Eeva Puumala

Events of the Body Politic: A Nancian Reading of Asylum-seekers’ Bodily Choreographies and Resistance

This article thinks the place of the body, agency and movement in politics through the body of the asylum-seeker. Asylum-seekers do not have ample space to politically voice their experiences, but their bodies and ways of taking agency are fluid. The Agambenian idea of exceptional space and bare life privileges the power of the sovereign, leaving little space for agency for its subjects. It leads to an impasse, as it offers no viable option of thinking the possibilities of opposing sovereign rule. We have resorted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy in order to read to the contrary: to sketch the potential of the body to move beyond the reach of sovereign power and to communicate itself and its relations to others. The untenability of the sovereign subject pointed to by Nancy’s ontology of bodies allows seeing the asylum-seeker’s body as expressive and moving body that reorganizes its relations to others and turns it to an active agent from which events of the body politic emerge. With its focus on crisscrossing movement of the body and between bodies, the notion of choreography assists us in envisioning that the space for political agency and community do not pre-exist, but are articulated through bodies’ movements. We argue that either purely textual analysis or focus on administrative rationality is bound to leave possible expressions of political agency aside, and thus to ignore the challenge the bodily choreographies of asylum-seekers pose to political theory. We illustrate our argument with vignettes from Fernand Melgar’s 2008 documentary film The Fortress.

Bodies of War, the Past Continuous, and (Ar)rhythmic Experiences

In recent years, International Relations scholars have shown a growing interest in the body. Yet, the body often remains rather abstract. In this article, we engage with the lived body and personal histories, claim that the international is not only personal but also corporeal with bodily dimension, and explore the body as a complex intersection that characterizes and shapes the relations between the singular, social, and international. To illustrate our argument, we discuss a sensuous experience of war that defies simplistic categorization and interpretation. The aim is to introduce an alternative onto-epistemological angle on International Relations in order to overcome the separation of the discipline from ordinary people and local everyday practices. The body is shown to be a site of the political, a place of intersection that both enacts practices and fosters relations with others and toward the world, and engages in practices that disrupt the normal rhythm of international politics and its governing logic.

Does the body matter? Determining the right to asylum and the corporeality of political communication

Analyses of political agency often take the Habermasian notion of an ideal speech situation and its related discourse ethics as the ultimate model of politically relevant communication. Our examination of Finnish asylum officers’ perspectives on their work leads us to consider the asylum interview as an event of the political, an event of the body politic. Our interest lies in acts of communication that go beyond speech, which necessitates an engagement with the corporeal element of communication. Based on our data, we show how a focus on spoken communication alone fails to capture manifold ways in which the encounter between asylum officers and asylum applicant produces the political. We argue that taking corporeality seriously would enhance our understanding of what is at stake in this encounter and also beyond it.