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 co-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.

The Border-Body Intertext

A border is an expression of a tendency to difference and separation. It simultaneously negates,

affirms, produces, disrupts, and transforms. A line on the map, a wall between two rooms,
skin on the flesh, the cover of a book, borders are everywhere. They signify existence via
making present. A border is more than simple expression of separation. It is a process of the
separation, a process of defining and withdrawing, of a continuous intimate negotiation and
relocation of ‘self’ from all the things, elements, bodies, events that are not the self. Waldenfels
(2011:15) speaks of an essential “self-referentiality” of bounding that rests on “self-
withdrawal”. The process of the boundary is of one thing separating itself from another and
thus this process itself is not one thing or another but a place of neither here nor there. The self
emerges as an “inside that separates itself from an outside and thus produces a preference in
the difference”, positing that “that which separates itself is being marked, while that from
which it separates itself remains unmarked” (Waldenfels 2011: 15). The self-referentiality rests
in the aspect of the withdrawal of the self, as the ‘unmarked’ unknown is enunciated from the
inside. The act of making a boundary, and thus the boundary itself, as well as the self, consist
in this self-withdrawal, both reflecting that which was withdrawn from and the withdrawal too.
The border then is a continuous, ongoing negotiation of the self and its withdrawal from the
emergent unmarked. It’s the site of an intimate retrieval of a sense of being, framed not in
opposition but negation. Borders themselves are not the matter of difference, but the
inaugurating emergence that communicate presence by making appear the ‘here’ in the ‘there’,
the ‘this’ in the ‘that’, the ‘us’ in the ‘them’, and the ‘you’ in the ‘I’. They express not mere
absence of one in the other but make possible both by reflecting one in the other. As a process
of separation the border founds in the self a trace of that which it separates from, by virtue of
mediation with and separation from. That is, the border as process invigorates the self, in every
instance of separation, with a repetitious imprint of each separation, a distinctive sense to refer
back to in every future enunciation of the self.
Borders by virtue of their essential function of marking separation are infinite, omnipresent,
varied, and conflictual. In the politics of the international borders are the necessary sites of
production, governing the ungovernability of the international. The diverse discourses of
borders make possible the classification, separation and regulation of populations on a global
scale. In the politics of the international, borders as the ungraspable trace of separation evolve
into an experience of the separation itself, reinforced, bound, marked, decorated, and feared.
The repetitious imprint of each separation is experienced as the central event of this politics
via different media, culminating in the sifting of bodies, peoples, geographies, and collective
imaginaries of self. Borders in the politics of the international are the emergent condition of
systems and patterns of identification that are manifested on a global scale, nonetheless
experienced locally and intensively on the intimacy of the self. Appearing as a necessary site
of this politics, the process function and experiential sense of borders are eclipsed in the
repletion of discourses that inaugurate the ‘international’ through codes and binaries which
divide and organise. The components of either ‘self’ or ‘self-referentiality’ come across only
as a peremptory suggestion of self-interest that is purged, or geared towards the absolute
purging, of the outside from the inside. As such, borders appear in international politics as
juridical limits that enforce identity through prohibition and containment. The borders of
sovereign power enforce subjection by bracketing off the domain of ‘natural’ identification. In
this sense, borders are entirely static, pregiven separations willed out of logical-rational
concerns. In an agenda driven discourse, borders are the façade, in both senses of the term,
demanding the protection of their inertness, their non-negotiable immovability, in order that
the international be sustained. Borders ‘exist’ in the discourses of international politics and not
emerge. That is, in place of process the border is struck as an act. Not a production but a thing,
fully formed, decisively confronted. A passivity masqueraded as an absolute symbol. To
engage with a conception of emergence of borders it is necessary to theorize the matter of
appearances. Theoretically, there is a need to liberate borders from the false conceit of the rigid
closeness of dumb matter.

