of abandonment articulated here is in direct contradiction to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, which was and is a mode of power predicated upon the securing of territory and its population, and “making them live” and encouraging productivity. But a basic limitation constrains Foucault’s work: due to his use of a particular form of archive and his narrow Francophone focus, he rarely engaged with what we would call today globalization, or truly global phenomena, and certainly not with what we might call a global politics. Foucault inherits a legacy in Western political thought that limits the political to specific bounded spaces and populations. This is not to say that his philosophical and political insights should be rejected out of hand, but it is to say that the conditions of the political have changed drastically since the early 1980s. While I am sure that he witnessed early globalization, he did not really write about it, save his lecture course entitle The Birth of Biopolitics, which was really a course on economic liberalism, rather than ruminations on a global political space, per se. Instead, I argue that if we take the archive to mean not just the physical space of an archive in a library, but also contemporary practices of politics, we can develop a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the political, power relations, and philosophy.

My basic argument in this dissertation is that:

a) We must conceive of political space differently; rather than as a given territory coextensive with police or military control, it is instead various processes and moments of boundedness and unboundedness, or territorialization and deterritorialization, primarily conceived through a concept of non-linear territoriality. Non-linear territoriality lays bare the myth of sovereign political space, and instead privileges the ways sovereignty is always multiple, layered, and contested, as well as the fact of human mobility that often carries territoriality from one space to another without drawing a contiguity in between. Contemporary political theory must deal primarily with the impending death of the nation-state, the effacement of identity, and bare life, and it must do so while avoiding the traditional fantasy of territory.

b) Beginning with a different conception of political space, a global political space, inevitably leads to the undeniable conclusion that the vast majority of the world’s population at any given time is actually far from secure in their livelihoods, and are in fact living precarious lives under conditions of abandonment. There are numerous factors at play here, and abandonment is certainly not experienced homogeneously. (In a way, the abandonment that characterizes global political life is akin to Marx’s understanding of alienation as a social, political, and economic phenomenon.)

c) This characteristic abandonment is both a precondition for and a result of Western political theory and the constitutive exclusions that characterize its conception of the political, from the Greek polis to the nation-state. Given this ontological fact, we must redefine political theory beginning with a figure of abandonment, what I designate here ‘the figure of the refugee.’

The dissertation will take the following form:

Chapter 1 State-Formation, Colonialism, and Abandonment

This chapter grapples with the refugee as a liberal political technology of spatial correction. My hypothesis is that the concept of refugee first takes root in the immediate aftermath of the Treaties of Westphalia, precisely to solve the problem of how to deal with populations that become superfluous after the initiation of processes of nation building.

Somewhat differently than dominant definitions of liberalism – which locates liberalism as an 18^th and 19^th century phenomenon – I posit liberalism as coextensive with the nation-state and the colonial project, primarily because these are the immediate preconditions that make self-conscious liberalism possible. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquiue, Mill, and others in the liberal tradition are expressions of political thought only possible within colonialism and the nation-state. To risk a conceptual slippage at this point is acceptable, because it denies liberalism its self-valorizing narrative and locates it more precisely with the practices that served as the immediate conditions of possibility for notions of ‘the citizen,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the people,’ and ‘limited government,’ among others, to emerge.

The first goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the schism of humanity inaugurated by liberal practice and thought, that identifies particular bodies and subjectivities as worthy of political membership, other bodies as worthy of exclusion owing to their membership in other polities, and yet other bodies as completely unworthy of the consideration of political membership at all. This latter category included African slaves, and indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. The first order of business for this dissertation is to understand the concept of “refugee” in light of this hierarchization of humanity.

The second goal of this chapter is to locate the concept of abandonment as crystalized in particular relationships at this time. Unlike much of the field of cultural studies, or even much political theory, I resist the notion of community or state-formation as involving a constitutive othering, a process Agamben details in Homo Sacer as “the ban.” What I would add to this conversation is that instead of an “inclusive exclusion,” or the inclusion in the political by the legal, formal exclusion of a body from the polity, what we have is the effective abandonment of those not even deemed worthy of the ban in the first instance. This is not simply the splitting of hairs with Agamben on historical fact; it is instead a recognition that the ban is a relation already predicated upon a division of humanity that allows for the sovereign, and law, to exist in the first place.

Chapter 2 (Dis)locating Control: Transmigration and Precarity

This chapter is located entirely in the present, and is an attempt to understand the relationships among territory and borders, state practices of migration control (including refugee movements), and precarious life. While the previous chapter took a historical view on the concept of abandonment, this chapter seeks to understand the way states continue to produce abandoned lives through a set of processes that, in sum, are in fact a system of global apartheid that continuously renders a significant portion, if not a majority, of the global populace absolutely precarious.

