Political Life Beyond Accommodation and Return

Political life beyond accommodation and return: rethinking relations between the
political, the international, and the body

Author(s): EEVA PUUMALA
Source: Review of International Studies , OCTOBER 2013, Vol. 39, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2013),
pp. 949-968
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24564440
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Review of International Studies (2013), 39, 949-968 © 2013 British International Studies Association
doi:10.1017IS026021051200037X First published online 28 Aug 2013
Political life beyond accommodation an

return: rethinking relations between the
political, the international, and the bod
EE VA PUUMALA
Abstract. This article explores political agency in the interstices of the bodily politics o
It shows how its practices make bodily surfaces and how alternative forms of political
emanate from bodies. Relying on Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology of the body, it examine
of political agency that are enacted by people often considered as abjective subjectiviti
spaces of the international. Deriving from interviews conducted with failed asylum see
article sheds light on agencies and resistances embedded in and extant despite the gove
efforts to solve the problem of the moving body. Ethnographic data and interviews
failed asylum seekers show how they take control over their lives, not as separate, so
subjects, but in relation to their political surroundings and others. In a way, the fail
seekers produce and practice their own politics that both takes part in and exceeds th
set by sovereign politics. By exploring political agency from underneath and beyond
power and governmentality, the article presents a reading of the intertwining of th
tional, political, and bodily.
Eeva Puumala is a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Social Sciences and Hu

University of Tampere, where she is a member of the research group on Corporeality
ment, and Politics. Her research interests include Nancian philosophy and the body w
the politics of mobility, and political agency.
Nasir: The [Finnish] government is just ignoring everything. And I received this rejec
B], They said that the district I came from, it is safe and you can return. And, I wond
said, where the hell I talked about the place being safe or unsafe? I never talked abou
unsafe. I don't care, if it's safe or unsafe. It is not safe for me. I have problems there.
mentioned this, this, this issue. I have talked to you about my problems! And you are t
it is safe! Who the hell cares!? I will talk to you for hours, for days, if you understan
and if you understand logic. They [the asylum officers] don't even think for a second
could be wrong. They have this prejudice that we are lying and they're always rig
could also be telling the truth. It is not that always we are wrong, and that always the
right. (Interview with Nasir, March 2007)1
1 This article was written as a part of a research project funded by the Academy of Finland (SA
I wish to thank Anitta Kynsilehto, Vicki Squire, Annick Wibben, and other participants at th
European Peace Research Association conference where a version of this article was p
Furthermore, I am grateful to the RIS editorial team and anonymous reviewers for their val
back on earlier versions of this article.
949

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950 Eeva Puumala
Nasir's is not simply a personal story of a failed asylum seeker, but

the body to sovereign power in legal, technological, and political t
resonates within the sphere of the international because the politic
asylum evokes a relationship between a sovereign state and a system
over, Nasir's is a story of the international, its politics and relation
they and the body intertwine. The experience of asylum, in fact, bears
of a history that cannot be totally owned up by or reduced to an indiv
The context of the story dates back to the year 2004, when the Finn
introduced a temporary residence permit (the B, section 51) for asylum
could not be returned to their home countries, although no ground
residence permit were discovered during the asylum process. Possible r
ing return were lack of technical connections and travelling document
lems, or that a state was not willing to take its citizen back. The B was
year at a time, and it could be used for two years after which the pers
to a continuous residence permit, if deportation still was imposs
Aliens Act was reformed, and by the year 2010 the B permit given
the section 51 had become a rarity. Before that a total of 672 perso
Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, had received and lived with this st
the B meant limitations on the right to work during the first year, li
education, the impossibility of family reunification, and having n
domicile to which many social security rights are connected. The w
behind the permit was, on the one hand, to make sure that all peo
Finland had a legally defined place in the society and, on the othe
total exclusion from the social support networks and systems. The sect
left too much room for interpretation, so the permit was used mu
than first anticipated.
Informed by Nasir's outrage at the Finnish asylum policy and th
were not listened to, this article will explore the limits and possibilitie
within the international. More practically, it will scrutinise how th
logic of inside/outside upon which the international has been found
enacted, lived, contested, and exceeded in the politics of asylum. Becaus
of people causes a flux in policies, any responses to the arrival of asylu
reactive rather than proactive. These policies can never anticipate
direction of bodily movement within the international, which can
terms of a particularly enacted political project aiming to produce a pa
order among states. This project simultaneously carries very concr
corporeal consequences for people's lives. However, this article thinks o
tional also as a process that - unlike a project - has no specific end
Empirically the article takes its cue from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews w
seekers living in three reception centres in Finland between August 2006-April 200
the participants of this research came from Afghanistan, Iraq (Kurdistan), Palestin
fieldwork period involved participating in the daily routines in one of the centres, s
at staff meetings. All in all, the period of participant observation added my underst
context of those issues that my interviewees addressed in their accounts, because it
witness what living in a reception centre means on a daily basis.
Interpretations that on the other hand surpass the notion of the sovereign subject
remain its captives have been offered by, for example, Parin Dossa, 'The Body Reme
Tale of Social Suffering and Witnessing', International Journal of Mental Health
Joseph Pugliese 'Subcutaneous Law: Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 19
Feminist Law Journal, 21 (December 2004), p. 33.

