585026
research-article2015
IPT0010.1177/1755088215585026Journal of International Political TheoryFrench
Article
To lose one’s home in the
world: The injustice of
immigrant detention
Journal of International Political Theory
2015, Vol. 11(3) 351­–369
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088215585026
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Craig French
University of South Florida, USA
Abstract
Forced outside of the system of modern nation-states into a regime of detention and
deportation, immigrant detainees suffer an injustice that is not easily or adequately
captured by the familiar vocabulary offered by contemporary liberalism. In this article,
I propose an alternative strategy for articulating the kinds of injustice that these
individuals suffer. I argue that the idea of metaphysical homelessness—a notion that I
recover through a reading of the work of Martin Heidegger—offers a useful theoretical
lens with which to identify the kinds of harms perpetrated against immigrant detainees.
Purged from the polis and shuttled instead into the realm of police, they are deprived
of a home in the world. This strategy is deployed as part of what I call a politics of crisis
containment, a kind of politics that ensues when states find themselves confronted by
troublesome individuals whose presence is deemed a threat to the existence of the
community.
Keywords
Agamben, detention, Foucault, Heidegger, immigration, realism, security
Introduction
In this article, I pursue three main aims. First, I interpret the practice of immigrant detention through the lens of the politics of crisis containment. This is the kind or style of politics that arises when politicians conceive of themselves as managers of public affairs.
This is the why of immigrant detention. The aim here is to give a provisional account of
the conditions of modern politics that have led to the use of detention by liberal states.
Second, I argue that this practice functions by means of the transfer, at the hands of state
Corresponding author:
Craig French, Department of Government and International Affairs, University of South Florida, 4202 E
Fowler Avenue, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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power, of vulnerable individuals from the world of politics (the space of political rights)
into the realm of police (the space of corporeal surveillance and detention). This is the
mechanism, or the how, of immigrant detention. In these pages, I claim that Foucault’s
understanding of the penal system illuminates the contours and significance of this
mechanism. Third, I reconstruct an interpretation of aspects of the thought of Martin
Heidegger, one that helps us to articulate the nature of the injustice perpetrated by the
detention and deportation system. This is the what—as in, what kind of injustice—of
immigrant detention. The Heideggerian apparatus gives us theoretical purchase on the
existential depression and anxiety suffered by detainees. This harm is not easily articulated by familiar liberal theoretic approaches to the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, which tend instead to concentrate on the violation of formal rights while neglecting
the psychological and existential aspects of detention.
The practice of immigrant detention: Some context
Asylum seekers and refugees are routinely detained in prisons and detention centers
throughout the European Union (EU) and the United States, pending the adjudication of
their right to remain (European Migration Network, 2014; Kerwin and Yi-Ying Lin,
2009). The ubiquity of this practice reflects the global securitization of border control in
the post-9/11 world and, along with it, the increasing tendency of states to criminalize the
border-transgressing figure of the migrant (Bigo, 2001; Huysmans, 2006; Quassoli,
2001). Although detention is now receiving both the popular and scholarly attention that
it deserves, there remains a great deal of confusion over the purposes of detention, its
legal basis and the exact legal status of detainees themselves. This confusion stems, at
least in part, from the complicated nature of the interaction between the international and
domestic legal frameworks that govern immigration detention. Article 31 of the 1951
United Nations (UN) Convention relating to the Status of Refugees sets out the standards
expected in the treatment of asylum seekers who have arrived in a country unlawfully.
According to paragraph 2, contracting states, “shall not apply to the movements of such
refugees restrictions other than those which are necessary and such restrictions shall only
be applied until their status in the country is regularized or they obtain admission into
another country” (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 1951).
However, the convention has been interpreted as giving states a wide discretion to impose
restrictions on the movements of such persons (Hailbronner, 2007).
For example, although the administrative control of aliens in the United Kingdom has
its historical origins in the early twentieth century (Wilsher, 2011), the contemporary
statutory instruments empowering the British government to detain non-citizens for
immigration control purposes emerge from a complex web of provisions adapted over
the last several decades in response to changing global migratory pressures. These powers, which are surprisingly broad and vague, leave immigration officials in the United
Kingdom with a great deal of discretion over individual cases. The power to detain in the
United Kingdom was laid down in the Immigration Act 1971 and later reaffirmed with
some modification by the Asylum and Immigration Act 2002. The 2002 Act officially
changed the name of the centers at which detainees are held from Immigration Detention
Centers to Immigration Removal Centers, indicating rather bluntly the overall spirit of
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British immigration policy as far as third-country nationals (i.e. non-EU citizens) are
concerned (Wilsher, 2011: 92).
An individual who does not possess citizenship of the United Kingdom or another EU
member state may, under the Act, be detained either upon entry into the country or at any
later stage for the purposes of a determination as to whether he or she has the right
(“leave”) to remain. Such leave may be granted in circumstances in which the individual
concerned satisfies the criteria for refugee status as laid down in the UN Convention. The
most numerous category of persons detained in the United Kingdom in 2013 was that of
those who had applied for asylum (totaling 60%), but other categories include those who
have been refused entry at the border and are awaiting removal, visa overstayers, undocumented migrants detected in-country, and foreign nationals convicted of crimes and
serving custodial sentences prior to removal (Silverman and Hajela, 2015: 4).