Taking up various literatures, from border studies to political science, I argue that contemporary states operate in ways that assume non-linear territoriality, even when they retain discourses of sovereign state space and the strict control of human mobility. States, non-governmental organizations, and supra-national entities (such as the European Union’s Frontex), work together to enforce what is effectively a topographical borderlands that no longer takes the national sovereign bounded space to be its primary “container.” I argue that before 1980 (to set a somewhat arbitrary date) the form of biopolitics envisaged by Foucault could operate discursively, as states were primarily concerned with securing their populations and making them more productive. Due to a variety of factors, the present moment has shifted to being characterized by non-linear territoriality, a topographical policing space of networked and overlapping strategies and technologies, and the abject abandonment of particular bodies and subjectivities. What emerges is something other than liberalism, although clearly related to it, and the impossibility of continuing to define political membership through either the category of ‘citizen’ or ‘worker.’

Chapter 3 Refugee Studies and the Management of Abandonment

This chapter argues that the field of Refugee Studies emerged, largely after 1980, in direct response to the intensification of abandonment in a deliberate attempt to manage its most deleterious effects, yet in ways that would leave the international state system fundamentally unchanged. In short, this chapter details the ways that the field of Refugee Studies is complicit in an ongoing process of legitimation of the nation-state system and the violence that maintains that system. The main argument in this chapter is that ‘the figure of the refugee’ produced by the field of Refugee Studies (including self-assumed Critical Refugee Studies) is in fact a depoliticized figure that is only, and always already, posited as an object of management.

Chapter 4 Securitization and Abandonment: The Governmentality of Abandonment

This chapter builds on the previous chapter to bring in other fields, especially Security Studies, Political Science, and the related, but distinct, academic field of Human Rights Studies to capture a complete picture of what I call the “governmentality of abandonment.”

Chapter 5 A Politics to Come: The Figure of the Refugee in Political Theory

Finally, in this chapter (or several chapters), I begin to imagine a politics to come based on the figure of the refugee that would essentially be the dialectically opposite figure posited in the governmentality of abandonment. This chapter effectively hinges on the previous chapters; the former chapters attempted to understand the relation between historic and contemporary forms of abandonment, this latter chapter takes the figure of abandonment and reimagines a political theory that takes it and notions of non-linear territoriality as organizing rubrics for a new concept of the political.

Part 1

In the first part of this chapter, I demonstrate the ways that the figure of abandonment, the figure of the refugee, has haunted our various conceptions of the political since the colonial/liberal era (perhaps, simply, modernity) began. The figure of the refugee here operates as a figure that dis-figures, or profanes, those ‘sacred’ categories of the political: the Citizen, Man, Rights, the worker, the nation-state.

Part 2 (perhaps Chapter 6?)

In the second part of this chapter, I dissect the well-established discussion of the concept of ‘community’ that began in the 1980s. Important authors here would include Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Esposito, Miranda Joseph, Derrida, and others.

Conclusion

This final chapter will sketch out provisional conclusions taken from the dissertation as a whole.

dissertation prospectus – the figure of the refugee: displacement, mobility and the politics to come

I’m finally done with my prospectus, and it has been sent to my committee for review and comments. It’s a purely descriptive document – I was basically asked to write theory out of it so that I could “prove” to my committee that I was planning a manageable project. Here it is:

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Introduction

            This dissertation approaches the figure of the refugee through three case studies. The first is an archival exploration of British asylum practices in the period following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Second, I will study refugee and immigrant controls in the Mediterranean by conducting fieldwork in Palestine, the Morocco/Spain border region at Ceuta and Melilla, and Lampedusa, Italy. Third, I will look at the parallel cases of the Sans-Papiers and the Roma in France. These projects will be detailed below, but for now I summarize by saying that taken together, these case studies focus on the refugee as a nexus of political, economic, and social problematics. The figure of the refugee haunts our understanding of the political, unbinding the nation-state, citizenship, security, rights, and sovereignty. The goal of the dissertation is to approximate the figure of the refugee via these three vectors, and hone in on the ways this figure opens onto numerous debates in political theory, Refugee Studies, and other relevant fields of disciplinary knowledge.

Part I

            Ostensibly, this dissertation is about refugees, displacements, and mobilities; but it does not stem from a desire to offer ‘solutions to the refugee problem,’ as diverse commentators from Arendt to the major proponents in the field of what is now called Refugee Studies have urged. Instead, it begins from an incitement offered by Giorgio Agamben:

given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community. It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.

This incitement is, by now, well known and much-discussed. Interestingly enough, though, Agamben’s challenge has not generally been taken up by ‘theorists,’ but rather by social scientists who have reacted both positively (as does Peter Nyers, for example) and negatively (e.g. Patricia Owens). He is held to account for his empiricism, or narrowly read on the exception and bare life, or often misread entirely; yet few engage the dialectic central to his work: both homo sacer/exception and potentiality/form-of-life. A broader reading of Agamben’s philosophy – if one can name it such – brings together these crucial concepts and corrects the predominant reception of his work as offering merely negation of life, a thanatopolitics of bare life. This dissertation diverges from the oft-tread Refugee Studies reception of Agamben’s incitement to engage “political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee” on the philosophical grounds of potentiality and form-of-life (and yet it is not a dissertation about Agamben).

