Borders, Statelessness, and Agency:
Rethinking Political Space
By
Jennifer Rose Vermilyea
B.A., University of Victoria 2006
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Masters of Arts
In the Department of Political Science
© Jennifer Rose Vermilyea, 2008 University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author.
Supervisory Committee
Borders, Statelessness, and Agency: Rethinking Political Space
By
Jennifer Rose Vermilyea B.A, University of Victoria, 2006
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Warren Magnusson, Supervisor (Department of Political Science)
Dr. R.B.J Walker, Departmental Member (Department of Political Science)
Dr. Matt James, Departmental Member (Department of Political Science) Dr. Michael Asch, Outside Member (Department of Anthropology)
Supervisory Committee
Dr. Warren Magnusson, Supervisor (Department of Political Science)
Dr. R.B.J Walker, Departmental Member (Department of Political Science)
Dr. Matt James, Departmental Member (Department of Political Science) Dr. Michael Asch, Outside Member (Department of Anthropology)
ABSTRACT
The modern state system has a specific answer to the question of where and how political action can occur: in the state and through citizenship. State sovereignty underpins the basic discourse of who belongs and who speaks in political communities, which is said to have important implications for those without claim to citizenship, namely the refugee. Giorgio Agamben‘s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is an important discussion of how the logic of sovereignty produces the refugee in the contemporary international state system. However, I will argue in this paper that this narrative, like many others, eclipses moments of refugee agency and reproduces the refugee in apolitical terms by binging a particular conception of the political to bear. This paper critically engages with the writings of Immanuel Kant and Giorgio Agamben to explore how this discourse of political community (state) and political identity (citizenship) has emerged historically and is continually reinforced. I argue that these narratives fail to see the politicality of so called spaces of abjection which are continually reshaping and reforming perceived understandings of the political.
Table of Contents
Supervisory Committee ii ABSTRACT iii Table of Contents iv Acknowledgements v Introduction: 1 Chapter One: 5SOVEREIGNTY AND THE POLITICAL 6
CONDITIONAL HOSPITALITY 17
Chapter Two 25
AGAMBEN: SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE 25
Chapter Three 45
BODY AS RESISTANCE 47
CITIES OF REFUGE 50
Conclusion 62
Acknowledgements
This paper could not have been written without the support and encouragement of my supervisors, colleagues, and friends. I am especially grateful to Warren Magnusson who provided extensive support and feedback throughout the process of writing this thesis. I would also like to thank Matt James for his helpful comments and careful reading of this thesis.
Parts of Chapter 1 were developed from a previous paper which I co-authored with Jen Bagelman titled ―The Blind Spot of Hospitality‖. I would like to thank Jen for helping me develop many of the ideas in this chapter, as well as helping me outline and think through many of the issues in this thesis.
Introduction:
The modern state system has a specific answer to the question of where and how political action can occur: in the state and through citizenship. State sovereignty underpins the basic discourse of who belongs and who speaks in political communities, which is said to have important implications for those without claim to citizenship, namely the refugee. However, by focusing on sovereignty, this narrative has the inherent effect of describing and reproducing the refugee in apolitical terms by bringing a particular conception of the political to bear. Moreover, it eclipses the modalities of being political that do not make claim to such state-centric notions as sovereignty and citizenship.
There has been a great deal of analysis on the ways in which those without claim to the political space of the state are continually silenced and forced to have others speak on their behalf. Whether represented as victims or as security threats, the modern state system – it is claimed – has the effect of politically silencing those without ‗proper‘ political community (state) and identity (citizenship). However, while aptly pointing to the significant exclusions embedded within state-centric politics, these approaches fail to emphasize how refugees and other so-called abject populations are continually problematizing these regimes of citizenship and mobilizing their own political interventions and voice.
This paper aims to address modalities of being political that do not make claim to such state-centric notions as sovereignty and citizenship. To do so, I first present an analysis
of how this language of the state-system has emerged historically and the implications it has for contemporary refugee politics. The first chapter of my paper looks at the writings of Immanuel Kant. While I recognize that we cannot draw a line from Kant‘s writings to contemporary forms of abjection, I argue that there are important logical implications embedded within Kant‘s writings for contemporary refugee politics. Specifically, I am interested in the tension he presents between a universal notion of humanity on the one hand, and a humanity that is always already conditioned upon life within a state. I argue that Kant‘s writings create an aporia which enables both the category of ‗statelessness‘ and the evasion of responsibility for these individuals. While Kant could not have anticipated the type of state system that has emerged today or the technologies of border control that enforce it, his writings were an early indication of the type of state system that would eventually prove to have significant consequences for contemporary politics of asylum.
While one logical extension of Kant‘s work is to look at contemporary humanitarian practices or contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism, for the purposes of this paper, it is more interesting to look at how the language of victimization and ‗bare life‘ has emerged to characterize those without claim to the political space of the state. To do this, in the second chapter of this paper, I engage with the writings of Giorgio Agamben, whose most famous and important work is titled Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare
Life. Agamben is an important thinker in this regard, as he highlights the violence of
sovereign power at the border, in the spaces where citizenship can no longer be claimed. However, while Agamben is an interesting and important thinker for contemporary
politics of asylum, I remain highly critical of his writings. I argue that Agamben not only universalizes the so-called condition of ‗bare life‘ – which is a highly contestable and ambiguous characterization to begin with – but that he also reproduces the conditions of abjection by failing to see the politicality of those individuals and groups of people without proper political community or identity. In presenting a particular understanding of sovereignty as the understanding of sovereignty, Agamben is able to draw a clear distinction between political life and bare life. In this chapter, I draw upon the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciere in order to shed critical light upon those pockets of resistance that are possible in even the most abject of spaces. I argue that an investigation into so-called spaces of exception must involve a consideration as to how these spaces might serve both as spaces of abjection as well as spaces of resistance.