Detainees are housed in prisons or detention centers, many of which are run by private
contractors. One such place is the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Center in
Bedfordshire, England, operated by the private firm Serco. British authorities are keen to
insist that in principle those detained in centers like this can leave at any time if they
agree to return to their country of origin. But in reality, detainees are often trapped in
detention while engaged in lengthy legal battles with the British government, since they
will not be “removed” (deported) while their asylum claim, or an appeal following the
refusal of such a claim, is still pending. Yarl’s Wood is in fact one of the most notorious
centers in the United Kingdom with a long history of controversies surrounding it,
including the widely reported suicide of a detained asylum seeker from Angola named
Manuel Bravo (Herbert, 2005) and allegations of serious sexual abuse (Gentleman,
2015; Townsend, 2014). Detainees are held in conditions similar to those experienced by
those incarcerated in regular prisons, convicted of the most serious, violent crimes. This
bears emphasis. Although some of these individuals may have broken immigration rules
(e.g. overstaying visas), many have committed no crime at all.
Human rights activists studying detention have documented detainees’ suicidal ideation and feelings of hopelessness, fear, chronic depression, despair, humiliation, disrespect and worthlessness (Amnesty International, 2005: 15–34). These accounts have
been confirmed in the work of health-care professionals and academics. For example,
researchers who interviewed 70 detained asylum seekers in the United States observed
“clinically significant symptoms of anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder,
which worsened with time in detention and improved on release” (Keller et al., 2003:
1722). Similarly, researchers studying the British immigration detention system have
found that the children in their study who were detained exhibited “high levels of depression, anxiety, sleep problems, somatic complaints, emotional symptoms and behavioral
difficulties” (Lorek et al., 2009: 581), even if they had only been in detention for a short
period of time. Others have noted that “broad indicators of psychological distress among
asylum seekers in detention include high rates of attempted suicide and hunger strikes,”
and in one particular study, detainees “exhibited significantly higher levels of depression, suicidal ideation, posttraumatic stress, anxiety, panic, and physical symptoms,
compared with compatriot asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants living in the community” (Silove et al., 2000: 608). Criminologist Mary Bosworth (2014) has undertaken
one of the first major studies of detention in Britain. Her research reveals that detainees
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often feel unable to make long-term plans, form trusting relationships with others, or
project a stable sense of their selves into the future.
A note on method, or: Why not Agamben?
Certainly, the last decade or two has seen an explosion of interest in the ethics and politics of immigration and asylum. So before I lay out my account of the why, how, and what
of immigrant detention, it makes sense to pause and briefly highlight the way in which
the analysis that follows offers a novel perspective on this now familiar set of issues.
Matthew Gibney has argued that the dominant theoretical approaches to issues related to
immigration and border control usually involve the search for an answer to the following
question: “What should the criteria for an adequate standard for assessing the response
of states to refugees and asylum seekers be?” (2004: 15). Thus, the focus of inquiry “has
usually been on what account of responsibilities to refugees people have good reason to
accept as morally ideal” (Gibney, 2004: 15). In other words, political theorists tend to
proceed by offering an abstract moral theory that is intended to guide how states should
deal with immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. The idea is that we should start with
the demands made by ethics and work back toward politics, concluding with some prescriptions for the real world. Arguably, this approach characterizes a good deal of contemporary political theory that is written in what we might roughly call the
Anglo-American, analytic style. It is precisely this kind of theorizing that has recently
been criticized by so-called new realists like Bernard Williams (2005), who calls this
way of doing political theory political moralism, and Raymond Geuss (2008), who calls
it the ethics-first approach. Both Williams and Geuss think that political moralism of this
sort is misguided. They think it rests on a mistaken view about the proper relationship
between morality and politics, one in which moral thinking comes first, either wholly
determining or at least significantly constraining what is politically permissible. The
problem is that this assumes there is a plane of ethical thinking to which one can have
access, and that “one can study this subject-matter without constantly locating it within
the rest of human life, and without unceasingly reflecting on the relation one claims to
have with history, sociology, ethnology, psychology and economics” (Geuss, 2008: 7). In
other words, political moralism is insensitive to the historicity of ethical thought and the
situatedness of all political action.
In their own ways, both Geuss and Williams advocate instead for a method they call
political realism. This should not be mistaken for the view that ethics has no place in
politics for, as they readily point out, ethical arguments are used all the time to motivate
people to behave politically. Rather, this method is supposed to offer us a more capacious
understanding of politics, one that keeps in view the “powers, opportunities, and limitations of political actors, where all the considerations that bear on political action—both
ideals and, for example, political survival—can come to one focus of decision” (Williams,
2005: 12). Similarly, according to Geuss, realism should incline us to
start from and be concerned in the first instance not with how people ought ideally (or ought
“rationally”) to act, what they ought to desire, or value, the kind of people they ought to be etc.,
but rather with the way the social, economic, political, etc. institutions actually operate in some
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society at some given time, and what really does move human beings to act in given
circumstances. (2008: 9)
Gibney himself is not strictly a realist in this sense. His aim is somewhat more modest: to offer normative prescriptions that are sensitive to the constraints of the politically
possible and to develop a theory that meets the test of what he calls practical relevance.
However, I would like to push his critique in a more realist direction, inspired by
Williams’ and Geuss’ reminder to put politics first in our thinking. To adopt the realist
orientation in the context of a discussion about immigrant detention would, I submit,
imply that our task should be one of highlighting the politicality of the detention regime.
That is, to exhibit the way in which it is historically embedded within a certain kind of
politics, has a significant effect upon the lives of those caught within its grasp, serves
particular interests and is enabled by a series of power relations that, in the ordinary
course of things, are often concealed. This does not necessarily preclude the construction
of theory altogether, or for that matter the use of a theoretical apparatus to illuminate the
issues at hand. It just means that our investigations should start in the domain of
the political by asking: what failures, traumas, deficiencies, or injustices are disclosed by
the practice of immigrant detention that suggest that something has gone awry with our
politics?