Two ways are explored about this problematic here, grounded in sense and movement. First,
of borders as appearance; and second, of borders as experience. In both ways, borders are
aesthetic, as a function of the senses, as sensing and sensed. Borders have a sense of the
concrete, both as demarcations in the everyday and as events of international politics. They
make visible, as material knowledge, that which is left outside of them. They are material
functions of a culture of entangled separations which rest on everyday movements and
transgressions. Borders are felt, located, sharpened and withdrawn everywhere, in every
moment of inter-action, thus making rupture an event of the order of here and now. Even when
encountered in imagination, or as imagination, borders are material, implicating material
manifestation through the entwining of bodies, objects, spaces, and even thought. As
phenomena of the senses, borders penetrate, organise and even confound the life of the day by
day by producing and reproducing ideas and imaginaries of the self, differentiated from that
which is not the self. That is, life negotiates with borders at the level of intimacy, on a scale of
the everyday, and as such borders are not a matter of the elsewhere, in the sense of frontiers of
nation-states, or nowhere, in the imaginings of a borderless, globalised world.

Borders in encounters

Borders necessarily create worlds of difference and sameness, even when they do not ‘exist’
as a visible or visibilised force. As such, a notion of appearance, as opposed to existence, better
serves the cause of approaching border theoretically. To locate borders as aesthetic phenomena
enables a perspective of coming-into-being of borders as communities, nations, mappings,
frontiers, limits, transgressions and erasures, and thus of the ‘self’ of the everyday in its
continuous negotiations and re-negotiation with existential discontinuity. Even the most basic
notion and navigation of the self is made up of the movements between mappings of identity,
dispersed along a host of coordinates on the moving grids of everyday interactions and
dialouges. ‘I’ am a matter of becoming, as I ‘find’ my-self in every moment of conversation
and confrontation with other bodies and objects, cultural and natural. This matter of becoming
turns in infinite directions on the fulcrum of the ‘intervening’ in-between, the moment where
neither the self nor the other is but from where both begin. In this sense, borders are not simply
the intervention on bodies and spaces of prohibitive power, but the intervening liminality that
inaugurate the sense of sameness and otherness. The phenomena of borders enable the very
idea of transformation, of the possibility of movement through transformation, inaugurating
movement as transformation. The liminal withdrawal of the self that projects outward, and
away, the other can thus be cast in the framework of transformation as opposed to carving of
mute identities. The border aesthetic is the articulation or suggestion, from an intervening space
or temporality, of difference avowed in matter. Svend Erik Larsen conceptualises this
difference as crucial to qualifying the ontology of a material or body as a boundary, and more
specifically as a “meaning- producing difference between two domains.” The difference is
enabled either as a separation ‘between’ or opening ‘to’, but in either case producing a sense
or meaning that engenders the two domains as such. The appearance of borders transforms the
body in every encounter into a subject of selfhood proposed in difference and separation, where
the body is the level of manifestation and the encounter constitutes the condition for their
coming into existence. Mere existence, pre-ordained and preemptive, can in this sense be
reconfigured as “coming into existence”, tying up the tangible manifestation of borders to the
conditions for their manifestation. To this framework, Larsen adds the dimension of the
medium wherein the materiality of the border can be recognised as a limit/boundary/border
only in reference to this particular medium. The border becomes when it exists within a medium
where its manifestation causes the conditions for its coming into existence. As such, the border
aesthetic is this convergent, dialogic economy of the medium, the manifestation, and the
condition lending to the transformative production of identity as difference.

How does an understanding of borders as aesthetic phenomenon help further a deeper

understanding of political borders? Whereas politics is immanent to the very suggestion of
borders, a political border in this sense could be understood as one where strategic impulses,
informed by geography, history, or ideology, are the conditions for the emergence or
occurrence of borders, and their manifestation serving the ontology of partition. Political
borders are divisional in length and scope, their implicit primary purpose being to demarcate
and secure the territory, either geographic or discursive or both, of sovereign legitimacy.
Political borders, depending on their purposive performance “as a barrier or as a gate”, enable
or inhibit interaction, but in both senses acting in the productive capacity of differentiating, and
hence transforming, collective notions of self, other, nation, region, and inter-national. Political
borders are attended to, textually and discursively, by a sense of a concrete impregnability, not
strictly in the sense of crossing and passage, but more in the sense of a mythical elevation above
and beyond regular human moulding. A function of high political agendas, political borders
become the refrain of grand separations that can but be touched, distorted, or reformulated only
as a jurisdiction of sovereign power. The obverse of sovereign articulation of political borders
is the encounter that leaves politics, to grapple with the resolute uncertainty of borders as a
phenomenon of everyday interaction.

