To Make Live and Let Die: On Sovereignty and Vulnerability in the EU Migration Regime

Mareike Gebhardt

doi:10.33134/rds.323

Abstract

The paper discusses the intricate power systems working within the current EU migration regime. It analyzes how constructions of sovereignty and vulnerability become both racialized and gendered to dehumanize the ‘migrant other.’ In a first step, Foucault’s study on biopower and the birth of modern sovereignty as the right to make live and let die is compared to Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, shifting the focus from the management of (migrant) life to the management of (migrant) death. As sovereignty works through constructions of impermeability, the paper shows, in a second step, how Butler deconstructs sovereignty as a narcissistic fantasy and reconceptualizes vulnerability as empowering sharedness, not victimhood and passivity. Consequently, resistance might rise from vulnerability to fight those necro- and biopolitics that render racialized and gendered populations less grievable. Discussing grievability via visualizations of migrant drowning, humanitarian affectivity, and moral economies are complicit with the EU migration regime. Its politics of drowning leave racialized and gendered populations in the Mediterranean to die to maintain Europe’s putative sovereignty by which ‘Europe,’ eventually, becomes undone. From these fragmented leftovers, the paper concludes, the sharedness of vulnerability discloses and opens leeway for protest and a new beginning.

Highlights

In his lecture series Society Must be Defended from 1975–76, Michel Foucault (2003, 241) describes ‘one of the greatest transformations political right underwent’ during the 19th century: the shift from sovereignty as the ‘old right [...] to take life or let live’ to the ‘opposite right [...] to make live and to let die.’ To Foucault (2003, 239), this shift marks the ‘birth of biopower’ through which people are divided into those who must live and those who must die
That reminds us of Foucault’s definition of modern sovereignty. Based on this argumentative similarity, the paper traces Foucault’s and Butler’s discussion of the relationship between sovereignty and power as well as grievability and vulnerability to scrutinize the intricate power systems working within the current EU migration regime in which the migrant other becomes both racialized and gendered and dehumanized
The paper connects the theoretical concepts to visualizations of the tragic, such as the drowning migrant other, to show that they represent the racialized biopolitical apparatus of the EU

Summary

Introduction

In his lecture series Society Must be Defended from 1975–76, Michel Foucault (2003, 241) describes ‘one of the greatest transformations political right underwent’ during the 19th century: the shift from sovereignty as the ‘old right [...] to take life or let live’ to the ‘opposite right [...] to make live and to let die.’ To Foucault (2003, 239), this shift marks the ‘birth of biopower’ through which people are divided into those who must live and those who must die.

Results

Conclusion