Nasir: The [Finnish] government is just ignoring everything. And I received this rejection [the B]. They said that the district I came from, it is safe and you can return. And, I wondered. I said, where the hell I talked about the place being safe or unsafe? I never talked about it being unsafe. I don't care, if it's safe or unsafe. It is not safe for me. I have problems there. I never mentioned this, this, this issue. I have talked to you about my problems! And you are telling me it is safe! Who the hell cares!? I will talk to you for hours, for days, if you understand reason and if you understand logic. They [the asylum officers] don't even think for a second that they could be wrong. They have this prejudice that we are lying and they're always right.… We could also be telling the truth. It is not that always we are wrong, and that always they are right.
(Interview with Nasir, March 2007)Footnote 1Nasir's is not simply a personal story of a failed asylum seeker, but it also connects the body to sovereign power in legal, technological, and political terms. The story resonates within the sphere of the international because the political institution of asylum evokes a relationship between a sovereign state and a system of states. Moreover, Nasir's is a story of the international, its politics and relations and the ways they and the body intertwine. The experience of asylum, in fact, bears with it a sense of a history that cannot be totally owned up by or reduced to an individual subject.Footnote 2
The context of the story dates back to the year 2004, when the Finnish Aliens Act introduced a temporary residence permit (the B, section 51) for asylum seekers who could not be returned to their home countries, although no grounds for asylum or residence permit were discovered during the asylum process. Possible reasons prohibiting return were lack of technical connections and travelling documents, health problems, or that a state was not willing to take its citizen back. The B was issued for one year at a time, and it could be used for two years after which the person was entitled to a continuous residence permit, if deportation still was impossible. In 2008 the Aliens Act was reformed, and by the year 2010 the B permit given on the basis of the section 51 had become a rarity. Before that a total of 672 persons, mostly from Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, had received and lived with this status. Receiving the B meant limitations on the right to work during the first year, limited access to education, the impossibility of family reunification, and having no right to legal domicile to which many social security rights are connected. The well-meaning idea behind the permit was, on the one hand, to make sure that all people residing in Finland had a legally defined place in the society and, on the other, to avoid their total exclusion from the social support networks and systems. The section, however, left too much room for interpretation, so the permit was used much more widely than first anticipated.
Informed by Nasir's outrage at the Finnish asylum policy and the way his views were not listened to, this article will explore the limits and possibilities of political life within the international. More practically, it will scrutinise how the spatiotemporal logic of inside/outside upon which the international has been founded is constantly enacted, lived, contested, and exceeded in the politics of asylum. Because the mobility of people causes a flux in policies, any responses to the arrival of asylum seekers are reactive rather than proactive. These policies can never anticipate the scope and direction of bodily movement within the international, which can be conceived in terms of a particularly enacted political project aiming to produce a particular political order among states. This project simultaneously carries very concrete material and corporeal consequences for people's lives. However, this article thinks of the international also as a process that – unlike a project – has no specific end-goal or scope, which means that the international can be conceptualised otherwise, and it is always prone to change. A focus on failed asylum seekers, their bodies, and the political illustrates the international in terms of an uneven and pitted process, which is transformed and shaped with various means, even by people often considered its shadow bodies or those who have no part in its politics and relations.
Literature about migrant struggles, agencies, solidarities, and mobility as forms of resistance to restrictive politics has gained prominence in recent years.Footnote 3 The present article contributes to discussions on political agency, but yet differs from theorisations of resistance, self-harm, or collective protest as the primary expressions of asylum seekers' agency. It suggests that these represent only some, although perhaps in the public discourse the most visible, of the multiple manifestations of agency among asylum seekers. This article puts forward an argument that the agency of failed asylum seekers is more than conformation or open, intentional resistance to sovereign power: it is enacted in daily lives in relation to various others. There is, then, no singular strategy or common identity on which agency is built and from which it arises. Instead, there are complex relations between the agency of the failed asylum seeker and the sociopolitical structures that shape and are shaped by that agency. Through such a focus the article seeks to avoid reducing the body beyond accommodation and return into an abjective subjectivity or a sovereign-less subject with no political significance.
The examination of the international, and the possibilities of political life within it, is here performed through Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology of the body. Such a focus involves thinking of the political in terms of an ontological relation between singularities, whose being always already signals togetherness. Through this particular ontology, political agency is framed in the form of ‘agentive body politic’; a politics that emanates from the acting, sensing, and experiencing body. Sometimes it resonates with sovereign power, but at others exceeds it and puts forward an understanding of the political that every body is. Within such an imaginary, political agency is related to ways of expressing every body's singular plural condition. This means examining agencies that are made visible through the relations and movement that the body enacts and in which it engages. It becomes, then, imperative to consider how the international takes shape and is reflected on (marginalised) bodies, and also the ways in which these bodies respond to, make sense of, and transform it. Therefore, the article explores how the agentive strategies and practices that failed asylum seekers adopt affect understandings of the possibilities of political life within the international.
A Nancian take on political life within the international
As a form of migration control, asylum represents one of the body political operations of sovereign power. At the human level this process leads to the emergence of a plethora of statuses and temporary protections, which effectively ‘restrict access to refugee status’Footnote 4 yet concealing the political agenda and ontology that give rise to it. Living with the categorical identity of a failed asylum seeker is always and at all times extremely political, dynamic, and ambiguous. Such an identity can function as a potential source of agency that exceeds the limits of sovereign politics and, therefore, the idea of states as solid bases for political being, belonging, and community is always to remain incomplete and undermined.
