The Residual Migrant

Abstract

Through a focus on corruptive seawater, this essay restores the underwater dimensions of borders – their verticality, reaching into the maritime depths, and their biopolitical devastation of drowned migrant bodies. Intersecting Achille Mbembe’s concepts of “necropolitics” and “borderization” with recent theoretical work in critical ocean studies and feminist new materialism, I examine the kinds of readjustments a focus on water as corrosive agent imposes on readings of the biopolitical foreclosure of “illegalized” life, and on conceptions of the sea as a necropolitical space. I probe the enmeshment of seawater with the regimes of borderization enacted across the space of the sea. Reading the Mediterranean as an aqueous frontier spotlights the fraught relationship between clandestine migrants and the strictly enforced borders on which Europe’s sovereignty rests. Yet seawater represents more than the border space containing the fatal encounters between law and bodies; it is the very substance through which the deadly logic of borderization is enacted. Through seawater, irruptive migrant bodies seeking agency are drowned, dissolved and turned into residue through an amalgamating dynamic that blends them into their more-than-human, aqueous environment. Embracing the borders’ regime of negativity, they become “border-bodies” [corps-frontière] (Mbembe). By effecting the becoming-residue of drowned bodies on the site of the border, water brings to material, hyperbolic completion the logic of obliteration underpinning European sovereignty. Yet it concurrently calls into question the very notion of borderization as the residual ontologies developed in the wake of the drownings reveal sites of resistance and remanence that resist the necropolitics of borders. Through its longue durée assimilation into the geophysical, residuality thus morphs into a locus of contest, one where the power of biopolitical annihilation is interrupted.