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.

Keywords:

• borderization
• dissolution
• membrane
• necropolitics
• residuality
• water

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Álvarez (2022).

2 All translations are mine.

3 Desert spaces and rivers have been similarly weaponized. See, for instance, De León (2015); Duncan and Levidis (2020).

4 Likewise Étienne Balibar has recently argued that “in the Mediterranean or in the Bay of Bengal, it is not unreasonable to speak of genocidal tendencies against the wandering population, which finds itself confined between increasingly impassable hostile barriers: from rejection at the entrance and expulsion, we move to elimination, and from there to extermination, not proclaimed as a political objective, but organized de facto through the dismissal of responsibilities, the refusal of international obligations (including those of the law of the sea), and above all the systematic dismantling of rescue operations organized by NGOs” (2019).

5 “Hors du nomos” (outside the nomos), in Michel Agier’s ascription, by which the anthropologist means the law (“la loi ordinaire des humains”; 2002, 55).

6 I am here referring to Melanie Griffiths’ subdivision of the temporality specific to asylum-seeking into the discrete categories of sticky time, suspended time, frenzied time, and ruptured time (2014).

7 In The Empire of Trauma, Fassin ascribes the recognition of the right to asylum to “a regime of veridiction where […] suffering, now uncontested, comes to attest to an experience that elicits sympathy and calls for reparations” (2011, 16).

8 In the Atlantic enslaved Black bodies thrown overboard endured similar eradication under the corrosive influence of seawater. Christina Sharpe (2016) powerfully examines the endurance of the bodily matter they left in their wake. See also Gunkel (2021); Hameed (2021); Talbayev (2023).

9 In this respect, seawater’s literal “baring” of these bodies spotlights the crucial impact of elemental geophysical forces that both reproduce and far exceed power dynamics hinging on biological life, such as the camp nomos discussed earlier. I examine these co-constitutive dynamics between biopower writ large and geopower in “Hydropower: Residual Dwelling between Life and Nonlife” (Talbayev 2023).

10 See, for instance, Stacy Alaimo’s provocation: “Contemplating your shell on acid dissolves individualist, consumerist subjectivity in which the world consists primarily of externalized entities, objects for human consumption. It means dwelling in the dissolve, a dangerous pleasure, a paradoxical ecodelic expansion and dissolution of the human, an aesthetic incitement to extend and connect with vulnerable creaturely life and with the inhuman, unfathomable expanses of the seas. It is to expose oneself as a political act, to shift toward a particularly feminist mode of ethical and political engagement” (2016, 168).