The failed asylum seekers' presence is a call to think of the question of the agentive body and its relation to the spatiotemporal organisation of the international from a fresh perspective. It means questioning the territorial division of the world into nation-states, which to a large extent still define where the limits of political life are drawn. However, sovereignty is not merely a spatial construct. It results also from a specific historical (temporal) development and thus it goes beyond being solely about the territorial state. As the examination of the mechanisms of surveillance and govermentality that accompany the daily existence of the failed asylum seeker will illustrate, sovereignty represents a form of authority, which develops in and through time. It relates to community formation as it gives communities a sense of continuity and enables the development of narratives of belonging and home.
Even though Nancy cannot be properly characterised as a political philosopher, the question of the political is central for his thought. Indeed, he makes a fine but significant distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. In Nancy's philosophy ‘politics’ refers to empirical action, praxis, which takes place within the sphere of normalised order. Thus, ‘politics’ denotes the oscillation of power and interests in processes of governance. To the contrary, ‘the political’ cannot be reduced to governmental rationality or the composition and dynamics of power, for it indicates philosophy, a system of meaning/intelligibility within which ‘politics’ manifests itself.Footnote 5 In a manner of speaking, ‘politics’ denotes various ways of actualising ‘the political’ and putting it into practice. In this article, ‘politics’ represents a struggle over something that can be known, named, and recognised.
‘The political’, again, takes form through humane restlessness brought about by a process of becoming, which remains open and subject to change and which the experiencing bodies consider lacking.Footnote 6 The political cannot be reduced to a project, for it is something that occurs when bodies come together and relate to one another; it emerges from relations rather than precedes them.Footnote 7 Furthermore, when we take note of the fact that for Nancy ‘the political’ is our ontological state and situation – a question of the nature of our existence – we can see that ‘politics’ takes shape as a project, a particular but by no means the only possible way of organising that existence.Footnote 8 Not only does this elaboration suggest that the body has a central role in politics, but further yet, it implies that the body is inseparable from the political.
Actually Nancy's philosophy takes up the body in its materiality and as such it goes beyond embodiment. With a focus on the marks and effects that power leaves on the body or on the ways that processes of inscription affect the body's capacity to take up political acts and constitute oneself as a political agent, embodiment works at an epistemological level. A focus on carnation and fathoming the body as ontological privilege the process of exscription and moments of exposure, which mark the body's capacity to articulate a relational politics. For Nancy the body as a place of existence is characterised by openness. It is a place, which makes room for creating an event. Perhaps we can understand what is at stake with such a notion of the body, when we pay attention to the Nancian conception of existence, which places heavy emphasis on happening. According to Nancy even our being occurs between us or, in other words, we are not, but we come-into-presence.
Bodies resist exhaustive telling and knowing. Therefore, the body never makes sense, but is a sense in action: always on the edge, ‘at the extreme limit’, ‘about to leave, on the verge of a movement, a fall, a gap, a dislocation’.Footnote 9 The body signifies that what is outside, next to, against, nearby, with a(n) (other) body; it is an opening and an exposure. What follows from the condition and nature of the body is that our being is always constituted by its withness. But even this relation between ‘us’ cannot be named beforehand as it has no specific shape, rather it is ‘a movement of withdrawal from any substance’.Footnote 10 The Nancian ontological body, hence, undermines the notion of a sovereign subject and rethinks the meaning of coexistence, that is how it would be possible to think of relations between bodies and between the body and community in a way that would not lead to totalitarian rule.
The openness of ‘the political’ and the openings that it bears for IR demand rethinking the structuring principles of community, or thinking of community in terms of ‘the destination of its sharing’.Footnote 11 This represents a fresh take on the question of political community, since within the discipline the state or the society of states has for long served to stabilise and justify a more or less common form of (international) social and political life.Footnote 12 A notion of the community of singular-beings positions identity in difference and articulates the radical (im)possibility of identity as an essential and substantive category of being.Footnote 13 Such an approach disposes the nation-state, the system of states and the sovereign subject, and requires engagement with the political potential that the inherent withness of being exposes.Footnote 14
With a Nancian take on the political, we can also redefine the notion of the international and, furthermore, conceive its spatiotemporal logic in terms of spacing. For Nancy, spacing is a fundamental ontological concept, which denotes the intertwining of time and space. It signifies the taking place of being, which opens up spaces in which presence is born. Therefore, spacing is inherent in the existence of a human body.Footnote 15 Conceiving failed asylum in terms of a corporeal and relational struggle enables engagement with the possibilities of political life in a way that transcends the logic of both particularism and universalism in the spheres of the international. Instead of focusing on either one of the trends singularly, considering political life through failed asylum seekers' agentive potential requires that attention be paid to the relation between diversity and commonality.Footnote 16 The international represents a political construct – both in terms of an ever-unfolding relational process and a political project – embracing both community and the world. It is a historical event, or to be more precise, political history taking place and being created through the ‘togetherness of otherness’.Footnote 17 Between the international and the local, the self and the social, the personal and the political, there is a constant dialectics, which becomes reflected through the practices and relations that people enact and foster locally on what is going on in the world.Footnote 18
The failed asylum seeker and the governmental politics of identification
Regarding refugees or asylum seekers as particular kinds of persons, with common characteristics, even when well-meaning, strips the person from authority to give evidence and narrate their condition in politically relevant forums.Footnote 19 As Liisa Malkki argues, bureaucratic systems easily reduce refugees to ‘pure’ victims assuming, or even requiring, political passivity from them.Footnote 20 Further still, we need to acknowledge our own complicity in the corporeal struggle of (failed) asylum and in turning asylum seekers into passive objects of our ‘hospitality’. If we assume that ‘giving a voice’ to failed asylum seekers is the task of various refugee and asylum seeker support groups, we in fact distance ourselves and anyone listening from the immediacy of the asylum seeker's experience. Such a well-meaning debate easily terms the failed asylum seeker as a tragic subject whom might do nothing but fulfil the role inscribed to her/him through hegemonic narratives of what asylum seekers are supposed to do and the way they are supposed to behave.