Once we have become clear about that, we can use theory to unveil, uncover, and
explain the origins and causes of these distortions. In other words, we can use theory to
construct a critical genealogy of our current social reality. This will prove especially useful in the present context because, as Bosworth observes, to the extent that political theorists have thought about detention, they tend to remain mired in abstract theory. As a
result, academic scholarship of this sort tends to shed little light on the actual conditions
of detention found on the ground (Bosworth, 2014: 7). The argument I put forward here
attempts to overcome this limitation by starting with an outline of immigrant detention
as a concrete practice, exhibiting its purpose in our politics and its psychological effects
on detainees, and then by working backwards toward a theoretical account that offers a
plausible narrative about its underlying features. It is this methodological step that opens
up space for criticism. For realism is not normatively empty—its critical edge lies in the
therapeutic aspiration that it shares with the tradition of critical theory to which it is in
some sense related. By unmasking the power relations that undergird our politics, we
might be put in a better position to change them.
If we reject the familiar, ethics-first approach there is another that seems to recommend itself as an obvious alternative, one that might even appeal to the historical sensibility of the realist, although I think it should also be rejected. According to Georgio
Agamben (1998), the history of the development of Western modernity reflects the history of the folding of the biological into the political, a process that reaches its culmination in modern times in a politics of exception or permanent emergency. In this kind of
politics, the sovereign exercises its power to declare an emergency that suspends ordinary rights and liberties, allowing it to finally grasp human life without limit. Accordingly,
the ability to suspend the very conditions of politics by virtue of this declaration simply
is the characteristic mark of sovereign power. The concentration camp represents, for
Agamben, the very physical instantiation of a zone of indistinction, that is, that topos in
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which the boundaries between the political and the biological are finally blurred and bare
life is acted upon in an unmediated fashion. Agamben claims not only that the concentration camp of the mid-twentieth century finds an analytical analog in the contemporary
humanitarian refugee camp, but also that the zone of indistinction is generalized into
every aspect of our modern political experience. All modern political power is thus experienced as exceptional power.
I think there are good reasons to resist the temptation to analyze immigrant detention
through this lens, even if the spatial aspect to the camp as depicted by Agamben is suggestive. First, setting aside the issue of whether or not this alternative genealogy of modern politics is even correct, Agamben’s preoccupation with executive decisionism
obscures the way in which immigrant detention takes place against a political backdrop
that is richer than the theory allows. By following Agamben too closely, we risk adopting
a potentially misleading conception of the political, reading the experience of homo
sacer (the obscure figure of Roman law who was expelled from the community for his
crimes and could be killed with impunity, but could not be sacrificed) into that of all
modern political subjects. This is problematic because our contemporary experience of
sovereign power within liberal democracies is not limited to, nor does it have much in
common with, its unmediated use over bare life. For example, as various commentators
have pointed out, liberal states are in fact constrained in their dealings with irregular
migrants by constitutional law, international human rights treaties, and the political bargaining processes that unfold as states attempt to share the burden of migration and
border control (Ellerman, 2010; Levy, 2010).
We should therefore resist the temptation to immediately conflate refugee camps and
detention centers with Hitler’s concentration camps, since in reality state power always
remains circumscribed in some sense. Moreover, we also find the liberal state’s ability to
coerce is limited, however imperfectly, by a representative democratic politics that is
supposed to involve its citizens in the public use of their reason to authorize, check, and
restrain political power.1 This raises an interesting question left unanswered by
Agamben’s analysis, namely: how has the state been able to mobilize popular opinion in
support of immigrant detention? In other words, how could immigrant detention gain the
acceptance of a public whose usual role is to check the use of coercive political power
through deliberation and collective judgment?
Second, Agamben’s emphasis on the sovereign power to exclude also tends to obscure
a more nuanced discussion of the harm that is inflicted on the detainee. As I shall demonstrate through a close reading of some of his key works, Martin Heidegger’s thinking
can help us here. Heidegger was keenly preoccupied with the spatiality of being. This is
perhaps just an elaborate way of expressing the following, simple idea: he thought that
the prospects for successful being in the world depended, in important ways, on the
proper constitution of the spaces and places in which individuals dwell. If the place of
being should collapse or be destroyed, as I argue it is in the context of the immigrant
detention system, then the individual in question suffers a kind of harm that reaches far
into his or her being. In fact, the individual is thrown into a highly deficient mode of
being that in Heideggerian terms we might characterize as anxiety, caused by the deprivation of a home in the world. Serena Parekh (2014) has recently sought to isolate the
ontological harm wrought upon the immigrant detainee by recourse to Hannah Arendt’s
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writings. I share Parekh’s desire to move the debate on the ethics of immigration away
from a preoccupation with the distributive right to admission. I also find elements of
Arendt’s thinking to be helpful here. But I will argue that ultimately it is Heidegger,
rather than Arendt, who provides us with the most useful account of the ontological deprivation, to use Parekh’s phrase, that the immigrant detainee suffers.
Finally, the account outlined here also serves as a vehicle to advance the admittedly
more controversial claim that the spatiality of our lives is a constitutive feature of our
existence, one that does not often receive the attention that it deserves in contemporary
political theory. I believe that our sense of ourselves as human beings is intimately tied
to our relationship with the spaces and places in which we move, about which we tell
stories, and in which we dwell, think, live, and die. These spaces do not just form a
backdrop to the unfolding of the history of our common world. They are our common
world. Insofar as these spaces can be more, or less, hospitable to the spatial kind of
being that is particular to humans, this fact has all kinds of implications for our political thinking about the built environment. For example, it should change the way we
think about the architecture of public housing, the design of parliamentary chambers,
town halls and civic spaces, city centers, universities and libraries, prisons and schools,
and so on. One way to illuminate this feature of our existence is to observe what happens to those whose spatial way of being in the world is damaged, as in the case of
immigrant detainees.
