“…we are being left to burn because we do not count” – Biopolitics, abandonment, and resistance

Anna Selmeczi recently spent some months participating in the day to day activities of Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban. This is the first paper that she has written on the basis of this immersion in the life and activities of the movement. It will be published in full in Global Society in October.

“…we are being left to burn because we do not count” – Biopolitics, abandonment, and resistance
– by Anna Selmeczi

Starting from the puzzle posed by the ultimate aim of modern governmental rationality to nurture the population and its tendencies to exclude large parts of the same population from the spectrum of its care, this article argues that abandonment is always already inscribed into this rationality. In contradiction to Agamben, abandonment here is not attributed to the sovereign exception, but is traced back to modern processes transforming the political—as problematized by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Complementing their observations with the empirical and the anti-political implications of “the count” based on Ian Hacking’s and Jacques Rancière’s thought, first a conceptual framework for understanding biopolitical abandonment is outlined, then the materialization of abandonment is assessed. Arriving finally at the possibility of thinking resistance to the power that disallows life through conceiving of politics as disruption, the last section discusses the South African shack-dwellers’ struggle, which, at instances, is able to disturb the dynamics of abandonment and so potentially furthers the conceptualization of resistance to biopolitics.

Click here to read this essay in word, here to read it in pdf and here to read the published version.