Reclaiming ‘Bare Life’?: Against Agamben on Refugees

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben claims that refugees can be seen as the ultimate ‘biopolitical’ subjects: those who can be regulated and governed at the level of population in a permanent ‘state of exception’. Refugees are reduced to ‘bare life’: humans as animals in nature without political freedom. Contra Agamben, it will be argued here that if refugee populations are not to face some inexorable trend toward a rule of ‘exception’, then it will not be through reclaiming ‘bare life’. It will be wholly dependent on the ability to forge a public realm grounded on the appropriate distinction between nature and political artifice, between human life and the political world. This argument is made through contrasting Agamben’s writing on refugees with Hannah Arendt’s. What is at stake in the difference is illustrated through the example of refugee lip-sewing.

Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement

“…Georgio Agamben's (: 175) theorizations on the camp and ‘bare life’ have been useful in thinking through the ways humanitarian agencies ‘manage’ displaced populations (Elden, ; Hanafi and Long, ). Agamben argues that ‘bare life’ ( zoe ) is one stripped of political life ( bios ), rendering ‘humans as animals’ (Owens, : 568). This legal abandonment is an active relational process, in that one is included through exclusion (Agamben, ; Pratt, ).…”

Sustainable development or sacrifice zone? Politics below the surface in post-neoliberal Ecuador

“…Some critiques of the usage of ''bare life'' in the social sciences suggest that this framing strips subjects of their politics (Fassin, 2010;Owens, 2009). I argue that the distinction between fit and unfit life, as in the making of all borders, always constitutes a political struggle, and that analysis of this struggle enables examination of changing instrumentalities of power as well as the political economy of life itself.…”

Demand and Deliver: Refugee Support Organisations in Austria

“…As Vickers has noted in the UK context, "the depoliticized provision of basic services to help refugees survive…stabilize[s] the asylum system by softening the impact of hardships caused by a lack of state support, thus provoking less resistance" (2016, p. 449). Providing opportunities for leisure time activities, safe spaces for sexual expression, and education beyond compulsory schooling, consciously and explicitly challenged the way migration regimes channel asylum seekers and refugees into 'bare life' (Owens, 2009). This is well illustrated with an example from the website of Flucht nach Vorn, which states that: "We are of the opinion that every human being, in addition to basic human rights, has the right to selfdevelopment and creativity" (Flucht nach Vorn, 2014).…”