It hit the headlines recently that the Mumbai Corporation draped many slums in the city with curtains and posters ahead of G20 Summit in an attempt to hide the ‘unaesthetic’ life worlds of slum dwellers from G20 delegates. Such acts, despite the social, political, and ethical questions they raise, have become another news item for the world to consume and be forgotten about. Media discussions around building walls in Ahmedabad to cover slums ahead of US President Trump’s visit in 2020 or slum evictions as part of the beautification mission in Delhi ahead of the Commonwealth games in 2010 are already buried in the shadows of the past. Evident under such deplorable acts are the politics of modern human life and the split that it entails- lives that are worthy of living versus lives that can be left to die or can be invisiblized. In the words of French anthropologist Didier Fassin, ‘politics of life’ is the ‘politics that give specific value and meaning to human life’ and one of its main features is the ‘dialectic between lives to be saved and lives to be risked’ (Fassin, 2007, p.500). He differentiates it from Foucauldian biopolitics for the latter’s concern is about ‘the regulation of population’ through ‘technologies of power’ but the former is about ‘evaluation of human beings and the meaning of their existence’ (p.500, 501) in its most fundamental form. Fassin’s understanding of human life and the division of it has been influenced by several scholars in the fields of social theory and political philosophy, some of whose works are discussed below.

Consider the work by Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian historian and political theorist, on Necropolitics. Questioning whether Foucault’s account of biopower is sufficient to understand contemporary politics, Mbembe asks, ‘What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembé & Meintjes, 2003, p.12). Making a case to understand politics as the work of death, he critiques the dominant understanding of modernity and politics through ideas of reason, freedom, equality, autonomy and collective communication and recognition. Sovereignty in the aforesaid dominant reading of modern politics is constructed based on the assumption that the subject is the author of one’s own life which in turn facilitates processes of ‘self-institution’ and ‘self-limitation’. Such normative reading of politics and sovereignty, for Mbembe, ignores other logics of modernity that are characterized by the instrumentalization and destruction of human lives. Therefore, in contrast to the dominant philosophical discourses that consider ‘reason as the truth of the subject’, Mbembe calls for less abstract and more tangible foundational categories such as life and death to understand modernity. In such framing ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a  large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (p.11), though the specific mechanics of necropolitics- the subjugation of life to the power of death -differ in modern, late-modern, and contemporary times. Furthermore, in such forms of social existence, a ‘large number of people are bound to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (p.40, emphasis original).

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of bare life and homo sacer are critical concepts that situate the politics and necropolitics of life that Fassin and Mbembe are further theorising. In his famous book, ‘Homo sacer, sovereign power and bare life’ by Agamben (1998), he discusses two terms in the Greek tradition that expresses the meaning of the word, ‘life’. These words, Agamben argues, though have the same etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: one, ‘zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)’ and two, ‘bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ (p.1). For Aristotle, as Agamben points out, the split was between ‘the simple fact of living (zēn) and politically qualified life (to eu zēn)’ (p.2). Drawing from the works of Foucault and Arendt, he highlights the dominant narrative that ‘the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis- the politicization of bare life as such- constitutes the decisive event of modernity’ (p.4) and thereby the discourse of biopolitics.

Agamben critiques Foucault’s rejection of the traditional approach based on juridico-institutional models to study power in favour of understanding technologies of the self; and argues that in Foucault’s work, the point of intersection at which ‘the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power’ (p.6) is unclear though briefly referred to. Agamben attempts to theorise this intersection by claiming that ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’ (p.6) and problematizing the binaries that characterise modern democracy. The question he poses to western politics in this light is, ‘what is the relation between politics and life if life presents itself as what is included by means of an exclusion?’ (p.6) is a crucial one for understanding the politics of life in modern times. Agamben furthers his thesis using the figure of homo sacer – ‘(sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (p.8). The bare life of homo sacer citizen that gets included in politics only through exclusion is for Agamben constitutes the new biopolitical body of humanity and aporia of modern democracy of which totalitarianism, capitalist hedonism and mass consumerism are all witnesses.