Within the described imaginary, the role that asylum seekers might play in contesting restrictive policies is either left unnoted or then considered in terms, which fall into the discourse on governmentality, even if from a critical perspective.Footnote 21 This article hopes to push further and problematise also the emphasis of reading the failed asylum seekers' agency solely in terms of intentional resistance. In so doing, through Nancy's philosophy, it seeks to think the meaning and content of the political body within international relations. The political cannot be reduced to resistance. It accounts for the ways in which the body exceeds the questions of sovereignty and subjectivity. As Phillip Darby has accurately pointed out, focusing either on dominance or resistance misses the ambiguity and mobility of social and political relations.Footnote 22 Therefore the contention that, through resisting and conforming to sovereign power, asylum seekers actually demand their political recognition and inclusion is somewhat problematic. Instead of debating how to redeem the asylum seeker with regard to the receiving society, it would be necessary to engage with the thought that foreignness and otherness readily reside within us, in the ‘I’.Footnote 23
Being placed beyond accommodation and return does not annihilate the body's political condition, or its political potential, although it regulates and shapes some of its manifestations, while enabling others.Footnote 24 Being labelled a failed asylum seeker does not provide a substantial identity, from which political agency results.Footnote 25 Instead, the failed asylum seekers through their movements and acts of relating open a space for thinking political agency beyond territorially and ontologically fixed identities. This means seeking to think beyond the inside/outside divide that has characterised politics of the international. A focus on citizenship – migrants asserting themselves through collective action as political subjects by protests and claim-making against experienced injustices – remains captive to the politics of sovereignty (to an idea of in-common-being), at least when looked through a Nancian prism. Looking at the practices and processes of political subjectivation is as problematic, as Nancy's thought is based on the political being always in the body ontologically.
Soran says that he thinks too much, but that he doesn't know how to explain his thoughts to me. He tells that if I stayed at the centre for a night I would understand, if I went to take a shower there, I would understand, but not even the staff understands, or they do not think about it. When he gets to the point of taking a shower in the centre, I slip: ‘I don't want to do that.’ He looks at me and says, ‘I know you don't, but then you would understand. How would you feel if you went to Kurdistan, and nobody would help you, talk to you or like you? What would you think?’ I tell him I would be sad, angry, bewildered and would want to leave. ‘Yes, and you could leave. What about me? Why do they take my fingerprints? If I leave will they delete them? Where can I go?’
(Field notes, 11 September 2006)Soran considered his status unfair and unjust. In seeking asylum, he had, in principle, done nothing but lodged a claim in order to be recognised as a refugee, but the Finnish officials ‘failed’ him. As a result, he encountered a liminal status that contradicted his sense of justice. Thus he demanded another kind of response from me. He, when describing being beyond both return and accommodation, needed me to reflect on the relation that had been imposed between us through a political asylum process. Soran did not invite me to elaborate on my private feelings that displacement and ‘refugee experience’ might arise. Rather he pointed out the moral hurt as well as personal and yet political action that such an experience gives rise to, if emotional distress was admitted as politically relevant.Footnote 26 His protest made me realise that we were not politically separate subjects, but that in a way I was a complicit in him being made a failed asylum seeker. We came to be only together, in relation to one another. My encounter with Soran affected me profoundly. What shook me was the experience of being exposed to the limits of my being and having to face in the flesh those others who are brought into being with the Finnish political project.
Tellingly, Soran pointed out my reluctance to change places with him. I am, together with many others, privileged enough to trust in the freedoms and securities that the Finnish state promises. Yet, the same state denied Soran this privilege. Ultimately, however, my status as a Finnish citizen was just as precarious as Soran's condition, although for the moment our situations did not begin to compare. My meeting with Soran functions as a point of depature for an examination of how the state and the system of modern states have come to frame the possibilities and necessities of political life. Everybody is expected to belong to a state, to have a nationality. The state also structures our accounts of who we are, who we must be and who we must become as political beings capable of acting in the modern world.Footnote 27 To an extent it is, thus, true that the failed asylum seekers are deprived of identity, agency and voice:
Ayan: They say: ‘… we don't know if you are Somali. You tell only all these things.’ Really, and they ask me where I live, and I tell, and they say: ‘it's not true.’ Now they are rejecting me, and say that we don't know if you are really what you say you are.… And now that I have my passport [an alien's passport], they write that we don't know for this person, really. [Ayan goes through her things in her handbag and looks for her passport.] We can't identify. Here, it's here, you see.
Eeva: Ah, ‘it has proved impossible to verify the identity of the holder.’
Ayan: And they write it there, that we can't verify your nationality, if you are a national of Somalia. I say: ‘if I am not a Somali, what am I?’
