Reclaiming 'bare life'?: Against Agamben on refugees

International Relations

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 567-582

  Owens, Patricia ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

'bare life'; Camps; Giorgio Agamben; Hannah Arendt; Refugees

Indexed keywords

EID: 73549095215     PISSN: 00471178     EISSN: 17412862     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0047117809350545     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. An important volume that seeks to redress this oversight is Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher (eds), Refugees in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. Martin Jay, 'Name-Dropping or Dropping Names? Modes of Legitimation in the Humanities', in Force Field: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 168.
3. Jenny Edkins, 'Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 25(1), 2000, pp. 3-25.
4. Bülent Diken, 'From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the End of the City', Citizenship Studies, 8(1) 2004, pp. 83-106.
5. Fiona Jenkins, 'Bare Life: Asylum-Seekers, Australian Politics and Agamben's Critique of Violence', Australian Journal of Human Rights, 10(1), 2004, available at: www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJHR/2004/18.html (accessed 4 February 2009).
6. Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 34(1), 2005, pp. 1-24.
7. Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (London: Routledge, 2005).
8. Raffaela Puggioni, 'Resisting Sovereign Power: Camps in- Between Exception and Dissent', in Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik (eds), The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 68-83.
9. Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2006).
10. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 16.
11. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 108.
12. Agamben, Means without End, p. 16.
13. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
14. Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004).
15. For a discussion of Arendt's efforts in this domain see Patricia Owens, 'Walking Corpses: Arendt on the Limits and Possibilities of Cosmopolitan Politics', in Cerwyn Moore and Chris Farrands (eds), International Relations Theory and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues (London: Routledge, 2009).
16. Nick Vaughan-Williams, 'Giorgio Agamben', in Jenny Edkins and Vaughan-Williams (eds), Critical Theorists and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 72-82.
17. See, for example, Cynthia Hardy, 'Refugee Determination: Power and Resistance in Systems of Foucauldian Power', Administration and Society, 35(4), 2003, pp. 462-88.
18. Benjamin Muller, 'Globalization, Security, Paradox: Towards a Refugee Biopolitics', Refuge, 22(1), 2004, pp. 49-57.
19. But see Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, 'Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30(1), 2001, pp. 41-65.
20. Stefan Elbe, 'AIDS, Security, Biopolitics', International Relations, 19(4), 2005, pp. 403-19.
21. Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
22. Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 8.
24. For discussions of Arendt and various themes in world politics, see Anthony F. Lang Jr. and John Williams (eds), Hannah Arendt and International Relations: Readings across the Lines (London: Palgrave Press, 2005).
25. Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
26. See Suvendrini Perera, 'What is a Camp...?', Borderlands e-journal, 1(1), 2002, available at: www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html (accessed 23 June 2009).
27. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 144.
28. Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
29. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 28.
30. The term 'critical Refugee Studies' refers to theoretically informed work that draw on combinations of feminist, postcolonial, Frankfurt School, post-structuralist and Marxist traditions of thought. See, for example, Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 139-40.
32. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 143.
33. Robyn Lui, 'The International Government of Refugees', in Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.116-35.
34. Giorgia Doná, 'The Microphysics of Participation in Refugee Research', Journal of Refugee Studies, 20(2), 2007, pp. 210-29.
35. Randy Lippert, 'Rationalities and Refugee Resettlement', Economy and Society, 27(4), 1998, pp. 380-406.
36. Randy Lippert, 'Governing Refugees: The Relevance of Governmentality to Under- standing the International Refugee Regime', Alternatives, 24(3), 1999, pp. 295-328.
37. L. H. Malkki, 'Refugees and Exile: From "Refugee Studies" to the National Order of Things', Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 1995, p. 498.
38. Didier Bigo, 'Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27(1), 2002, pp. 63-92.
39. Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
40. Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
41. Vanessa Pupavec, 'Refugee Advocacy, Traumatic Representations and Political Disenchantment', Government and Opposition, 43(2), 2008, pp. 270-92.
42. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 35.
43. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. and intro. George Schwab, new foreword Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), p. 5.
44. Jef Huysmans, 'International Politics of Exception: Competing Visions of International Political Order Between Law and Politics', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31(2), 2006, pp. 135-65.
45. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 127.
46. Agamben, Means without End, p. 20.
47. Agamben, Means without End, p. 21.
48. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 83.
49. For a discussion of the accuracy of Agamben's account of Roman legal history, see Peter Fitzpatrick 'Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of the Law', in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 49-73.
50. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
51. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 20. These authors make the same argument about an Iranian man, Abbas Amini, who was seeking asylum in the UK and who sewed his eyes, ears and mouth shut in May 2003.
52. Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, 'Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance', in Edkins, Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1-21. Referring to the Woomera case, Benjamin Muller suggests lip-sewing has now become 'a stable part of the refugees' arsenal of "bio-agency"'.
53. See Muller, '(Dis)Qualified Bodies: Securitization, Citizenship and "Identity Management"', Citizenship Studies, 8(3), 2004, p. 292.
54. Jürgen Habermas, The Post-National Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
55. Agamben, Means without End, p. 22.
56. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 21.
57. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 20.
58. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 15.
59. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 24.
60. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 188.
61. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 121.
62. For a discussion of the actual history of forced migration in this period, see Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
63. Agamben, Means without End, p. 22.
64. Agamben, Means without End, p. 40.
65. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 120.
66. Agamben, Means without End, p. 36.
67. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 58. In The Human Condition, Arendt mounted a sustained attack on the modern merging of the distinction between zoe- and bios. She talked about this in terms of the 'rise of the social', a realm of governmental administration which is neither 'public' nor 'private' but a mixture of both.
68. There is now a small but growing literature that links Arendt's thought to what is now most often discussed in the terminology of 'biopolitics', probably an oxymoron as far as she would be concerned. See Miguel Vatter, 'Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt', Revista de Ciencia Política, 26(2), 2006 pp. 137-59.
69. André Duarte, 'Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics, and the Problem of Violence: From Animal Laborans To Homo Sacer', in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), pp. 191-204.
70. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966; new edn with added prefaces), p. 440.
71. Arendt in Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 69.
72. On the relevance of the distinction between 'everything is permitted' and 'everything is possible' for how we might understand the US-run camps at Guantanamo Bay, see the disagreement between Helen Kinsella, 'Arendt and Analogies', International Politics, 45(4), 2008, pp. 497-505.
73. Patricia Owens, 'Humanity, Sovereignty and the Camps', International Politics, 45(4), 2008, pp. 522-30. The disagreement concerns Agamben's claim that the Nazi camps are the appropriate analogy for Guantanamo Bay.
74. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
75. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 403.
76. Arendt, Origins, pp. ix, 295.
77. There is a large literature on Arendt and statelessness/refugees. For a small sample see Richard Bernstein, 'Hannah Arendt on the Stateless', Parallax, 11(1), 2005, pp. 46-60.
78. Wolfgang Heuer, 'Europe and its Refugees: Arendt on the Politicization of Minorities', Social Research, 74(4), 2007, pp. 1159-72.
79. Patrick Hayden, 'From Exclusion to Containment: Arendt, Sovereign Power, and Statelessness', Societies Without Borders, 3(2), 2008, pp. 272-93.
80. Bernstein, 'Hannah Arendt', p. 54.
81. The literature on Arendt and human rights is extensive. For some important studies in addition to Agamben's, see Jeffrey C. Isaac, 'A New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights', American Political Science Review, 90(1), 1996, pp. 61-73.
82. Jacques Rancière, 'Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?', South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3), 2004, pp. 297-310.
83. Benhabib, The Rights of Others
84. Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
85. Étienne Balibar, '(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt's Practical Philosophy', Social Research, 74(3), 2007, pp. 727-38.
86. Arendt, Origins, pp. 297-8.
87. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 7.
88. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 8.
89. Arendt, Origins, p. 301. Emphasis added.
90. Arendt, Origins, p. 302.
91. Arendt, Origins, pp. 296-7.
92. For a critique of the comparison see Patricia Tuitt, 'Refugees, Nations, Laws and the Territorialization of Violence', in Peter Fitzpatrick and Patricia Tuitt (eds), Critical Beings: Law, Nation, and the Global Subject (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 37-57.
93. Balibar, '(De)Constructing the Human', p. 733.
94. Arendt, Origins, p. 300.
95. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 22.
96. Joseph Pugliese, 'Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality', Borderlands e-journal, 1(1), 2002, available at: www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no1_2002/pugliese.html (accessed 4 February 2009).
97. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. and intro. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 57, 59.
98. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 10.
99. Michael Leach, '"Disturbing Practices": Dehumanizing Asylum Seekers in the Refugee "Crisis" in Australia, 2001-2002', Refuge, 21(3), 2003, pp. 25-33.
100. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. and intro. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), p. 175.
101. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 4.
102. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 9.
103. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire', p. 22. Abbas Amini, an Iranian in Britain, is similarly quoted as saying, 'I sewed my eyes so others could see, I sewed my ears so others could hear, I sewed my mouth to give others a voice', and later, 'Yes, it was political.'
104. Edkins and Pin-Fat, 'Introduction', p. 15.
105. Arendt, Origins, pp. 296-7.
106. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 9.
107. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 176.
108. Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 145.
109. Agamben, Means without End, p. 20.
110. Agamben, Means without End, p. 19.