Where ethics and politics meet : The violence of humanitarianism in France

I examine the role of humanitarianism and compassion in an emergent ethical configuration that makes illness a primary means by which undocumented immigrants obtain legal residency (“papers”) in France. I argue that the sacred place of biological integrity in this ethical discourse leads immigrants to trade in biological integrity for political recognition. I demonstrate first how humanitarianism has been transformed into a form of politics, functioning as a transnational system of governance tied to capital and labor even while purporting to be apolitical. I focus in the second half of the article on the consequences of humanitarianism as politics, which include new biopolitical practices, unexpected diseased and disabled citizens, and a limited version of what it means to be human. [medical humanitarianism, human rights, France, anthropology of ethics, biopolitics, immigration, citizenship] W hile I was conducting fieldwork in Paris, the former president of the gay-rights activist group Act-Up Paris told me that he had received phone calls from undocumented immigrants inquiring how they could infect themselves with HIV and thereby obtain legal status in France. Although this particular account of HIV self-infection is anecdotal, the rhetoric of willed self-infection can be located in the larger reality I observed during the course of my research between 1999 and 2001: I increasingly saw undocumented immigrants, or sans papiers (lit. those without papers), turn to physical injury or infection to claim the basic rights supposedly granted to all “human beings.”1 This tendency to turn to illness for papers occurred in the wake of the limited success of the social movement by and for undocumented immigrants in France to secure basic human rights. It also coincided with the introduction of a humanitarian clause in French law—what I call the “illness clause”—that gives people with serious illnesses the right to stay in France and receive treatment.2 In this article, I examine the role of humanitarianism and compassion in the development of an ethical configuration that has made illness a primary means by which to obtain papers in France. I open with the HIV anecdote to introduce the notion of the often-unintended consequences of ethical discourses such as humanitarianism or practices that claim to further social justice. More broadly, I use this example as an entryway into what I see as an incipient or emergent ethical configuration in which people end up trading in biological integrity for political recognition. The sacred place of biological integrity in this emergent ethics became apparent to me over the course of my fieldwork with undocumented immigrants. I initially went to Paris to examine the promises and failures of human-rights discourse in the sans papiers movement and, more broadly, to understand transnational ethical and legal regimes. Thus, in addition to working with sans papiers organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I conducted research at various hospitals, state medical offices, and clinics both within and just outside of Paris that focused on AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 33–49, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm. American Ethnologist Volume 33 Number 1 February 2006 marginalized populations (those en situation de précarité).3 In the clinics, social workers and doctors worked hand in hand, driven by the conviction that social and medical issues are intertwined, particularly for those designated “les exclus” by the French—society’s excluded. Early on in my observations, however, I noted that the first question many social workers asked their undocumented clients was, “Are you sick?” and if an individual answered yes, they would ask almost too eagerly, “How sick?” I gradually understood that the answer they hoped for was “Very sick,” because it provided clients with the one clear means by which to apply for papers. A woman from an immigrant-rights association confirmed this conclusion at a workshop on sans papiers and HIV/AIDS, stating, “Isn’t it terrible? We almost wish for illness when we talk to sans papiers.” This wish for illness, of course, was not born of malice but of a desire to better help the undocumented. The illness clause is a provision of the 1998 amendment to the Ordonnance of 2nd November 1945 no. 45–2658 on Conditions of Entry and Residence of Foreigners that grants legal residency permits to those in France with pathologies of life-threatening consequence if they are declared unable to receive proper treatment in their home countries.4 The logic behind this provision was humanitarian and exceptional; indeed, legal permits for illness are officially given for “humanitarian reasons.” The French state felt it could not deport people if their deportation had consequences of exceptional gravity, such as their deaths. Despite the goal to keep it exceptional, the illness clause—instituted as a humanitarian provision—has come to play an important role in the politics of immigration. In this article, therefore, I explore the consequences of a politics of immigration largely grounded in a humanitarian logic. How does humanitarianism function as politics—how does it address inequality and injustice? My main contention is that, when humanitarianism, often enacted through a moral imperative of compassion, fills in for the failure of politicalrights discourses and practices, the exclusionary effects can be brutal; indeed, I argue that, rather than furthering human dignity, the result is a limited version of what it means to be human. By drawing on ethnographic examples of how humanitarianism works on the ground, in “a space of concrete problems, dangers, and hopes that are actual, emergent, and virtual” (Rabinow 2002:145), I trace its contours and its often-counterintuitive consequences. My argument has two main theoretical points. First, I suggest that humanitarianism, although driven by the moral and ethical imperative to relieve suffering, can have discriminatory and even violent consequences in the absence of guiding political principles and practices. These consequences are all the more striking because they are unexpectedly found at the very heart of the compassion that grounds humanitarian action. Here, I engage in a debate about the contemporary resurgence of discourses of moralism and how they blur boundaries between legal, political, and ethical–moral orders. I am particularly interested in the growing emphasis on the role of compassion, sympathy, and benevolence in political life—sentiments that play a crucial part in the discourses of what some call “global civil society.” NGOs fighting in the name of human rights, environmentalism, and cultural preservation, among many other causes, intervene on behalf of a moral order, each fighting for a role in “the global meritocracy of suffering” (Bob 2002). One of the most prominent of these movements is humanitarianism, which grew in global importance and visibility over the course of the 1990s. The massive proliferation of humanitarian organizations, the awarding of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), and the entry of humanitarianism into common political discourse—illustrated by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government calling the bombing of Kosovo a “humanitarian bombing”—are just a few examples of its growing presence.5 There has been a concomitant focus on suffering, in the name of which humanitarianism intervenes.6 As just one example, the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has increased exponentially in recent years, giving public prominence to the suffering and trauma endured in a variety of contexts, from military interventions to domestic disputes.7 Yet how does the recognition of suffering result in a political program for change? Although the question of how moral demands translate into politics has a history as long as political philosophy itself, I am interested in its current manifestation precisely because moral demands have increasingly filled the space of political action. Whereas scholars such as Wendy Brown and Chantal Mouffe have argued that the tendency to moralize has taken the place of political action, I make my second but related point by suggesting that this moralism has created another type of politics, even while being labeled apolitical.8 I engage here in the contemporary debate about biopolitics and humanitarianism, which relies heavily on work done by philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben, in turn, builds on the intersection of works by Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. Agamben (1998:133) suggests that humanitarian organizations can only function by grasping human life as “bare life,” the Greek zoe, the fact of living common to all beings—life unqualified by the political and social communities that distinguish humanity from other types of life. Bare life is life excluded from the polis, and insofar as human beings are political or social beings, the polis marks the boundary between human and nonhuman. In fact, my research suggests that humanitarianism does not simply produce or reproduce bare life as separate from political life, even if the protection of bare or biological life is its goal; rather, it allows for the recombination of bare life and