(Interview with Ayan, October 2006)Bodies identified as ‘false’ in their asylum claim can neither be accommodated within the Finnish society as recognised refugees, nor can these bodies accommodate the image of themselves put forward by the authorities.Footnote 28 Failed asylum, as Ayan's account makes evident, is an example of a situation where people and themselves ‘limited by the singular voice of the role and begin to feel that the role is first “restricting” or oppressing, and, more radically, that it is alien to them’.Footnote 29 Giving an account of oneself is not as straightforward as we often make it sound: Ayan was denied the authority to voice herself. This does not, however, mean that failed asylum seekers do not have a voice or that they would lack the capacity to articulate their views and claim a position for themselves. Rather, in philosophical terms, the body of a failed asylum seeker does not exist, but comes into being through a politics of identification; the body is subjected to a specific system of meaning and caught in transubstantiation.Footnote 30 Therefore, claiming to know something about the lives that ‘failed asylum seekers’ lead is not a simple deal, but doing so evokes complex relationalities and webs of power.
When the asylum seeking body is addressed primarily through its political status or label, there is a politics of identification at work: the other is known on our terms and subjected to our knowledge practices. This politics does not invite or encourage critical self-reflection, which would engage more deeply with the conjunctures of the self and the other. According to Nancy, each and every one of us must at all times be able to answer for our existence. This is our ethical and existential responsibility to one another. However, it is exactly this that the spatiotemporal logic of sovereignty prohibits us from doing by seeking to frame our rights and liberties in terms of our political situatedness in the state. If we wish to come to terms with this existential responsibility, we must resort to a different ontological order, a different status of what is.Footnote 31 Thus, ontological descriptions of being-in-common are never contemplations of the status quo of the world, but lead to a much deeper exploration of the problems confronting our time. For me and within this context, this suggests a focus on the lived realities, agencies, and resistances that arise from and despite the assigned label.Footnote 32
The meanings and content of political life are always ultimately negotiated between people, beyond state practices. Too often IR theories and asylum policies do not take note of their human dimension and leave the person faceless and nameless – as a statistic, a mere drop in the wider ‘flow’ of her/his ‘kind’. And yet, in their lives and through their movements, people enact political potential that is not accounted for in the current political discourse or thought. Failed asylum seekers have multiple and multiform ways of contesting the practices and ideas as well as disrupting the functions of the spatiotemporal logic on which international relations have been built. Their bodies are both created by the politics of the international and creative of the international as a bodily process. Political life unfolds when bodies come together and ‘the political’ begins to take form and be sensed on the surface of the body.
Political agency revisited: agentive body politic
With regard to the international, the presence of the failed asylum seekers exposes fluid and ambiguous political relationalities in terms of both space and time.Footnote 33 These people exceed the perceived limits of political life and gesture towards shared, relational, and overlapping political spaces and authorities. Their agency is always already political, but never free from the sphere of politics. I call this specific understanding of political agency ‘agentive body politic’. The failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic challenges static notions of identity and belonging, and instead of occurring in a fixed, stable framework, it creates that very framework.
If it is assumed that people sharing the same status form a community within which they can form their subjectivity and from which they can acquire a political position, the failed asylum seekers are denied the possibility to construct themselves as political agents because in the current political imaginary their bodies are made intelligible only by making them appear common.Footnote 34 Another equally problematic approach is to sweep the effects of the label aside and replace them with claims about a cosmopolitan or global humanity; this equals not taking note of the effects of power that inevitably restrict the failed asylum seekers' agency. The ontology of bodies does not imply neglecting the sphere of power relations, in which we are always caught up. Thus, Nancy's thought does not evacuate or annihilate the element and relations of power. Rather, his ontology is a call to remedy oppressive power differentials by mobilising counter-energies, which however must never be allowed to become totalising and oppressive in turn.Footnote 35
I would suggest scrutinising the limit between the international and the (singular) body as an extremely active site, undoubtedly only one of the many possible ones, in which the exploration of possibilities of political life can begin. Such a move does not privilege the real and the apparent, but illustrates a potential and becoming politics that emanates from the moving, sensing, and experiencing body and therefore marks an understanding of the political that every body is. Let Soran help me make this claim concrete:
‘I am not happy. [E]verybody here treats us bad. Everybody hates us.’ Omar has come to sit with Soran and me just in time to hear his lament. ‘You cannot say that, Soran,’ Omar says. ‘Not everybody hates us. You cannot generalize like that. Not everybody here [in Finland] is bad, we just live here [in the reception centre], and that affects us.’ Soran nods, but does not seem convinced.
(Field notes, 11 September 2006)The vignette makes evident that Soran felt that he represented the ‘unwanted’ part of the society, which put him in a vulnerable position. His could be taken to represent an experience of a situation, in which the body has been reduced to nothing more than a set of stereotypes that the labelled body cannot mediate. Omar, however, intervened in our discussion and countered Soran's interpretation by spacing the problem and saying that hostility stems from the fact that they live in the reception centre. In other words, Omar sought to point out that their positioning in the Finnish society, not their being/presence as such, generates the feel of being hated. The failed asylum seekers are, then, by no means unaware of the fact that at the level of public debate they are made to look culpable for taking advantage of the system and aggravating already existing social problems.