From emergency politics to the politics of crisis
containment
As William Walters (2010) points out, the detention and expulsion of asylum seekers
manifests a deeply entrenched view without which we have not yet learned to live: that
all individuals in the world have a proper place to which they can be returned, forcibly,
if necessary, by means of the authority of the state. The ascription of such a place in the
world to each human being constitutes an attempt by the architects of our world order to
restrain the transnational movement of people, a force that overtaxes the compartmentalized system of nation-states into which governments would prefer to force their charges.
Immigrant detention and deportation has therefore become, in the apt words of scholars
studying the phenomenon, a global regime: a calculated and hostile reaction to a runaway
world that increasingly seems to be spinning out of control.2 This regime, as Patrick
Hayden notes, forms part of a specific strategy of crisis containment that states routinely
use to manage international mass migration (2009: 82–86).
But the label of crisis containment is apt to describe not just a specific policy. It is also
useful shorthand to describe a general tendency displayed by a good deal of all modern
politics, domestic and international. This is a distinct mode of politics that unfolds when
states find themselves confronted by phenomena that appear to pose a threat to the life or
harmony of the political community, and political leaders assume the role of managers
whose role is to contain this threat. This supposed threat might come in the shape of an
impersonal force, like a natural disaster or financial market failure, or a personal one,
exemplified in the terrorist, insurgent, political dissident or even, as we shall see, the asylum seeker. Huysmans (2006) has something similar in mind that he calls existential
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politics, though I think the label of politics as crisis containment captures a little more ably
the way in which state power is used under these conditions. When confronted with such
a figure or phenomenon, political leaders respond by mobilizing whatever tools they have
at their disposal to find a solution. Politics has essentially become a problem-solving
activity that relies on the tactical deployment of administrative and regulative apparatuses
to dissolve the political, economic, social, or environmental crises that regularly unfold in
public life. In the wake of Agamben’s work, there is a temptation to interpret the most
dramatic responses to perceived problems, for example those that suspend individual
rights and liberties in the name of national security, as evidence of an emergency politics
that confirms the validity of the Schmittian conception of sovereign power. Unless we
could find a way to overturn this model of politics entirely, this would leave us with few
options but to try to ameliorate it, taming its excesses, perhaps by deriving normative
constraints on the sovereign’s ability to declare an emergency. But as Bonnie Honig
(2009: 2) points out, we thereby risk legitimating the very model of executive decisionism
that we are trying to undermine so long as we continue to work within this paradigm.
Moreover, it may not even be an accurate reflection of reality. Of the immigration detention system, Bosworth observes, “parliamentary and archival documents … expose an
enduring lack of planning where border control is concerned. It is often simply reactive.
It is almost never principled, and, as a result, many acknowledge, hard to justify” (2014:
25–26). This suggests that what we really witness in the state’s actions is not a sinister,
premeditated Schmittian decisionism but a series of reactionary and unprincipled policy
decisions that reflect, if anything, a state of confusion rather than a state of exception.
We need to find an approach that recognizes that our political world cannot be
reduced to executive decision under conditions of emergency, one that makes sense of
Honig’s provocative remark that “in the end, it is not the lawgiver but the people/multitude’s decision to accept him that is decisive for their political future” (2009: 3). We
can do so by conceiving of sovereignty not simply as the power exercised over bare
life by the state as an executive decider, but also as the power to persuade, cajole, act,
and react that the state commands in its role as a manager. On this view, it will turn out
that it is not so much that the people’s survival depends upon the decision of the state
over bare life, but also that the state’s survival depends upon the continued support of
the people, which it secures by managing these crises successfully. Huysmans and
Buonfino (2008) offer us perhaps the more apt term “politics of unease” to capture this
idea. Analyzing the securitization of the debate about immigration and asylum in the
United Kingdom, they write that
instead of dramatic speech acts articulating existential threats and thereby legitimating calls for
exceptional politics, security practice consists of knitting various discourses of unease and
danger into a patchwork of insecurities that facilitate the political exchange of fears and beliefs
and the transfer of security practice from one policy area to another. (Huysmans and Buonfino,
2008: 782)
It is the danger that lies ahead that politicians tell their electorate they can help them
to avoid. This is achieved by distributing responsibility for the task throughout the various technocratic agencies and departments of government. As Didier Bigo puts it,
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the securitization of migration is … a transversal political technology, used as a mode of
governmentality by diverse institutions to play with the unease, or to encourage it if it does not
yet exist, so as to affirm their role as providers of protection and security and to mask some of
their failures. (2002: 65)
That politicians are so quick to declare such phenomena as threats to be neutralized
through the application of solutions derived from public policy is attributable to the
emergence of this managerialist paradigm in late-modern politics.
