Through the wire: Relations of power and relations of violence

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-24

  Edkins, Jenny ^a   Pin Fat, Véronique ^b  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27844459858     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298050340010101     Document Type: Review

References (110)

1. Mehmet al Assad, 'Asylum', borderlands e-journal 1, no. 1 (2002). [http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au]
2. Sam Azad, 'Abbas Amini Gets Leave to Remain But Continues to Protest', Independent Race and Refugee News Network, 29 May 2003 [http:// www.irr.org.uk]. Spellings of Amini's first name vary.
3. Abbas Amini, BBC News, 30 May 2003 [http://news-bbc.co.uk]
4. Tania Branigan, 'Kurdish Poet Finds His Voice', The Guardian, 31 May 2003 [http://www.guardian.co.uk].
5. Maryam Namazie, 'Abas Amini is Granted Leave to Remain in the UK', Hambastegi: Paper of the International Federation of Iranian Refugees, 29 May 2003, 2 [http://www.rowzane.com]
6. Azad, 'Amini Gets Leave'.
7. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
8. For recent discussions of sovereign power and exceptionalism see Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, 'Zones of Indistinction: Security, Terror and Bare Life', Space and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 290-307;
9. Jef Huysmans, 'Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy', Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 3 (2004): 321-41;
10. Andrew Neal, 'Cutting Off the King's Head: Foucault's "Society Must Be Defended" and the Problem of Sovereignty', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 4 (2004): 373-98;
11. Sergei Prozorov, 'Three Theses on "Governance" and the Political', Journal of International Relations and Development 7, no. 3 (2004): 267-93;
12. and Rens Van Munster, 'The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule', International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 17, no. 2 (2004): 141-53.
13. See, for example, William E. Connolly, 'The Complexity of Sovereignty,' in Sovereign Lives, 23-40.
14. There is considerable discussion of questions of immigration and the refugee in the critical international relations literature. See, for example, Jef Huysmans, 'Migrants as a Security Problem: Dangers of Securitizing Social Issues', in Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion, eds. Robert Miles and Dietrich Thänhardt (London: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1995);
15. Michael Dillon, 'The Scandal of the Refugee', in Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, eds. David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 92-124;
16. Michael Dillon, 'The Sovereign and the Stranger', in Sovereignty and Subjectivity, eds. Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram and Véronique Pin-Fat (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1999),117-40);
17. and chapters in Michael J. Shapiro, and Hayward R. Alker, eds. Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
18. Giorgio Agamben, 'Form-of-Life', in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 151-56, 154.
19. A similar argument could be made without including Foucault; for a discussion which does precisely this, see Jenny Edkins, 'Whatever Politics', in Sovereignty and Life: Essays on Giorgio Agamben, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2006).
20. Michel Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 ed. Colin Gordon; trans. Leo Marshall Colin Gordon, John Mepham and Kate Soper (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 78-108, 89.
21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth. Penguin Books, 1990), 94.
22. Foucault, 'Two Lectures', 98.
23. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93.
24. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 142.
25. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Michel Foucault 'The Subject and Power', in Essential Works of Focault 1954-1984, Volume 3: Power, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000), 326-48, 342.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 329.
33. Ibid., 331.
34. Ibid., 332.
35. For a discussion of the terms 'bare' and 'naked' see the translators' note in Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 143.
36. Agamben's use of these terms and the way he relates them to Foucault's notion of biopower is contentious; see for example the discussion in Mika Ojakangas, 'Impossible Dialogue on Bio-Power: Agamben and Foucault', Foucault Studies 2 (2005): 5-28;
37. and Michael Dillon, 'Cared to Death: The Biopoliticised Time of Your Life', Foucault Studies 2 (2005): 37-46.