With the emphasis it places on openness, the ontology of the body offers an experience-based venue to the questions of agency and political existence within the international. Thus, whether Soran's claim of everybody hating (failed) asylum seekers is true, or to what extent it is accurate, is not under scrutiny here. Through Nancy's philosophy opens an alternative avenue to the relation between body and knowledge and also to the possibilities of political life within international relations both as they are lived (ir) and theorised (IR). The body, according to Nancy, does not ‘belong to the domain in which “knowledge” and “non-knowledge” are at stake’.Footnote 36 Bodies belong to the domain of experience, which does not translate into truth sought in the asylum process. Therefore, even though the body being categorised might signal an administrative closure, for the person a struggle over and of the body has merely begun. For instance, although Soran obviously felt the values and attitudes placed on his body through the asylum process, he was not willing to consider himself in those terms. According to Paul Sullivan and John McCarthy this is agentive, because through inscription one is able to search for one's voice.Footnote 37 As with Soran and Omar, the person's ability to know their body beyond the label, to sense its positive presence, enables them to move outside the label.Footnote 38 The body constantly exposes itself with multiple means, at various fronts – with, in relation to and towards others. When its claim to agency is ignored, the body can still resort to its potential of casting itself outside the political label, move towards other bodies, and evoke the necessarily political connections and relations between bodies.
A focus on the meanings of the plurality of existence enables tweaking the question of political life – what and where we take it to be – in such a manner that sovereignty as its founding and affirmative principle loses its hold. In other words, and importantly for our understanding of the international, politics must not be surrendered to the self-interest of atomic agents – whether states, corporations, or individuals – or to a totalising globalism.Footnote 39 We are always free for the unexpected, or in other words we infinitely resist politics, if politics signals the appropriation of essences.Footnote 40 The relation between the bodily, the political, and the international is revealed to be a process, a set of various practices and struggles. The failed asylum seeker's body is, then, a point of intersection where all of these elements come together and unfold.
The multiple sites, practices, and forms of political agency
Writing about failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic as it takes form through their bodies, movements, and voices, in a political context and as politically potential, requires placing emphasis on multiple sites of political activism and forms of political activity that are not often associated with visible (sovereign) politics. Through the establishment of relations that exceed or interrupt sovereign power, the failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic challenges the spatiotemporal logic on which the international has been built. And yet that body politic does not totally escape or evade the effects of that logic.Footnote 41 The potentiality of the failed asylum seekers' political agency lies in understanding that being displaced fosters a particular take on the world, which makes asylum seekers highly attuned to and conscious of the frailty of those social and political structures upon which they stand.Footnote 42 It is worthwhile to examine more in detail the way failed asylum seekers put notions of the international in flux.
The possibility of identity, in Nancy's thought, is necessarily related to multiple others and the world, which signals that identities are shared between people. In raising the element of sharing Nancy plays with the double sense of the French word partage as both an act of sharing and dividing. In terms of the international this word play becomes meaningful, when we bear in mind that both elements of universality and particularity are present in the notion; the international represents both a political act of sharing and dividing. However, bodies that are divided into different nationalities, statuses, and positions are yet joined together in their singular plural condition. Thus they are all equally political and capable of politics, even though their ways of engagement and articulation may differ.Footnote 43 The words with which the asylum applicant is expected to characterise their experience might not correspond to the lived reality which they inhabit. Furthermore, some words may carry connotations and references that one is not willing to accept or that make the story seem contradictory. The asylum seeker might, in fact, anchor their identity in a radically different manner than what the political subject secured by the collective body of the state assumes. We easily turn the asylum seeker into a homo sacer, who neither has nor can adopt a political voice.
The failed asylum seeker's voice remains always somewhat open in that its scope and meaning cannot be fixed. In failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic there are echoes of various other discourses and voices, as well as traces of other agencies. Agency is not monological and ‘blind to the diversity of other voices’, but defined through the value placed in these voices and the role given to them.Footnote 44 This signals fathoming the political in terms of a relation that the body exposes. The failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic rearticulates political relations between people and it calls for a questioning of the meanings, rather than the practices, of the power to separate between bodies. Let us still consider the case of Soran that illustrates how the policing act of taking an asylum seeker's fingerprints turns into a corporeality, which again initiates emotional, fluid and open-ended relations between bodies. His account exposes political agency as inherently relational. It is not relevant to estimate Soran's account, but to take note of our voices intertwining, and explore them as a corporeal exposure.
I meet Soran when I enter the counsellors' office, he has come to ask Lumi, a counsellor, to write a note stating that he wants to cancel his asylum application and leave the country. He looks tired, fed up, frustrated. He wants to know if his fingerprints will be deleted from the Eurodac-system when he leaves. Lumi tells him that is not the case, the prints will stay. ‘Why?’ he wants to know. In talking with me, he repeats time and again that he is going to leave Finland and ‘go to Europe.’ For him ‘Finland is not Europe. The Finns do not think. I don't want to be here, I will leave.’ [He has burnt himself with a cigarette, and while we talk he keeps picking the spot: pink flesh in the middle and burned skin around the edges.] … I ask if he has a particular place in mind. ‘Sweden.’ I ask if he is aware of the fact that Finland and Sweden together with several other European countries have agreed to share the prints and people are then returned back to the country where they first were. I say that he must know about those people in the centre, who live there just for some weeks, after which they leave. I tell that many of them are people like him; people who have wanted to go and live in another country, but that is just not possible as an asylum seeker in the EU. He gets increasingly frustrated. ‘I have been to Greece, where I lived with two other people, and before that I was in Italy. In Italy they took my prints, but nobody found them here.’ His ideas about living in Italy and Greece are ultra-positive. There everything was good, whereas here everything is bad. He says that any place else would be better than Finland. He would maybe like to go to Iceland, his friend told him that there they don't take the prints. Or then to Canada.… I ask Soran if he then has thought about going back to Kurdistan to live with his family. He starts thinking about that. I ask if he misses his family, and he looks at me bewilderedly, as if he didn't understand my question. ‘No, I don't, I haven't lived with my parents in Kurdistan for a long time. I lived with my aunt, who didn't have a husband or children. Why would I miss my parents?’ He tells that he has decided to leave, and I still say that he should think. Go some place outside the centre, calm down, and think. He says that he is still going to leave, but what if he buys an expensive ticket and then is returned to Finland?
