Ludwig Maximiliaans Universit�t 16.06.2014

Sose 2014

Dr. Sharron A. FitzGerald

Seminar: English-speaking perspectives on biopolitics, the body through the prism of international migration

Assignment: Drawing from a range of examples, critically evaluate the impact of biopower onwestern systems of border control. In your answer consider how these systems make specificpopulations the object of governmentality.

Islands as Camps: Australia and Lampedusa

Lucio Santin Landsbergerstr. 14

2. Fachsemester 80339 M2nchen

Master Ethnologie Tel. 0151 2058 2256

lucio.santin@campus.lmu.de

Islands as Camps: Australia and Lampedusa

Introduction

In this short paper I aim at drawing a sketch for an analysis that wants to highlight how – in the

frame of western systems of border control – islands can be thought as being some kind of

Foucauldian biopolitical dispositifs in the process of the creation of the homo sacer.

I want to focus on two specific cases. Firstly, because of its salience, I will analyse the situation

of Australia's excised territories in depriving incoming migrants of a legal status and creating, rather

ironically, out-of-the-law subjects by means of laws. Secondly – also based on my own field

experience on the Italian island of Lampedusa – I would like to explain how the discourse over this

island transforms the migrants in not only legal, but cultural homini sacri: before being stripped of

political status legally, migrants are constructed as inconvenient, different and thus perilous on a

cultural level, denying them political status in the popular discourse because of their otherness: the

“concept” of Lampedusa, I will argue, has a pivotal role in this process.

Following this logic – and from these two different points of view – both Australia's offshore

territories and Lampedusa can somehow be considered camps, or metamorphoses thereof, in an

Agambenian sense.

Biopower

Before analysing the relevance of Lampedusa and Australia's excised territories in the

biopolitical process of transforming migrants into homini sacri, it will be necessary to briefly

overview the Fouculdian concept of biopower itself. Michel Foucault, at the beginning of his

lectures at the Collège de France in Paris, describes biopower as “the set of mechanisms through

which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy”

(Foucault 2007:1). Biopower is, in Foucault's view, one of three different kinds of power that

historically1 developed in the so-called western world, together with sovereign and disciplinary

power, and differs from the former two by its specific object, i.e. populations.

The first declination of power, sovereign power, can be considered as the authority of a ruler

1 Every epoch, argued Foucault, has had its dominant form of power, but the three actually co-exist in a samesituation. There may be an evolution or an amelioration from sovereign to biopolitical power, but the one neversuppresses the other. (Foucault 2007:6-7, Nail 2013:113-4).

over people's lives taken singularly, or in other words as the power to “take life or let live”

(Foucault 2004:241). Following a Foucauldian exemplification (2007:4-5), it is the power that the

medieval sovereign had to dictate, for instance, forced isolation for individuals affected by leprosy.

Here, the object of power is a specific body taken as a single entity.

In the case of disciplinary power, on the contrary, power does not act through direct punishment

but through surveillance and correction. In 16th century Europe, for example, we can detect

disciplinary power at work in the treatment of the plague. The introduction of specific rules and

control mechanisms to contain the spread of the disease affects the individual, this time, however,

taken as part of a group – in this case the group of infected people. Still, power is exercised on

single persons, but has a disciplinary objective in that it introduces rules about what is licit and what

is not.

Biopolitical power finally, differing from the previous two, is that type of power in which the

difference between licit and illicit disappears, and which makes entire populations the object of its

action. Continuing the example on these lines, the introduction of statistics and vaccinations in

healthcare from the 18th century onwards testifies a will to have an “optimal mean” of ill and

healthy people (2007:6) in the treatment of diseases: the object of power shifts from the individual

to an entire population, or to life in general – thus the term biopower.

The object of biopower is massified: its techniques do not have the purpose to “modify any given

phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar he is an individual, but, essentially, to

intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined” (Foucault 2004:246), that

is, at the level of biological life. This focus on generality, on populations, has an important

consequence for our analysis: it shifts away the focus from power over territory to power over a

mass of bodies taken as a multitude, i.e. assesses “the subsumption of the 'territory state' with the

'population state'” (Legg 2005:141). Territory is not anymore directly linked to the state, and this

makes the relation between state and birth (or state and nation) particularly difficult – a difficulty

that comes to the surface in analysing the concept of refugee.