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Political life beyond accommodation and return 951
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 trans
formed 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.3 The present
article contributes to discussions on political agency, but yet differs from theorisa
tions 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 singular
ities, 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 ex
plores 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 opera
tions of sovereign power. At the human level this process leads to the emergence of
See, for example, Pugliese, 'Subcutaneous Law', pp. 23-34; Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat,
Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence', Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, 34:1 (2005), pp. 1-24; Carolina Moulin and Peter Nyers, '"We Live in a Country of UNHCR" -
Refugee Protests and Global Political Society', International Political Sociology, 2:1 (2007), pp. 356-72;
Peter Nyers, 'In Solitary, in Solidarity: Detainees, Hostages and Contesting the Anti-policy of Deten
tion', European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11:3 (2008), pp. 333-49; Andreja Zevnik, 'Sovereign-less
Subject and the Possibility of Resistance', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30:1 (2009),
pp. 83-106; and Kim Rygiel, 'Bordering Solidarities: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement
and Camps at Calais', Citizenship Studies, 15:1 (2011), pp. 1-19.

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952 Eeva Puumala
a plethora of statuses and temporary protections, which effectively 're

refugee status'4 yet concealing the political agenda and ontology that g
Living with the categorical identity of a failed asylum seeker is al
times extremely political, dynamic, and ambiguous. Such an identity ca
a potential source of agency that exceeds the limits of sovereign po
fore, the idea of states as solid bases for political being, belonging, and
always to remain incomplete and undermined.
The failed asylum seekers' presence is a call to think of the quest
tive body and its relation to the spatiotemporal organisation of th
from a fresh perspective. It means questioning the territorial divis
into nation-states, which to a large extent still define where the limits
are drawn. However, sovereignty is not merely a spatial construct
from a specific historical (temporal) development and thus it goe
solely about the territorial state. As the examination of the mecha
lance and govermentality that accompany the daily existence of th
seeker will illustrate, sovereignty represents a form of authority, whi
and through time. It relates to community formation as it gives comm
of continuity and enables the development of narratives of belonging
Even though Nancy cannot be properly characterised as a politic
the question of the political is central for his thought. Indeed, he m
significant distinction between 'politics' and 'the political'. In Nanc
'politics' refers to empirical action, praxis, which takes place with
normalised order. Thus, 'politics' denotes the oscillation of power
processes of governance. To the contrary, 'the political' cannot be redu
mental rationality or the composition and dynamics of power, for it in
ophy, a system of meaning/intelligibility within which 'politics' manif
manner of speaking, 'politics' denotes various ways of actualising 't
putting it into practice. In this article, 'politics' represents a struggle o
that can be known, named, and recognised.
'The political', again, takes form through humane restlessness broug
process of becoming, which remains open and subject to change and
riencing bodies consider lacking.6 The political cannot be reduced to a p
is something that occurs when bodies come together and relate to
emerges from relations rather than precedes them.7 Furthermore
note of the fact that for Nancy 'the political' is our ontological stat
a question of the nature of our existence - we can see that 'politi
as a project, a particular but by no means the only possible way of
Roger Zetter, 'More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an E
Journal of Refugee Studies, 20:2 (2007), p. 189.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political (London
Also Andrew Norris, 'Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead', Diac
p. 54.
This aspect has been raised earlier in Eeva Puumala and Samu Pehkonen, 'Corporeal Choreographies
between Politics and the Political: Failed Asylum Seekers Moving from Body Politics to Body Spaces',
International Political Sociology, 4:1 (2010), p. 56; and Eeva Puumala, Tarja Väyrynen, Anitta Kynsilehto,
and Samu Pehkonen, 'Events of the Body Politic: A Nancian Reading of Asylum-seekers' Bodily Choreo
graphies and Resistance', Body & Society, 17:4 (2011), pp. 83-104.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, p. 133; Mustafa Dikeç, 'Space, Politics, and the
Political', Environment and Planning D, 23:2 (2005), p. 185.