(Field notes, 19 October 2006)Soran had received his first temporary permit some months before the above interaction, and the waiting and insecurity were starting to weigh on him. He wanted to find a way out of this limbo, and had decided to leave. During our discussion about the Dublin Convention, the Eurodac, Common European Asylum system, and the B, he gets frustrated with me and with the situation he finds himself in. Soran builds connections and relations between different bodies in responding to my voice and to the European asylum politics. His intention to leave Finland after cancelling his asylum claim signals taking charge of one's future and moving on in one's search for more promising life prospects. Because his fingerprints have been saved in the Eurodac system, Soran's agency cannot be directed towards an achievable goal, but is left hovering between different choices, which all seem equally undesirable. He begins to grasp the grip of politics on his body through my presence. It makes him voice a frustrated, undetermined agency, which is directed more at creating a sonorous meeting point and speaking position than advocating a single cause. As Sullivan and McCarthy opine, activity can be expressed through weighing up alternative possibilities and committing one over the other.Footnote 45 This puts potentiality at the centre of inquiry. Soran's voice actively ponders his body's potential for action through movement and simultaneously in interacting with my voice it creates complex corporeal and political conjunctures of responsibility and relationality.
Soran opposes the official reading of his presence in the Finnish society and becomes first frustrated and then angry. By expressing his anger he tries to translate his frustration to me. Under the conditions of failed asylum, anger and frustration are directed at everything that makes the story of that particular body politically possible.Footnote 46 In voicing his anger Soran expresses political agency, which in its singularity is emotional and private. This interpretation of mine counters the oft-presented view that anger (passion) is an irrational force that obstructs, annihilates, or negates political agency.Footnote 47 Yet, this agency is always plural as anger is a commentary on the relations that have been constructed between bodies through the asylum process. Therefore, anger manifests hopes, fears, and grievances. Understanding anger as an agentive position is easier, when the failed asylum seekers' profound experience of distrust and their fear for their lives are kept in mind. If we take anger to be focused on a unified object, we miss the force of that agency together with the demand that the failed asylum seekers present.Footnote 48 It is crucial that we learn to hear the anger of others without turning it into defensiveness of our own positions, notwithstanding that anger exposes the limits of our being.Footnote 49
Anger might actually be the political sentiment par excellence, and yet it is most neglected in its philosophical mode.Footnote 50 Besides the Finnish asylum policy Soran's anger is directed at a particular operationalisation of the international and its practices, as well as at the political instrumentalisation of the human body. His anger carries traces of earlier experiences of injustice, which intertwine with a sense of alienation, vulnerability, and powerlessness. Therefore, anger brings out emotional connections and relationalities that are inadmissible and intolerable. In fact, Soran's refusal of and resistance to where he has been placed represent a step that goes ‘beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably – in order to open possible paths for a new negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising vigilance’. Without anger, politics, and communities created through current policies would be nothing but ‘accommodation and trade in influence’.Footnote 51
Anger as an agentive position keeps the body verbal. It attempts to participate in the political project that has immobilised it, but on its own terms. This understanding signals intensification of Soran's presence through relationality and potentiality, and furthermore, it makes it imperative to entertain the wider context in which something becomes said. Central to Nancy's idea of togetherness is that existence, which is always plural, takes place in an interval.Footnote 52 The interval is the space between us, which makes ‘us’ possible. It reflects the sense that all being is being towards something, meaning that senses emerge out of relations between singular beings.Footnote 53 Indeed, Soran accused me of not knowing anything, since ‘life has always been easy for you, when ever has it been difficult?’ With this statement, he presented an understanding of our beings (political identities) being related, but not being mutually exposed.
Soran's exclamation emphasises the constitutive relationship between those who have a part in the territorial political community and those who do not. Treating either one of these bodies as singular or existing in isolation can never result to a compelling and comprehensive picture of political agency, its preconditions and shadow practices. In other words, my discussions with Soran made me confront the fact that the effects of the body's placing are concretely sensed, and yet without a solid foundation. The ontology of the body enables studying these bodily relations and relationalities without remaining captive to the dichotomous logic of sameness/alterity, identity/otherness, and inside/outside that still, at least to some extent, characterises the system of knowledge within IR. In order to depart from that logic, I will now address how experiences of injustice and ontological essentialism shape and give rise to emotional agencies. In theoretical terms this means rethinking politics as a bond as it is lived and imagined.
