Volume 2 issue 1 APRIL 2014
Asylum and the Common: Mediations between
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Through the use of predominantly biopolitical theoretical concepts from Foucault, Agamben and Esposito, this article aims to uncover the dynamics that enable violent exclusion from the community of asylum seekers in the UK. Foucault’s notion of state racism, and the dynamic of hierarchisation that results from this, are shown to play a significant role in enabling destitution amongst asylum seekers. Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer and bare life are used to show similarities with the legal situation and de facto destitution of asylum seekers in the UK, who occupy a zone of indistinction between inclusion and exclusion.
By examining Esposito’s paradigm of immunisation it is shown how asylum seekers represent a threat to the preservation of individual identity. Furthermore, institutions granting rights protection could be seen, following Esposito, as attempts to immunise oneself from the ‘threat’ of the common. In the end, it seems that asylum seekers are subject to illegalisms by the very institutions that at once grant them rights and produce them as an unwanted category, occupying an ever expanding space of remnants in our presupposed common universality. |
