As a discourse and as a mode of sociability that determines what forms of life are recognizably human and thus politically qualified, citizenship is permeated by gendered, sexual, racial, national, and economic antinomies of belonging,
and as such it is appropriated in the context of relevant expectations, claims, struggles and promises of rights. However, rather than dwelling on the notion of citizenship as a ‘thing’ or even as a ‘right’ that one possesses or not, it might be also useful to conceptualize it as an aspect of the dispersed multiplicity of power relations that discursively (and unpredictably) produce subjectivities according to normative political and biopolitical preconditions. Thus, it might be important to rethink citizenship through its fundamentally aporetic character: normative apparatus but also fulcrum of resistance; site of struggle for those precariously positioned at the fringes of the polis but also state practice of legitimization and subordination.
In this paper, I would like to consider the history of the relation between ‘man’ (or human) and ‘citizen’, in order to trace the ways in which the human body enters the body politic and political imagination as a question of who has the right to be protected and who does not; in other words, as a question of who has, and who does not have, the right to have rights (as Hannah Arendt has put it). I ask: In our time of biopolitical humanism, in which the politics of exclusion and dispossession is accompanied by paternalistic pluralism (much like capitalist exploitation is counteracted by philanthropy and war by humanitarianism), is it possible to put forward a political possibility of citizenship beyond the moralism and legalism of tolerant administration of (the vulnerability or the distress of) the Other? Does the awareness of the exceptions, exclusions and alienations that demarcate the space of the polis necessarily amount to a claim for ‘inclusion’? Is it possible to dismantle the erasure of the political and leave open the possibility of dissensus?
As the title of the paper suggests, my reflection here draws on the ambivalence underlying the very notion of ‘remains’. Thus I would like to inquire into not only the remains of citizenship, that is, what remains outside the normative boundaries of citizenship as unintelligible form of life, but also the question of what remains of the political notion of citizenship as a way to rethink and remobilize the political today.
Athena Athanasiou teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. She has received her Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research, in New York, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center, at Brown University. She is the author of Life at the Limit: Essays on the Body, Gender, and Biopolitics (Ekkremes, 2007, in Greek); editor of Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Nissos, 2006, in Greek) and Biosocialities: Anthropological Perspectives on Social Suffering (Nissos 2010, in Greek); co-editor of the special issue Performing Emotions: Historical and Anthropological Sites of Affect (Historein, 2008), and the collective volume Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘the Greeks’ (SUNY Press, 2010).