In the final chapter, I take up this notion of resistance more concretely. In particular, I consider the ways in which certain practices can work to subvert the speechlessness imposed upon the ‗absolute other‘ into a form of political voice. Specifically, I consider how certain forms of bodily resistance function as a spectacle of resistance. I will first look at Abbas Amini who, in May 2003, protested the UK government‘s treatment of asylum seekers by going on a hunger strike. In addition to resisting food and water, he also sewed his own ears, eyes and mouth with coarse thread. The point here is not to celebrate Amini‘s ‗spectacle‘ as a heroic act of resistance, but rather to consider how this action both confirms and denies his own abjection. In bringing the violence imposed upon him into shocking visibility, Amini is able to gain a small pocket of political voice in and through the practices that seek to render him invisible.
The spectacle of bodily resistance, however, is not the only way in which spaces of abjection might be politicized. I would like to consider how the ‗city of refuge‘ potentially opens up ways in which the sovereignty of the state is confronted and contested at the local level. The initiatives of the ―Don‘t Ask Don‘t Tell‖ campaigns have been adopted in numerous cities across the United States and are underway in Toronto. The aim is to make cities more hospitable to non-status peoples by forbidding city workers to ask about a person‘s status, or reveal it to other government officials, to ensure that all residents of the city, regardless of status, are able to access essential services without fear of arrest or deportation. I explore the ‗city of refuge‘ as an example of a local action in response to demands that confront and challenge the regulatory regimes of the state. It would seem that this initiative – and others like it – is not a claim to sovereignty but to a right to act and respond to local needs and demands which, crucially, are not being made in the name of citizenship. By exploring the subjective nature of migration, one is able to move beyond this paternalistic vision and recognize that migrants pose significant challenges to our received notions of community (state) and identity (citizenship). By taking the subjective aspect of migration seriously, we can be better attuned to how migrants are active agents in the process of their own political subjectification.
Chapter One:
This chapter will explore the ways in which citizenship is articulated through a state-centric notion of political belonging, and how this extends to the hospitality practices of states in relation to asylum seekers. I will assess the way in which citizenship and the state are commonly invoked as the natural and in many cases pre-political division of humanity into people, and more particularly, into nations or societies. While explicit reference to ‗nature‘s plan‘ has long passed out of fashion, I argue that the notion of a teleological progression of humanity – as laid out in Kant‘s Political Writings – remains all too familiar today. The Kantian framework suggests that it is possible to locate diverse peoples along a singular developmental continuum, and also, to show that some people have moved farther along this continuum while others remain behind. This teleological understanding of humanity has resonances in contemporary anthropological studies, and continues to have important implications in distinguishing between civilized and uncivilized societies and individuals.1
I will then outline the Kantian conception of hospitality which, I argue, is conditioned upon the state-system. I will explore how Kant‘s theory enables a conditional hospitality that has important contemporary implications for asylum seekers. Kant is unable to imagine a ―universal humanity‖ that does not also create a fundamental division between valid standing in the world and those experiences and perspectives from which there can
1 See, for example, George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York, The Free Press, 1987); also see the contributions of Marc Pinkoski & Michal Asch and of Mark Pluciennik in Alan Barnard (ed.)
Hunter –Gatherers in History, Archaeology, and Anthropology (Berg, Oxford, New York: 2004); see also
Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: 2004, 295-297).
be no entry into that world.2 I will argue that Kant‘s logic of hospitality leaves the status and fate of the contemporary asylum seeker unclear, and that this aporia enables states to evade responsibility for asylum seekers and, at best, treat them as guests with the right of ‗temporary sojourn‘.
Although this paper serves to shed critical light on the violences woven in the Kantian strand, I am cognisant of Kant‘s motivations to create a universal humanity moving towards perpetual peace. Indeed, Kant, among his contemporaries, was particularly concerned with the evils of colonialism, and his analysis of the hypocrisy of European states ―who make endless ado about their piety, and who wish to be considered as chosen believers while they live on the fruits of iniquity‖3
has enduring significance. While these contributions may be considered progressive for his time, and indeed for our own time, I remain sceptical of this progressive language of inclusion and equality as it tends to cloak the violences inherent in the Kantian state-system which appears to offer us freedom. Moreover, as I will argue in this chapter, Kant‘s anti-imperial position exists in tension with his arguments in favour of self-defence against non-civil states and actors.4
Sovereignty and the Political
Modern notions of citizenship are frequently articulated through a peculiar tension between internalist state-centric notions of political belonging on the one hand, and an
2 Kant, Perpetual Peace 105. 3 Kant, Perpetual Peace, 107 4 Anghie (2004), 297.
appeal to universal human rights or citizenship on the other hand.5 Indeed, as Barry Hindess suggests, ―Modern democratic regimes commonly express a commitment to the idea of universal human rights. They also discriminate against foreigners in their midst and at the borders…‖6
Thus, while it is now widely accepted that at least some form of human rights exist, the common assumption is that these will normally be exercised in the state through which one is a citizen. This is not to say, however, that the discourse of human rights is not commonly invoked to denounce torture activities or argue for the inherent rights of refugees. However, my point here is simply that there remains a highly state-centric notion of rights and of entitlement to these rights. While refugees may indeed have the inherent rights of protection and survival, these remain the most basic of rights which continually position the refugee as a victim in opposition to the political citizen.7
To understand this modern articulation of citizenship and political belonging, it is perhaps useful to consider the way in which the ahistorical narrative of sovereignty underpins the basic discourse of the political.8 By ―sovereignty‖, I mean something much broader than government authority: sovereignty is not so much a tangible thing or fact as it is the constitutive principle of political life, forming the seemingly incontestable basis – i.e. the ‗political‘ –upon which politics is said to occur. As Peter Nyers suggests,
[Sovereignty] provides a solution to the problem of political order, establishing the conditions for legitimate authority over time and within a particular space. What‘s more, as questions of order inevitably lead to questions of identity (i.e., the political body that is to be ordered),
5
See, for example Hindess (2000) 6 Hindess (2000), 1486
7 This point will be discussed further in the second chapter. 8 See Nyers (2006) Walker (2000)
sovereignty also provides a powerful historical answer to the question of what kind of political subjectivities we possess (citizenship) and where political relations can be practiced (state).9
Sovereignty, therefore, provides a historically specific answer to the problem of political order – one that is contingent yet carries significant implications in that this story of sovereignty is rarely contested in the study of international relations.