            This dissertation will explore how the category of ‘refugee’ developed in the late 17^th Century in European political thought, at the moment of the formalization and intensification of the global system of nation-states, in order to diffuse tensions and more easily handle the ‘purifications’ of multiple peoples into a singular national people. This system, with its gradual legal formalization and the development of a subsequent international human rights regime, worked relatively well for several centuries (on a political register, not necessarily in terms of effectiveness in delivering aid, for example) in large part due to the ability of metropolitan states to displace large portions of their populations to colonial areas. However, numerous historical events and evolving attitudes towards humanitarian aid processes and structures have left the refugee as a body in circulation, but as an empty conceptual category. Refugees are increasingly ever present, yet more and more frequently denied access to the legal-institutional and human rights provisions developed within the Westphalian system. Rather than ‘solutions to the refugee problem,’ what is needed now is a reconceptualization of the ways we imagine the interrelationship of people, place, and politics: the primary goal of this dissertation.

            Central to the problem is that the very conceptual and philosophical categories mobilized in refugee discourses have their foundation in a violent history of separation and expulsion. This history is exposed by Agamben, but obliquely; it is more directly posed by Domenico Losurdo in Liberalism: A Counter-History. Liberalism itself, according to Losurdo, is rooted in the distinction made between human and non-human, wherein the non-human was subjected directly to the violence of slavery, racial exclusion, and systematic oppression. This division is extended in Red, White, and Black where Wilderson highlights the structure of racial antagonism in the US as a division between White (settler, master, human), Red (savage, half-human), and Black (slave, non-human). The very categories of citizenship, the nation-state, security, rights, and sovereignty are predicated upon a logical foundation of colonialism and a material foundation of slavery and genocide. The concept of “refugee” is coextensive with modernity and its political schism. A basic timeline would be as follows: 1492 initiates colonialism and settler state genocide; 1648 formally founds the nation-state; 1685 locates the first identification of refugees after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The concept of refuge as a mass phenomenon (rather than the individual order of exile) follows quickly from the formalization of the coupling of nation and state, and effectively operates as an institution to manage conflict between newly formed nation-states as they distributed [partage] their populations along ethno-linguistic lines.

            Historically, the refugee as a mechanism for conflict management functioned well, because it was rarely deployed. In the context of Europe in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, excess populations were dispersed when metropolitan states sent ‘problem populations’ to the colonies. WWI and WWII marked moments of crisis in the imperial-colonial world system, though, and brought back the problem of excess populations, this time without easy territorial outlets. Arendt demonstrates the crisis in much of her writing about refugees; but the very way she poses the problem exposes a fundamental misrecognition of the history of colonial violence. For example, she wrote, “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends” (1994, 111), an apt description of colonial governance. She identifies the how the colonial experience has come “home,” so to speak, to be visited upon those social groups who were formerly marginalized in Europe but not yet fully excluded. What Arendt more properly identifies, and Agamben picks up, is the new political condition of the dislocation of displacement, or the deterritorialization of the liberal schism into the heart of metropolitan states themselves. Displaced populations, with nowhere to go, become de facto stateless populations existing within states. In other words, the colonial foundation of modernity became universalized and injected into the bodies of the former colonial powers. It is upon this ruined foundation that Agamben locates his incitement to build political philosophy anew from the figure of the refugee.

Part II

            The field of Refugee Studies is first and foremost a political and technological economy of management, predicated upon an understanding that refugeeness is a temporary condition resulting from the momentary ‘madness’ of nation-states (rather than from the ‘reason’ of liberalism’s foundational schism). The key debates are primarily limited to discursive arguments over labeling (who is a ‘proper’ refugee?), the distribution of aid (what do ‘proper’ refugees get?), and placement (where do ‘proper’ refugees go?). Betts (2010) describes three “ideal-type” contemporary projects of Forced Migration Studies: legal-institutional, empirical, and critical:

firstly, the legal-institutional which works predominantly with existing institutional categories to inform policy and practice; secondly, a critical approach, which explores and challenges the power, interests, and discourse underlying policy and practice; thirdly, an empirical approach, which works to identify what is actually happening, outside the prevailing concepts, categories and labels. (268)

The examples cited by Betts, in his reflections on the 12^th meeting of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration, remain largely managerial in nature, in that their primary purpose seems to be to make the provision of services and protections more efficient, or more democratic, or more logically consistent. Even the “critical” examples he cites are oriented towards better policy responses and reforming the refugee regime given new patterns of global forced migration. The field draws upon new ontologies of movement (i.e. Urry), but does not necessarily advocate for the disfiguring and reconfiguring of the political based upon such ontologies. The gravitational center of the field retains an assumption of stability in the relation of people, politics, and place. This can perhaps be attributed to a prominent gap in understanding the term “critical,” a situation summarized by Favell (2009); he notes, Refugee Studies is “[d]ominated by a mix of short-term pragmatic policy imperatives and a naturally defensive humanitarian bias that seeks to protect the claims of ‘true’ refugees from contamination with those of other migrants…” (209). Indeed, those who try to undertake a project that directly undercuts the Refugee Studies assumptions of the necessity of law, the humanitarian mission, and the primacy of rights are marginalized or even actively obstructed (Hatton, personal communication with the author). Betts’ observation that the critical discourse within Refugee Studies “challenges the power, interests, and discourse underlying policy and practice” is an apt descriptor, then, as it ‘challenges’ but does not attempt to reconstitute the political.

