The relationship that obtains between politics and security entitles one to the other wholly such that

dynamic transforms from a matter of difference and separation to grounding and mediality whereby
all politics is a politics of security and all security is a securing through politics. The medial function of
politics enunciates security as an evasive, elusive, yet essential securing of more than just bodies, life,
or even the discretion of power. Modern politics occasions security as the founding measure of its
total understanding. Positioning it at the horizon of and ground for certitude, modern politics
formulates security as a pursuit, never given but always sought, thus prolonging its own vital necessity.
In its turn, as the ground and pursuit, security projects upon politics the discourses that secure it as
the fundament of politics, thus fastening a binding, reproducing knot between the contents and the
form, closing the distance whereby one escapes the other, reinforcing the logic whereby one
exaggerates the other. Nowhere does this hold greater veracity than for an understanding of
international politics, which only begins at the end – the end of rationality, knowability, and
governability – and extends past the limit of certitude into a zone of persistent, radical uncertainty
wherein unfolds a theatre of a groundless pursuit. Groundless because this politics itself declares that
the pursuit of what it pursues is always already lost to lawless manoeuvres of survival and self-
preservation. Against this understanding the discourses of international politics situate security as an
event deferred, the passage to which leads through insecurity, a prolonged moment darkened by the
long shadow of unknowable dangers. This prolonged moment of the pursuit of security, or in “securing
security” as Michael Dillon refers to it, is now a moment of banal, everyday insecurity, of negotiating
the embodied performances it commissions, of justifying the vulnerabilities it delivers as a function of
a future security that it may someday engender, of knowing via the categories of classification it
fosters, of serving the suspicion that arises in the wake of this interminable moment of insecurity.

The politics of international subjection and abjection finds its ground in this lingering insecurity. This
is a curious terrain of politics; for one, it confounds the separation between sovereign power and
biopower. Relentless channels of information, aggressive systems of separation, the explosion of
global identities that are nevertheless subordinated to the sovereign rule, this politics has by sheer
scale and force entwined everyday human life with technologies of international segregation and
security with the nation-state at the centre. The central puzzle is that while all technologies of security
have isolated the body as their object, with the regime of security being ordered around bodily cues,
the tenor of the international yet remains disembodied. That is, there are few theoretical overtures
that attempt to develop a language for the everyday embodied experience of the international. This
politics continues to fashion itself as the rupture, in terminologies of magnanimity, disenfranchising
the increasingly banal occurrence and experience of the securitising politics of the international.

This paper seeks to argue for a theory of international subjection and abjection that locates its primary
focus on the body, in an attempt to advance an understanding of the body in the international. The
argument here is that the embodiment in the international is an intertextual economy, brought into
being by discourses on borders. But not to stop at looking at the body as a mere discursive
construction, this paper argues for a conception of becoming by identifying the border-body intertext
– a con-constitutive relation where the both write the limits of the other. Borders and the body are
understood here to be ceaselessly signifying, corroding, circumscribing, and inscribing each other,
intimately, locally, and globally. In-turn, it is this intertext that informs the discourses of security which
further find ground in an inter-national politics as the evasive fulcrum of its deeds. And yet, it is this
intertext which underwrites the obverse of this power, a fundamental unknowability that marginally
exceeds the full grasp of knowledge, reversing, obtruding, and upturning its formidable boundaries.
This paper furthers endeavours to conceptualise the figure of the ‘refugee’ through this intertext. The
refugee arrives into the context of the international from a complex interface of the body and borders.
Before being a crisis, an event, a condition, a compromise, the refugee is a body in conversation, albeit
impermissible, with borders. Borne of threat, fraught by movement, a body catapulted into suspicion.
The refugee is a body in emergence par excellence. This is a body essentially without a location or
positionality, one that has lost its “referential direction”, coming into being not only in movement but
as movement. A transitory, transitional body arriving into and as a constellation of non-guarantees;
survival, death, loss, dislocation, waiting, statelessness, citizenship, return. The body of the refugee is
continuous in its discontinuity, always in a disavowed relation with its own foundering movement,
traversing but never reaching. The exemplar ‘in-betweeness’ that weaves much of modern self-
understanding in worlds nurtured by shifts, fluidities, movements, and transitions.

In the following discussion, this paper first develops the border-body intertext by drawing from
Butler’s theory of performative materiality, to build on a deeper understanding of the politics of
international subjection and abjection. From here this paper turns to a conceptual understanding of
the refugee. A twofold purpose underlies this project. First, to inquire into how, in the politics of the
international, the most intensive location of subjectivity is circumscribed upon the body through the
productive centrality afforded to borders in the discourses of nation-state around security and
movement. The attempt is to recover the body, an understanding for and of it, for the experience of
the international. Secondly, by conceptualising the refugee through the body, this paper seeks to
locate pathways other than those of passive voiceless victimhood, such pathways that may enable
going beyond mere stipulations of victimhood and suffering. This paper intends to show how
embodying the abject, the refugee also simultaneously occupies the inadvertent zone of excess
leading power to contend with its own, however marginal, subversion.