Sovereignty works to provide a specific spatial answer to the question of where and how politics can occur: in the state and through citizenship. As Rob Walker argues, ―Modern politics is spatial politics. Its crucial condition of possibility is the distinction between an inside and an outside, between the citizens, nations, and communities within, and the enemies, others and absences without‖.10
According to this line of thinking, the state provides a spatial resolution to the problem of political order by insisting that any dispute within its bounded territory will be resolved by a legitimate sovereign power. Moreover, theories of international relations commonly express the claim that only within the secure borders of territorial states is it possible to engage in proper politics of the type that would form the basis of a political community.11 The lack of a common power or legitimate authority to secure the relations between states is interpreted as evidence of the anarchical nature of the international realm. Thus, the violence involved in securing the borders of the state against the anarchical ‗outside‘ is justified as the necessary precondition for civil political relations to flourish within the political community. As Walker argues, this notion of the political has taken on an almost undisputable presence
9 Nyers (2006) xi 10 Walker (1995) 306 11 Walker (1995) 306
in the modern world. Thus while it is common for debates to exist about relations within states and indeed between states, the notion of sovereignty itself is less frequently problematized as a site of political inquiry.
The concept of sovereignty and the way in which it has come to dominate and indeed underpin much political discourse today is extremely complex and is not something that can be discussed in the length of this chapter. However, I will focus particularly on how the notion of citizenship functions as a mechanism of the political through the state system, and how claims to a ‗universal‘ or ‗cosmopolitan‘ citizenship frequently revert back to a statist notion of political belonging. As I laid out at the beginning of this chapter, modern notions of citizenship – while on one level maintaining a commitment to the idea that the rights of citizenship should be universal – function upon the suggestion that states should be accountable to their citizenship and responsible for their protection. In this way, while the idea of universal rights has taken on new significance in the twentieth century, the way in which these rights are to be secured is most often through the state to which one belongs.
One such example of this notion of citizenship is the way in which citizenship repeatedly emerges as the answer to questions of human displacement. Durable solutions for stateless peoples – the quintessential example of human displacement – are tied to citizenship either by return to county of origin or voluntary repatriation. However, if voluntary repatriation is not an option – as in the case where it would pose a threat to the asylum seeker‘s life – the alternative solution would be integration within a new host
society. In both cases, citizenship and community membership is contrasted with the asylum seeker‘s instability and portrayed as the solution to problems of human displacement. These ‗solutions‘ are increasingly presented under the guise of humanitarianism, which purport to be an ethical and apolitical intervention into the problems of human displacement. However, the ‗problem‘ of stateless people is repeatedly presented as a problem of political space: the real problem is that the asylum seeker does not belong to a particular state in which he or she can receive the privileges and security of citizenship.
How should we understand this pervasive notion of citizenship and the division of humanity into nations and societies upon which it is based? This is a complex issue and I can hardly do more here than touch its surface. However, as Barry Hindess suggests, ―the common view is that this partitioning reflects a natural, or at least extrapolitical, division of humanity into people and, more particularly, into nations or societies‖.12
Here, the story of citizenship in the modern period is commonly presented as a historical teleology of the kind set out with exemplary clarity in Kant‘s political writings. Kant‘s ―Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose‖ unveils the ―purpose in nature‖ that, in Kant‘s view, underlies the ―senseless course of human events‖.13
Kant‘s argument here rests on an assumption that still commands considerable academic support: namely, that the natural capacities of individuals and societies flourish best under the external guidance of the state. To understand the influence of this teleological notion of
12 Hindess (2000) 1491 13 Kant, Universal History, 42
humanity through citizenship, it is necessary to consider the a priori assumptions of Time and Space articulated by Kant which still carry considerable weight today.14
According to Kant we cannot know things in themselves (noumena): ―the world as it really is…is unknowable‖ for the world is always mediated through our own deceiving sense perceptions; thus, ―[w]e can apprehend only the world of appearances.‖15
Man as a finite being – one who is both the subject and object of his knowledge – can never know the world separate from his perceptions of it; therefore, a gap between the finitude of man and the infinite world is a given. Despite man‘s inability to know the world in itself, Kant insists that man as a species can progress in its knowledge and understanding of the world. As such, he rejects empirical dogmatism as well as dogmatic rationalism in favour of a critical philosophy that is aware of the conditions under which it is possible to attain knowledge of the world.
While Kant dismisses the contention that we can know the world in itself, he assumes the mathematical a priori principles of Time and Space, through which it is possible to organize the world. For Kant, Space and Time function as ‗intuition‘ separate from, and untainted by, our sense perceptions: ―[they] are not empirical concepts which [have] been derived from outward experiences.‖16
As such, Time and Space operate as the conditions of possibility for man to know and order the world through that which is not
14
The following section on Kant‘s teleological notion of humanity has been derived in part from an earlier paper that I co-authored with Jen Bagelman titled ―The Blind Spot of Hospitality‖.
15 Kant, Political Writings: Introduction. 17 16 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 175
sense-based, but rule-based. That is to say, the a priori principles ―serve as the foundation of all external intuitions.‖17
It is important to consider here how Kant‘s a priori principle of Time interacts with his teleology. Kant contends that, ―[a]ll the natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end.‖18 All beings are imbued with an absolute destination towards which they must move; to deny this end is to deny one‘s own nature. The idea here is that a telos is buried inside each individual, waiting to be worked out through time. Through Kant‘s teleological understanding of nature, Time becomes a linear progressive projection. This progressive understanding of Time is what informs his – and our - modern notion of History.
In addition to a progressive notion of Time, Kant constructs a singular, universal conception of Time, and therefore of History, through his teleological assumptions. Kant claims that, as humans, we share a single universal teleology. Before turning to the content of nature‘s plan, however, we should note the moral significance this plan has for Kant. Kant writes that ―I have an innate duty to influence posterity in such a way that it will make constant progress.‖19
Moreover, since humanity ―is constantly progressing in cultural matters (in keeping with its natural purpose), it is also engaged in progressive improvement in relation to the moral end of its existence‖.20
Kant‘s teleological understanding of humanity, then, can be viewed as a moral necessity. Rather than a plan
17
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 178
18 Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, 42 19 Kant, Theory and Practice, 89-89
of nature that is based upon empirical observations, this is a plan that is based upon a moral necessity taken for granted by Kant. In writing a single teleology for human being, Kant is writing a single History which necessarily writes Time as progress. This understanding of Time is effectively spatialized as a singular line upon which different forms of existence may be ranked according to their progression along that line.