            The field of Refugee Studies, then, has developed from the 1980s to the present along only two primary paths of inquiry. First and foremost has been the purely “managerial-administrative discourse,” focused on identifying refugee populations, identifying the needs of those populations, and suggesting solutions to specific refugee situations or to “the problem of refugees” in general. Betts’ “critical” ideal-type would still largely be confined to this managerial-administrative discourse. The second path of inquiry has been doggedly reflexive in nature (the “reflexive discourse”), concerned with identifying the assumptions of the field, providing various “state of the field” overviews, questioning labels and the labeling process, and troubling the foundations of the managerial-administrative discourse, but not doing much to overturn them; in fact, the reflexive discourse has largely been subsumed under the managerial-administrative discourse from the field’s inception. Today, the newer “Critical Refugee Studies” discourse, primarily reflexive in nature, seems more about alleviating the conscious of the Global North than it is about making the world amenable to difference and mobility. Disregarding a few notable exceptions, Refugee Studies has not undergone a truly critical turn – if we understand “critical” to mean a rejection of both the managerial-administrative and reflexive discourses to instead assert the primacy of the figure of the refugee in and of itself. To put it another way, Refugee Studies has not yet moved beyond the turn to identity studies in order to assert the political subjectivity of the refugee unmoored from the “solutions” offered by the managerial-administrative discourse.

            Positively, however, recent developments in Refugee Studies have begun to position the field away from the managerial-administrative and reflexive discourses, taking a more materialist stance toward the field itself and how the concept of refugee, the practices of asylum, and the discourse of Refugee Studies have in fact acted as a mechanism of control (Chimni; Hatton). B. S. Chimni has shown how academic Refugee Studies, including legal-institutional (administrative or policy) research and the empirical and critical academic projects, along with refugee governance projects are both implicated in the extension of colonial paternalism into the 20^th and 21^st Centuries. He argues:

The move from Refugee Studies to Forced Migration Studies should in my view be explored against the backdrop of a western strategy to employ political humanitarianism to legitimize a new imperial world order. There is continuity here between the colonial era and the present that was only interrupted by the imperatives of cold war politics. The meaning of the turn to Forced Migration Studies, I therefore make bold to suggest, has to be examined in the matrix of the history of humanitarianism in and since the era of colonialism. (2009, 13)

This is an important observation, as it performs a necessary move uncommon for the Refugee Studies literature: Chimni calls into question the humanitarian and apolitical assumptions of the field and places it directly within a political register that is deeply marked by a history of violence and exclusion.

            Chimni admits, and I agree, that this implication does not mean that Refugee Studies has not benefitted at least some refugees. He argues that, like all knowledge, Refugee Studies is “dual use” (14). Indeed,

Refugee Studies helped counter the image of refugee as a parasite, critiqued the practice of imposed aid, underlined the need for listening to refugee voices and adopting participatory approaches, elaborated the rights of refugees, highlighted the special needs of refugee women and children, paid attention to the psychosocial health of refugees, pointed to the dangers of involuntary repatriation, and identified the institutional and democracy deficits in intergovernmental and non-governmental agencies concerned with the welfare of refugees. (2009, 15)

This is a record any academic field can be proud of, but as he presses us to understand, it does not mean it should be sufficient justification for continuing with the status quo. Chimni is, in part, a foundational source for scholars wishing to push beyond the traditional boundaries of Refugee Studies while still being able to undertake the study of refugees:

As for Refugee Studies, it must be remembered that even when restrictive measures of Western states are criticized, what are validated are often particular philosophical and political ideas about what kind of boundaries western states may legislate… Invariably methodological nationalism carries the day, even when the turn to Forced Migration Studies is legitimized on the basis of a growing democratic space. The world of displacement has thus become a site of power to embed selective humanitarian practices that facilitate the exercise of hegemony. (2009, 24, emphasis mine)

This dissertation project takes up Chimni on the point of displacement having become a site for the contestation of power, but adds the express aim of developing a line of flight away from Refugee Studies towards exploring the potentiality of the figure of the refugee for a ‘coming politics.’ Rather than take the administrative standpoint and further facilitate the exercise of hegemony, this dissertation argues from the figure of the refugee for the political potential [potenza] of statelessness, mobility, and autonomous forms-of-life.

Part III

            A key portion of the dissertation will include chapters organized around three case studies, conceived as entry points towards the figure of the refugee. These cases are meant to speak across and through one another, to highlight parallels and disjunctures in historical and contemporary practices, concepts, policies, and subjects.

