BORDERS,

BIOPOLITICS AND
THE STATE OF
EXCEPTION
1. PROLOGUE: MAJORITIES AND MINORITIES
2. SOVEREIGN POWER, THE STATE OF EXCEPTION AND THE BIO-POLITICAL
3. SOVEREIGN POWER AT THE BORDER
PLAYLIST

 Radiohead – The National Anthem

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bGPPBoh9E8
 Pearl Jam – Not for You
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGdnfUt8lQo
 MIA - Borders
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Nw7HbaeWY
 The National – Mistaken for Strangers
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbheJizcpNk
WRAP UP ON STATELESSNESS
Stateless in Canada
The case of Deepan
Budlakoti
 Born in Ottawa’s Grace Hospital
 The son of Indian diplomats who later became
Canadian citizens - may not have been when Deepan
was born
 Raised in Canada as a Canadian, never been to India
 Issued passports and birth certificates
 Convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison in 2010 for
weapons and cocaine trafficking
 Ordered deported to India in 2011 for “serious
criminality”
 Rejected by India, continues to live under terms of
federal deportation order, which forces him to live with
his parents
 Denies him of health care, social services and
employment opportunities
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ayW6GwSwUs
Law vs. politics
McBride and Kingston
 “The 1954 Convention [on statelessness]
sets the standard for the treatment of
stateless individuals, ensuring that basic
rights and needs are met—including
access to employment and education—
and protects individual stability and
quality of life. If Egypt became a
signatory, the government would be
required to issue travel documents for
stateless individuals (Article 28), would be
prohibited from expelling stateless
individuals without due process (Article
31), and would be obliged to revise its
naturalization laws to better integrate
stateless persons and provide them with
legal status (Article 32).
Michael Weinman
• “there will be no legal solution to the
problem of statelessness”
 “In short, the sans-papiers and other
agents who bring about the shift from the
legal to the political determination of
personhood. In this shift from the legal to
the political, and the related shifts from
institutions to actions, from states to
individuals acting collectively, and from
metaphysical essence to appearance in
public…Here, precisely, we see the
power of a shift away from a framework
based on the granting of rights to human
beings-as-nationals (i.e., those
recognized as legal persons) and toward
a framework based on the taking of rights
as political persons
Masks of Personhood
Sovereign Power, the State of
Exception and the Bio-Political
This is Not for You

 What agency grants the

right to have rights?

 Are the sovereign’s

decisions vis-à-vis who is a
member open to
contestation?
 What agency grants the
right to have rights?
 Are the sovereign’s
decisions vis-à-vis who is a
member open to
contestation?
 The sovereign (i.e. the state
in its executive functions)
 How does the sovereign
grant the right to have rights?
 By identifying their status as
members of the national
community in good standing
 No, they are implicitly
arbitrary
 The sovereign’s decisions vis-
à-vis membership it is political
community operate within a
more or less permanent state
of exception
 The State of Exception

 Carl Schmitt/Giorgio Agamben:

 Sovereignty defined by ability to
define exception to legal norms
› What is the exception?
 an emergency situation not foreseen
by the constitution, and the extra-
constitutional powers necessary to
resolve it
 Legal/order: action outside of the
law to preserve the legal order
 Implicitly: State of exception is the
normal background presupposition
of every sovereign order
Bio-Power and the Bio-Political:
Foucault
 The emergence of bio-power
 marks the shift from medieval, monarchical absolutism
 In which the sovereign ruled over death
 Bio-power instead reveals itself by means of administrative
governance of life itself, in a productive manner

 Modern bio-politics is defined by

 the management and regulation of the everyday lives of
individuals and populations
 the categorization and surveillance of different segments
of population according to the their functional value
 the rise of administrative powers that act independently
of judicial-legal regimes,
 an increasing pressure placed on individuals to conform
to administrative imperatives and categories
Bio-Power and Bio-Politics:
Agamben
 In antiquity, homo sacer was excluded from
political realm
 Modern politics has taken the regulation of homo
sacer as the foundation of politics itself
 Cf. Arendt vis-à-vis relationship of rights of man and
the citizen
 Bio-political state of exception: The direct power
of administrators over the lives of citizens and non-
citizens alike
 Homo sacer: excluded from political community,
but yet included in it under the aegis of sovereign
bio-power: a human who is not a human
 Telos of bio-power: the concentration camp
The Camp as a Permanent State of
Exception
 Detention camps outside the
law
 A-legal (legally instituted as
outside the law)
 Rights of the prisoner vs. non-
rights of the detainee
 Detainee = denationalized
other = Muselmann
 Between life and death
 Auschwitz as model?
Sovereign Power at the Border
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=ILKEYBKVL0M
 Where is the sovereign capacity to
decide to include and exclude on
most direct display?
 The border, which represents the
distinction between inside and
outside, or the threshold of the law,
 over which the sovereign rules from a
position that is of the law, even
though it is outside of it