Homo Sacer, refugees and the State

The political philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998) has taken up this argument where Foucault

had left it, further developing on the concept and biopower. He describes modern power over life

with the help of the concept of homo sacer, an ancient Roman figure which had no citizen rights

and could not be killed but could be left to die. The Homo Sacer is according to Agamben a

fundament of our modern society in that its life is strictly biological, it is nuda vita, bare life, “life

stripped of its political existence to become nothing but biological […] life” (Clough Marinaro

2010:268). The homo sacer is for example incarnated by the Jew in Nazi Germany, but its most

relevant contemporary manifestation is the one of the refugee.

The essential characteristic of the refugee as homo sacer is its intrinsic contradiction. Its

“exclusion from the law occurs through its inclusion within it” (ibid.): through means of laws

he/she is excluded from the rights of citizenship and thus from the state, but precisely in this process

he/she is directly and strictly controlled by the state itself.

Why, then, is such a figure created? The most important point for our analysis is that the refugee,

indeed, represents one of the largest problems for the modern state, since it underlines its fragile

foundations. The refugee disrupts the classical unity of the post-Westfalian modern state because it

is not inscribable into its classic constitutive triad of sovereignty, territory and nation. Its figure

highlights the contradiction of the linkage between rights and birth, birth and nation, nation and

territory, or rights and blood – the fiction upon which modern states are built:

[i]f refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a

significant part of humanity today) represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern

nation-state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity

and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the

difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political

domain – bare life – to appear for an instant within that domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly

“the man of rights,” as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of rights outside the

fiction of the citizen that always covers them over. Yet this is precisely what makes the figure of the

refugee so hard to define politically. (Agamben 1998:77).

In the modern state, “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign

power” (ibid.:11) and the production, the creation of the refugee is thus a central issue in the

analysis of the unfolding of governmentality – i.e. the multitude of practices and institution that

express biopower. For this reason I am interested, in this paper, in explaining how, or through which

mechanisms – Foucault would say: through which dispositifs – the figure of the refugee is created

in modern states. I believe that the refugee as Homo Sacer cannot be considered just as legal figure

– a figure, that is, is created only through means of laws. I believe that its status is also the

consequence of a cultural process that comes before the law, or at least is not directly triggered by it

– a Foucauldian discourse, some “distinctive ways of thinking and questioning; the use of certain

vocabularies and procedures for the production of truth” (Legg 2005:147) that are active at a certain

moment in a society. I will then, in the next paragraph, outline how the refugee is legally and

culturally constructed by means of two examples: the use of law to exclude bare life from the law

itself in Australia's excised insular territories, and the cultural discourse over the island of

Lampedusa in southern Italy. Both these insular territories take up, in two different ways, the

function of the Agambenian camp, that of naturalising a the “state of exception” (Agamben

1998:19) in which the refugee is embedded.

The Camp and Australia's Migration Territory

The fundamental moment in the creation of bare life is, according to Agamben, the state of

exception: “a moment when the sovereign law, with is protection and rules, is suspended” (Phillips

2009:136-7). This state of exception is often materialised and localised in a space of exception, or

zone of exemption (Legg 2005:137) which most relevant manifestation is the camp – be it a

concentration camp during the Boer war in southern Africa or a CIE in contemporary Italy. The

camp is “the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (Agamben

1998:96, original emphasis) and where bare life is incarcerated not for “having broken the law, but

as outside of the domain of law.” (Phillips 2009:138, original emphasis).

In this sense the camp is a “dislocating localization [, it] is the hidden matrix of the politics in

which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its

metamorphoses” (Agamben 1998:99). The camp is thus, in my opinion, not only to be intended in a

narrow sense, but as a wide concept. In this sense Australia's excised territories are a direct

declination, or metamorphoses of this concept.

In the Australian migration legislation a distinction is made between zones where an incoming

person has to hold a visa to enter the national territory and those where a visa is not required, but

can be issued later, the latter called “migration zones” (Perera 2002). In 2001 the Australian

government passed two pieces of law to excise some of its insular territories, namely Christmas

Island, Ashmore, Cartier and the Cocos islands (ComLaw 2001), the places where the great part of

migrants coming by sea land with their vessels, from the migration zone. There, the migrant –

significantly called “unlawful non-citizen” (Phillips 2009:138) – cannot present a visa application to

the Australian state as if he/she had never reached Australian territory. Through this legal dispositif

the refugee, at the threshold of the nation-state, is [made to be] outside the law; he or she may be

subject to […] forcible transport to countries other than their intended destination on the simple

grounds that they have no basis on which to protest. (Rajam and Grundy-Warr 2004:40, cited in

Phillips 2009:138).