Although this spatialized time works itself out within and through human subjects, Kant maintains that certain external conditions are necessary for this internal maturation to occur. Kant contends:
―As things are at present, we still have a long way to go before man as a whole can be in a position…of using their own understanding…without outside
guidance.‖
This quotation represents a triple move for Kant. First, it is apparent that we are in a perpetual movement towards peace, evident in the fact that we have a ―long way to go.‖ It is unclear if we will ever reach Enlightenment; however, our ambition towards it continually justifies the present as a regulative ideal. Second, we see Kant constructing a
singular teleos, a singular humanity, through his totalizing phrase, ―man as a whole‖,
which further reinforces his story of Time as a singular historical progression. Kant offers such a totalizing understanding of the world that it is difficult to imagine it otherwise. Finally, Kant is telling a story that necessitates the state as the external condition of possibility for – or ―outside guidance‖ of – our self-actualization. 21 Yet he seems to promise that this statist guidance is temporary and will eventually become redundant; ―at present‖ the state is required, which implies that in the future it may not be.
In this final move, Kant is setting up the state as the only condition under which human beings may be fully human, and mature. According to Kant, it is our unsocial socialability – people‘s tendency, ―to come together in society, coupled, however, with the continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up‖22 – which drives us towards civil society. This leads to conflict and competition among individuals, and later also between states, which in turns leads them to develop more fully towards their telos:
In the same way, trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight.23
Kant‘s understanding of nature, then, relies upon competition and conflict, and it is this tendency which moves humanity as a whole towards their telos. However, it is also the case that this competitive and conflictual nature requires that our unsocial qualities be brought under control, namely by means of the state. The interactions of individuals must be regulated by ―lawful power in a whole, which is civil society.‖24
So too, the relations of civil societies themselves must be regulated but by a larger cosmopolitan whole ―for only in this case can the greatest development of the natural dispositions occur.‖25
In a sense, Kant urges us to abandon the state of nature for the state itself:
He must accordingly enter into a state wherein that which is to be recognized as belonging to each person is allotted to him by law and guaranteed to him by an
22
Kant, Idea. 44. 23 Kant, Idea, 46
24 Kant, Critique of Pure Judgement, 300 25 Ibid.
adequate power (which is not his own, but external to him). In other words, he should at all costs enter into a state of civil society.26
The establishment of a civil society, initially out of the need for survival, eventually provides the conditions ―in which human attributes and qualities can be further cultivated, thus gradually transforming society itself into a moral and rational whole‖.27
If it were not for this natural tendency of conflict and competition – which in turns creates the need for civil society – ―all human talents would remain hidden for ever in a dormant state, and men, as good natured as the sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of their animals‖.28
This developmental view of humanity should not be view as merely a rhetorical theory without implications in lived experience. Indeed, as Barry Hindess suggests, this developmental view of humanity continues to have significant and unfortunate consequences:
If, as Kant suggests, we should view our universal history, all peoples can be located along the one developmental continuum, and if constitutional republics (today‘s democracies) represent the most advanced stage so far achieved, then those who live in other ways must be seen as inhabiting stages which are less advanced.29
Rather than a recognition of cultural diversity, this understanding of human development leads Kant to place the rest of humanity culturally and morally behind the peoples of the
26 Ibid. 27 Hindess (2000), 4 28 Kant, Idea, 45 29 Hindess (2000), 9
West. Far from celebrating difference, then, ―Kant‘s hierarchical perspective requires us to see them as deficiencies to be overcome‖.30
Kant‘s temporalising of difference remains all too familiar even today. Johannes Fabian‘s Time and the Other argues that there is a tendency in contemporary anthropological discourse to locate peoples one studies as somehow representing a time that is now past: there is a ―tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.‖31
While, as Fabian notes, this may not be a problem in studying cultures that are clearly in the past, the problem is with its use in relation to one‘s contemporaries. This location of contemporary peoples as somehow in the past is made possible by this Kantian discourse which temporalizes difference along a universal continuum. This logic enables a distinction between civil societies, and ones which have yet to reach this point.
In these ways, Kant writes universality into his starting point by assuming a singular teleological progression of humanity and by showing how this teleological progression must occur within the state. The political implications of this origin story are more deeply understood when considering how they manifest in his conception of cosmopolitan hospitality.
30 Ibid.
Conditional Hospitality
For the purposes of this paper I will turn to Kant‘s third definitive article in Perpetual Peace, ―Cosmopolitan Right Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.‖ Rather than looking at hospitality through a lens of free trade – whereby nations are required to open their borders to a global market – I will analyze hospitality as it applies to refugee and humanitarian practices. While I agree with Jim Tully‘s traditional reading of Kant‘s hospitality as each state‘s ―duty to…open its border to the cosmopolitan right of voluntary ‗commerce‘ and free trade of other nations‖ here I am primarily focussed on hospitality as dealing with the flow of bodies rather than capital.32 I contend that both the free trade and refugee practices that are imbued in Kant‘s notion of hospitality function as powerful mechanisms of exclusion even today.
In Perpetual Peace Kant lays out hospitality as a universal human right. He clearly states that when speaking of hospitality ―we are…concerned not with philanthropy but with
right.‖33 Hospitality, then, is inscribed in the form of a right, and thus becomes a matter of law. To consider the implication of this delineation we must question both his understanding of ‗right‘ and his conception of the ‗human‘ entitled to this right.