Liberalism, Asylum, and the Legacy of Colonialism  

            I will research the historical and philosophical conditions that gave rise to the political concept of “refugee” in Europe in the late 17^th Century, and subsequent shifts in those conditions. Through archival research I seek a better understanding of the historical trajectory of asylum in Europe. I intend to complete research at the United Kingdom’s National Archives in Kew to gather data with which I will write a case study of British asylum practices and discourses following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815). This time period is interesting because the relationship between France and England at the time was tense; however, ideological shifts in the UK led to what Collyer (2005) referred to as a liberal consensus committed to asylum, even if the political activities (i.e. anarchism) of some asylees were frowned upon. It is in this context that I wish to explore asylum in Britain as a case study by exploring Parliamentary records and newspaper (and other media) sources of the time period.

Refugee and Immigration Controls in the Mediterranean

            I will research various techniques of control shaping international migration at three locations around the Mediterranean, with a focus on border-sites both internal to and at the margins of nation-states. Such techniques of control ostensibly serve to filter populations as they move across territories, but often have the effect of blocking both ‘illegitimate’ and ‘legitimate’ (i.e. refugee) population flows. Through research in Palestine, the Morocco/Spain border region, and on the island of Lampedusa, Italy, I will observe and document the landscape (both literal and figural) of mobility and settlement, explore the impact of border checkpoints and barriers, document the processes of governance at work in migrant and refugee settlements, and interview people affected by techniques of controlling migration. These sites were selected partly due to their prominence in recent migration-related events, and also due to their longstanding statuses as foci for migration to ‘developed,’ Western states. Palestine is home to the largest population of “warehoused” refugees (those kept in camps for five years or more), in one of the most hotly contested lands in recent history. The cities of Ceuta and Melilla are intriguing research sites because they have acted as transit points for migration from the African continent to the European Union for decades. In fact, Ceuta has become infamous for the deaths of 18 would-be migrants, and the serious injury of over 50 others, by both Spanish and Moroccan security forces in September 2005. Finally, the island of Lampedusa is a crucial case study site due to the large flow of migrants passing through fleeing turbulence from the “Arab Spring” of 2011: the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, and further civil upheaval in Morocco, Syria, and other African and Middle Eastern states.

            Palestine and the Moroccan/Spanish border region are in some ways similar sites. Palestine and Ceuta/Melilla each feature highly contested and stringently securitized borders characterized by physical barriers. Israel has constructed a security wall specifically designed to restrict the movement of Palestinians; Ceuta and Melilla are both separated from Morocco by a double-row of fences up to 9 meters in height.  Added to the physical barriers is the contestation over sovereign control: Morocco claims both cities do not belong to Spain, but are in fact Moroccan territories; the Israel/Palestine region has been contested territory for millennia, taking on its contemporary form in 1948, and it uses its border wall as a mechanism to appropriate and excise sovereign territory, exacerbating the land conflict. Lampedusa, related, but distinct, is an island off the coast of Sicily, famous recently for its “temporary stay and assistance center” (TSAC) that is, in reality, an overpopulated detention camp. Because it is an island, it is accorded a liminal status, where the isle itself is seen as borderland, even as the “TSAC” is isolated and fenced off from the surrounding, Italian, population. These sites have similarities, yet are singular, characterized by a great number of differences. Documenting their similarities and differences is the goal of this project.

Nomads and Strangers: Mobility and Presence in France

            The final case study will be primarily theoretical in nature (as opposed to archival or fieldwork-based). It hinges upon Balibar’s work on European citizenship, and the problematic posed by populations that are historically present but not considered to be members of any European member-state. The Roma are often associated with Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, but are not welcome, generally, as citizens in those states. A long history of forced displacements have contributed to the popular image of the Gypsy nomad, travelling Europe by caravan and earning a living performing small craft work and petty criminality. Yet even when Roma integrate into European states, many becoming citizens in France, Spain, or Germany, they are still positioned as problem populations who are never truly ‘assimilated.’ France has gone so far as to conduct raids of Roma camps, detain and then deport Roma ‘back’ to where they are supposed to be from: Eastern Europe. This of course was deeply problematic, at the least due to the fact that many of the Roma deported or detained were in fact citizens of France. The Roma have presented a problem of territorial presence combined with a legal exclusion that has no simple solution. The Sans-Papiers in France are another case where territorial presence and legal rights have a conflicted relationship. In the mid-1990s, several hundred Africans occupied St. Ambroise church in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris, demanding that their work status be regularized and that they be granted legal status and benefits equal to their French citizen counterparts. Their arguments hinged upon the relationship between presence, work, and rights; their demand to be ‘regularized’ challenged the role of birth/descent in the granting of citizenship rights, and argued for a kind of citizenship functionalism. Both the Roma and the Sans-Papiers present limit-cases for notions of membership and citizenship in relation to mobility. This case study will explore this relationship further.

Conclusion

            Returning to Agamben, we are left with a history of violence as the “hidden foundation” upon which most of our contemporary political concepts are constructed. Agamben’s work exposes this violence, and brings us back to the fundamental indistinction of modernity’s emancipatory and exclusionary impulses. This dissertation seeks a line of flight away from this foundation, and seeks a politics that does not stem from the will to realize an essence (Nancy). Unlike much of the scholarship that focuses on this history of violence as one of exclusion, I reverse this history and view it as a long project of inclusion. Drawing upon anthropological and philosophical models of state formation that reverse the understanding of political community by defining it in relation to its “constitutive outside,” I explore how the state and the nation work together to fix a people in place. The state-form is always already a moment of the cessation of mobility in order to produce a coherent interiority. To concretize this inversion, I will focus on the history of asylum in Britain, mechanisms of refugee and migrant controls in the Mediterranean, and theories of European citizenship and theorize from these cases what social and political relations are like. Etienne Balibar refers to this as a “clinical” method for studying politics and political philosophy, because it allows for the “progressive clarification of a central problem and its logical and practical implications” (Balibar 2004, vii).