143.107.3.225 on Mon, 18 Jul 2022 14:12:30 UTC
existence.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'.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 with
drawal from any substance'.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 re
thinking the structuring principles of community, or thinking of community in terms
of 'the destination of its sharing'.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.12 A notion of the community of singular-beings positions
identity in difference and articulates the radical (im)possibility of identity as an essen
tial and substantive category of being.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.14
8 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, p. 110.

9 Nancy, Corpus, pp. 15-17, 33.
10 Howard Caygill, 'The Shared World: Philosophy, Violence, Freedom', in Sheppard, Sparks, and Thomas
(eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 23.
11 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press,
2004), p. 40; 'The Confronted Community', Postcolonial Studies, 6:1 (2003), pp. 23-36; In contrast, see
also Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), esp. pp. 125-46.
12 See, for example, Naeem Inayatullah, and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of
Difference (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 146—7.
13 Jeffrey S. Librett, 'Interruptions of Necessity: Being between Meaning and Power in Jean-Luc Nancy',
in Sheppard, Sparks, and Thomas (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 124, fn. 25.
14 Even though Nancian thought has not thus far inspired many discussions in IR, there are contributions
within the discipline so as to think the implications and meaning of Nancy's philosophy of singular plu
rality. See Jenny Edkins, 'Exposed Singularity', Journal for Cultural Research, 9:4 (2005), pp. 359-86;
Louiza Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (Minneapolis: Uni
versity of Minnesota Press, 2007); Nick Vaughan-Williams, 'Beyond a Cosmopolitan Ideal: The Politics
of Singularity', International Politics, 44:1 (2007), pp. 107-24.

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954 Eeva Puumala
With a Nancian take on the political, we can also redefine the notion
national and, furthermore, conceive its spatiotemporal logic in terms o
Nancy, spacing is a fundamental ontological concept, which denotes the
of time and space. It signifies the taking place of being, which op
which presence is born. Therefore, spacing is inherent in the exist
body.15 Conceiving failed asylum in terms of a corporeal and rel
enables engagement with the possibilities of political life in a way
the logic of both particularism and universalism in the spheres of the
Instead of focusing on either one of the trends singularly, consider
through failed asylum seekers' agentive potential requires that atte
the relation between diversity and commonality.16 The internatio
political construct - both in terms of an ever-unfolding relation
political project - embracing both community and the world. It is a his
or to be more precise, political history taking place and being crea
'togetherness of otherness'.17 Between the international and the lo
the social, the personal and the political, there is a constant dialectics,
reflected through the practices and relations that people enact and
what is going on in the world.18
The failed asylum seeker and the governmental politics of identificatio
Regarding refugees or asylum seekers as particular kinds of person

characteristics, even when well-meaning, strips the person from au
evidence and narrate their condition in politically relevant forums.19 A
argues, bureaucratic systems easily reduce refugees to 'pure' victim
even requiring, political passivity from them.20 Further still, we need
our own complicity in the corporeal struggle of (failed) asylum and in
seekers into passive objects of our 'hospitality'. If we assume that 'g
failed asylum seekers is the task of various refugee and asylum s
groups, we in fact distance ourselves and anyone listening from t
the asylum seeker's experience. Such a well-meaning debate easily
asylum seeker as a tragic subject whom might do nothing but fulfil th
15 See, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, 'La Comparution/The Compearance: From th