32 Tully (2007), 16
We should remind ourselves that for Kant, not all people are at the same developmental position in their maturity. While relying upon a supposedly universal understanding of humanity, Kant insists that while some humans are civilized, or at least moving towards civility, others remain in the state of nature. For Kant the state is the condition of possibility for the actualization of humanity. Without the state‘s ―external guidance‖ humans are unable to fulfill their teleology, and are thus not fully ‗civilized‘. Indeed, it is a ‗crime against human nature‘ to live without the state for the state is the condition under which our teleological progression towards peace must occur. Furthermore, those who live within the anarchic state of nature are considered equally chaotic and unpredictable, and thus must be looked upon with constant suspicion.34 Although it would appear that all hostile action is not to be tolerated, hostile action is perfectly acceptable and even necessary where the non-state actor is concerned:
Man (or an individual people) in a mere state of nature robs me of any such security and injures me by virtue of this very state in which he co-exists with me. He may not have injured me actively (facto) but he does injure me by his very lawlessness of his state (statu iniusto), for he is a permanent threat to me, I can require him either to enter into a common lawful state along with me, or to move away from my vicinity35 [emphasis added].
In this way, while Kant claims to provide hospitality for all humans, those who pose potential threats to one‘s own security – namely those individuals in a ‗mere‘ state of nature – are denied such treatment.
It may be argued that Kant‘s theory of the state of nature is simply a thought experiment without any real ramifications for contemporary stateless persons. We can clearly see, however, the logic behind Kant‘s theory operating in international law today. Anthony
34 Kant Perpetual Peace, 98 35 Ibid.
Anghie, one of the leading international relations lawyers in the world, argues that Kant‘s work provides justification for violence against states and individuals which are not ‗civilized‘ according to the Kantian definition of the term.36
Commenting on the above quote in which Kant outlines the permanent threat posed by the individual in a mere state of nature, Anghie suggests that, by making this argument, Kant enlarges the justifications for war to a quite extraordinary extent by expanding the concept of an ‗injury‘: ―those societies, which lack a ‗legal civil state‘, by their very existence, injure their neighbours, thus justifying the use of force against them‖.37
Anghie argues that what this concept permits, and indeed requires, is the development of a set of ideas relating to how we should distinguish a legal civil state from a non-civil state.38 Anghie relates this discussion of civil states versus non-civil states to contemporary practices of International Law, and suggests that International Law can be said to operate only among liberal states, while non-liberal states ―operate in a zone of lawlessness, untrammelled either by international or domestic law – and it is precisely for this reason that Kant feared such states‖.39
As we see in Kant‘s writings, his solution to the existence of non-civil actors does not explicitly and immediately call for war or violence; rather, ―I can require him either to enter into a common lawful state along with me or to move away from my vicinity‖40
. However, as Anghie notes, what globalization has ensured, of course, is that it is no
36 Anghie (2004) 37 Anghie, 295 38 Ibid 39 Ibid
longer possible to distance oneself from the civil state.41 Thus, the first possibility – namely that ‗I can require him to enter into a common lawful state along with me‘ – is all that remains. We should pause on the word ‗require‘ because, while this may be a vague term, it can, and has been, interpreted in such a way that enables significant violence against those without proper claim to ‗statehood‘. Anghie concludes his discussion on Kant by suggesting that ―Kant‘s anti-imperial position, then, exists in tension with his arguments in favour of self-defence – and, indeed, a version of self defence that appears to make conquest of the non-civil state imperative‖.42
This tension in Kant‘s argument creates an aporia about how the modern asylum seeker might be treated. The modern asylum seeker, it would seem, is not in the state of nature because, for Kant, this seems to imply a voluntary condition on the part of the individual in the state of nature. As our unsocial socialablity suggests, it is first out of desperation that we enter into civil society because of our competitive and conflictual nature.43 To remain in the state of nature, then, is both an irrational and voluntary decision. The modern asylum seeker, however, comes to a host country precisely because he or she is seeking membership within a political community. The asylum seeker, then, is not in the state of nature, is not part of the host society (but does have a right of temporary sojourn), and yet he or she cannot go back to their ‗home‘ society.
A look at contemporary immigration and refugee politics in the UK illustrates the enduring significance of this aporia enabled by Kant‘s writings. On March 13, 2008, it
41 Anghie (2004), 297 42 Ibid.
was reported that more than 14,000 Iraqi asylum seekers in the UK will be told that they must go home or face destitution in Britain, as the UK government considers Iraq safe enough to return. The Iraqis involved will be told that unless they sign up for ‗voluntary‘ removal, they will essentially be made homeless and lose all access to city services. They will also be asked to sign a waiver agreeing that the government will take no responsibility for them or their families once they return to Iraq.44 All this is being done despite the fact that 78 people have been killed in incidents across Iraq in the past week alone. Furthermore, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says that it is dangerous to return asylum seekers to Iraq because of continuing conflict.45
Here, we see the ambiguity of the modern asylum seeker at play. It is precisely the logic of this aporia – which we already see present in Kant‘s writings – that enables this evasion of responsibility for the asylum seeker. Kant‘s claim that first entry cannot be denied to those who seek it if this would result in their ‗destruction‘ has been incorporated into the Geneva Concention on the Status of Refugees as the principle of ‗non-refoulment‘ (United Nations 1951). While this principle requires signatory states not to forcible return refugees and asylum seekers to their countries or origin if doing so would pose a clear danger to their lives, this is often done, as in the case of the Iraqi asylum seekers mentioned above. Furthermore, it is possible for states to manipulate this article in a variety of ways, such as by sending asylum seekers to so-called safe third countries. The contradictions and tensions within Kant‘s writings enable states to treat asylum seekers as individuals in the state of nature or at best as guests. The ‗choice‘ to
44 The Guardian, ―Iraqi asylum seekers given Deadline to go home or face destitution in UK,‖ March 13, 2008.
enter into civil society is not apparent for many contemporary asylum seekers, as the modern state system creates the conditions under which certain individuals can be left in a ‗non-space‘ in terms of political belonging. While unable to return to their ‗home‘ country, the ‗host‘ country is not required to provide them permanent residency. This contradiction has significant consequences for those left in this space of limbo. As I have suggested, Kant‘s logic makes both the status of contemporary asylum seekers, and a state‘s response to these individuals unclear. This ambiguity thus makes it possible for states to evade responsibility and creates the very conditions of possibility for stateless people, and also those who are in the ‗state of nature‘, in the Kantian sense, and must thus be looked upon with constant suspicion.