Unpacking the encounter demands a theoretical reflection beginning with the medium which
enables political borders to be recognised as such. An encounter with a political border can
only be conceived or met with, in context of the specific medium of power. Power is the
responsive medium that attends to the setting up of borders, and to the dissemination of
corresponding meaning that follows in the wake of borders. Interaction with political borders
demands an intimate recognition of them as such, mediated by the discourses and categories
that power makes possible. Power has a productive dynamic here, signifying the impossibility
of clearly differentiating or categorising it as sovereign or juridical or disciplinary power. It is
in an even broader and comprehensive sense of a productive conversation that power gathers
its forces into a boundary producing medium. This productive network can be called politics,
in the first sense, creating a dynamic juxtapositional and metonymic structure of experience
which in-turn serves as the broader medium in which boundaries and borders emerge and fulfil
a divisional ontology. It is in this framework of politics-power that borders produce the
differentiated and differential identification that engenders subjecthood, thus positing borders
as a productive force of power, producing the subjects of this power, and more specifically
producing the body as a subject of this power.

Borders as sites of power emerge as effects of discourses of geopolitics and history and
technologies of mapping and war which are in-turn engaged in constituting the very idea of the
nation-state. Borders are the necessary sites that enable the ‘bio-power’ which governs
international politics. The diverse discourses around borders make possible the classification,
separation and regulation of populations on a global scale. The possibilities of subjectivity
within international politics have today diversified exponentially. Immigrants, illegal
immigrants, refugees, terrorists and so on command the greatest of international attention and
the most expansive intervention by regimes of power. These categories see the imperative
towards life, implicit within regimes of bio-power, doubly reinvigorated and on a global scale.
The introduction of these categories into the taxonomy of danger creates mass hysteria – fear
of death, disease, loss of employment, space, etc. – which then makes possible a largely
generalized acceptance of discourses and technologies that seek to intervene, observe, control
and regulate the ‘excess’ of the international. What is especially important to note here is that
all possibilities of subjecthood are contingent on the specific way in which a body interacts
with borders. It is the nature of these interactions which determines the production of this body
as an illegal immigrant or a refugee or a terrorist. The consequent lines of separation often
remain indistinct and perception remains blurred, yet the first moment of subjectivity within
international politics is defined by whether a body illegally traversed the border, or if it
legitimately travelled beyond the confines of its natural citizenship or if it breached the borders
from within by upsetting the denomination of sovereign power.

Security has emerged as an extremely crucial, if not the most dominant, discourse within
international politics. However, it is not in the proliferation of threats to the nation-state that
the rationality behind the emergence of security studies can be placed. Rather, in a distinctly
Foucauldian sense, it is possible to see how these categories of threats and subjects have
emerged only within and in the wake of discourses in security and their practices. Security
discourses, sanctioned by the sanctity of borders and invested into in the name of preservation
of the life of the nation, rely on close proximity to and scrutiny of the body. Biometric security
systems, surveillance, racial profiling, precision bombing rely on very specific bodily cues to
segregate, classify and identify bodies into subject categories within international politics.
These systems produce the body as objects of knowledge to render them intelligible as subjects
(Wilcox, 2014). Thus, within the practices and technologies of security, borders become the
productive force which inscribes itself upon the surface of the body to cultivate it as a subject
of power. The body’s referentiality, or intelligibility, is estimated, intimated, and lived by the
inscription of borders on it. In other words, body becomes the sign of borders.

Body

Reimagining the body as body-in-becoming, Judith Butler, conceives materiality – the surface
that projects matter into the world as a ‘body’ – as a performative reiteration. The gendered
body is not a simple product of linguistic and social construction but matter that performs the
materialising imperatives of power formulated through the matrix of “regulatory norms of sex”.
Materilisation implies a bringing forth or making manifest through materially sensible cues.
What renders the body as a performative is the necessary reiteration or projection of bodily
identification. The body must perform its materiality repeatedly in accordance with the norms
of power to continuously establish and affirm its intelligibility. The very notion of a
performance implies a dynamism and flow: a perpetual staging of being as an unremitting
narrative of becoming. Matter acquires intelligibility through configuration and reconfiguration
of meaning in the constant performative of body in re-production.