munism" to the Community of Existence', Political Theory, 20:3 (1992); Corpus (N
University Press, 2008), pp. 19-25; Martta Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation: C
and Its Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy's Philosophy (Helsinki: Helsinki U
House, 2007), pp. 72-7.
16 Here my examination is greatly inspired by Rob Walker's After the Globe, Before
Routledge, 2009), p. 29.
17 In contrast, see Wilhem S. Wurzer, 'Nancy and the Political Imaginary after N
Sheppard, Simon Sparks and Colin Thomas (eds), The Sense of Philosophy: O
(London: Routledge, 1997), p. 92.
18 Also see Boyu Chen, Ching-Chane Hwang, and Lily H. M. Ling, 'Lust/Caution in
World Politics with Culture as Method', Millennium: Journal of International S
p. 757.
19 See also Anne McNevin, 'Becoming Political: Asylum Seeker Activism through Community Theatre',
Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, 8 (2010), pp. 142-59.
20 Liisa Malkki, 'Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization', Cultural Anthro
pology, 11:3 (1996), pp. 384-7.

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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.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 domi
nance or resistance misses the ambiguity and mobility of social and political rela
tions.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'.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.24 Being labelled a failed asylum seeker
does not provide a substantial identity, from which political agency results.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.
21 Research on governmentality has gained a prominent position in IR. An interesting article examining
the limits of governmentality, both as a social theory and actuality, within the international has been
written by Jonathan Joseph, 'The Limits of Governmentality: Social Theory and the International',
European Journal of International Relations, 16:2 (2010), pp. 223-46.
22 Phillip Darby, 'Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial Rethinking of Relations International', Millen
nium: Journal of International Studies, 33:1 (2004), p. 26. On action that does not simply follow the
axis between resistance and domination, see also Howard Campbell and Josiah Heyman, 'Slantwise:
Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 31:1 (2007),
pp. 3-30.
23 See Nancy, Corpus, pp. 161-70.
24 Rygiel, 'Bordering Solidarities', pp. 4-5.
25 Not supposing identities to be substantial, according to Nancy, is to do right by identities. He sees the
task being enormous and yet extremely simple; it is the task of a (political; my addition) culture remak
ing itself. Nancy notes that this task means mixing together again 'the various lines, trails, and skins,
while at the same time describing their heterogeneous trajectories and their webs, both those that are
tangled and those that are distinct'. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p. 147; also Ignaas Devisch, 'Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and
"the Size of Humanity" ', Law and Critique, 22:1 (2011), pp. 1-13; in contrast, see Zevnik, 'Sovereign-less
Subject', pp. 90-3.

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956 Eeva Puumula
Soran says that he thinks too much, but that he doesn't know how to expl
me. He tells that if I stayed at the centre for a night I would understand, i
shower there, I would understand, but not even the staff understands, or t
about it. When he gets to the point of taking a shower in the centre, I slip
that.' He looks at me and says, 'I know you don't, but then you would un
would you feel if you went to Kurdistan, and nobody would help you, talk
What would you think?' I tell him I would be sad, angry, bewildered and w
'Yes, and you could leave. What about me? Why do they take my fingerpr
they delete them? Where can I go?' (Field notes, 11 September 2006)
Soran considered his status unfair and unjust. In seeking asylum, he h

done nothing but lodged a claim in order to be recognised as a refuge
officials 'failed' him. As a result, he encountered a liminal status
his sense of justice. Thus he demanded another kind of response from
describing being beyond both return and accommodation, needed
the relation that had been imposed between us through a politica
Soran did not invite me to elaborate on my private feelings that
'refugee experience' might arise. Rather he pointed out the mora
personal and yet political action that such an experience gives ris
distress was admitted as politically relevant.26 His protest made m
were not politically separate subjects, but that in a way I was a
being made a failed asylum seeker. We came to be only together,
another. My encounter with Soran affected me profoundly. What
experience of being exposed to the limits of my being and having to
those others who are brought into being with the Finnish political pr
Tellingly, Soran pointed out my reluctance to change places w
together with many others, privileged enough to trust in the freedo
that the Finnish state promises. Yet, the same state denied Soran
mately, however, my status as a Finnish citizen was just as pre
condition, although for the moment our situations did not begin
meeting with Soran functions as a point of depature for an exami
state and the system of modern states have come to frame the possib
sities of political life. Everybody is expected to belong to a state, to h
The state also structures our accounts of who we are, who we mu
must become as political beings capable of acting in the modern
extent it is, thus, true that the failed asylum seekers are deprived of
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.
26 The intertwining of personal and political has been discussed and its underpinnings charted within IR,
but yet 'personal' suffering and emotional distress are often regarded politically uninteresting or irrele
vant. For a different interpretation, see Christina Zarowsky, 'Writing Trauma: Emotion, Ethnography,
and the Politics of Suffering among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia', Culture, Medicine und Psychiatry,
28:2 (2004), p. 201.
27 Walker, After the Globe, pp. 57-8.