While, as I have argued, Kant‘s writings have significant logical consequences for contemporary politics, there are some important qualifications that need to be made to understand the specific set of conditions within which Kant is writing. I evoke Kant‘s writings here to shed light on contemporary forms of abjection, as it would seem that many of the ways in which stateless people are marginalized today follow logically from the type of politics Kant sets up in his Political Writings. However, I am cautious not to read contemporary forms of abjection back into the work of Kant. Indeed, there is much about contemporary forms of abjection that Kant could not have imagined when he was writing. Kant is writing in a time of frontiers rather than borders. The notion of statelessness did not have the same implications or meaning as it does today, as the vast majority of the world was ‗stateless‘ in the modern definition of the term. Furthermore, contemporary practices of citizenship extend far beyond the idea of citizenship that was
just emerging at the time of Kant. Modern technologies of border control, the passport, and emerging forms of biometrics were virtually unthinkable in the context in which Kant was writing.
Many contemporary politics theorists – such as Giorgio Agamben, who will explored in the next chapter – argue that there is no longer an ‗outside‘ to international politics and thus even the ‗excluded‘ are now always already included by means of abjection. We can see this phenomenon of inclusion through exclusion operating in Kant‘s work. While it is clear that Kant is critical of the European colonialism of his time, his ‗solution‘ to this is less clear. Kant implicitly accepts that the Europeans will stay, and that those who are further behind on the developmental continuum will eventually be brought into civilized society. Thus, while he excludes the vast majority of the world from his understanding of civilized society, he nonetheless implies that these people will eventually be included in what we now see as European civilization. Thus, while being careful to qualify Kant‘s writings within the context of his time, I argue that the implications of his thought can be seen in contemporary forms of abjection. The tension between the universal and the particular set out by Kant can be seen in contemporary debates between the notion of universal human rights and a state-centric understanding of citizenship. Furthermore, the specific type of politically qualified life set out by Kant – as a life within the state – has significant consequences for contemporary migrant and refugee politics. In the following chapter, I will take a shift to critically engage with the work of Giorgio Agamben who I see as a thinker that explores some of these logical consequences which have followed from Kant‘s writings. Ultimately, I see Agamben as an interesting but
deeply problematic thinker who, while trying to engage with contemporary forms of abjection, ends up reproducing these very categories of abjection in the process.
Chapter Two
Thus far, I have considered how the language of the state system and the world historical development model operate in Kant‘s work to enable a distinction between civilized and uncivilzed. I have also argued that there is an aporia in Kant‘s logic about how the modern asylum seeker might be treated. At this point, I would like to take a shift to consider contemporary theories of abjection through the writings of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben is an important thinker in this regard because of the questions he raises of the exception. Moreover, he aptly points to the ways in which spaces of abjection – the camp – can take the capacity of being a subject away from those caught within these spaces. However, I am interested here in the question of how spaces of exception can serve against abjection. In this chapter, after first outlining Agamben‘s argument, I will highlight what I see to be the main shortcomings of his analysis. Ultimately, I am interested in politicizing those spaces which Agamben considers to be inherently apolitical.
Agamben: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
Much has been written on Agamben‘s analysis of the camp and the exception. Indeed, since September 11, 2001, Agamben has become almost the obligatory reference for critical academic analysis of geopolitics in regards to the U.S. dominated war-on-terror. The reason is not difficult to discern. As Matthew Hannah suggests,
His account of the primordial basis of state sovereignty seems to have found perfect illustrations in the blinkered, bound, and orange-clad ‗enemy combatants‘ held at Guantanamo Bay; the hooded victims of the torture filmed at Abu Ghiraib prison in Iraq; and the mysterious unidentified captives moved by ‗extraordinary rendition‘ to CIA-run ‗black sites‘ for interrogation.46
These prisoners are examples of what Agamben, drawing on ancient Roman jurisprudence, calls homo sacer or, following Walter Benjamin, ‗bare life‘, that is , people who have been subjected to the sovereign ―ban‖, individuals ―set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law‖.47
Agamben begins his most important study, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, by taking up threads from Foucault‘s arguments regarding the centrality of biological life in modern politics.48 Agamben credits Foucault with having recognized that ―a society‘s ‗threshold of biological modernity‘ is situated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society‘s political strategies.‖49
According to Agamben, however, Foucault failed to extend his analysis of biopolitics to include such phenomenon as the Holocaust, and how the politics of life is implicated within sovereign power. As such, Agamben takes up this ‗vanishing point‘ within Foucault‘s analysis and asks, ―What is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power?‖50 His conclusions reveal the extent to which, for Agamben, biopoliltics presents itself at the centre of sovereign power: 46 Hannah (2008), 57 47 Agamben (1998), 82 48 Agamben (1998), 3-12 49 Agamben (1998), 3 50 Agamben, (1998), 6
What this work has to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses [which Foucault had held apart, namely, of biopolitics and of sovereignty] cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power….Placing biological life at the center of
its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life….51
In what sense is the politicization of life constitutive of sovereign power? Drawing upon a range of classical sources, such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Carl Schmitt, Agamben argues that sovereignty is a paradoxical concept because the sovereign ―is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. [T]he sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law‖.52
Agamben explains this suspension by means of the term ―state of exception‖, taken from the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt. A passage from Schmitt‘s Politische Theologie already clearly suggests what Agamben means when he says that biopower and sovereignty are inextricable:
The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid. Every general rule demands a regular, everyday frame of life to which it can be actually applied and which is submitted to its regulations. . The rule requires a homogeneous medium. This factual regularity is not merely an ―external presupposition‖ that the jurist can ignore; it belongs, rather, to the rule‘s immanent validity. There is no rule that is applicable to chaos. Order must be created, and sovereign is he who definitely decides if this situation is actually effective. All law is ―situational law.‖ The sovereign creates and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality.53
