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Slavoj Žižek
Ingo Günther
Matthew Hylan
K.Zakravsky

REFUGEE SUBJECTIVITY, ‘BARE LIFE’ AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISION OF LABOUR

Matthew Hylan


The practical contours of the universalisation of ‘refugee’ status are not hard to imagine. Techniques of control introduced in the name of immigration enforcement are soon used on the unemployed and so-called ‘underclass’, then on the working proletariat, then throughout society as a whole. Racist media hysteria about ‘welfare cheats’ coming into the country was used by successive British governments to attack all benefits; now manufactured panic about ‘aggressive begging by asylum seekers’ is used as an excuse for aggressive policing tactics such as Stop & Search and ‘zero tolerance’. It can only be a matter of time before the voucher system for refugees is extended to dole and sickness benefit claimants: anyone who doubts this should take note that Sodexho Pass, the company running the system, issues ‘unemployed people who perform odd jobs’ with ‘payment vouchers’ in Belgium, and sees its core business as ‘managing welfare benefits offered by government agencies and local communities’.
The political and existential position of ‘the refugee’, and progressively of entire populations as the link between ‘State’ and ‘Nation’ dissolves, is that of what Agamben calls ‘bare life’ (vita nuda). Ancient Greek distinguished bios, ‘political’ life, from zoé, the same animal or ‘bare’ life to which Nazi law required that the individual be reduced by cancelling her national citizenship before she could be sent to die in the camps (9). ‘Bare life’ refers to body’s mere ‘vegetative’ being, separated from the particular qualities, the social and historical attributes that constitute individual subjectivity (10). Citizenship of the ‘Nation’ is the medium through which such subjectivity attains the State’s recognition. ‘Nation-State means a State that makes nativity or birth (nascita) the foundation of its own sovereignty... The fiction that is implicit here is that birth (nascita) comes into being immediately as nation, so that there may not be any difference between the two moments’ (11). Consequently a State no longer dependent on the myth of National territory need no more address the subjective ‘rights’ of its inhabitants than modern Nation-States did those of refugees.

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