10 - Suspending the Body: Biopower and the Contradictions of Family Values

Summary

If the family is the original scene of filial belonging, and culture the general term for affilial bonding, what are the consequences of (con)fusing la patrie with la nation? If family values undergird a normative understanding of cultural identity, what is the father's place in the patrimony through which national culture is to be understood? In the context of dispersed and divided families, how might we understand family values in the recent debates around cultural values? What happens to the family when the migrant body enters the nation? If there is indeed a metonymic confusion between nation and patrimony, this must have consequences for the conception of the family as well. It is with these questions that I want to read the figuration of the immigrant body in LES TERRES FROIDES (Sebastian Lifshitz, 1998), in which a young second-generation Arab immigrant (a socalled beur), Djamel (Yasmine Belmadi), moves from St. Denis to Grenoble to find his French father.

The immigrant body provides us with one entry point through which to confront the discourses of family and cultural values within contemporary processes of displacement and mobility. How can such a body act, and move, within a material and discursive force field that is constructed through the idiom of “civilization” and “barbarism”? This is not just a metaphoric or idealistic question, for my argument engages with the figuration of the raced body and its potential for mobility through a materialist reading of value. This chapter will frame the value of the body within the social, ideological, and economic relations of migration, racism, and the discourse of national culture.

If culture and family as different fields of analysis are distinct, what combines them in much political discourse is the appendage “value”. Family values are often considered to reflect national values. In a sense, “value” as a conceptual hinge is that which makes a comparison between culture/nation and family possible. However, much of this discourse that evaluates cultural values through discourses on the family erases important historical contradictions. By referring to Karl Marx's theories about the body as labor-power and value, I will critique the conceptual contradictions that are hidden when the circulation of a discourse of value unites the family to culture.