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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.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'.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.30 Therefore, claiming to know something about the lives that
'failed asylum seekers' lead is not a simple deal, but doing so evokes complex rela
tionalities 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.31 Thus, ontological descriptions of being-in-common are never contempla
tions 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.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
28 In contrast, see Erin Manning, 'Beyond Accommodation: National Space and Recalcitrant Bodies',
Alternatives, 25:1 (2000), pp. 51-74; Judith Butler, 'Giving an Account of Oneself', Diacritics, 31:4
(2001), pp. 22-40.
29 John H. Gagnon, 'The Self, Its Voices, and Their Discord', in Carolyn Ellis and Michael G. Flaherty
(eds), Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992), p. 235.
30 Francis Fischer, 'Jean-Luc Nancy: the place of a thinking', in Sheppard, Sparks, and Thomas (eds). The
Sense of Philosophy, p. 35.
31 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 179; Devisch, 'Doing Justice to Existence', p. 6.
32 Mika Ojakangas, 'Philosophies of "Concrete" Life: From Carl Schmitt to Jean-Luc Nancy', Telos, 132
(2005), pp. 42-5.

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958 Eeva Puumala
through their movements, people enact political potential that is not a

the current political discourse or thought. Failed asylum seekers ha
multiform ways of contesting the practices and ideas as well as disr
tions of the spatiotemporal logic on which international relations
Their bodies are both created by the politics of the international and c
international as a bodily process. Political life unfolds when bodies
and 'the political' begins to take form and be sensed on the surface of
Political agency revisited: agentive body politic
With regard to the international, the presence of the failed asylum

fluid and ambiguous political relationalities in terms of both space and
people exceed the perceived limits of political life and gesture towa
tional, and overlapping political spaces and authorities. Their agen
already political, but never free from the sphere of politics. I call this
standing of political agency 'agentive body politic'. The failed asylu
tive body politic challenges static notions of identity and belongin
occurring in a fixed, stable framework, it creates that very framewor
If it is assumed that people sharing the same status form a comm
which they can form their subjectivity and from which they can a
position, the failed asylum seekers are denied the possibility to constru
as political agents because in the current political imaginary their
intelligible only by making them appear common.34 Another equa
approach is to sweep the effects of the label aside and replace them wi
a cosmopolitan or global humanity; this equals not taking note of
power that inevitably restrict the failed asylum seekers' agency. T
bodies does not imply neglecting the sphere of power relations,
always caught up. Thus, Nancy's thought does not evacuate or annihilat
and relations of power. Rather, his ontology is a call to remedy op
differentials by mobilising counter-energies, which however must
to become totalising and oppressive in turn.35
I would suggest scrutinising the limit between the international and
body as an extremely active site, undoubtedly only one of the many po
which the exploration of possibilities of political life can begin. Such a
privilege the real and the apparent, but illustrates a potential and b
that emanates from the moving, sensing, and experiencing body and th
an understanding of the political that every body is. Let Soran he
claim concrete:
'I am not happy. [E]verybody here treats us bad. Everybody hates us.' Omar
with Soran and me just in time to hear his lament. 'You cannot say that, Sor
'Not everybody hates us. You cannot generalize like that. Not everybody her
bad, we just live here [in the reception centre], and that affects us.' Soran no
seem convinced. (Field notes, 11 September 2006)
33 See also Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Differenc
After the Globe, pp. 20-1.
34 In contrast, see Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Min
of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 62-3.
35 See also Fred Dallmayr, 'An "inoperative" global community? Reflections on N
Sparks, and Thomas (eds), The Sense of Philosophy, p. 183.

