Combining the international with the singular: agentive body politic Failed asylum seekers’ presence no-w-here within the international exposes uid

and ambiguous political relationalities in terms of both space and time (cf. In-ayatullah & Blaney 2004: 44; Walker 2009: 20–21). The international is not an already existing space, a stable framework for or even just a particular project of political life, but an open-ended political process that comes to exist with singular bodies coming into presence together (cf. Inayatullah & Blaney 2004: 165–166).

Through a Nancian lens my work, then, constructs a collage of the ways in which the compearance of bodies, as singular plural beings, shapes the limits and rela-tions between the singular, the political and the international. I pursue this task by engaging with those ways in which the failed asylum seekers exceed the perceived limits of political life and gesture towards shared, relational and overlapping politi-cal spaces and authorities.

In this work the kind of acts count as political, which in their potential effect can be understood to contest, interrupt or exceed the logic of straight lines and articulate a condition of ‘with being’ or compearance between different bodies.

The adopted focus does away with the prerequisite of intentionality for an act to

be considered political. The failed asylum seekers seek to re-establish the bond severed by governmental processes and sovereign politics both of which signal the negligence of singular plurality. Their agency is always already political, but never free from the sphere of politics (cf. Manning 2007: 63). I call this speci c understanding of political agency ‘agentive body politic’. It does not privilege the real, but illustrates a potential politics that emanates from the moving, sensing and experiencing body and therefore marks an understanding of the political that every body is. The failed asylum seekers’ agentive body politic challenges static notions of identity and belonging, and instead of occurring in a xed, bounded framework, it creates that very framework.

Although there is no singular strategy or common identity on which agency is built and from which it arises, most debates concerning failed asylum seekers’

agency seem to assume that people sharing the same status form a community within which they can form their subjectivity and from which they can acquire a political (speaking) position (cf. Sudbury 2001; Butler 2004: 11; see also Piece III)⁴². Within this imagery the political community is an ultimate end, which is essentialized and put beyond question (see Nancy 1992, 2004a; Kellogg 2005;

Panelli & Welch 2005, 2007). In this politics failed asylum seekers cannot con-struct themselves as political agents because their bodies are made intelligible only by making them appear common (cf. Manning: 2007: 62). Another equally problematic approach is that the effects of the label are swept aside and replaced with claims about a cosmopolitan or global humanity. This is how the claims of particularity and universality enabled by the notion of the international materialise through the phenomenon of failed asylum. Both remaining with the “sticky sign”

(Ahmed 2004) and disregarding the label altogether would make my attempts of exploring the failed asylum seekers’ means of adopting political agency to no avail. Both approaches fail to scrutinise the political dynamics at work and ignore the question concerning what we take politics and political life to be, and where we expect to nd them (cf. Darby 2004: 1; Agier 2008: 64–65).

Within an imaginary that draws inspiration from Nancy’s thought, political agency is about the undulation of the body in relation to others – their being with one another – and the tensioning and loosening of these relations through engage-ment and through corporeal conjunctures no-w-here. My interest in the complex relations between the failed asylum seeker and the international means exploring bodies’ ontological compearance and both the international and the acting body as

42 Not supposing identities to be substantial, according to Nancy (2000: 147), is to do right by identi-ties. He sees the task being enormous and yet extremely simple; it is the task of a (political; my ad-dition) culture remaking 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 also Devisch 2011; cf. Zevnik 2009: 90–93.)

events of the political. The limit between the international and the (singular) body is an extremely active site, undoubtedly one of the many possible ones, in which the exploration of possibilities of political life can begin. Let Soran help me make this claim concrete:

Soran contends: “I am not happy. [E]verybody here treats us bad. Everybody hates us.”

Omar has come to sit with Soran and me just in time to hear Soran’s lament. “You can-not say that, Soran”, Omar objects. “Not everybody hates us. You cancan-not generalize like that. Not everybody here [in Finland] is bad, we just live here [in the reception centre], and that affects us.” Soran nods, but does not seem convinced.

(Field notes, September 11^th 2006)

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 (see Noland 2009: 199). Omar, however, countered Soran’s interpretation by spacing the problem and saying that hostility stems from their living in the centre. 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 (cf. Uçarer 2006; Squire 2009: 139; see also Pirjola 2009).

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 phi-losophy 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 (1993a: 200), does not “belong to the domain in which ‘knowledge’ and ‘non-knowledge’ are at stake”. Bodies belong to the domain of experience, which does not translate into truth sought in the asylum process. Therefore, even though the body being cat-egorised might signal an administrative closure, for the person a struggle over and of the body has merely begun. We are always free for the unexpected, or in other words we in nitely resist politics, if politics signals the appropriation of essences (Wurzer 1997: 98).

The ontology of bodies does not imply neglecting the sphere of power relations, in which we are always caught up (also Nancy 2004a: xxxvii). Thus, Nancy’s thought does not evacuate or annihilate the element and relations of power. Rath-er, his ontology is a call to remedy oppressive power differentials by mobilising counter-energies, which however must never be allowed to become totalising and oppressive in turn (also Dallmayr 1997: 183). With the emphasis it places on

open-ness, the ontology of the body offers an experience-based venue to the questions of agency and political existence within the international. In Nancy’s (1993c: 4) words experience signi es “being born to the presence of a sense, a presence it-self nascent, and only nascent”. It means going through, moving from one side to another (Nancy 2008: 97–103). Experience and body cannot be separated; it is al-ways a body that experiences. Hence, Nancy’s ontology persuades me to ask what it means to be(come) many, to be-with-one-another (cf. Piece I: section 1.2.).

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 af rmative 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 (also Dallmayr 1997: 193). Thus, as a ten-tative expression of compearance, the failed asylum seekers’ agentive body politic suspends both the claims of particularity and the claims of universalism within the sphere of the international.

The relation between sovereignty, the individual, the political and the interna-tional is revealed to be a process, a set of various practices and struggles, and the failed asylum seeker’s body is a point of intersection where all of these elements come together and unfold. 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 (see Noland 2009: 199; also Takhar 2007: 123). The body con-stantly exposes itself with multiple means, at various fronts – with, in relation to and towards others. Thus, it is not that the (failed) asylum seeker re-discovers his/

her agency and existence as a political body, but that s/he always has been capable of political agency and performed political acts (cf. Dolan 1995; Cavarero 2002).

When considering agency in the political – agentive body politic – the acts of saying and doing and the relationality and sharing that they establish are privi-leged. Accounts of failed asylum tell about the processes of making oneself, being made by others and the possibilities of becoming. These accounts resist reifying the state of being an asylum seeker into a de nite identi catory marker. Although the space of agency is not readily available for failed asylum seekers, by engaging with and relating to others they open this space, which however always remains in-complete and subject to change. Exploring the question of political life through the ontological body necessitates (re)framing skin and touch politically, and thinking of the international and its relations in terms of ‘the political’. Such a focus means moving from the politics of ‘in-common-being’ where the common is the essence of being and political existence, towards ‘being-in-common’ where being is what unites all people and constructs them as legitimate political bodies. It offers a way to explore critically the ontological foundations that give rise to our conceptions of

possible and meaningful ways of political participation and belonging as expres-sions of political life.

The body maintains its capacity to reach towards others even if it is rejected.

The challenge lies in understanding ‘with-being’, not only as ‘in relation to’, but as a ‘relation’ or ‘being-towards’, which is ontological. Because it puts into play the differences between presence and absence, inside and outside, self and other, the failed asylum seekers’ agentive body politic both reaf rms and calls into question – although not systematically – the system of metaphysical oppositions on which IR as a discipline was originally founded (cf. also Naas 1997: 73).