Agamben explains,

The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoē in the polis-which is, in itself, absolutely ancient – nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead, the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. (p.9)

While Agamben highlights the significance of Arendt’s conception around the emergence of ‘homo laboran’ (in turn biological/natural life as such) and dissolution of the political realm as signifying modernity, he critiques that Arendt fails to integrate her work of human condition with that of totalitarianism and that the latter lack a biopolitical perspective on modernity. Yet, other scholars have pointed out that Agamben’s interpretations of both Foucault and Arendt are not fully correct  (see Braun, 2021; Suuronen, 2018). For instance, Braun (2021) points out that Foucault, in the last part of The History of Sexuality (1980) and other lectures at the Collège de France (1976) has referred to totalitarianism and the politics of life that defines it. Moreover, Foucault’s conception of power over life and living beings is ‘not so much the life people live, the life story, the biography, but rather the zoe-aspect of their existence’ (p.124). Similarly, Braun points out that Arendt deeply engages with the question of life and its politics through the figure of ‘homo laboran’ who is merely involved in ‘necessities of life and the ongoing circle of consumption and reproduction’ (p.124) and the ‘rise of the social’ which indicates ‘degradation of individual lives to mere means of sustaining and feeding the economy’ (p.125). In these senses, it is argued that the political zoefication of humans and its significance for modern democracy have been central concerns for both Foucault and Arendt, although they differ in their levels of optimism. The latter offers hope and alternative politics through action and natality.

Returning to the present, Veena Das offers a significant conceptual development in the theorization around life and margins by shifting the vantage point of analysis from grand abstractions around politics of life such as that by Agamben to everyday messiness, complexities, and negotiations. There is an explicit attempt in her work to engage with the agency of people inhabiting the margins beyond the politics of life in totalitarian states, refugee camps, war zones and other such sites of straightforward exceptions. Das & Poole (2004) challenge the dominant conception of socio-spatial margins as ‘sites of disorder where the state has been unable to impose its order’ (p.8). Such dominant conception, the authors’ critique, draws theoretical strength from foundational theorists of state such as Max Weber for whom the state is a legitimate agency of violence and the ‘state of nature’ that human beings are inclined to be a threat to the rational organization of the state. In their attempt to the foreground, the significance of anthropology at the margins of the state, Das & Poole discuss three concerns around the concept of margins: one, direct and indirect technologies of power that the state employs to convert people on the margins as lawful subjects; two, interactive space between state and margins created through practices of legibility and documentation; and three, politics as a domain where ‘life’ is put into question.

As can be seen, the scope of analysis of politics of life and margins that the authors draw upon is distinct from that of scholars such as Agamben though there are various points of inspiration from their body of work. For instance, Das & Poole acknowledge that ideas from Agamben’s work such as law producing some bodies as killable; margins as constitutive of the state rather than it is an outlier; and the existence of practices that are simultaneously inside and outside the law are central concerns of their work. To situate this in the light of the event shared at the beginning of the article if margins were simply outliers of the state or were simply outside the law, the Mumbai corporation did not have to take the pains of disguising them but could have just eliminated them.

For Veena Das, margins are also not an inert site and people at margins are not incapable of engaging in a deliberative form of politics (Das, 2011; Das & Poole, 2004). In such formulation, the initial analysis of slums being covered up only as a deplorable act of governmentality does not reveal the other side of the truth about how margins engage with such aesthetic techniques of the state on an everyday basis. It is also through the focus on every day that Das’s theorization is distinct from the ‘canonical status of resistance’ (Das & Poole, 2004) attributed to margins in prominent social theory. While drawing from the critical contributions of Foucault and Agamben, for Veena Das, the primary focus is on the significance of anthropological knowledge construction that engages with studying ‘particular genealogies and histories of the modes of sociality’ and thereby how ‘desires, hopes and fears shape the experience of the biopolitical state of knowledge’ (p.30).