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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, inter
vened 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'.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.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.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.39 We are always free for the unexpected,
or in other words we infinitely resist politics, if politics signals the appropriation of
essences.40 The relation between the bodily, the political, and the international is
36 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 200.
37 Paul Sullivan and John McCarthy, 'Toward a Dialogical Perspective on Agency', Journal for the
Theory of Social Behaviour, 34:3 (2004), p. 303.
38 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing GestureslProducing Culture (London & Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 199.
39 Also Dallmayr, 'An "inoperative" global community?', in Sheppard, Sparks, and Thomas (eds), The
40 Wurzer, 'Nancy and the Political Imaginary after Nature', in Sheppard, Sparks, and Thomas (eds), The

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960 Eeva Puumula
revealed to be a process, a set of various practices and struggles. T

seeker's body is, then, a point of intersection where all of thes
together and unfold.
The multiple sites, practices, and forms of political agency
Writing about failed asylum seekers' agentive body politic as it ta

their bodies, movements, and voices, in a political context and as
tial, requires placing emphasis on multiple sites of political activ
political activity that are not often associated with visible (sovereign)
the establishment of relations that exceed or interrupt sovereign
asylum seekers' agentive body politic challenges the spatiotempor
the international has been built. And yet that body politic does not t
evade the effects of that logic.41 The potentiality of the failed asylu
agency lies in understanding that being displaced fosters a particular t
which makes asylum seekers highly attuned to and conscious of the f
social and political structures upon which they stand.42 It is wort
more in detail the way failed asylum seekers put notions of the inter
The possibility of identity, in Nancy's thought, is necessarily relat
others and the world, which signals that identities are shared betwee
ing the element of sharing Nancy plays with the double sense of
partage as both an act of sharing and dividing. In terms of the i
word play becomes meaningful, when we bear in mind that both elem
sality and particularity are present in the notion; the international r
political act of sharing and dividing. However, bodies that are divided
nationalities, statuses, and positions are yet joined together in th
condition. Thus they are all equally political and capable of polit
their ways of engagement and articulation may differ.43 The words
asylum applicant is expected to characterise their experience migh
to the lived reality which they inhabit. Furthermore, some words ma
tions and references that one is not willing to accept or that mak
contradictory. The asylum seeker might, in fact, anchor their identi
different manner than what the political subject secured by the
the state assumes. We easily turn the asylum seeker into a homo s
has nor can adopt a political voice.
The failed asylum seeker's voice remains always somewhat open
and meaning cannot be fixed. In failed asylum seekers' agentive b
are echoes of various other discourses and voices, as well as traces
Agency is not monological and 'blind to the diversity of other vo
41 This claim resonates closely with discussions surrounding resistance and governm
Campbell and Heyman, 'Slantwise', pp. 3-30; Shaminder Takhar, 'Expanding the Bo
Activism', Contemporary Politics, 13:2 (2007), pp. 123-37; Zevnik, 'Sovereign-less S
and Joseph, 'The Limits of Governmentality', pp. 223-46.
42 Kim Huynh, 'Refugeeness: What's So Good and Not So Good about Being Perse
Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, 8 (2010), p. 54.
43 In contrast, see Charlotte Epstein, 'Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the
international polities', European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2010), p.

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through the value placed in these voices and the role given to them.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 interac
tion, 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 con
nections 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
44 John McCarthy, Paul Sullivan, and Peter Wright, 'Culture, Personal Experience and Agency', British
Journal of Social Psychology, 45:2 (2006), p. 430.

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962 Eeva Puumala
grasp the grip of politics on his body through my presence. It make