Negotiating the limits of political life within the international
Although thus far I have opted for a rather positive approach on the question of agency, it cannot be denied that being categorised as a failed asylum seeker poses severe limits to people's capacity to enact themselves politically. Among failed asylum seekers experiences of abjection and exclusion are common, and yet extremely individual. I claim that precluding (apparently) singular acts from the space of politics misses the political potential in these bodies and their agencies. As a singular plural the body never truly is individual, or separated from networks of power, and social mobilisations. Rather there are various ways of engaging with wider sociopolitical framework, be it ‘singularly’ or ‘plurally’. This suggests that notwithstanding their marginal condition, the failed asylum seekers negotiate the limits set to their bodies, and their existence within the international. Thus, it is necessary to take a closer look at a gestural politics that arises from experiences of distress, pain, and suffering. The body is a potent medium of flesh and blood, which carnates person's capacity to interact with others and one's surroundings.Footnote 54
Benaz is a journalist by training. While in Finland he has written a book on ‘how having black hair affects you negatively here: I look outside and see the other building where similar people to myself are living in their own flats where they have their own showers and bathrooms. And then I think about myself and us living here in this centre. Why do we have to share the shower with 15–16 other people? Why can't we have the same life as Finns? Couldn't more foreigners fit into Finland?’ He explains that when he meets with the staff, who tell him [to do] something, he smiles, but inside he is extremely angry. He would like to shout. Benaz describes the thing that he finds especially upsetting: ‘I take showers, and I clean my room. And then they [the staff] come to my room [there are regular room checks in the centre], put on rubber gloves to protect themselves and start sorting through my rubbish. I am clean, why do they put those gloves on?’ Benaz tells that he cannot get into bars, because they ask for his ID. He has only the resident's card from the centre. It is not an official document, and hence most places do not accept it. ‘Then they ask me to leave. People here do not want to touch you because of your hair or skin colour,’ he adds.
(Field notes, 24 August 2006)During our discussion Benaz often elevated his voice and gestured wildly making his frustration and anger obvious. Instead of suggesting that the story is indicative of a newly developed awareness of the restrictions to movement and the possibilities of action, I claim that Benaz's gestures and movement indicate him having gained a sense of those forms of power that become operative when the body is categorised politically.Footnote 55 Benaz does not become suddenly aware of the restrictions placed on his body, but perceives the political power at work in relation to and on the surface of his body. Yet his body is capable of changing its direction, (s)pace, and rhythm. The body unfolds constantly, and in this sense it always outdoes sovereign politics that seeks to fix it firmly on a grid. Benaz's agentive body politic, even though it at times took on even gruesome verbal and corporeal forms (below in italics), exposed the materiality of every body and also the fleshiness of politics.
Benaz has been involved in a knife fight just after his arrival to the centre and caused other disturbance by lowering his pants in public. He is also suspected of setting off at least two false fire alarms in the centre. When the staff has taken things up with him, Benaz has said that he is a bohemian character and if the staff tries to restrict him, he has a knife in his room and he might kill himself, but he wants that his eyes are sent back to his home country. Or, if the staff tries to restrict him he might get his knife and slit somebody's throat and take the head with him back to his room. At times he is really stable and friendly, but in a couple of hours he might come to the office and start miaowing there. He is unpredictable, and the staff is not quite certain of the state of his mental health.
(Field notes, 1 September 2006)In my interpretation Benaz's hostility to the practices of surveillance, control of movement, and requirements to behave in a particular manner exhibits resistance. However, I do not intend to suggest that the kind of action to which he resorts – threatening or assaulting others – is in any way laudable or justified. My key claim, in fact, does not concern Benaz's acts in themselves at all. Rather, I take his behaviour that happens in wanton disregard of the regulative ambitions and the disrupting effects of that behaviour to illustrate a protest against the rationale that has debased him and views his presence and body strictly in terms of a political order, which he himself is not ready to accept. Benaz's agency and gestures thus may arise prior to cognition, from a sense of dislocation that the loss of control causes.
As the failed asylum seekers contest, resist, and interrupt the working of disciplinary mechanisms through their irregular movements, they keep their potential for politics open. Moreover, their movement reveals the centre as one place where the struggle between politics and the agentive body culminates on a daily basis. In terms of the dialectics between bodily movement, the political, and the international such a view suggests that movement is characteristic and constitutive of the relations between bodies, communities, and worlds.Footnote 56 A protest, hence, does not have to be explicit in its expression, and still it can be understood as resistance to a particular spatiotemporal notion of political community.
When put alongside mass protests or social movements, the body's corporeal resistance and its acts of exscription are perhaps less romantic or heroic. Because of their ambiguity and multiplicity, however, the singular body's ways of political expression are all the more disturbing for those who witness them. Through a minor defiance, a reach toward or a move beyond the body discloses existence in ways that displace or rupture the spatial frame within which our political existence is supposed to occur. Consider, for instance, Benaz's miaowing: the act caused consternation and made the reception centre staff powerless in the face of his protest. They did not know how to read and react to this behaviour. The gestures and moves of the agentive body force a response. At any given moment the failed asylum seekers are capable of disrupting the smooth and frictionless functioning of the sovereign logic and disclosing togetherness between bodies. This happened with Benaz, whose actions caused a number of security measures being discussed and rehearsed among the staff. His case was actively followed, the state of his mental health scrutinised, and even the slightest indication of a heated temper was discussed and analysed thoroughly in the daily staff meetings. Through his body Benaz momentarily made the line of separation between people less stable, exposed the limit of the sovereign subject and the relationality between various political subjectivities. The contradictory forms of resistance, contestation, and transformation that he adopted, address the notions and corporeality of politics. They mark the international, sensing body, and political community coming into existence and gaining meaning only with and in relation to one another.