If we take ―regular, everyday life‖ to mean the realm of biopolitics, and Schmitt‘s distinction between ―order‖ and ―juridical order‖ as distinguishing biopolitics from
51 Agamben (1998), 6, emphasis in original. 52 Agamben (1998), 15
legality, Schmitt can be taken to argue here that ―sovereignty is the ability of the sovereign to step outside the law in order to (re)establish the biopolitical regularity or normalcy of life necessary for law itself, the juridical order, to function‖.54
For Agamben, the state of exception also pertains to bare life. What is significant and dangerous about the modern order, according to Agamben, is that the state of exception becomes the rule, ―the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction.‖55
For Agamben, the camp is the space where politics becomes biopolitics and ―bare life‖, not the citizen, the subject of politics.56
In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, including agency, voice, and even their humanity. They become what Agamben calls ‗bare life‘ or ‗homo sacer‘ – that form of life that can be killed but not sacrificed.57 The figure of bare life is ―included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed).‖58 Homo sacer is constituted by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrifice). In short, homo sacer is ―Life that cannot be sacrificed and yet may be killed.‖59
He is neither fully human in political jurisdiction nor a form a life that can be brought into the
54 Hannah (2008), 59 55 Agamben (1998), 9 56 Agamben, (1998), 9 57 Agamben, (1998), 8 58 Agamben, (1998), 8 59 Agamben, (1998), 82
realm of divine law. This double exclusion is of course at the same time a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed."60 This exposes homo sacer to a kind of raw violence and ―constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.‖61
The exception – the sovereign‘s ability to step outside the law – in fact defines the very center of the juridical order. That is to say, ―the very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception.‖62
However, sovereign law is more complex than simply a binary logic of inclusion by means of an interdiction. As Jenny Edkins suggests, ―It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction.‖ 63
In this zone of indistinction, the exception and the rule become indistinguishable. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid suggest that the zone of indistinction can be seen ―as a switching mechanism that affects a passage between inside and outside, law and violence, physis and nomos.‖64 In commanding the trafficking that takes place, sovereign power positions itself as that which decides upon and controls this trafficking. Bare life is constituted, then, in and through the fundamental act of sovereignty, in the moment of deciding what forms of life will be granted political qualification under the state, and what forms absolutely will not.
60 Agamben (1998), note 7, 82 61 Edkins (2000), 17 62 Edkins, (2000) 5 63 Ibid, 6.
In this zone of indistinction, what counts as life is not so much life defined by and controlled through a language of freedom and facilitation – the normalizing practices of disciplinary and biopower of Foucault – but rather a raw life, a bare life, devoid of even the operationalized type of freedom of which Foucault speaks. In this space of the zone of indistinction, what we see is not so much a relationship of governmental power – where power is not negative and repressive but positive and productive – but rather a relationship of violence, where life is exposed to the violent limit of sovereign power. As Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat suggest,
What we have in the camps is not a power relation. Power is no longer necessary: it is no longer necessary, for example, in its role as constitutive of subjectivities, because there is no longer a subject – just bare life. But more to the point, if power relations are productive as Foucault tells us, there is no such thing, no subject, no anything that is being produced in the camp. All we have is bare life being administered.65
In short, it is not possible to talk about power, in the Foucauldian sense, in the zone of indistinction. Governmental power is something that produces and constitutes subjectivities; however, where there is no subject, no anything, being produced – just bare life – this particular form of power recedes and all that is left is mere administration, violence.
To further expand upon Agamben‘s argument, it is useful to consider some contemporary spaces of ‗exception‘. The number of people kept in refugee camps around the world is staggering. For example, of the 20 million people currently receiving assistance from the UNHCR, approximately 12 million are refugees living in camps or similar conditions.66 An example of a well-documented detention center is Woomera detention center in South
65 Edkins and Pin-Fat (2004), 9 66 Mayell, Hillary
Australia, a desert camp that operated from 1999 to April 2003, designed to hold about 400 people, but holding at times as many as 1,400 asylum seekers, some for as many as three years, in desperately poor conditions.67 Australia has a policy of mandatory detention and detains every asylum seeker until they can ‗prove‘ that they are a legitimate refugee. In the center, about 20 inmates a week attempted suicide.68 A detainee says, ―when we came first to Woomera, we didn‘t believe we were in Australia…Because the things that happened – they wouldn‘t happen in Australia. In must be another country‖.69 ―Woomera is another country‖, adds Campbell, commenting on his interviewee‘s utterance. However, the significance of Woomera is that it was effectively a place of unlaw within law – it was a place in which the so-called ‗normal‘ state of affairs was suspended for an ‗exceptional‘ state of affairs. Hence the confusion whether it was inside or outside Australia. The paradox here consists of sovereign power being both inside and outside the juridical order at the same time, a situation in which the experience becomes ‗the law is outside itself‘, or, ‗nothing is outside the law‘.70
In reflection of the frustration felt by the detainees in Woomera, many went on hunger strikes, slashed themselves, and committed suicide. Fifty of them broke out of the camp in 2002, most have been captured, ―but they are unlikely to be prosecuted or jailed – if they were, they would have visiting rights and a definite length of imprisonment, luxuries denied them as asylum seekers inside Woomera‖.71
The detainees were ―legally abandoned outside the legal system through exceptional practices that hold them under
67 BBC News, ―Australia Shuts Asylum Camp,‖April 17, 2003. Quoted in Isn and Rygiel, 196. 68
Campbell (2002)
69 Quoted in Campbell (2002), 26 70 Agamben (1998), 15
their ban…the detention center is a ‗hybrid‘ in which the distinction between the legality and illegality of what happens in it does not make sense‖.72
It is what Agamben would call the exception, constituting a space categorically different from a prison, in which inmates have ‗rights‘. Indeed, it is the reason why the inmates of Woomera could find the panopticon luxurious compared to the camp.73After all, the panopticon was ‗a model of mutual involvement and confrontation‘ that required the constant mutual engagement of power holders and those subject to power‖.74
The power involved in the camp, as Edkins suggests, is simply a relationship of violence where the positive powers of normalization and discipline disappear.