 Is there a universal right of either

entry or exit which transcends the
sovereign’s decisions? Is there a
natural right to mobility?
 Vis-à-vis positive legal right: neither
exit nor entry can be assured of any
traveller
 Who decides at the border?
 Legal system? Judges, etc.? No
 Individual agents, as backed up by
an administrative system
 What is the nature of the decision?
 Discretionary:
 “the moment of interpretation of a
personal narrative [of the traveller]
by an agent of the state.”
Mistaken For Strangers: Citizens at
the Border
 Salter: the capacity of
border sovereignty to deny
admittance to the foreigner
is “secondary, a derivative
of the primary ability/force
to admit [to] or expel
citizens from the polis.”
 Ultimately, even citizenship
is not a guarantee, since it
can be withdrawn
unilaterally by the sovereign
 As a result, even as citizens,
at the border we are made
“strangers to ourselves”
Follow-Up Questions for Salter

 Isn’t the discretionary power of border sovereignty

much more directly felt by the foreigner, the traveller,
the migrant, etc.?
 Vis Agamben: Can anyone become homo sacer?
 Is the border fixed or mobile?
 Vis-à-vis interdiction on the seas, extra-territoriality provision
in airports, etc.
 Vis-à-vis the everyday legal status of migrants, temporary
foreign workers, foreign students, permanent residents, etc.
 Is the state of exception governing border crossings
not a legitimate function of the state’s obligations to
its citizens to prevent entry to certain individuals or
groups?
FOCUS ON AUSTRALIA’S
IMMIGRANT DETENTION SYSTEM
 Australia’s Immigration Detention
Camps - Facts
 1992: Mandatory Detention for Asylum Seekers introduced
 1994: detention for up to 7 years legalized

 2001: Pacific Solution

 Offshore Processing Centres in Naura and Papua New Guinea

 2004: High Court approves Pacific Solution (incl.

“intolerable conditions”)
 2005: Reforms introduced requiring visa in 90 days
 Gov’t excises OPC’s from Australian Migration Zone

 2010: Asylum seekers intercepted and re-routed to

Malaysian detention facility; other refugee “swaps” follow
 At present: there has followed a period of instability in
Australia’s asylum policy
 1792 still in detention
 The Politics of Nauru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=625p2d2gcDo

The Children of Nauru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNhRPVs4U6I

Race, Fear of the Stranger and
Immigration Policy
 New Britannia
 Expropriation of aboriginal peoples
 White Australia Policy
 Restriction of immigration of “coloured races”
 Multiculturalism
 “Populate or perish”: Bio-politics as pro-immigration
 White Backlash
 From One Nation to Labour Party
 Demographic Danger and the State of Exception in Discourse
MINORITIES AND MAJORITIES
On the Genealogy of Minorities
Why Are Minorities Minorities?
 Contingent reasons: migration, inter-mixing, trade, etc.
 Conceptual reason: because the majority constitutes
them as minorities
 In the process of becoming a majority
 The state has as its telos, hegemonic national project
(nation-building)
 And what of those who share territory with the national
majority, but not (or not fully) its national ethnos?
 These become the minority

 The national project is what intends that those who do

not share in it (fully) to be or become minorities
 To be protected and included (to bolster liberal, secular,
pluralist practices)
 To be attacked and excluded (to bolster majority identity What is a majority?
and unity) Is the majority simply the group
with the largest # of people?
 The Fear of Small Numbers
 Why do majorities frequently fear minorities?  Under what conditions is a
 Presence (no matter how small) creates an
majority likely to become
“anxiety of incompleteness” “predatory”?
 Inability to experience majority dominance  Uncertainty and anxiety
 Liberalism’s ambivalence vis-à-vis permanent vs.  Terrorism
procedural minorities
 War
 The narcissism of small differences
 Globalization
 Are all majorities potentially “predatory
majorities”?