Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:44:49.210Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political life beyond accommodation and return: rethinking relations between the political, the international, and the body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2013

EEVA PUUMALA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores political agency in the interstices of the bodily politics of asylum. It shows how its practices make bodily surfaces and how alternative forms of political authority emanate from bodies. Relying on Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology of the body, it examines forms of political agency that are enacted by people often considered as abjective subjectivities in the spaces of the international. Deriving from interviews conducted with failed asylum seekers, the article sheds light on agencies and resistances embedded in and extant despite the governmental efforts to solve the problem of the moving body. Ethnographic data and interviews with the failed asylum seekers show how they take control over their lives, not as separate, sovereign subjects, but in relation to their political surroundings and others. In a way, the failed asylum seekers produce and practice their own politics that both takes part in and exceeds the limits set by sovereign politics. By exploring political agency from underneath and beyond sovereign power and governmentality, the article presents a reading of the intertwining of the international, political, and bodily.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 949 - 968
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This article was written as a part of a research project funded by the Academy of Finland (SA 132403). I wish to thank Anitta Kynsilehto, Vicki Squire, Annick Wibben, and other participants at the 2011 European Peace Research Association conference where a version of this article was presented. Furthermore, I am grateful to the RIS editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Empirically the article takes its cue from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with failed asylum seekers living in three reception centres in Finland between August 2006–April 2007. Geographically the participants of this research came from Afghanistan, Iraq (Kurdistan), Palestine, and Somalia. The fieldwork period involved participating in the daily routines in one of the centres, such as being present at staff meetings. All in all, the period of participant observation added my understanding of the wider context of those issues that my interviewees addressed in their accounts, because it gave me a chance to witness what living in a reception centre means on a daily basis.

2 Interpretations that on the other hand surpass the notion of the sovereign subject, but on the other remain its captives have been offered by, for example, Dossa, Parin, ‘The Body Remembers: A Migratory Tale of Social Suffering and Witnessing’, International Journal of Mental Health, 32:3 (2003), p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pugliese, Joseph ‘Subcutaneous Law: Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 21 (December 2004), p. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Pugliese, ‘Subcutaneous Law’, pp. 23–34; Edkins, Jenny and Pin-Fat, Véronique, ‘Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34:1 (2005), pp. 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moulin, Carolina and Nyers, Peter, ‘“We Live in a Country of UNHCR” – Refugee Protests and Global Political Society’, International Political Sociology, 2:1 (2007), pp. 356–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nyers, Peter, ‘In Solitary, in Solidarity: Detainees, Hostages and Contesting the Anti-policy of Detention’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11:3 (2008), pp. 333–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zevnik, Andreja, ‘Sovereign-less Subject and the Possibility of Resistance’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30:1 (2009), pp. 83–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rygiel, Kim, ‘Bordering Solidarities: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement and Camps at Calais’, Citizenship Studies, 15:1 (2011), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Zetter, Roger, ‘More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalisation’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 20:2 (2007), p. 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc, Retreating the Political (London: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar. Also Norris, Andrew, ‘Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead’, Diacritics, 30:4 (2000), p. 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 This aspect has been raised earlier in Puumala, Eeva and Pehkonen, Samu, ‘Corporeal Choreographies between Politics and the Political: Failed Asylum Seekers Moving from Body Politics to Body Spaces’, International Political Sociology, 4:1 (2010), p. 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Puumala, Eeva, Väyrynen, Tarja, Kynsilehto, Anitta, and Pehkonen, Samu, ‘Events of the Body Politic: A Nancian Reading of Asylum-seekers' Bodily Choreographies and Resistance’, Body & Society, 17:4 (2011), pp. 83–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, p. 133; Dikeç, Mustafa, ‘Space, Politics, and the Political’, Environment and Planning D, 23:2 (2005), p. 185CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, p. 110.

9 Nancy, Corpus, pp. 15–17, 33.

10 Caygill, Howard, ‘The Shared World: Philosophy, Violence, Freedom’, in Sheppard, , Sparks, , and Thomas, (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 23Google Scholar.

11 Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 40Google Scholar; ‘The Confronted Community’, Postcolonial Studies, 6:1 (2003), pp. 23–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; In contrast, see also Edkins, Jenny, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), esp. pp. 125–46Google Scholar.

12 See, for example, Inayatullah, Naeem, and Blaney, David L., International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 146–7Google Scholar.