Many studies in contemporary urban anthropology point out such agential engagements at the margins. For instance, consider the issue of legibility and documentation as an important marker of state and exclusionary force at the margins. Srivastava (2014) points to an important trend in the light of obtaining paper documents of identity and the resulting negotiation with the state. Situated in contexts of uncertainty and precarity, he shows how and why people at urban margins engage in the culture of duplication and faking to become subjects of governmentality. Through these engagements, people and the state establish each other’s identities because the relationship between the state and people at the margins is of ‘double bind’ in nature- ‘of wanting and not wanting the state’ (p.55). Bhan (2016) points out a similar trend that slum residents aspire towards having a ‘paper trail of their lives- on the one hand, they existed only in the paper as far as the state is concerned, on the other hand, they invested a great deal in existing on paper’ (p.10). Routray’s (2022) latest work highlights that the complex spectrum of ‘rann-nitis’ of the poor against the ‘quotidian practices of the state’ is simultaneously ‘vital, messy, and deeply politicized’. In his own words, ‘the rann-nitis are complex and labyrinthine mazes of tactics and counter-tactics. If statecraft is marked by absurd, exclusionary, and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures, the poor then operate to ensure that they are indeed counted to stake claims to a panoply of citizenship entitlements’ (p.19).

In the aftermath of the pandemic, politics of life and margins have come to our attention like never before – be it through the tragic displacement of migrants, letting people die for lack of oxygen,  pervasive surveillance employed by the state or through technologizing the already exclusionary schooling landscape. In fact, many people died in the country during the pandemic not only because of the virus but also because of the tragic mismanagement of life and death. The pandemic is thus only a limit point of whitewashing the slum in the past, present, and future. Engaging with such politics of life in the contemporary necessitates then encounters with the fundamental split in human life, the deaths it fabricates, everyday agential strategies at the margins and perhaps also straightforward pursuit of individual and collective resistance. Arendt too may rescue us today and hence ending the note with her hope on natality as articulated in the essay, ‘The Crisis in Education’ (Arendt, 1961, p.196).

 …natality: the fact that we have all come into the world by being born and that this world is constantly renewed through birth. Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Acknowledgements

The literature reviewed in the article around politics of life and margins is explored as part of a larger project titled Education, Margins and City: Examining the Linkages through an Ethnographic Exploration funded by The Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures -TESF (UKRI/ESRC) anchored at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore.

References:

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought. Viking Press.

Bhan, G. (2016). In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship, and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. University of Georgia Press.

Braun, K. (2021). Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Biopolitics, Time and Totalitarianism. In K. Braun, Biopolitics and Historic Justice: Coming to Terms with the Injuries of Normality (pp. 121–140). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839445501-006

Das, V. (2011). State, citizenship, and the urban poor. Citizenship Studies, 15(3–4), 319–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2011.564781

Das, V., & Poole, D. (2004). State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. In V. Das & D. Poole (Eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (pp. 3–33). Oxford University Press.

Fassin, D. (2007). Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life. Public Culture, 19(3), 499–520. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-007

Mbembé, J.-A., & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

Routray, S. (2022). The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi. Stanford University Press.

Srivastava, S. (2014). Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon. OUP Catalogue. https://ideas.repec.org/b/oxp/obooks/9780198099147.html

Suuronen, V. (2018). Resisting Biopolitics: Hannah Arendt as a Thinker of Automation, Social Rights, and Basic Income. Alternatives, 43(1), 35–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0304375418789722

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Vijitha Rajan is a faculty member at the School of Education, Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. Before joining the university in 2020, Vijitha was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Delhi (2015−2020). In 2018 -19, she was a Commonwealth Scholar at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Her doctoral research is on understanding the educational exclusion of migrant children and foregrounds the discord between mobile childhoods and immobile schools in the Indian context.