In this way, Australia's excised islands are transformed in open-air Agambenian camps, whose

inhabitants “are those deemed to have no claim on the nation but, paradoxically, are brought even

more firmly under its control by virtue of their exclusion from its laws” (Agamben 1997:110, cited

in Phillips 2009:138). The islands become thus a biopolitical dispositif in transforming the incoming

migrants into nuda vita.

The Camp and Lampedusa

Another metamorphosis of the camp understood in a wider sense, I believe, is represented by the

discourse in Italy over the island of Lampedusa. Lampedusa – the southernmost Italian territory,

laying only 100 km away from the Tunisian coast – is in Italy much more than just an island. Since

approximately a decade, with the increase of refugees arrivals from the African continent, it has

become, due to its special location, the focus of an extended discourse on migrants. Almost every

time an “illegal” vessel is spotted in the waters between Sicily and Africa, the italian media report

of it being “off Lampedusa coast” (GdS 2014). The island and its inhabitants are always described

as protesting against the arrival of migrants that fill the island, the latter collapsing under their

weight (see: Tg3 2011) and the binomial “Emergenza Lampedusa” (lasiciliaweb 2013, RN24 2013)

has become almost of common usage in the italian language to refer to the “problematic” situation

on the island2.

A real emergence has, needless to say, never really taken place in Lampedusa (Friese 2008, 2012,

Van 't Klooster 2012), and the Lampedusani, actually extremely hospitable with the migrants, are

eager to say so every time they are asked. However if, as Agamben writes, we must be able to

recognize all the metamorphoses of the camp, I believe Lampedusa to be one of those. In contrast to

the Australian legislation, which creates the homo sacer on a legal level, I believe the discourse over

Lampedusa – which would need much more space to be fully analysed – to create the homo sacer

on a cultural level3.

This discourse helps in my opinion to build what Stolcke called “cultural fundamentalism”, a

rhetoric that “reifies culture conceived as a compact, bounded, localized, and historically rooted set

of traditions and values transmitted through the generations by drawing on an ideological repertoire

that dates back to the contradictory 19th-century conception of the nation-state” (1992:4). In this

new form of racism, “the other” is seen as a threat not because of its racial inferiority, but because

of its incommensurable cultural difference (ibid.:3). It is this very difference, actually, that threatens

2 Just the fact that searching for “emergenza lampedusa” on Google gives approximately one million results from verydifferent periods in time is significant in understanding how this “emergency” has become a totem in the Italiandiscourse on migration.

3 See: TG3 2011. In this media report from Lampedusa about the 2011 protests on the island – even more striking ifone thinks that the broadcaster can be considered a left-wing one – the population is described as protesting againstthe arrival of migrants themselves. Actually however, the population is protesting against the state, which does verylittle in organising the reception of foreigners on Lampedusa. Still, this media construction has an important goal: itbuilds an image of the refugee as an unwanted and perilous person and thus, as a Foucauldian dispositif, contributesto strip the migrant of cultural and political rights ab initio.

the cultural unity of the nation-state according to Stolcke and that brings to light, with Agamben's

words, the difference between birth and nation.

The discourse over Lampedusa, I believe, contributes to the creation of the migrant as a “perilous

other”. By constructing the arrival of migrants as an emergency – defined by the Oxford Dictionary

as “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action” (my

emphasis) – and thus the emergency as a threat, the migrant becomes the personification of the

emergency itself, is considered perilous and stripped of cultural rights before this process actually

happens on the legal level, in order for the nation-state to be protected. Before being constructed as

a homo sacer through means of laws, he/she is already a homo sacer in the cultural understanding

of the receiving country: he does not have rights, or does not have the potential to apply for them,

because he/she is “the perilous other”.

In this short essay I hope to have showed how the camp as a biopolitical tool in the western

management of borders should be recognised, following Agamben's suggestion, in all its

metamorphoses. Australia's excised territories are a camp in the narrow sense, a spacialised state of

exception where the homo sacer is legally created. Also the discourse on Lampedusa can, however,

be considered one, since it has the same purpose: that of negating citizenship rights – even though

only on a cultural level – to the refugee, that specific subject that otherwise would bring to light the

originary presupposition of the nation-state.

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