            The central problem I am articulating is a question of being, articulated (via Agamben and Wittgenstein) as form-of-life. What exists outside of citizenship? Must we hold on to the term at all? What potential for organizing life exists beyond the state-nation diptych? Must we choose between anarchy (not anarchism) and the nation-state? Most importantly, are we doomed to a world reduced to, as Nancy puts it, political and technological economies, where difference is always already a problem to be solved, recuperated into the system to ensure smooth operation? This dissertation begins in the ruins of the Westphalian system in order to excavate modernity’s waste (Bauman) and imagine a politics to come.

            The figure of the refugee is the true figure of modernity, rather than the worker (proletarian) or the citizen. The refugee was always the other of modernity, the stranger (Simmel) who was not allowed to come today and stay tomorrow, but instead transformed into barbarian, the mythic figure of difference. By exploring the ways that the figure of the refugee binds and unbinds the nation-state, sovereignty, citizenship, security, and rights, this project seeks to transform the study of refugees from a managerial-administrative, solutions-oriented problematic to one that foregrounds the spectre of autonomy, resistance to various forms of governance, and the power [potenza] of life.

preliminary notes on the figure of the refugee

Giorgio Agamben delves into the ancient Greek distinction between zoe and bios in an essay entitled “Form-of-Life.” These terms, he notes, are in fact nuanced definitions for what, in English especially, we call only life: “zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings… and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group” (Agamben 2000). He offers a further refinement within bios, however, with the hyphenated term form-of-life, or “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life” (3-4). Essential to the form-of-life is potentiality or possibility:

A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power. Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings – as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves – are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the form-of-life as political life. (Agamben 2000)

This is a crucial distinction for Agamben, because political life is form-of-life, and human life is always already predicated on a distinction above and beyond the zoe/bios split. It is not enough that humankind are not merely biologically alive, nor that we have a “form or manner of living,” which is true for all animals. A wild dog separated from a pack is both biologically alive and in possession of a form or manner of living; an ape raised in captivity may be both bored and well fed, but is in possession of both zoe and bios. It is only humankind, Agamben asserts, that requires form and happiness to go hand-in-hand.

This formulation of life, as form-of-life, is what allows Agamben to trace the originary relationship of sovereign power to be the state of exception, wherein the sovereign decides on the life or death of the subject. Form-of-life is effaced in this relation, and the power of life (its potentiality) is interrupted and disrupted by various apparatuses (Agamben 2009). He notes:

The Marxian scission between man and citizen is thus superseded by the division between naked life (ultimate and opaque bearer of sovereignty) and the multifarious forms of life abstractly recodified as social-juridical identities (the voter, the worker, the journalist, the student, but also the HIV-positive, the transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent, the woman) that all rest on naked life.

Agamben is concerned with this trend, in that it separates human action from happiness (politics), redirecting the realm of action towards questions of mere survival or the lessening of exploitation rather than towards the “good life.” This concern leads him, in several works, to insist on a non-Statist politics:

A political life, that is, a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life, is thinkable only starting from the emancipation of such a division, with the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty. The question about the possibility of a nonstatist politics necessarily takes this form: Is today something like a form-of-life, a life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living, possible? Is today a life of power available? (Agamben 2000)

What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging itself? … The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. (Agamben 1993)

This brings Agamben directly into conversation with a multitude of contemporary authors discussing community (i.e. Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida, Esposito) and the common (i.e. Hardt and Negri, Zizek). Form-of-life is contingent upon a relation between “common power” and thought:

Intellectuality and thought are not a form of life among others in which life and social production articulate themselves, but they are rather the unitary power that constitutes the multiple forms of life as form-of-life. In the face of state sovereignty, which can affirm itself only by separating in every context naked life from its form, they are the power that incessantly reunites life to its form or prevents it from being dissociated from its form. (Agamben 2000)

Ultimately, form-of-life is neither the State-form, reliant upon sovereignty and therefore zoe, nor is it mere “community,” reliant upon identification and distinction; form-of-life is, rather, the potential or possibility of the good life as life, where means and ends are in and of themselves indistinguishable, where life and happiness are entirely co-incidental. Form-of-life is explicitly Spinozist, then, in that the particular form of expression is entirely incidental to the being-together of bodies in action. The coming politics, therefore, is not an identitarian politics, but a multitudinous politics, governed by affect, directed by singularities (of whatever kind…).