13 Librett, Jeffrey S., ‘Interruptions of Necessity: Being between Meaning and Power in Jean-Luc Nancy’, in Sheppard, , Sparks, , and Thomas, (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 124, fn. 25Google Scholar.

14 Even though Nancian thought has not thus far inspired many discussions in IR, there are contributions within the discipline so as to think the implications and meaning of Nancy's philosophy of singular plurality. See Edkins, Jenny, ‘Exposed Singularity’, Journal for Cultural Research, 9:4 (2005), pp. 359–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Odysseos, Louiza, The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Vaughan-Williams, Nick, ‘Beyond a Cosmopolitan Ideal: The Politics of Singularity’, International Politics, 44:1 (2007), pp. 107–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See, for example, Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘La Comparution/The Compearance: From the Existence of “Communism” to the Community of Existence’, Political Theory, 20:3 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 19–25Google Scholar; Heikkilä, Martta, At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-Presence and Its Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy's Philosophy (Helsinki: Helsinki University Printing House, 2007), pp. 72–7Google Scholar.

16 Here my examination is greatly inspired by Walker, Rob's After the Globe, Before the World (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 29Google Scholar.

17 In contrast, see Wurzer, Wilhem S., ‘Nancy and the Political Imaginary after Nature’, in Sheppard, Darren, Sparks, Simon and Thomas, Colin (eds), The Sense of Philosophy: On Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 92Google Scholar.

18 Also see Chen, Boyu, Hwang, Ching-Chane, and Ling, Lily H. M., ‘Lust/Caution in IR: Democratising World Politics with Culture as Method’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37:3 (2009), p. 757Google Scholar.

19 See also McNevin, Anne, ‘Becoming Political: Asylum Seeker Activism through Community Theatre’, Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, 8 (2010), pp. 142–59Google Scholar.

20 Malkki, Liisa, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11:3 (1996), pp. 384–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Research on governmentality has gained a prominent position in IR. An interesting article examining the limits of governmentality, both as a social theory and actuality, within the international has been written by Joseph, Jonathan, ‘The Limits of Governmentality: Social Theory and the International’, European Journal of International Relations, 16:2 (2010), pp. 223–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Darby, Phillip, ‘Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial Rethinking of Relations International’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33:1 (2004), p. 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On action that does not simply follow the axis between resistance and domination, see also Campbell, Howard and Heyman, Josiah, ‘Slantwise: Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 31:1 (2007), pp. 3–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See Nancy, Corpus, pp. 161–70.

24 Rygiel, ‘Bordering Solidarities’, pp. 4–5.

25 Not supposing identities to be substantial, according to Nancy, is to do right by identities. He sees the task being enormous and yet extremely simple; it is the task of a (political; my addition) culture remaking itself. Nancy notes that this task means mixing together again ‘the various lines, trails, and skins, while at the same time describing their heterogeneous trajectories and their webs, both those that are tangled and those that are distinct’. See Nancy, Jean-Luc, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 147Google Scholar; also Devisch, Ignaas, ‘Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and “the Size of Humanity”’, Law and Critique, 22:1 (2011), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in contrast, see Zevnik, ‘Sovereign-less Subject’, pp. 90–3.

26 The intertwining of personal and political has been discussed and its underpinnings charted within IR, but yet ‘personal’ suffering and emotional distress are often regarded politically uninteresting or irrelevant. For a different interpretation, see Zarowsky, Christina, ‘Writing Trauma: Emotion, Ethnography, and the Politics of Suffering among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 28:2 (2004), p. 201CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

27 Walker, After the Globe, pp. 57–8.

28 In contrast, see Manning, Erin, ‘Beyond Accommodation: National Space and Recalcitrant Bodies’, Alternatives, 25:1 (2000), pp. 51–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Butler, Judith, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’, Diacritics, 31:4 (2001), pp. 22–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Gagnon, John H., ‘The Self, Its Voices, and Their Discord’, in Ellis, Carolyn and Flaherty, Michael G. (eds), Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992), p. 235Google Scholar.

30 Fischer, Francis, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy: the place of a thinking’, in Sheppard, , Sparks, , and Thomas, (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 35Google Scholar.

31 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 179; Devisch, ‘Doing Justice to Existence’, p. 6.

32 Ojakangas, Mika, ‘Philosophies of “Concrete” Life: From Carl Schmitt to Jean-Luc Nancy’, Telos, 132 (2005), pp. 42–5Google Scholar.