trated, undetermined agency, which is directed more at creating a s
point and speaking position than advocating a single cause. As Sulliva
opine, activity can be expressed through weighing up alternativ
committing one over the other.45 This puts potentiality at the centre
voice actively ponders his body's potential for action through movem
neously in interacting with my voice it creates complex corpore
junctures of responsibility and relationality.
Soran opposes the official reading of his presence in the Finnish so
first frustrated and then angry. By expressing his anger he tries to
tration to me. Under the conditions of failed asylum, anger an
directed at everything that makes the story of that particular body
ble.46 In voicing his anger Soran expresses political agency, which in
emotional and private. This interpretation of mine counters the
that anger (passion) is an irrational force that obstructs, annih
political agency.47 Yet, this agency is always plural as anger is a com
relations that have been constructed between bodies through th
Therefore, anger manifests hopes, fears, and grievances. Underst
agentive position is easier, when the failed asylum seekers' profo
distrust and their fear for their lives are kept in mind. If we take a
on a unified object, we miss the force of that agency together with
the failed asylum seekers present.48 It is crucial that we learn to
others without turning it into defensiveness of our own positions, n
that anger exposes the limits of our being.49
Anger might actually be the political sentiment par excellence, an
neglected in its philosophical mode.50 Besides the Finnish asylu
anger is directed at a particular operationalisation of the internation
as well as at the political instrumentalisation of the human body
traces of earlier experiences of injustice, which intertwine with a se
vulnerability, and powerlessness. Therefore, anger brings out em
and relationalities that are inadmissible and intolerable. In fact,
and resistance to where he has been placed represent a step tha
that can be accomplished reasonably - in order to open possible
negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising v
anger, politics, and communities created through current policie
but 'accommodation and trade in influence'.51
Anger as an agentive position keeps the body verbal. It attempts t
the political project that has immobilised it, but on its own terms. T
45 Sullivan and McCarthy, 'Toward a Dialogical Perspective of Agency', pp. 295,

46 See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Un
pp. 174-5.
47 See, for example, Kimberly Dugan and Jo Reger, 'Voice and agency in social movement outcomes',
Qualitative Sociology, 29:4 (2006), p. 470. For a different interpretation see, however, Andrew Ross,
'Why they don't hate us: emotion, agency and the politics of "anti-americanism" ', Millennium: Journal
of International Studies, 39:1 (2010), pp. 109-25.
48 Ross, 'Why they don't hate us', pp. 117, 120.
49 Ahmed, The Politics of Emotion, p. 178.
50 See Nancy, 'La comparution/the compearance', p. 375; also Zarowsky, 'Writing trauma', p. 201.
51 Nancy, 'La comparution/the compearance', p. 375.

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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.52 The interval is the space between us,
which makes 'us' possible. It reflects the sense that all being is being towards some
thing, meaning that senses emerge out of relations between singular beings.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, char
acterises 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 indi
vidual. 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.54
52 Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation, p. 15; also Jacques Derrida, On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 111-30.
53 Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation, p. 76; Nancy, Inoperative Community, pp. 9-10, 27-8.
54 See Kim Hewitt, Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1997), p. 122; Erica Reischer and Kathryn S. Koo, 'The Body Beautiful: Sym
bolism and Agency in the Social World', Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), p. 303.

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964 Eeva Puumala
Benaz is a journalist by training. While in Finland he has written a book on

hair affects you negatively here: I look outside and see the other building wh
to myself are living in their own flats where they have their own showers an
then I think about myself and us living here in this centre. Why do we have to
with 15-16 other people? Why can't we have the same life as Finns? Couldn't
fit into Finland?' He explains that when he meets with the staff, who tell hi
thing, he smiles, but inside he is extremely angry. He would like to shout. B
thing that he finds especially upsetting: 'I take showers, and I clean my room
[the staff] come to my room [there are regular room checks in the centre], put
to protect themselves and start sorting through my rubbish. I am clean, why
gloves on?' Benaz tells that he cannot get into bars, because they ask for his
the resident's card from the centre. It is not an official document, and hence
accept it. 'Then they ask me to leave. People here do not want to touch you
hair or skin colour,' he adds. (Field notes, 24 August 2006)
During our discussion Benaz often elevated his voice and gestured w
frustration and anger obvious. Instead of suggesting that the story is
newly developed awareness of the restrictions to movement and th
action, I claim that Benaz's gestures and movement indicate him
sense of those forms of power that become operative when the bod
politically.55 Benaz does not become suddenly aware of the restric
his body, but perceives the political power at work in relation to and o
of his body. Yet his body is capable of changing its direction, (s)pa
The body unfolds constantly, and in this sense it always outdoes so
that seeks to fix it firmly on a grid. Benaz's agentive body politic, eve
times took on even gruesome verbal and corporeal forms (below in
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 a
disturbance by lowering his pants in public. He is also suspected of setting of
fire alarms in the centre. When the staff has taken things up with him, Bena
a bohemian character and if the staff tries to restrict him, he has a knife in
might kill himself but he wants that his eyes are sent back to his home country
tries to restrict him he might get his knife and slit somebody's throat and take
back to his room. At times he is really stable and friendly, but in a couple of
come to the office and start miaowing there. He is unpredictable, and the staf
certain of the state of his mental health. (Field notes, 1 September 2006)
In my interpretation Benaz's hostility to the practices of surveilla