What the body brings forth are the injunctions of discourses and practices of power. These
discourses posit the limit of intelligibility and law. As Butler asserts, the process of the
construction of the subject is neither to be assigned to the subject nor to the act itself but is best
understood as the sustained reiteration which brings both the ‘subject’ and the ‘act’ within
language itself. The discourses thus necessarily work through the body, by situating the body
as a site of appearance of power and thus simultaneously constituting it as a subject. Power is
inseparable and indeed contingent upon the reiteration and performance of its effects. The body
that fails to materialize the regulatory norms of power displaces power, or causes power to
disappear and reappear again, only this time not as a surface projection of embodied
subjectivity but as a force external to the unintelligible body, intending to intervene, restrict
and contain it. Butler notes that the very legitimacy of the subject is inextricably tied to the
emergence of an “abject”: the body that fails to materialize within the imperatives of the
framework of heteronormativity (Butler, 1993). That is, bodies that do not discharge the
regulatory conditions of heterosexual desire form a necessary externality that the subject needs
to constantly retain a distance from. These abject bodies provide the “outside” without which
the veracity and legitimacy of the normative bodies could not be established. Body comes to
matter in its performance of the principles that discharge meaning, “where “to matter” means
at once “to materialize” and “to mean”.” (Butler, 1993: 32). Thus, body’s materialization is
also the signification of the presence of what it is not: a statement of radical dissociation from
the meaningless “abject” that symbolically threatens the body’s constitution and intelligibility.
The abject is the source and condition of the anxiety that belies the matter of the body. If the
abject were to be dissolved together with the shadow of its own “unlivibality”, the plank upon
which body’s matter takes form would also collapse. It is such a “disavowed identification”
(Butler, 1993:115) that necessarily allows the possibility of both the abject and the body,
wherein such contingent possibility defines the conditions of existence for both.

Body in this sense is the reiteration, repetition of power. Power perpetuates itself through the
body via its reiterative material formation. It is not only the becoming of the body in question
but also the embodiment of relations of power. But in this formulation it is the idea of repetition
that assumes crucial importance. When materialization is subject to repetition, it always already
carries the potential of failing the repetition. What is condemned to repeat is condemned to the
potentiality of failure to repeat, condemned to the possibility of embodying the abject: that
which has failed to materialize power. In this sense then the ‘constitutive outside’ is not a mere
keeping outside to preserve the inside but it is the refuse from the inside. It is what the power
does not construct. The always present potentiality of failing to materialize. Abjection does
not aggravate power so much from the outside as an externality, but threatens power as the
latent potential that subsists within the body itself. The abject is not the domain of the excluded
but the domain of what has failed the count of inclusion. It is the excess that nonetheless
inhabits the body as the potential to undo. As such, the abject subsists inside, it is the condition
against which the subject becomes. The body is not just the mode of subjection and
subjectification but also the contested terrain which always already carries the potential to
deviate from power. The body itself is, thus, the boundary between subject and abject, the
performance of its materialisation also becoming the positing of this border.
The boundary between the subject and abject remains extremely thin precisely because the
body performs, and becomes, the intimation of this boundary. The material signifier of the
boundary between the subject and the abject is thus borne on and through the body whereas the
materialization of the body is symptomatic of the borders that separate the subject from the
abject. Border is thus always-already present on the body and the body in the discharge of its
performative constraints becomes the signifier of borders. Thus sealed by the “matter” realized
through the body, borders and body come to inhabit a co-constitutive relationship that opens
up on to the politics of identity which cuts across societies, cultures and nations.

