Ce que disent les « vies nues »

Abstract

In the world of migration management, the label is an indispensable instrument for counting, filtering, identifying, classifying and controlling individuals in their mobility trajectory. For Giorgio Agamben, the lives of refugees, displaced persons and rejected asylum seekers lost in the semi-permanent limbo of IOM detention centres or UNHCR camps appear as 'bare lives' – lives whose political nature has been progressively denied and erased, leaving only their biological nature to emerge, without legal, social, economic or even political existence. However attractive this perspective may be, it seems to ignore not only the experience of migrant lives but also their capacity to make a difference. These lives are indeed permeated by emancipatory struggles for freedom of movement, for access to decent work, for the right to be the agent of one's own well-being, to carry the struggles of elders, to embody the memory of minority languages and cultures. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted since 2015 in official camps or informal settlements of migrants in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, this paper highlights this dual process of subjugation and subjectivation that seems to me to be at the heart of the question of mobility today. What is the symptom of Agamben's myth, which constitutes the implicit intellectual matrix of most international aid organisations? By abstractly considering migrant lives as 'bare lives', atoms without qualities, are we not basically playing into the hands of neoliberal political rationality, socially isolating and politically destructuring?

Keywords

• labels; Giorgio Agamben; myths; vulnerability; subjectivation; resistance