movement, and requirements to behave in a particular manner exh
However, I do not intend to suggest that the kind of action to wh
threatening or assaulting others - is in any way laudable or justified. M
in fact, does not concern Benaz's acts in themselves at all. Rather,
iour that happens in wanton disregard of the regulative ambitions and
effects of that behaviour to illustrate a protest against the rationale th
him and views his presence and body strictly in terms of a political or
himself is not ready to accept. Benaz's agency and gestures thus m
cognition, from a sense of dislocation that the loss of control causes.
As the failed asylum seekers contest, resist, and interrupt the w
plinary mechanisms through their irregular movements, they keep th
55 Lila Abu-Lughod, 'The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Pow

Women', American Ethnologist, 17:1 (1989), p. 49.

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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.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 resis
tance 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.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.58 In
other words, gestures and movement are aesthetic and political stances, which con
test and exceed the ideas and practices 'associated with the singular, the original,
the uniform, the central authority, the hierarchy'.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
56 See Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 132.

57 See Jocelyn Solis, 'Narrating and counternarrating illegality as an identity', in Colin Daiute and Cynthia
Lightfoot (eds), Narrative Analysis: Studving the Development of Individuals in Society (London: Sage,
2004), p. 197.
58 Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 8. Within Inter
national Relations Nevzat Soguk has presented the idea of passage and connected it with migrancy,
see 'Poetics of a world of migrancy: migratory horizons, passages, and encounters of alterity', Global
Society, 14:3 (2000), p. 433.
59 Krim Benterrak, Benjamin Muecke, and Paddy Roe, Reading The Country: Introduction to Nomadology
(Fremantle WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), p. 15, cited in Paul Muldoon, 'Between speech
and silence: the postcolonial critic and the idea of emancipation', Critical Horizons, 2:1 (2001), p. 46.

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966 Ee va Puumula
interventions into the social reality in Finland. These interventions

ordinates of what is perceived to be possible; they require us to sta
unexpected.
Furthermore, Benaz's story illustrates that also vulnerability is, from another per
spective, 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.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 communi
cate grief, distress, and the pain caused by politics, they suggest a critical engagement
and relation between variously categorised bodies.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 mean
ing 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 power
ful 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 com
munity, but about the political that the body is, or about the ontological condition
of the body, which is political.
60 Zarowsky, 'Writing Trauma', pp. 198-9.

61 In contrast, see Kate Schick, 'Acting out and Working Through: Trauma and (In)security', Review of
International Studies, 34:4 (2011), pp. 1837-55.

143.107.3.225 on Mon, 18 Jul 2022 14:12:30 UTC
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.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.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'.64 The demand of their agentive body politic goes
well beyond the scope of the contemporary political debates around migratory move
ments. 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 under
mine 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 philo
sophically 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 per
spective, seeks to do nothing less than to interpret and transform the political organ
isation of the world again and anew.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
62 Within the context of Palestinian intifada Laura Junka, 'Camping in the Third Space: Agency, Repre
sentation, and the Politics of Gaza Beach', Public Culture, 18:2 (2006), p. 359, has presented a similar
interpretation.
63 Noland, Agency and Embodiment, p. 185.
64 Linda Tabar, 'Memory, Agency, Counter-narrative: Testimonies from Jenin Refugee Camp', Criticalarts,
21:1 (2007), p. 17.
65 Jean-Luc Nancy, 'Banks, Edges, Limits (of Singularity)', Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8:2
(2004), p. 53.

143.107.3.225 on Mon, 18 Jul 2022 14:12:30 UTC
968 Eeva Puumala
urge us to think of the international not as a static constellation

process that is constantly negotiated, debated, resisted, and enact
simultaneously. Within such an imaginary the international bec
plural spacing: a matter of co-appearing bodies that cannot be r
tiality. In terms of International Relations this suggests exploring, b
fact and reason, also the tactile and sensual.

143.107.3.225 on Mon, 18 Jul 2022 14:12:30 UTC

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Political life beyond accommodation and return: rethinking relations between the

political, the international, and the body

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