Like with Benaz, the body's experiences are outcomes of involvement in diverse, potentially changing activities and institutions.Footnote 57 The failed asylum seekers' moves as a part of their agentive body politic are perhaps best conceptualised as passages, that is as movements-to, which open space and construct it as meaningful, intelligible, and experiencable. Thus their moves represent the relationality of our existence.Footnote 58 In other words, gestures and movement are aesthetic and political stances, which contest and exceed the ideas and practices ‘associated with the singular, the original, the uniform, the central authority, the hierarchy’.Footnote 59 Benaz's unpredictability is a subversion of the body allegedly ‘known’ and placed within the Finnish political order. His acts are not only gestures and moves that try to do the impossible, but interventions into the social reality in Finland. These interventions change the coordinates of what is perceived to be possible; they require us to stay open for the unexpected.
Furthermore, Benaz's story illustrates that also vulnerability is, from another perspective, a part of the agentive body politic. It is caused by the body's exposure to others and their refusal to engage with it. Based on her ethnographic insight Christina Zarowsky claims that individual suffering and political experience are linked. She states that instead of isolation, person's suffering actually embeds them deeply in a moral web.Footnote 60 Thus, suffering, emotional experience, and the failed asylum seekers' multiple ways of expressing them, connect the singular body to broader political, social, and economic structures and forces. As their acts and expressions communicate grief, distress, and the pain caused by politics, they suggest a critical engagement and relation between variously categorised bodies.Footnote 61
The agency of failed asylum seekers is about boundaries built between bodies and the efforts to cross these boundaries, to exscribe the body towards others so as to raise a different political relationality. In this light, both Soran's and Benaz's struggles can be understood to gesture towards an understanding that the political is a corporeal relation through which meaning is born. Such a stance means that the body is equipped with a variety of dispositions, capacities, and potentialities that allow for agency and social change. Although failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic might be without clear purpose and direction, it resists the political closure of meaning and sense. The body refuses to be closed into itself, into an essential political identity and out of yet another political community.
The failed body exceeds the logic along which modern political communities within the international have been built. Even seemingly minute acts are quite powerful in indicating some of the foundational problems of the modern conceptions of politics. The politics of borders never defeats the body or its movement, but instead the body constantly pushes through, evades, resonates to and withdraws from this politics and renders it incomplete.
Emerging possibilities and further openings
This article has suggested that the demand with which the failed asylum seekers present our thought concerns the ways in which people become politically agentive within and in relation to diverse networks of sociopolitical relations. In exploring the possibilities of political life within the international should not, in this light, be merely about being a sovereign political agent, but also scrutinise the events of the political between people. The failed asylum seekers' acts are best not to be read in terms of what they mean, what caused them, or how to come to terms with them. An engagement with the failed asylum seekers suggests that political agency is not merely about person's right to have rights in relation to a certain political community, but about the political that the body is, or about the ontological condition of the body, which is political.
Maybe just because the failed asylum seekers' accounts are non-teleological in their hopes, orientation, and voice, a political space for agency – however contestable and fragmentary – is opened.Footnote 62 The multiple enunciative positions that the body adopts in relating itself to the world and to others with whom it comes into contact allow room for presenting oneself in unpredictable ways.Footnote 63 In shifting between various roles and lines of narration the failed asylum seeker resists dominant ways of telling about the life before and after displacement and, following Linda Tabar, insists on ‘a fuller notion of the person, one situated within community and conscious of the virtues of ordinary, day to day existence’.Footnote 64 The demand of their agentive body politic goes well beyond the scope of the contemporary political debates around migratory movements. In playing an active role in politics that seeks to govern their bodies and being, the failed asylum seekers undermine the founding logic upon which both movement and staying embedded in the spheres of the international is being addressed and dealt with. Sharing, connections, touch, and acts that cross and cut through borders and their practicings time and again in unforeseen places and in unexpected ways undermine that politics of the international, in which the body is contracted to a state.
In a failed asylum seeker, or refugee of any category, we actually encounter what Arthur Koestler termed the ‘exposed nerve of humanity’. The failed asylum seekers' acts gesture and reach toward a potential politics to come, rather than articulate an affirmative possibility or transformation. Their political potentiality lies in their exposure: the presence of the failed asylum seeker requires even us who are rather comfortably situated within the modern international to get involved at least philosophically with its bloody and bodily politics. A rethinking of the relations between the body, political, and international with Nancy's ontology of the body illustrates political life unfolding in and through the failed asylum seekers' engagements, bodies, and moves. This ontology enables scrutinising the political taking place and being born whenever bodies meet, tension, expose themselves and intensify in coming together. Indeed, Nancy's thought suggests that we are not, but we happen, come into presence only with others. When we scrutinise the possibilities of political life within the international through such a perspective, new horizons of relationality and responsibility emerge. These horizons challenge more traditional views on what counts as a political community and who counts as a political agent. The agentive body politic of a failed asylum seeker, when approached from an ontological perspective, seeks to do nothing less than to interpret and transform the political organisation of the world again and anew.Footnote 65
In articulating the political, agency and participation in terms of becoming, that is, being as it happens, the ontology of the body departs from the view that agency is a given condition or attainment. Albeit the failed asylum seekers' agencies are various – some more immediate, some more practiced, some more reflexive – they urge us to think of the international not as a static constellation, but in terms of a process that is constantly negotiated, debated, resisted, and enacted in various ways simultaneously. Within such an imaginary the international becomes a singularly plural spacing: a matter of co-appearing bodies that cannot be reduced to an essentiality. In terms of International Relations this suggests exploring, besides matters of fact and reason, also the tactile and sensual.