Foucault (2009) identified the origins of this drift toward political managerialism
when he spoke of the birth of biopolitics and the rise of governmentality in his lectures
at the Collège de France. Foucault used the term governmentality to refer to that series
of mechanisms and controls by which sovereign power would be used in the modern
period to regulate the circulation of the things found to be present within the territorial
bounds of the nation (people, capital, goods, etc.). In a novel application of sovereign
power, one enabled by new forms of statistical knowledge about the population, the
state, Foucault argued, would install an apparatus of security so that it could anticipate,
adjust for, and maybe even avoid events that threaten the life of the population. This it
did in order to secure its ability to extort power—biopower—from the bodies of the
citizenry (Foucault, 2009). Security apparatuses would comprise a “juridical and disciplinary system of controls, constraint and permanent supervision” in order to stop the
event from coming to pass (Foucault, 2009: 32). What Foucault had noticed was the
beginnings of a new, modern politics: a politics oriented toward problem-solving, sustained by technocratic solutionism, one that aims at assuring the health, vitality, and
prosperity of the community.3
This tendency has continued apace, but now, with the advent of more robust forms of
democratic accountability, the bodies that were once merely regulated now speak back to
the state, demanding both that it safeguard the interests that they are now accustomed to
having protected, and that it be held accountable in its efforts to do so. As a consequence,
political leaders have been forced to adapt in the face of democratic pressures. They have
learned how to draw their authority and legitimacy from their ability to successfully
deliver on their promises to protect the ontological security of the polis.4 Border control
now ranks among the most prominent domains in which this managerialist paradigm of
politics-as-crisis-containment shows itself most clearly. On the one hand, the opening of
a political community to migratory forces is necessitated by the demands of global capitalism. But on the other, immigration, particularly in the Western European context of
nations that are at least nominally still social democracies, puts immense pressure on
local government and welfare services, leading to social unrest, anxiety, and sometimes
even panic, ills for which those in power will most likely be blamed. Once the state finds
itself caught between these two poles—the desire to fill gaps in the labor market with
regular migrants on the one hand, and the demands placed upon it by a hostile general
public anxious to exclude irregular migrants on the other—the detention, encampment,
and expulsion of aliens presents itself as a political solution par excellence. The use of
immigrant detention is thus an example of a Foucauldian security apparatus, one that
also underlines and reinforces the logic of territoriality that underpins and drives the
modern state (Cornelisse, 2010).5
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From the realm of politics to the realm of police
One of the most striking features of contemporary immigration detention is also its most
obvious: it involves the incarceration in prisons of individuals who in many instances
have been convicted of no crime. Pace Agamben the detainee is not, in fact, thrown back
into the most basic condition of bare life after all. Arendt was closer to the truth when she
observed, in the plight of the stateless in the middle of the twentieth century, the beginnings of a tendency that has only since accelerated: the transfer of individuals from the
realm of the political into the realm of the police (Arendt, 1968: 287). The detention of
migrants in prisons is a contemporary example of this phenomenon of transfer. While
Arendt (1998) reminds us that the prospects for the exercise of citizen power, and by
extension true human freedom, depend upon individuals having access to properly constituted spaces of appearance, we find in Foucault a set of resources with which to theorize the opposite kinds of spaces into which the immigrant detainee is thrust by virtue of
this transfer. These are spaces of surveillance, detection, and control.
Foucault identified two features of the prison system that are particularly relevant to
our discussion, since both of these features have their analog in immigrant detention. The
first feature is that it is in the prison that the individual is made into an object of intense
study by official power. As Foucault puts it,
the prison … is also the place of observation of punished individuals. This takes two forms:
surveillance, of course, but also knowledge of each inmate, of his behavior, his deeper states of
mind, his gradual improvement; the prisons must be conceived as places for the formation of
clinical knowledge about the convicts. (1999: 249)
As such, the incarcerated individual is placed at the heart of a set of power–knowledge relations. The more the individual is confined and isolated, the more he or she can
be studied, and his or her experiences recruited to “a body of knowledge that would regulate the exercise of penitentiary practice” (Foucault, 1999: 250). The second feature is
that it is in the prison that we witness the calculating manufacture of a particular type of
illegality. In Foucault’s analysis, the penitentiary system receives a convict, but applies
itself to an entity that it has a direct role in creating: the delinquent. This figure is to be
“distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that
is relevant in characterizing him” (Foucault, 1999: 251). The delinquent is a “pathologized subject” whose biography—his or her upbringing, circumstances, choices, and
moral codes—provides both an explanation for his or her misdemeanors and the raw
material with which the prison system will work. The delinquent is a representative of a
specific type of illegality, “a politically or economically less dangerous” individual who
can be supervised (Foucault, 1999: 277). The delinquent “thus represents a diversion of
illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power for the dominant class” (Foucault,
1999: 280) and deliquency appears “both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat
to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origins and motives, both everyday and
exotic” (Foucault, 1999: 286).
There are obvious parallels between the general figure of the delinquent in Foucault’s
thought and the specific figure of the criminalized migrant in contemporary politics.
Both are tactically created to serve particular ends—so that they can be supervised,
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studied, diverted, and redistributed in the general economy of bodies—and both are the
targets of hostility from the wider population, appearing in the popular imagination “as
close by, everywhere present and everywhere to be feared” (Foucault, 1999: 286). The
disciplining of the immigrant detainee does not have the aim of transforming his or her
soul for the purposes of reform, as the prison does in Foucault’s account. The immigrant detainee is not being primed by detention for membership of the political community. In fact, pending the adjudication of a claim for asylum, the question of the
membership of the asylum seeker is precisely the issue that hangs in the balance. Still,
as Foucault suggests, within the general economy of biopower the purposes of punishment are also linked to “a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their
task to support” (1999: 24). The useful effects in the context of immigrant detention
are threefold. First, the detainee is segregated from the general population of citizens
and moved out of the space of appearance, where he or she might act in concert with
others, into a space of concealment and confinement. The detainee is thus stripped of
the ability to act politically in the Arendtian sense. Second, this segregation means that
the individual can be isolated, closely monitored, and made into the object of study.
Details such as the detainee’s life experiences, country of origin, political identity, and
prior treatment at the hands of other states are recorded, checked, verified, scrutinized,
and subsumed into a body of technical knowledge about migratory patterns in relation
to which the receiving state may act and calculate. Third, detention serves the symbolic
purpose of legitimating the status of the immigrant detainee as a criminal in the eyes
of the public, successfully manufacturing a new category of delinquent: the criminalized migrant or asylum seeker.