38. Putting these controversies to one side, this article seeks to explore what happens if we take Agamben's reading of Foucault as said and use it to provocatively open the question which this article addresses. For examples of other works that discuss Agamben's arguments in relation to an overcoming of sovereign power, see Catherine Mills, 'Agamben's Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and. Happy Life', Contretemps 5, no. 5 (2004): 42-62;
39. Stefano Franchi, 'Passive Politics', Contretemps 5, no. 5 (2004): 30-41;
40. and Adam Thurschwell, 'Specters of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida', 2002 [http:// www.law.csuohio.edu/faculty/thurschwell/nietzsche.pdf]
41. Foucault, 'Subject and Power', 343.
42. Agamben, 'Form-of-Life', 154.
43. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 80-86.
44. A female equivalent, femina sacra, has been suggested. See Ronit Lentin,'"No Womans Law Will Rot This State": The Israeli Racial State and Feminist Resistance', Sociological Research Online 9, no. 3 (2004): U244-U59. Agambens blindness to the gender issues raised in his work has been noted by several writers;
45. see, for example, Thurschwell, 'Specters of Nietzsche'.
46. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 90.
47. Agamben, Means Without End, 41, emphasis in original.
48. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 174-175.
49. Ibid., 176.
50. Agamben, 'Form-of-Life', 154.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 155.
54. Virno and Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, 263.
55. Ibid.
56. Agamben, 'Form-of-Life', 152.
57. Foucault, 'Subject and Power', 341.
58. Politics, seen here as the realm of possibilities and power relations, is similar to what elsewhere has been called 'the political'. See Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
59. Foucault, 'Subject and Power', 339.
60. Ibid., 340.
61. Ibid., 342.
62. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1979), 96.
63. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181.
64. Ibid., 11, emphasis added.
65. Ibid., 115.
66. William E. Connolly, 'The Complexity of Sovereignty,' in Sovereign Lives, 23-40, 27.
67. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181.
68. Ibid., 188, emphasis added.
69. Ibid., 11.
70. Foucault, 'Subject and Power', 340.
71. Sergei Prozorov, 'X/Xs: Toward a General Theory of the Exception', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30, no. 1 (2005).81-112. In this article, Prozorov develops a discussion of 'the relation between the constituted ordet... and its constitutive principle', (Prozorov, 'X/ Xs', 82). He contrasts his position with an earlier version of the argument presented here; there is not space to respond as fully as is warranted.
72. Prozorov, 'X/Xs', 101, 104
73. Ibid., 104.
74. We would want to examine closely the parallel that Prozorov draws between the sovereign exception and the notion of the constitutive outside in Derrida or the excess/surplus in Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian work. The sovereign exception or 'constitutive transgression' is framed in relation to sovereign order as a transgression of that order, and is, moreover, in a sense under sovereign control. The Lacanian excess is precisely that which cannot be expressed or understood in terms of the symbolic order: it exceeds the framework of that order and cannot be framed in terms of it.
75. Prozorov's interpretation of our refusal to draw lines is inaccurate in so far as he reads us as meaning a 'total refusal to draw dividing lines and installing limits' (Prozorov, 'X/Xs', 104). We are specifically referring to the drawing of lines between what amounts to forms of life as 'politically qualified' or as 'bare life'. This strategy of refusal (of the drawing of sovereign lines) removes the possibility of opting for one side of the sovereign equation or the other, be it bare life or indeed politically qualified life, as a strategy of contestation. It also removes the possibility of sovereign violence being reenacted directly.
76. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188.
77. We are not suggesting a return to a 'quasi natural site of authentic life' (Prozorov, 'X/Xs', 106) but a heterotopia that 'contest[s] the very possibility of grammar [or order] at its source'; which is indeed 'disturbing'. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (London: Routledge, 1970), xviii.
78. al Assad, 'Asylum'.
79. Harvey Thompson, 'Britain: Second Iranian Asylum Seeker Risks Death in Protest', World Socialist Web Site, 12 July 2003 [http://www.wsw.org].
80. BBC Online, 'Asylum Seeker Ends Sewn Lips Protest', 6 February 2004 [http://news.bbc.co.uk].
81. James Doherty, 'Kurds in Hunger Protest Said to be Close to Death', The Scotsman, 5 March 2004 http://news.scotsman.com].
