Governing Affective Citizenship

Denaturalization, Belonging, and Repression

Marie Beauchamps

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786606785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates politics of denaturalisation as a system of thought that influences seminal cultural political values, such as community, nationality, citizenship, selfhood and otherness. The context of the analysis is the politics of citizenship and nationality in France. Combining research insights from history, legal studies, security studies, and border studies, the book demonstrates that the language of denaturalisation shapes national identity as a form of formal legal attachment but also, and more counter-intuitively, as a mode of emotional belonging. As such, denaturalisation operates as an instrumental frame to maintain and secure the national community. Going back to eighteenth-century France and to both World Wars, periods during which governments deployed denaturalisation as a technology against “threatening” subjects, the analysis exposes how the language of denaturalisation interweaves concerns about immigration and national security. It is this historical backdrop that helps understand the political impact of denaturalisation in contemporary counterterrorism politics, and what is at stake when borders and identities become affective technologies.

1Part I

The Foreigner of the French Revolution

3Chapter 1

The French Revolution

A Producer of Narratives about Citizenship

The events of the 1789 French Revolution led to radical changes in the organization of France. When the royal family was deposed, its sovereign power was replaced by new ruling republican elites who claimed to represent the people at large through an Assemblée. Claiming that a republican institution would guarantee the rights of the people—as opposed to a ruling and hereditary monarchy—the republican elites developed a new political framework based on the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment. Central to these ideas was the notion of “nation,” a social and political concept that was primarily connected to the idea of an emancipatory liberty, be it from colonial, aristocratic, or imperial power (Noiriel 2005, 135). As a social and political organ, the nation essentially emerged in relation to a broader social protest that raised questions of identity in the process of defining whose sovereign power the nation would—or should—represent (135–36). According to Gérard Noiriel, the emergence of the nation involved a discursive construction of the nation’s identity according to which the nation itself became increasingly personified, causing its identity to be defined on a twofold basis (136). On the one hand, it expressed its uniqueness by displaying its objective identity in opposition to others (136). On the other, it also developed a subjective identity, that is, an identity based on a supposed development through time, characterized by memory or by the presence of its own past in its present (136). The nation became a complex organ that played a major role in the development of new political ideas, while its form and agency still needed to be socially, politically, and juridically defined.

Along with the development of the nation and its identity, a new form of political subjectivity was born: the citizen. Primarily narrated through the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), the citizen was installed as the new omnipresent political subject. This is not to say that the 4concept of the citizen itself was invented during the French Revolution. Engin Isin (2002) has shown in meticulous detail that the notion of citizenship long preceded the French Revolution. He explains that “every age since the ancient Greeks fashioned an image of being political based upon citizenship” (1). Accordingly, instead of having invented the notion of the citizen, French revolutionaries appropriated specific images of citizenship from earlier societies, such as the Greek polis and the Roman civitas (121). Nonetheless, revolutionary narratives did claim a specific image of the revolutionary event according to which the new democratic government—made by and for citizens—was differentiated from cities as governing bodies. Specifically, they created a new, dominant image of the citizen around which an entire social, political, and juridical structure was to be constructed. Modern historians have tended to reproduce those narratives without critically assessing for what purposes those specific images of citizenship were mobilized at that specific time (Isin 2002, 121). By doing so, both historians and revolutionaries have turned the French Revolution into a key moment in the establishment of the modern notion of citizenship.

Throughout Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (2002), Isin invites us to question these dominant narratives, “not because they give us false or implausible images, but because we must understand for what purposes or uses these images were mobilized” (121). In a similar vein, this genealogy of denaturalization law in France aims to further investigate, in a first stage, the various imaginaries informing the revolutionary understanding of citizenship. Focusing on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political and juridical narratives, it recognizes a transition with respect to forms of political agency. As producers of narratives, the revolutionaries crystallized their understanding of citizenship in texts meant to sustain the new political and juridical system.1 To the extent that they reshaped the reality of the political subject around the notion of citizenship inscribed into the frame of the nation, such revolutionary narratives are meaningful instances of performative language; they contributed to the realization of a new social, political, and juridical system, thereby becoming acts with consequences. As such, they defined new modes of recognition, including new lines of belonging and repression.

