THE 2011 REVOLUTION IN TUNISIA HAS ELICITED MANY COMMENTS, but perhaps not enough consideration has been given to the meaning of the event that sparked it: the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, in the small town of Sidi Bouzid (where I happened to have worked some years ago). The 24-year-old street vendor, who financially supported his mother, uncle, and siblings with his meager earnings, committed suicide after one of the numerous confiscations of his wares and wheelbarrow by the police whom he was not able to bribe, and as the immediate consequence of the public humiliation endured as he was slapped in the face by a female municipal official (a fact that was later contested). This desperate act, followed by others in Tunisia as well as Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, provoked a wave of protests throughout the country, leading to the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and contributed to wider civil unrest in the Arab world. How can this event be interpreted in light of the question of the state and the body?.
The way I have approached so far the relation of the state with violence and the mediation of the body between these two entities is founded on the idea that the issue is fundamentally that of power--the power legitimately or illegitimately exerted on others, and the power to defend oneself by usual or unusual means. Actually, violence emanating from the state or directed against the state has long been the main historical fact, from the Roman Empire to the Communist revolutions, just as it has been the principal concern for political theorists, from Hobbes and Machiavelli to Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. Although this empirical reality still exists and its intellectual translation remains valid--we are not done with the question of power, of course--another dimension of the relation between state and violence mediated by the body deserves more attention. It is the dimension on which Michel Foucault (2011 [2009]) focused his analysis in his last years and ultimate lectures, when he shifted his interest from power, precisely, to subjectivity--that is, the question of truth and truth-telling, or in a literal translation from the French: the question of veridiction. Unlike him, however, I do not want to separate power and truth, to go beyond the former to concentrate on the latter, but to analyze their articulation.The Tunisian case is exemplary in that the violence of the state and the resistance of the individual are embodied in one person. Mohamed Bouazizi is a victim of both the structural and the political violence of the state: his dire living conditions are intricately linked to the corruption of the regime and the massive theft of public goods organized by the state, and his harassment is the expression of the unlimited possibility of police officers and public officials to abuse with impunity. Facing this intolerable excess of violence, the powerless young man still had the power to expose his life and exhibit his suicide as a desperate act to save his dignity. His body is almost simultaneously the site of the violence exerted by the unscrupulous military dictatorship (which in itself is the negation of the foundational contract of the state) and of the ultimate resistance of the individual (which thus demonstrates how political subjectivity may respond and overcome political subjection). But this interpretation does not imply that when committing the gesture of burning himself, Mohamed Bouazizi was entirely and explicitly conscious of its signification; who knows? On the contrary, by highlighting the presence and evidence of the body as the site of violence and resistance, I emphasize not a psychological but a political move.THE BODY AS THE SITE OF EVIDENCEMy thesis is that the relation between the state and violence takes two forms, which are linked in a specular way--in other words, as mirror images. The body is not only the site where power is exerted or resisted, it is also the site where truth is sought or denied. Whereas much has been written on power and the body, probably because it is the most obvious dimension of the relation between state and violence, as well as the most evidently disquieting one, there is still much to be explored about truth and the body. Let me clarify my intention. Instead of analyzing the origin of violence, as is usual, either explicitly or implicitly, I suggest examining its effects. Or better said: its trace. If power leaves traces on bodies, what sort of truth does the state--and more generally society--extract from them? I describe power and truth as mirror images since they are intimately but symmetrically related around the body, respectively on the side of causes and consequences, as will become manifest in the two case studies I will briefly evoke. In the first, based on research I conducted in France about asylum seekers, the body bears the truth of violence that the state looks for in order to grant them the status of refugee. In the second, grounded on a study I carried out in South Africa about AIDS sufferers, the embodied truth of violence is denied by the state. Asylum is related to political violence; AIDS is linked to structural violence.In a sense, Mohamed Bouazizi's act is the most violent response to violence that can be imagined. It violates indeed the most widely accepted biopolitical principle briefly evoked by Walter Benjamin (1986 [1921]: 299) in his Critique of Violence--the sanctity of life--of which the German philosopher writes: "The proposition that existence stands higher than just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life." Mohamed Bouazizi, as many men and women who sacrifice their life for their cause, demonstrates that just existence may still be higher than mere life--and that humanity may ultimately rely upon such conviction. This may be a lesson worth retaining here where political subjectivity is more often expressed by killing others for bare hatred than killing oneself for superior values.In France, as in most Western countries, asylum has become a critical issue over the last quarter-century. Far from the great expectations raised by the 1951 Geneva Convention in the aftermath of the Second World War, official institutions overseeing asylum in Europe are increasingly "mistrusting refugees," in Val Daniel's and John Knudson's words (1995). With the restrictions levied on immigration from the mid-1970s onward, the confusion between immigrants and refugees has been escalating, probably on both sides, as some candidates for immigration may be inclined to apply for asylum and as governments tend to denounce so-called bogus refugees in order to justify their harsh policies. In France, in 1976, 19 out of 20 asylum seekers were granted refugee status by the National Office for the Protection of Refugees. Three decades later, 19 out of 20 were denied the status by this institution, a proportion hardly modified when rejected candidates appeal to the National Court for Asylum, which only reverses one decision out of ten. Whereas Michael Marrus (1985) concluded his book on the history of those he called "the unwanted" during the twentieth century by enthusiastically predicting "the apparent end of a European refugee problem," the global situation of asylum has turned out to be today the most problematic it has been since the 1950s.The state has a foundational relation with violence. To paraphrase Weber (1994 [1919]), in the ideal-typical social contract that links it to individuals, the state is supposed to protect society from violence through law and law enforcement, and in exchange it is granted the monopoly of legitimate violence. The contract holds as long as individuals receive sufficient security from the state and are not overly subjected to abuse by it. When it is not respected, either because security is denied or abuse is gross, individuals may feel entitled to resist the state or even revolt against it. In the model of the moral economy via which E. P. Thompson (1971) interprets the so-called food riots of seventeenth-century England, it is when norms and obligations are not complied with that peasants rebel (in that case against landowners or grain-buyers), but the paradigm can be extended to the relationship of individuals with the state.
In France, as in most Western countries, asylum has become a critical issue over the last quarter-century. Far from the great expectations raised by the 1951 Geneva Convention in the aftermath of the Second World War, official institutions overseeing asylum in Europe are increasingly "mistrusting refugees," in Val Daniel's and John Knudson's words (1995). With the restrictions levied on immigration from the mid-1970s onward, the confusion between immigrants and refugees has been escalating, probably on both sides, as some candidates for immigration may be inclined to apply for asylum and as governments tend to denounce so-called bogus refugees in order to justify their harsh policies. In France, in 1976, 19 out of 20 asylum seekers were granted refugee status by the National Office for the Protection of Refugees. Three decades later, 19 out of 20 were denied the status by this institution, a proportion hardly modified when rejected candidates appeal to the National Court for Asylum, which only reverses one decision out of ten. Whereas Michael Marrus (1985) concluded his book on the history of those he called "the unwanted" during the twentieth century by enthusiastically predicting "the apparent end of a European refugee problem," the global situation of asylum has turned out to be today the most problematic it has been since the 1950s.