82. Anthony Browne, 'Dutch Order Expulsion of 26,000 Migrants', The Times (London), 11 February 2004, 13.
83. For other discussions of Woomera that draw on Agamben, see Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, 'The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand', International Migration 42 no. 1 (2004): 33-64;
84. and Suvendrini Perera, 'What is a Camp...?', borderlands e-journal 1, no. 1 (2002) [http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au].
85. See also Liisa H. Malkki, 'Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricisation, Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (1996): 377-404.
86. Grant Holloway, 'New Suicide Bids at Woomera', 23 January 2002, CNN.com [http://www.cnn.com].
87. Australasian Correctional Management is a unit of the US prison operator Wackenhut Correctional Corporation. The other two camps were Port Hedland and Curtin. Curtin saw protests involving lip sewing in February 2000;
88. see Regina Lohr, 'Refugees Resort to Hunger Strike in Remote Australian Prison Camp', World Socialist Web Site, 16 February 2000 [http:/// www.wsws.org]. Woomera dosed in 2003.
89. Claudia Tazreiter, 'Asylum-seekers as Pariahs in the Australian State: Security Against the Few', Discussion Paper No. 2003/19, United Nations University/World Institute for Development Economics Researh, February 2003.
90. For a very interesting study of the activism of non-status immigrants and refugees, focusing particularly on the campaign to stop the deportation of non-status Algerians in Montreal, see Peter Nyers, 'Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement', Third World Quarterly 24, no. 6 (2003): 1069-93. Nyers points to the centrality of asylum seekers to sovereign power, and he explores the role of 'taking speech' in anti-deportation campaigns.
91. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 173-174.
92. The details of how a specific government's immigration policies violate the Refugee Convention depends on the state in question.
93. Prem Kumar Rajaram, 'Disruptive Writing and a Critique of Territoriality', Review of International Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 201-228, 222.
94. Jeevan Vasager, 'Asylum Seeker Sews Lips Together in Protest at Sangatte light', The Guardian, 27 May 2002.
95. The logic of the camp is not confined to spaces surrounded by barbed wire. For a discussion of the many forms of,camp, see Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
96. Amin Jan Amin, Ghulam Hussain, Sayed Naihmatullah, and Muhammad Latif Tawaquli, 'Letter From 4 People Who Have Sewn Their Lips', to DIMIA [Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs] in Nauru, 1 January 2004.
97. Tazreiter, 'Asylum-Seekers as Pariahs', 2.
98. Rajaram, 'Disruptive Writing', 224.
99. Or the space of literature (Lee Spinks, 'Thinking the Post-Human: Literature, Affect and the Politics of Style', Textual Practice 15, no. 1 (2001): 23-46).
100. al Assad, 'Asylum'; the poem is reprinted in Rajaram, 'Disruptive Writing', 224.
101. Rajaram, 'Disruptive Writing', 224.
102. The comparison with Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man' is instructive here. Levi's poem commands those who return at night safe to their warm houses: 'Consider if this is a man/Who works in the mud/Who does not know peace/Who fights for a scrap of bread'. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and the Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1979).
103. This is a similar call to responsibility from those who 'live outside the confines' of the camp fence. James Hatley, Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 11.
104. Julie Wolfram Cox and Stella Minahan argue that 'the extremity of reactions to, and reporting of, lip sewing at Woomera may have to do with lip sewing having gendered symbolism in addition to its literal protest as a means of resisting feeding during a hunger strike and its immediate signification as an indicator of the silence and silenced position of the asylum seekers in detention'. Julie Wolfram Cox and Stella Minahan, 'Unravelling Woomera: Lip Sewing, Morphology and Dystopia', Journal of Organisational Change Management 17, no. 3 (2004): 292-301, 296.
105. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188.
106. Ibid., emphasis added.
107. Quoted in BBC Online, 'Australia Unmoved by Migrants'. Strike', 20 January 2002.
108. Quotation cited in Craig McGill, Human Traffic: Sex, Slaves and Immigration (London: Vision, 2003), 55.
109. Joseph Pugliese, 'Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality', borderlands e-journal 1, no. 1 (2002) [http:// www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au].
110. Pugliese, 'Penal Asylum,' paragraph 7.