Understanding politics in this manner, though, brings a kind of absent presence to the center of any analsysis of the political: the figure of the figure of politics. The figure of the figure of politics… Agamben mobilizes a series of figures in his essays that each in their own way works to disfigure the political. In his early works, the figures “the man without content” and “infant” are mobilized; his later works are marked by more explicitly ‘political’ figures: homo sacer, the sovereign, the Muselmann, the whatever singularity. The figure of the figure operates throughout Agamben’s work as a sort of deconstructive force that in its ambiguity, opacity, critiques and complicates, or disfigures. He is slippery, unable to be pinned down to a positive politics; indeed, his most political text, The Coming Community, does not put forth a positive project as much as it poses a series of exemplary figures culminating in “Tiananmen” with the figure of “a herald from Beijing”: the nameless, faceless image of the man with a shopping bag standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square (Agamben 1993).

The figure of the coming politics, however, does not end with the “herald from Beijing,” and in fact comes to a rather pointed assertion in “Beyond Human Rights.” For Agamben, the figure of the figure of politics, par excellence, is not the citizen, nor is it man, the worker, sovereignty, the people, or rights (Agamben 2000). The ghostly image of the political is thus the figure of the refugee:

It is not only the case that the problem presents itself inside and outside of Europe with just as much urgency as then. It is also the case that, given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today – at least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has achieved full completion – the forms and limits of a coming political community. It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee. (Agamben 2000, 16)

refugee as whatever singularity?

What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions (a negative community, such as that recently proposed in France by Maurice Blanchot), but by belonging itself? … The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. (Agamben 1993)

The refugee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed… What industrialized countries face today is a permanently residing mass of noncitizens who do not want to be and cannot be either naturalized or repatriated. These noncitizens often have nationalities of origin, but, inasmuch as they prefer not to benefit from their own states’ protection, they find themselves as refugees, in a condition of de facto statelessness. (Agamben 2000)

Agamben, G. (1993). The Coming Community. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Agamben, G. (2000). Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

refugee – oed definition

Etymology: partly <refuge + -ee suffix,  after French refugie, and partly directly < French refugie (1576 in Middle French), use as noun of past participle refugier.

1. a. A Protestant who fled France to seek refuge elsewhere from religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries, esp. following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Now rare (hist. in later use).

1. b. gen. A person who has been forced to leave his or her home and seek refuge elsewhere, esp. in a foreign country, from war, religious persecution, political troubles, the effects of a natural disaster, etc.; a displaced person. Also fig. and in extended use.

1. c. In negative sense: a person who is fleeing from justice, deserved punishment, etc.; a runaway, a fugitive. In later use only with from, esp. in refugee from justice.

1. d. A migratory bird. Obs. rare

2. U.S. During the American Revolutionary War: a member of a group of guerrilla fighters active in support of the British cause, esp. in New York, and nominally affiliated with the Tories.

www.oed.com

some theses on the figure of the refugee

Still in development; a bit rough:

1. The refugee is co-eval with the development of the nation-state. It is neither pre-existing nor a product of the nation-state.
2. The concept of ‘refuge’ and the figure of the refugee facilitate the establishment of sovereignty over a single people in a fixed territory by depoliticizing the ‘surplus population’ and establishing a set of agreed-upon rights, privileges, or protections. This depoliticization facilitates the relative inter-state peace necessary for global colonization by Europe to occur.
3. This depoliticization works, for a time, because there are spaces for excess populations to go.
4. Once the world ‘fills’ horizontally – colonies are fully established, world population rises rapidly, violent forms of nationalism and state racism arise, etc. – the refugee becomes re-politicized, treated as a mass phenomenon, and described as a threat.
5. Global population flow shifts from core -> periphery to periphery -> core. Refugee now marks the limit-case of state-nation-territory compromise (Westphalia), forced to confront the depoliticization of global politics with the figure of its own violence.
6. Once refugees become ‘unassimilable,’ they move from depoliticized figure of human rights protection to autonomous global political subject.
7. The figure of the refugee marks the ambiguous right to have rights as the vanishing horizon of politics. The part of those who have no part (Ranciere), human rights, and other conceptions of rights not prefigured by citizenship and national protection illuminate the impossibility of normative human rights and grounds the right to have rights in the space of appearance and the event. The figure of the refugee is a figure of pure appearance, as its status as always already other to the nation-state system renders refugee discourse (speech) utterly unintelligible.

research statement – the figure of the refugee

I was working on this for a presentation in my department, which has since fallen through. But I thought I would post it here, as I found it to be a pretty useful exercise.

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As a scholar, I am primarily interested in the problematics of political transformation, in both actually-existing and ideal forms. My work aims toward understanding politics and political phenomena genealogically and/or archaeologically, using Foucault’s and Agamben’s approaches to understanding concepts, practices, and discourses. In particular, I have been trying to understand the development of borders and bordering practices as an aspect of political sovereignty, and how current developments in the enforcement of human mobility would change that border/sovereignty relation. As a part of this project I have been studying European and American migration histories, popular and political responses to migration, and the laws and policies that enable specific regimes of policing practices. For my dissertation, I am turning toward a study of the figure of the refugee. This study explores the discourses of political membership from the point of view of politics’ excess populations, those deemed surplus to the constitution of a polity and expelled from a territory.