The enunciation of such a co-constitutive relationship between borders and body suggests an
‘intertextuality’ between them. Contending with the agency of an intertextuality demands the
delineation of a ground of convergent participation of the two terms, a ground not stable or
static or always given, but a moving grid of networks and nodes which offer common passage
to the two categories. The border/body intertext, in the contextual international, is a metonymic
reflection that is avowed in movement. A complex, continuous structure of substitution that
veers off in different capacities and directions of interpretation and inter-action from the first
thrust of movement. Conceptualising movement allows for a critical intervention into the
immanently fluid creative composition of both borders and the body which is otherwise sought
in paradigmatically structured questions and text whose focus eclipses emergence to
underscore existence. Movement is here conceived as the transitive performative that engages
the body with borders in its many becomings. A fundamental life force, ontologically essential
to both borders and the body, movement engenders the critical potential that makes every body
a ‘border subject’ – a transitive matter that in aesthesis produces, renegotiates, and overcomes
or transgresses borders. The body in movement, in an act of doubling and dividing, becomes
both the boundary of it-self and the intervening liminality in the midst of which the other is
differentiated and reconfigured. It is a matter of encounter and interaction, of movement as
transformation, which is often stabilised into a fleeting, momentary image of differentiated
meaning and a delineated self, in order that questions of ‘identity’ and ‘belonging’ may be
addressed. This “cultural freeze framing” may be largely responsible for blocking the
theoretical passage to affirmation and understanding of formative, productive, and re-
productive performatives arising within the politics of the international that could
fundamentally transform the representational narratives of this politics into experiential
articulations.
Movement has to be addressed as more than simply a generative possibility of the body.
Instead, it has to be understood as the immanent generative condition that causes the body to
become. It corresponds with the body at the levels of both existence and knowing.
Simultaneous to life, movement informs the basic latent potential that underwrites all incipient
bodily phenomena. This is the potential that not only informs the repetition that entrusts the
body to a specific socio-cultural boundary but also engenders the body as the fundament of all
politics. Movement posits the body as a site for contestations of belonging and desire, of
situatedness and identity, and yet always already signifies the impossibility of locking the body
on a temporal, spatial, or discursive plane. Position, or positionality, is sought to be replaced
with a notion of “indeterminacy” following Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of the abstract.
A body in motion is only ever transposable to its own variation, and not itself. This is the
body’s indeterminacy, its abstract correspondence with something that it is not right now –
other than its own time and space of the here and now. This is the “real-abstract” or the “real,
material but incorporeal” dimension of the body – the indeterminacy that subsists within the
body as the obverse of its movement. The incorporeal indeterminacy of the body, allows for its
simultaneous potential to fail the count of inclusion, the count that enables embodiment as
power. In passage, from the body to the self to the subject, the matter becomes one of
transformation, of persistent qualifying encounters with borders, which assimilates differences
and casts out the differentiated. This echoes Massumi’s formulation that ‘possibility is back
formed from potential’s unfolding.’ Going back to Butler then it is possible to see precisely
how the reiterative performative turns on an uncertain dynamic of an indeterminate potential –
in the case of embodied power, the always present potential of failing to repeat the
materialisation of power. The reiterative body performative, by demanding matter to be ever
in repetition, ever as reiteration, posits the body as ever in motion. And as such, it is always
shadowed and dogged by the persistent question of how the body’s indeterminate
incorporeality, introduced by movement, would reconfigure its materiality. A question that sets
up for a direct confrontation between power and body, in that the question of the body in motion
cannot be separated from the emplotments of power, a process that is simultaneous, leading up
to the emergence of dis/embodied power.

In a different but related sense, movement necessitates, affirms, and negates boundaries, being
the mode for transgression of limits as also the justification of their purpose; the immanence
that both presides within and without. Movement institutes the repetitious, metonymic
substitution of body and boundaries, instigating the blur that obfuscates the difference between
them, while being the mode that sets up the demarcation and articulation of identities via
differentiation. The coincidence of the body in motion with borders prevaricates fixed unities
of identity and at this juncture of cancelation the differential that separates and transforms
emerges. When the body in motion only ever coincides with its own transitioni, it can also be
suggested that every encounter of transition is a moment of liminal transgression, and thus of
a simultaneous border crossing as well as border formation. That borders are omnipresent
becomes a sensible statement in light of the body as a reiterative and transitional performative.
The coincidence or the encounter – the intersection of movement, body, and borders – thus
articulates the instance of transforming, trespassing, transgressing, as becoming; underlining
the ‘ontogenetic’1 process of coming into existence, that supersedes the uniformities of being
in its ability to purvey a sense of the subject as emergence.

