Prof. Dr. Yasmeen Arif

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Life, per se: A Critique of the Government of Identity is a book project that investigates how group identity embeds juridical imprints, bureaucratic apparatus, political expediency, and governmental strategy to create the conditions by which life is constituted. Using a bio-political groundwork, in which both the creation of governable populations and the implication of life become focal points, my intention is to invest in an empirical description as well as an analytical intervention. While I  locate this question largely in the context of India, in so far as the cohering theme is a universal notion of identity as it appears in the horizon of socio-political experience now, I expect my work to be informed by global questions and conditions of social identity in the contemporary. 

Simply stated, my intention is to understand the relationship between how changing notions of the social, as it is articulated in notions of identity, comes to be implicated in jural and governmental categories of lived life, creating as it were forms of life.  In so much that identity is my focus here, it seems to appear that lived life becomes unmoored from personal biography, but stays anchored in group identity, shifting shape, as it were, per governmental reason. My interest here is to see how that group identity emerges in modern statecraft, what are its conditions of recognition? In that I find three vectors useful for exploration:  

• by blood – renewed classifications of hereditary or fictive 

• by person – articulations as personhood or as in persons and things

• by property – as proprietary or proper claim on nation, territory, culture, economy or the sacred. 

Identity has no easy definition, and its best exploration is perhaps done in a specific framing. In that attempt, when I mention identity as a notion that  connotes a collective or a group sharing common characteristics, however construed, I indicate the place of that kind of group identity in governmentality. In addition, a precursor to that governmentality is the place of identity in the realm of the political, where political strategy grows into governmental reason. Scholarship on identity in politics is a considerable archive, however a biopolitical intervention promises to show an unusual connection between nuances of the social as articulated in group identity and the crafting of governance through law and administrative practices. That promise of the unusual in understanding identity, I expect, is what the biopolitical offers through the combined exploration of the three vectors I have suggested:  blood, an arguably socially constructed biological substance; personhood, a notion constructed on the cusp of the biological and political, and property, a socio-economic vector that threads through both former terms in legal administration. In sum, to illustrate further with an exemplar - inheritance is a well-known register that equally involves blood, personhood and property – which together appear in administrative categories of collective identity. Collective identities are a matter of representation of the social via the political. My search in this meeting of the biological and the political, is the notion of the social – very simply, in pursuing the question of life, how do we think of the social, or in another way, how is life instituted the social. What is the social, or a question that is often posed in this kind of epistemology – what is its veridiction? That is what I am searching for through a biopolitical lexicography.

Context 

My work so far has been in the realm of a politics of life – a brief paragraph describing an earlier monograph follows later in this proposal – and the book project proposed here is a continuation of that as a second part deliberation of how the biopolitical framework might appear in contexts and locations which have not been the putative condition of biopolitical debates. Once again in this project and through the interventions outlined below, I amplify on the question of how life is instituted in the social, again and again, as forms of the social in governmental and bureaucratic strategy. 

To extend the relevance of this research proposal, I would emphasize that these forms entangle in current imaginations of nation and citizenship, finding their resurgence in contemporary democracies. The renewed instituting of life in law in the interstices of government and bureaucracy makes it necessary to invoke a biopolitical lexicon – where corporeal bodies meet political strategy – to show how conventional paradigms of identity as self-assertion, redistribution and social justice have altered traction in the contemporary. These interactions then, between life, law and government is the terrain on which forms of life appear. Second, as I mentioned earlier, my larger aspiration is to address how the interface between nomos and bios in formulating identity provokes forms of life that inhabit citizenship and democracy today. Life outside these group identities possibly invite attention as to where the elusive common community must be affirmed, where solidarity can be sustained without normative ressentiment.

The privilege of this fellowship for my work is the invitation for a multidisciplinary renewed vocabulary for an inquiry into how life engages identity. I seek a vocabulary that will adequately capture this institution of identity, produced by blood, person and the proper with which to construct the moving thresholds of belonging and expulsion. By this, I do not reject the dominant discourses within the biopolitical framework, for example, of securitization, statelessness or nationalism, nor the human rights debates that engage with such discourses - but rather learn from them to address the gaps currently apparent. Carrying forward a commitment towards a politics of life from my earlier work, I now focus again on a contemporary, perhaps renewed, understanding about life and its displacements by law. India is my focus, however, this fellowship offers a very privileged location with which to glance at how legal forms of life can be seen, especially in the distinct German jural tradition which stands apart and informs beyond the Anglo-Saxon tradition that appears withing the Indian context. Given the deepening homologies among popular comparisons of  caste, race and faith in discussions of group identity, migration and citizenship and how these discussions follow similar motifs of blood, person, property and legal life, I look forward to enriching environment to work on these issues.