Such contextual framework leads to the following questions: In which specific terms did the revolutionary narratives address individual subjects? What is the relationship between subject and citizen, and how did it relate to the emergence of the notion of national identity? And finally, what do these narratives tell us about the production of a “threatening otherness” along the lines of national identity, citizenship, and security discourses?

5Citizen Subject and Subject Citizen: Who Comes after the Subject?

Investigating the concept of the citizen during the French Revolution, Étienne Balibar’s essay, entitled “Citizen Subject” (1991), helps us to understand what is at stake when we consider the citizen as a new modern political subject. His essay responds to Jean-Luc Nancy’s question of “Who comes after the subject?” (Cadava, Connor, and Nancy 1991). Although leading to a large philosophical discussion, Balibar’s primary answer is wonderfully concise: “After the subject comes the citizen,” he says (38).

Balibar’s answer, significantly, is placed in the context of the French Revolution, with 1789 marked as a moment of irreversibility, in other words, as “the effect of a rupture” in what he calls the “process of the substitution of the citizen for the subject” (1991, 39). This is not to say that Balibar dismisses earlier origins of the notion of citizenship.2 Instead, his argument merely maintains that the French Revolution—and the year 1789 in particular—produced a rupture in the evolution of the term (44). This rupture is predominantly connected to the fact that the revolutionary system of law defined the subject as citizen, while the citizen reciprocally defined the system of law. The effect of such a reciprocal definition is that the revolutionary event faced a moment of irreversibility: the citizen had become both the one who received the quality of being a citizen and the one who decided on the parameters of what a citizen can, or should be. In other words, the citizen needed to comply with the rules of what it meant to be a citizen while at the same time having control over the definition of those rules.

However, if the citizen comes after the subject, this raises the question of who was the subject, and how might he or she genuinely relate to the citizen? The who question is crucial, Balibar notes, because it implies an interpretation of the subject that, while it defines a new origin, can neither be the origin of the subject nor that of the citizen “because the origin is not the subject, but man” (1991, 39).

The idea of man thought of as the origin of both subject and citizen is a seminal feature of revolutionary narratives. As Hannah Arendt (1990, 108) puts it, “[revolutionaries] believed that they had emancipated nature herself, as it were, liberated the natural man in all men, and given him the Rights of Man to which each was entitled, not by virtue of the body politics to which he belonged but by virtue of being born.” Indeed, when reading the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, it becomes evident that man remains central to the new political and juridical narrative. Moreover, we can observe that the dominant revolutionary discourse is fully grounded in the twofold basis of law and nature: while working on establishing a 6system of law that had to be potentially universal in its reach, Revolutionaries considered human nature as the primary defining basis of their claim to a universal system. In other words, nature prefigured institutions while being defined by them (Thomas 2011, 27).

Such mutually constitutive dynamic between nature and institutions is most saliently present in the first two articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which read:

Article I

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

Article II

The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.3

As Jacques Rancière observes (2004, 300), in these articles, “[t]he Rights of Man make natural life appear as the source and the bearer of rights. They make birth appear as the principle of sovereignty.” Identifying birth as the fundamental principle of sovereignty has consequences for appreciating the substitution of the citizen for the subject. Indeed, by referring to birth as a defining moment in the enactment of the rights of man (“people are born free and equal in rights”), the revolutionary text reaffirms the natural origin of the subject while affording it juridical and political clothing in terms of citizen...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I THE FOREIGNER OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
• 1 The French Revolution: A Producer of Narratives about Citizenship
• 2 Becoming Foreign 1: The Nation as Space Susceptible to Intrusion
• 3 Becoming Foreign 2: The Nation and Its Affective Economies
• 4 Becoming Foreign 3: The Nation and Its Juridical Community
• PART II DENATURALIZATION IN TIMES OF WAR: MODELING THE SELF, CREATING THE OTHER
• 5 From Belonging to Repression: Denaturalization and World War I
• 6 Denaturalization in the Context of World War II: Expanding Denaturalization before the War
• 7 Denaturalization in the Context of World War II: France's Totalitarian Infection
• PART III TERRORISM, NATIONALITY, AND CITIZENSHIP: FRANCE AND BEYOND
• 8 Of the Link between the War against Terrorism and Denaturalization
• 9 The Twenty-First-Century Struggles over Denaturalization
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index