The spatial structure of being
Recall the research on anxiety and depression within the detainee population cited earlier. These studies suggest that detainees experience a very severe psychological disturbance as a result of their detention. What is more, the injustice of this harm is not ably
captured by conventional liberal political theory, which has a tendency to frame the
injustices it highlights in terms of the violation of individual rights or liberties. The harm
identified here seems to go beyond the deprivation of physical liberty or the denial of a
purported right to enter a community of which one is not already a member. Instead, it
penetrates directly to the detainee’s psychological integrity and results in a breakdown in
his or her ability to relate to the world. The final task remaining is to find some theoretical resource with which to articulate the nature of this harm. I think that such a resource
can be found in the thought of Martin Heidegger. In the account of it that I present here,
I follow Jeff Malpas’ (2006) lead, emphasizing the way in which Heidegger thought of
human being as essentially and irreducibly a spatial affair.6 This seemingly straightforward idea is embedded within a theoretical apparatus that is notoriously difficult to penetrate. This is especially so because it is expressed in a highly technical and obscure
vocabulary. But in a way that is unavoidable. Heidegger’s project was nothing less than
an attempt to teach us how to “speak the place of being” (Malpas, 2006: 314), something
that he thinks we have forgotten how to do, in part because our language is no longer up
to the task. While Heidegger himself offered no political theory on the basis of these
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ideas, this does not prevent us from using them to help us think through the workings of
the immigrant detention system.7
According to Heidegger, we are the sort of creatures who, fundamentally speaking,
dwell. In order to understand why this is the case, Heidegger begins the essay “Building
Dwelling Thinking” by posing the following series of questions: What is building? What
is dwelling? What is the connection between them? By way of explanation, he offers a
genealogy of the Old High German bauen (to build), uncovering its connection with the
word bin in ich bin (I am). This is through buan (building or dwelling), whose sense
continues into the German word Nachbar (neighbor), or the Nachgebauer (the neardweller), which, in turn, reaches into “bauen, buan, bhu, beo, […] our word bin in the
versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are … What then does ich bin mean? The old word
bauen … answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell” (Heidegger, 2008b: 348–
349). These connections suggest to Heidegger that dwelling is intimately tied to being.
This might at first appear strange to us, but only, he says, because of a series of historical
transformations in the use of language that have obscured this fundamental connection.
As Heidegger puts it, “the way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we
humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on earth as
a mortal. It means to dwell” (2008b: 349). It is not that we dwell because we are builders
of things (spaces, locations, houses, etc.); rather, we build because we are dwellers.
But what does it mean to dwell? Again Heidegger looks to language for a clue:
The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, means to remain, to stay in
a place. But the gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian
means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede,
means the free, das Frye; and fry means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from
something, safeguarded. To free actually means to spare. (2008b: 350–351)
Thus to dwell is to remain in a safe place at peace, but it is not merely a passive activity. Beyond staying with things it connotes also an active clearing, making-way or freeing. This making room is achieved by building. To build is to gather together things that
happen to be in space in order to construct a locale, a bounded horizon in which “something begins its essential unfolding” (Heidegger, 2008b: 356). The example that
Heidegger uses is that of a bridge that gathers together the earth and the banks into a
space or locale, allowing mortals to conduct their business and to pass. So space is not
merely an environment of physical objects punctuated by the distances between them,
nor is it those distances between objects. As locale, it emerges only when it is consciously cleared, given over and built by humans for the purposes of their dwelling in and
among things. Mere space is converted into place. Indeed, he is keen to reject the idea
that there is a physical environment of space into which man—separate and apart—
intrudes: “space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an
inner experience” (Heidegger, 2008b: 358). To speak of man is already to speak of a
creature embedded in spaces of significance that have become, through his efforts,
places, in which he dwells and through which he lives and passes. A constitutive feature
of being is thus the conversion, through our efforts, of space—physical location in three
dimensions—to place, the abode of being.
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Dwelling involves the bringing forth through building (literally from the Greek
techne, or letting appear), the preserving and the maintaining of those elemental structures in which life processes may unfold: it is how we make a home for being. In fact,
dwelling is “the basic character of Being” (Heidegger, 2008b: 362). But this formulation
remains mysterious. In order to clarify what this means, we need to turn to Heidegger’s
(2008a) Being and Time since this is where his famous description of being as dasein
appears. Since dwelling is part of the basic nature of dasein, and hence the being of
human beings, an explication of what dasein is will help throw light back onto the concept of dwelling, indicating its significance in human life.
If all entities have their own sort of being, the sort of being which is peculiar to
human beings is what Heidegger calls dasein or, literally, there-being. In asking about
dasein, we are asking about the being of a particular entity, and in this case, that entity
is ourselves. We are trying to make ourselves transparent to our own investigation.
This leads to the foundational insight that “Dasein … is ontically distinguished by the
fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger, 2008a: 32). What
distinguishes dasein from other sorts of being is that it is and must be preoccupied by
the question of its own existence; indeed, dasein comports itself toward the question of
its own existence in a peculiar, and peculiarly significant, way: “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or
not itself” (Heidegger, 2008a: 33). In other words, dasein has a view about its being—
and a relationship to its manner of being in the world—in the way that a nonhuman
object in the world does not, and cannot, have toward its own existence. In fact, dasein
takes a stand toward its own existence—it can either take hold of itself and safeguard
its possibility of being as its ownmost or most authentic, or it can fail, neglect itself,
display a lack of concern for itself, and become inauthentic. Precisely because it is
constantly preoccupied by being as a problem for it (Malpas refers to this as the perennial questionability of being), and because this problem has a temporal dimension,
dasein endeavors to live its possibilities at any given moment by projecting itself into
a possible future as it moves through the world.