Camps such as Woomera, however, are not the only spaces of ‗exception‘ that can be found today. There also exist spaces within the city where abjects live under suspended rules and rights. Unlike camps, whose logic is to keep out and away those threats to state sovereignty, spaces, or what Isin and Rygiel identify as ‗zones‘ are nestled within the city which create internal borders and spaces of exception.75 Refugees living in many cities of the world have been called ―an invisible population‖ whose needs are often overlooked even under UNHCR programs.76 People living without legal status are vulnerable to abuse by employers and landlords, exploitation by immigrant consultants and lawyers, and detention, deportation, and surveillance by authorities. For non-status people, the national border is not just a wall around the country; it creates walls inside the country as well. People living without status often do not have access to social services because
72 Diken (2005), 82 73 Diken (2005), 82 74
Bauman (1991), 10 75 Isin and Rygiel (2006), 193
76 Human Rights Watch, ―Refugees, Migration, and Trafficking‖, in Human Rights Watch World Report 2003
they fear that by going to the Police or a Social Worker, they will be reported to immigration authorities.77 The government does not collect official statistics on people living without status, so it is difficult to say how many non status immigrants live in Canada. However, recent estimates suggest that there are anywhere between 50,000 to 200,000 people in Canada with less than full legal status, with 50% living in Toronto.78
While almost all non-status immigrants work, they are not protected against unfair and dangerous conditions.79 Peter Nyers has interviewed non-status people about their dangerous and unfair working conditions, and as one person living without status suggests, ―A lot of employers are delighted to hear that you have no papers, because they can overwork you and exploit you…it really drains you that you have to work 12 hour shifts for very little money. I used to be young, now I feel so old‖.80
Indeed, the use of immigrant labor is not restricted to Canada, but is something that pervades the American economy and many others. While this is an important and extensive issue in itself, the point I wish to make here is simply that it is possible to identify these spaces of exception within the city as well, and operating through a logic similar to what Agamben identifies.
In France, the build-up of Iraqis sleeping in tents in Cherbourg is alarming local residents and politicians. The northern French port has become a ―no man's land‖ of Iraqis desperately trying to get to England to claim asylum.81 Because Iraq is at war, the Iraqis cannot be forcibly deported. They are instead forced into a continual cycle of destitution: 77 Nyers (2004), 8 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid.
―Caught by French police at the ferry terminal, they end up being released and head straight back to Cherbourg. Caught at a British ferry terminal, they are escorted back to their port of departure - Cherbourg, where the cycle restarts‖.82
In Britain, would-be asylum seekers find themselves in similar situations, forced onto the street without any access to social services. While the UK government provides housing to some asylum seekers, once a negative decision has been reached they often find themselves on the streets without any access to social services, place to sleep, or even the right to work.83 Indeed, the ‗choice‘ recently given to Iraqi asylum seekers to either voluntarily return to Iraq or face destitution in the UK reflects the desperate state of affairs in which failed asylum seekers might find themselves.84 These asylum seekers are literally turned into a homeless population without rights to social services or even the basic rights of ‗humanity‘. These zones within the city are spaces in which the state attempts to render asylum seekers invisible and inaudible, without access to the services and rights afforded to proper citizens of the city.
In considering contemporary spaces of exception, Agamben‘s thesis becomes more evident. Agamben argues that ―the camp is the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity.‖85 During the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, ―the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order.‖86
The zone of indistinction transgressed the
82 Ibid. 83
The Observer, ‗Desperate Measures‖, October 2007
84 The Guardian, ―Iraqi asylum seekers given deadline to go home or face destitution in UK‖, March 2008. 85 Agamben (1998) 123.
sphere of a space of exclusion to become the necessary centre of politics in modernity.87 That is to say, all human life became potentially bare life, or homo sacer. As Zizek puts it, ―the true problem is not the fragile status of those excluded, but, rather, the fact that, at the most elementary level, we are all ‗excluded‘ in the sense that our most elementary ‗zero‘ position is that of an object of biopolitics and that eventual political and citizenship rights are given to us as a secondary status‖.88
In saying that all human life has become potentially homo sacer, then, Agamben is suggesting that without the secondary status of citizenship, we are nothing but the bare life produced by sovereign power. The asylum seekers living within the city without any rights embody the ‗zero‘ position of humanity for Agamben. Our ‗politicality‘ is then only a product of this secondary status of citizenship, and not something that is a potential in our most elementary ‗zero‘ position.
I want to argue that the logic of the camp as set out by Agamben does not – and cannot – account for the modalities of being political in these spaces of exception. He is utterly unable to see the politicality of out most ‗zero‘ position because he is only able to see spaces of exception as spaces of abjection, and not politics. Here I would like to consider Ranciere‘s protest against Agamben and Arendt on what he sees to be a conflation of the condition of being rightless with the condition of being apolitical. Ranciere argues that by following Arendt so closely, Agamben takes the capacity of being a subject away from those who are caught in the camp, rendering it an altogether apolitical space. Ranciere argues that, in distinguishing between bare life and political life through a kind of ontological trap, Arendt and Agamben sort of the problem of the political in advance.
87 Agamben (1998), 23 88 Zizek (2002), 95
Ranciere notes that ―[i]n this space, the executioner and the victim, the German body and the Jewish body, appear as two parts of the same ‗biopolitical‘ body‖.89
Ranciere argues, ―Any kind of claim to rights or any struggle enacting rights is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life and state of exception.‖90
He notes this distinction in Arendt, where she argues,
[i]f a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as fellow man.91
Ranciere takes issue with Arendt, arguing that for Arendt
Either the rights of the citizen are the rights of man – but the rights of man are the rights of the unpoliticized person; they are the rights of those who have no rights, which amounts to nothing – or the rights of man are the rights of the citizen, the rights attached to the fact of being a citizen of such and such a constitutional state. This means that they are the rights of those who have rights, which amounts to a tautology.92
In his criticism of Arendt, Ranciere confuses her critique of human rights – and the state system upon which they are founded – with a claim that politics depends upon rights. In fact, what Arendt is arguing is that politics cannot be founded on rights. Moreover, despite its weightiness as a discourse, human rights are in fact meaningless without the ability to first claim a right to have rights, that is, to exist as a political subject.93 Arendt‘s argument is that human rights are indeed predicated upon a certain notion of the political, which has important implications for those without claim to this political space.
89 Ranciere (2004), 301 90 Ranciere (2004), 301. 91 Arendt (1951), 300. 92 Ranciere (2004), 302 93 Isin and Rygiel (2006), 186.