There are (at least) three basic strands to the dissertation. The first strand is to understand the phenomenon of forced displacement throughout history. Understanding, for example, the shift from an order of political exile of individuals to an order of mass displacement can illuminate changing patterns in politics, and lay bare some underexplored workings of the nation-state. I see the figure of the refugee as constituted by the nation-state, a state-effect, countering popular ahistorical assertions in the field of Refugee Studies that refugees have always existed. I also see the figure of the refugee, however, as an autonomous figure, marking the limits of the state and a potential revolutionary subject.

The second strand is to understand how the nation-state has operated through a process of interiorization, or the production of an interiority through a dual process of conquest and pacification. This is related to the first strand, in that this portion of the study is dedicated to the processes behind and discourses related to state formation itself. How and why is it that the process of state formation produces excess populations? This question is a step back from the preceding strand, from an understanding of the production of the refugee subject to an understanding of the production of the nation-state as the primary institution governing human movement. In other words, a move from the subject to the structural milieu.

The third strand is a consideration of the figure of the refugee as part of a coherent global system of complementary, but distinct, structures of state and capital. I argue that the effect of nation-state formation and continual processes of primitive accumulation is the production of an ever-growing surplus population. Unlike past eras, however, today’s surplus populations have nowhere to go, and therefore exist as an exterior population present in the interior. This phenomenon is what has given rise to a novel regime of contradictory practices of policing, monitoring, and controlling migration flows. The surplus population in past eras were expelled and, generally, only open to primitive accumulation after state formation; now, however, with states encompassing the entire territorial scope of the globe, there is no longer room for state formation, but capital would like to enclose, productivize, and capture surplus populations nonetheless. This means that globalization is not merely the shift to an immaterial or information economy, but is also the making-refugee of the economy. This process is ongoing, and opens up a vast and growing population of peoples to class conflict, but the composition of this “class” must be produced in conjunction with flexible workers in the knowledge economy.

To sum up, the questions posed in the dissertation revolve around a set of interlocking questions:

• What are the mechanisms, technologies, and practices by which states have mobilized to control human mobility? What can we learn about the state, power, and politics from these practices?
• How are states and capital operating in distinct, complementary, and contradictory ways that produce precarious migration flows, and how does this form of precarity articulate with longer-standing forms of labor flexibilization? How can we weaponize this precarity against capital and the state?
• How can political thought be opened into new directions by beginning with the figure of the refugee, rather than, for example, the citizen?

birkbeck critical theory summer school

So I got some good news this morning. I’ve been accepted to participate in this summer’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities London Critical Theory Summer School at the University of London. It was a response I wasn’t expecting for at least a few more weeks, so it was an exceptionally pleasant surprise to find that email in my inbox this morning.

And now the irritating process of securing some funding begins…

Below is my proposal. I share it because 1) as a student, I like to find successful application letters and proposals online, so it seems good to reciprocate, and 2) because it articulates my engagement with critical theory in a way I haven’t really posted about yet I think.

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Please consider my application to the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities 2011 London Critical Theory Summer School. I am currently enrolled in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. My scholarly work has long engaged with Critical Theory, and I will benefit a great deal by participating in the London Summer School. All of the participating academics are generally useful to my work, but I most look forward to and will benefit most from Jean-Luc Nancy and Etienne Balibar, as they have written most directly in my line of research.

My dissertation is in its very earliest stages – the main reason I think I will benefit so much from attendance at the Theory Summer School – and will be an exploration of the political potential of the figure of the refugee. The dissertation will consist of two main parts: the first will explore the contemporary political context and conditions which produce refugees (this portion of the dissertation will cover diverse grounds, from State border policing practices to globalization to issues of race and gender); the second will be an attempt at articulating a political ontology based upon the figure of the refugee – a political theory that is not (hopefully) as burdened with the specters of our traditional categories of political thought. The figure of the refugee, then, is a threshold figure between a genealogical past and a potential future.

This project will engage various Critical Theory traditions as diverse as Heidegger, Nancy, Marx, Benjamin, Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Balibar, Althusser, and Foucault. The opportunity to work with Nancy would be invaluable; the further opportunity to engage in close conversation with Drucilla Cornell on issues of the law and deconstruction, and Esther Leslie on issues of political aesthetics will also help move my dissertation research forward considerably.

Beyond my dissertation research and writing, I also hope to approach the London Critical Theory Summer School as an opportunity to observe various pedagogical approaches to teaching Critical Theory. I am very interested in teaching Critical Theory at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the future, and see the classroom as a potential site to perform, reflect on, and produce Critical Theory. Participating in the program will expose me to some tremendous thinkers and, by many accounts, great teachers. I take my teaching very seriously, and will use this opportunity to improve how I teach theory in my classroom.

Most importantly, I see the BIH London Summer School as an opportunity to engage with a community of academics dedicated to Critical Theory and debating and developing political-academic discourse. I look forward to being a part of this community, contributing to and benefitting from the program. Again, please consider my application; I greatly appreciate the time and effort of the organizers.