The body in motion as a subject of borders; borders as subjected to the body in motion. A
remedial notion of emergent subjecthood that aligns with the uncertainties and eventualities of
encounters, better serves the cause of approaching an understanding of the ecology in which it
emerges. A politics of the international begins at the moment of stipulation, when borders are
stipulated and bodies assimilated (and left out). However, if this chronological stance is
theoretically disrupted to reintroduce co-incidence in place of stipulation, there would be space
for articulating the putative excesses of this politics from within. That is, the matters of rouge
subjectivities, recrudescent violence, and dislocated immobilisations, which so far are deemed
as matters of prohibition, containment, and retribution could be engaged with as emerging from
within. Not as ploys from the beyond that require intervention, but instead as experiences which
constitute the essence of this politics itself, thereby demanding responses in the nature of
facilitation and rehabilitation.

Mapping the performative materialization of the border/body intertext on the politics of

international the inevitable production of its intrinsic excess is the refugee, the emergence of
its necessary failure, the denial of the border and its materializing imperatives of the body of
the state. The alien that teeters on the outside for losing what Elaine Scarry refers to as the
‘referential stability’ii, the consistent repetition of the biddings of state sovereignty.
Directionless, unanchored, and ungrounded the refugee marks the break in the discourses
seeking to secure security. Upending distinctions of inside/outside, us/them, the refugee
occupies the ‘psychic unlivability’iii of stateless abjection.

1
The narrative of embodied refuge emerges at the moment of the transgression of borders and
excludes from its ambit the structures that force the body into such movement. This
discontinuity underscores, most pressingly, the centrality of borders and the internal/external
binary in the discourses that write the body of the refugee. It is only when a border is disrupted
and distance as difference threatened to be erased that the persecuted body finds its articulation
within political discourse. The definite pattern of belongingness and subjection of the body is
disrupted and there is no longer that singular authoritative affiliation between the state and the
body, formulated and articulated in terms of ‘citizenship’. Disavowed from the space where it
ought to have commanded legitimate claims to security and alienated within the space which
it now occupies, the body of the refugee is a condition of the ‘in-between’ that is lost in
discourse. No longer within the secure confines of citizenship, which enunciates the criteria for
legitimate subjecthood within the nation-state, the body of the refugee is essentially one in a
state of breach. A state of interim, wherein this body can neither suffer moving backwards into
persecution, nor directly foray forward into a hope for rehabilitation, condemned nonetheless
to the interminable movement of a body without the sensibility of absolute identification. A
spatial and temporal non-presence that is governed by strangenessiv. The borders, arrested in
the act of their penetration and donned upon the penetrating body as its abjection, become
implicit in the configuration of the refugee performative by penetrating this body itself and
marking it out as a substance of their own production. For the national citizen, legitimate and
rightful, the ambiguous body of the other in the midst of one’s own space signifies a condition
to be continuously distanced and differentiated from – the body to separate from and define
oneself against. The body of the refugee becomes the barrier not to be breached, as it unfolds
as a spectacle, to be performed and executed (in both senses of the term) in popular imagination.

The refugee arrives as an anomaly in the juridical mode of power to be normalized as abject
within a biopolitical regime of power. Borne of the connivance of prohibition (of juridical
sovereign borders) and penetration (of sovereign borders by the disallowed body), the refugee
condition is a condemnation in both rhetoric and legality – an attribution of abjection. A
discursive construction, it proceeds from a sense of loss of meaning; its own meaning situated
precisely in the displacement of Self, its loss in the symbolic Other and the recovery of an
Othered Self. Beyond the confines of the state to which allegiance was pledged and within the
jurisdiction of a state whose express willingness of legal acceptance was never sought, the
location of the refugee is an undefined interim, the conditions of which rely for cues upon the
materialization of the body that inhabits this position. The embodied performance of the
refugee position is contingent and unstable as the body becomes the object of confluence of
historical and political narratives. The body, unable to detach itself from the border that it
violated, can only be expressed within the particular space as the matter of the border itself.
The body of the refugee draws inwards the borders in discourse whose material transgression
delivered the body to the category of the refugee in the first place.

i
ii
iii
iv