33 See also Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, p. 44; and Walker, After the Globe, pp. 20–1.

34 In contrast, see Manning, Erin, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 62–3Google Scholar.

35 See also Dallmayr, Fred, ‘An “inoperative” global community? Reflections on Nancy’, in Sheppard, , Sparks, , and Thomas, (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 183Google Scholar.

36 Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 200Google Scholar.

37 Sullivan, Paul and McCarthy, John, ‘Toward a Dialogical Perspective on Agency’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34:3 (2004), p. 303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Noland, Carrie, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (London & Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Also Dallmayr, , ‘An “inoperative” global community?’, in Sheppard, , Sparks, , and Thomas, (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 193Google Scholar.

40 Wurzer, , ‘Nancy and the Political Imaginary after Nature’, in Sheppard, , Sparks, , and Thomas, (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 98Google Scholar.

41 This claim resonates closely with discussions surrounding resistance and governmentality. See especially Campbell and Heyman, ‘Slantwise’, pp. 3–30; Takhar, Shaminder, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Political Activism’, Contemporary Politics, 13:2 (2007), pp. 123–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zevnik, ‘Sovereign-less Subject’, pp. 83–106; and Joseph, ‘The Limits of Governmentality’, pp. 223–46.

42 Huynh, Kim, ‘Refugeeness: What's So Good and Not So Good about Being Persecuted and Displaced’, Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, 8 (2010), p. 54Google Scholar.

43 In contrast, see Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2010), p. 336Google Scholar.

44 McCarthy, John, Sullivan, Paul, and Wright, Peter, ‘Culture, Personal Experience and Agency’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 45:2 (2006), p. 430CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

45 Sullivan and McCarthy, ‘Toward a Dialogical Perspective of Agency’, pp. 295, 306–7.

46 See Ahmed, Sara, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 174–5Google Scholar.

47 See, for example, Dugan, Kimberly and Reger, Jo, ‘Voice and agency in social movement outcomes’, Qualitative Sociology, 29:4 (2006), p. 470CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a different interpretation see, however, Ross, Andrew, ‘Why they don't hate us: emotion, agency and the politics of “anti-americanism”’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:1 (2010), pp. 109–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Ross, ‘Why they don't hate us’, pp. 117, 120.

49 Ahmed, The Politics of Emotion, p. 178.

50 See Nancy, ‘La comparution/the compearance’, p. 375; also Zarowsky, ‘Writing trauma’, p. 201.

51 Nancy, ‘La comparution/the compearance’, p. 375.

52 Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation, p. 15; also Derrida, Jacques, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 111–30Google Scholar.

53 Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation, p. 76; Nancy, Inoperative Community, pp. 9–10, 27–8.

54 See Hewitt, Kim, Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), p. 122Google Scholar; Reischer, Erica and Koo, Kathryn S., ‘The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), p. 303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Abu-Lughod, Lila, ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist, 17:1 (1989), p. 49Google Scholar.

56 See Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 132.

57 See Solis, Jocelyn, ‘Narrating and counternarrating illegality as an identity’, in Daiute, Colin and Lightfoot, Cynthia (eds), Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society (London: Sage, 2004), p. 197Google Scholar.

58 Nancy, Jean-Luc, A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 8Google Scholar. Within International Relations Nevzat Soguk has presented the idea of passage and connected it with migrancy, see ‘Poetics of a world of migrancy: migratory horizons, passages, and encounters of alterity’, Global Society, 14:3 (2000), p. 433Google Scholar.

59 Benterrak, Krim, Muecke, Benjamin, and Roe, Paddy, Reading The Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), p. 15Google Scholar, cited in Muldoon, Paul, ‘Between speech and silence: the postcolonial critic and the idea of emancipation’, Critical Horizons, 2:1 (2001), p. 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Zarowsky, ‘Writing Trauma’, pp. 198–9.

61 In contrast, see Schick, Kate, ‘Acting out and Working Through: Trauma and (In)security’, Review of International Studies, 34:4 (2011), pp. 1837–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Within the context of Palestinian intifada Junka, Laura, ‘Camping in the Third Space: Agency, Representation, and the Politics of Gaza Beach’, Public Culture, 18:2 (2006), p. 359CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has presented a similar interpretation.

63 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, p. 185.

64 Tabar, Linda, ‘Memory, Agency, Counter-narrative: Testimonies from Jenin Refugee Camp’, Criticalarts, 21:1 (2007), p. 17Google Scholar.

65 Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘Banks, Edges, Limits (of Singularity)’, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8:2 (2004), p. 53Google Scholar.