If being is to be properly studied and understood, we must begin, Heidegger tells us,
by considering a fundamental structure of dasein: being-in-the-world. For “not until we
understand Being-in-the-world as an essential structure of Dasein can we have any
insight into Dasein’s existential spatiality” (Heidegger, 2008a: 83). This spatiality, which
is already intimated in the “there” of there-being, consists in dasein’s dealings with its
immediate surroundings. The thought that dasein is, in some complex and important
fashion, already in a world comes ostensibly, Heidegger says, from our pre-theoretical
familiarity with our own manner of existence. That is, we experience the world as a place
in which we are in, a “primordial” and “constant” whole, as an a priori structure. That is
why da-sein is literally there-being: we find ourselves there, in a world with all manner
of other kinds of beings, human and nonhuman. Dasein recognizes other dasein in the
world, while nonhuman beings merely appear as “present-at-hand”: they are alongside
dasein but they are not in a world in the strong sense in which dasein is. Dasein’s in-ness
is akin to absorption within a world, a world with which it may become fascinated
(Heidegger, 2008a: 80).
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For dasein to be-in-the-world means that dasein dwells in the world. This world is
made up of “ready-to-hand” tools or, in Heidegger’s term, equipment (2008a: 97). This
equipment, which Blatter helpfully calls the “paraphernalia or gear of human life” (2007:
18) appears against an organizing context, a network of assignments, meanings and references that prescribe how, in what ways, and to what end such equipment is put to use.
This contextualizing background, or web of meaning, only becomes apparent to us when
it is disturbed or breaks down, when “something is unusable for some purpose.” At this
point, “the world announces itself” (Heidegger, 2008a: 105). But in the absence of such
a breakdown, dasein’s space in the world has the character of “inconspicuous familiarity” about it (Heidegger, 2008a: 137).
We are now in a position to summarize being-in-the-world as “a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-tohand of a totality of equipment” (Heidegger, 2008a: 107). Dasein is thus primordially
spatial which is to say we are, by nature, the sorts of beings who are not just located in
a spatial field but who exist within it. The world is the space through which dasein
moves, in which it is immediately immersed and in which it dwells, surrounded by
equipment. But dasein itself is also spatial in an even more sophisticated sense. First,
space is not merely a pre-given fixture in the world; rather, it is cleared, opened-up, or
made-room-for by dasein itself. When dasein encounters entities in the world, it makes
room for them. When Heidegger talks of making space or clearing in this context, what
he seems to have in mind is the idea that when it is functioning properly, dasein adopts
a disposition toward the world that we might describe as an openness to possibility,
one that is facilitated by, and in turn sustains, our interaction with others and the world.
Second, dasein exists in a state of deseverance. This means that it strives to de-sever:
recognizing that it is distinct and separate from other beings, that the ready-to-hand is
experienced as far, it nonetheless constantly tries to conquer its remoteness from things
in the world, because “in Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness”
(Heidegger, 2008a: 140). Thus, dasein is not only thrown into world of assignments,
references, signs, and equipment. It is, in a constitutive sense, also in a world with
other dasein: “its understanding of Being already implies the understanding of Others.
This understanding … is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge about them, but
a primordially existential kind of Being … which makes such knowledge and acquaintance possible” (Heidegger, 2008a: 161).
Being-in-the-world means to live among things with which one is ordinarily and
proximally familiar, to dwell in places that afford possibilities for being and involvement
with others, to see one’s self as thrown and projected (a potentiality to be), and to stay in
a place that one cultivates by making space for things, projects, and beings and safeguarding them or showing care toward them. These are the structural features of beingin-the-world in its average everydayness, that is, the conditions that are necessary for the
enjoyment of being in the normal course of things.
Anxiety, nonbeing, and detention
We are now in a position to appreciate that not only is the immigrant detainee transferred
from politics to the police, in this transformation of the space of being at the hands of
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state power, the detainee is also made homeless, existentially speaking. This is because
the conditions of the detainee’s detention make it impossible for him or her to dwell in
the way that Heidegger indicates is centrally important to the human experience. Caught
between worlds (the sending nation and the receiving nation), confined, unable to go
about their normal business, detainees are prevented from being able to project a stable
sense of themselves into the future or be with others. The place of the detainee is
destroyed, and instead, the individual is thrown back into mere space, in confinement.
The detainee is, in other words, evicted from the house of being, which leads to his or her
consumption by what Heidegger called anxiety.
Heidegger’s description of anxiety is ambiguous. On the one hand, anxiety appears to
be a basic state of mind of being, a “mood” in Blattner’s phrase (2007: 141), and an unavoidable one that finally and ultimately discloses “the world as world” (Heidegger,
2008a: 232). On the other hand, it is clearly a deficient mode of being: it is a pathological
state that cripples dasein and hinders its ability to be. Unlike fear, anxiety is not a reaction to something in the world, but a feeling about some problem with the world itself.
Heidegger describes this peculiarity of anxiety as follows: “That in the face of which one
is anxious is completely indefinite,” “nothing which is ready to hand or present-at-hand
within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious,” and “what
threatens is nowhere” (2008b: 231). Instead, that which causes dasein to be anxious is a
threat to its “authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 2008a: 232).
Anxiety is a state in which one can no longer see oneself as a being with a potentiality
projected into the future. Interestingly, Heidegger describes the mood that is characteristic of anxiety as one of feeling uncanny, which is the existential mode of not-being-athome. When dasein is consumed by anxiety, it is no longer at home in the world as it
should be. The world has become strange, hostile, inhospitable, and alien, no longer able
to offer a framework of intelligibility of the sort that previously made being possible.
