Between justice and compassion: "Les sans papiers" and the political economy of health, human rights and humanitarianism in France.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation argues that there has been a shift in emphasis in contemporary France from a regime of systematicity and justice, grounded in the rule of law, to a narrower ethics of exceptionality and benevolence, based on a politics of humanitarianism and compassion. I examine this shift from the angle of those most impacted by the failure of the rule of law—immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants—or those called “les sans papiers” in France, meaning literally, those without papers. Based on ethnographic field research in Paris from 1999–2001 with undocumented immigrants, women's activist groups, lawyers, immigration officials, nurses, doctors and social workers, this dissertation documents how, as one example of this shift, illness has become a primary means by which to stay in France legally. My argument is most strikingly supported by the discovery that undocumented immigrants are responding to the medicalization of human rights by seeking out information on how they can become infected with HIV, the goal being to gain legal status in France through a humanitarian clause in French law, one that requires them to evoke the compassion of medical officials.
I identify this emergent ethical regime in France as one that takes the right to biological life as that which transcends all, and therefore that which informs a universal ethics—a notion of life beyond political, social, cultural or other qualification. Despite this conception of a universal humanity, this dissertation illustrates how gender and race figure crucially in determining <italic>how</italic> one can be human, and who can solicit compassion. I demonstrate how this emergent ethics based on benevolence and compassion has turned the politics of immigration into a politics of life and death, where one must barter one's suffering for inclusion in the concept of humanity, and ultimately, barter biological life for political recognition. This politics of compassion is part of a transnational moral economy that extends into many realms, focusing on apolitical, suffering bodies. It is an ethical regime that helps to constitute and maintain the interior and exterior borders of the French nation-state, while simultaneously functioning to constitute a space of “humanity.&rdquo.