Sociologists and psychologists have described a very similar phenomenon using the
term ontological security. Anthony Giddens goes so far as to claim that that is foundational to the modern sense of self. According to Giddens (1991: 35–46), the prospects for
successful individual agency depend upon our capacity to step back and subconsciously
monitor, and rely upon, the day-to-day social conventions and experiences that constitute
the “goings on” of our daily lives. These conventions and experiences, as well as people
and things, form the fabric of our social reality—they are the background conditions that
make our lives possible. We must be able to maintain a measure of confidence in the
integrity of this fabric to be able to successfully act in the world. This confidence, which
is maintained by our everyday routines and rituals even if we do not notice them, allows
us to bracket the infinite range of risks to which we are exposed in our interactions with
the world, the direct contemplation of which would be so overwhelming as to paralyze
us completely. In other words, the confidence we have in the responses of others and in
the constitution of the social spaces around us serves as a bulwark against the overwhelming anxiety that would otherwise engulf us in its absence. The wellspring of this
confidence is interpersonal trust, a resource of vital importance for the proper development of the individual psyche. Without this basic trust and the “emotional and behavioral
‘formulae’” (Giddens, 1991: 44) that inhere in our routines, we would simply be unable
to manage the risks that are attendant with the carrying on of everyday life. Furthermore,
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without basic trust in our surroundings we would be unable to project a stable selfidentity into the future and we would not be able to engage in creative thinking, both of
which are necessary to achieve “psychological satisfaction and the discovery of moral
meaning” (Giddens, 1991: 41).
In her study of the British detention regime, Bosworth has recorded testimony from
several detainees who remark upon the difficulty they experience in maintaining healthy,
trusting relationships with their fellow detainees as well as case workers and the custodial staff, noting that “low levels of trust influenced people’s capacity and desire for
forging friendships” (2014: 141). So while Giddens’ examples of the breakdown of this
protective barrier are generally drawn from cases involving the improper development of
interpersonal trust during childhood, the discussion could easily be transposed onto the
experiences of adults too, especially those in detention. Giddens writes, for example, that
“where individuals cannot live creatively, either because of the compulsive enactment of
routines, or because they have been unable to attribute full ‘solidity’ to persons and
objects around them, chronic melancholic or schizophrenic tendencies are likely to
result” (1991: 41). Individuals who cannot maintain a trust in the social world around
them “may feel that the object-world, or other people, have only a shadowy existence, or
be unable to maintain a clear sense of continuity of self-identity” (Giddens, 1991: 43).
When he considers the origins of these ideas in existentialist philosophy, Giddens attributes them most directly to Kierkergaard, not Heidegger. But it is quite clear that the
object-world fabric in which an individual needs to trust in order to act in the world is an
analog to the interlinked web of assignments of meaning that underpin Heidegger’s
notion of equipment. It is the breakdown of a trust in equipment that punctures the fragile
barrier against existential anxiety, which engulfs the detainee.
If we take the research on the mental health of detainees cited earlier as our guide, we
can begin to appreciate that the highly pathological mode of being that occurs when
equipment breaks down, and which Heidegger categorizes as anxiety, is a constitutive
feature of the immigrant detention system. In fact, it is normalized there, which means
that the possibility of being-as-dwelling for the detainee is radically precluded. Because
of the conditions that inhere there, projecting one’s potentiality-to-be is no longer possible inside the detention system; the contextual horizon (and its equipment) that usually
makes such projection possible has been destroyed. The temporal element of being—the
possibility of stewarding one’s self and one’s projects into a future—is radically undermined. In fact, time in this sense has no meaning within the detention system. The carving out of a locale and the conversion of space into place, in the Heideggerian sense, is
no longer possible.
Conclusion
When the troublesome figure of the irregular migrant seeks entry into a receiving nation,
this triggers a response aimed at crisis containment: the state smuggles the migrant from
politics to police via the back door of immigrant detention. The effect is twofold. First,
the state is able to deprive the detainee of a political voice and, therefore, of a political
identity. Second, the state is able to recast the asylum seeker as a criminal. But that does
not exhaust the description of the harm that is perpetrated by this system. With this
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transformation of the space around the detainee—the individual’s removal from one kind
of space and reinsertion into another—a certain kind of existential injustice is manifest.
In an effort to get at this harm, I have offered an interpretation of Heidegger’s views on
the spatiality of being and anxiety. My aim here has been a narrow one: to present a
plausible interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking, one that is suggestive of a critique of the
practice of immigrant detention in the contemporary context. This critique emphasizes
that human beings live spatially and that when their capacity to live in this way is threatened or undermined, as it is for those who have been detained, the kind of suffering that
ensues reaches into their very being. Herein we have uncovered a previously neglected
aspect to the injustice of immigrant detention.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Didier Bigo argues that “the transnational movement of capital, people, and ideas destabilizes
the territorial state and the simplicity of the (Schmittian) formula of designating the sovereign” (2007: 10). Although Bigo develops his critique of Agamben in a direction that is very
different from mine, it seems to me that we both share a desire to move out from underneath
the preoccupation with the top down, decisionistic nature of sovereign power that is so characteristic of Schmitt and Agamben’s thinking.
See Walters (2010) and also the other contributions to De Genova and Peutz (2010).
For further treatments of this kind of politics, see Dean (1999) and Rose and Miller (1992).
Adam Curtis (2004) makes this point in his own inimical, polemical style in the excellent
BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
For an analysis of the contemporary treatment of illegal immigrants and regulation of borders
more generally through the Foucauldian lens of governmentality, see Inda (2006).
In my interpretation of Heidegger I have, in addition to Malpas’ book, drawn on the familiar
and leading exegeses in Dreyfus (1991) and Blattner (2007).
It is arguably Arendt’s project, in fact, to politicize Heidegger’s writings on being, transforming them into the grounds of a political theory of becoming. The relationship between these
sets of ideas and the intellectual debt that Arendt owes to Heidegger are beyond the scope of
the present investigation, but these connections, as well as the utility of reading Heidegger
on being and dwelling for the purposes of this article, were suggested to me by Dana Villa’s
(1995) Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political.
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Author biography
Craig French is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Government and International Affairs
at the University of South Florida, United States. He is interested in a broad range of topics both in
the history of political thought as well as in contemporary political theory, especially democratic
theory, global justice, and international ethics. He is also interested in the reception of figures usually associated with continental philosophy into recent Anglo-American political thought, such as
Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger.
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