Searching for Foundations in Noncitizenship

One of the most stirring propositions that literature on noncitizenship has offered is its distinction as “not derivative,” theoretically, from the citizenship framework of politics. Noncitizenship, as Tendayi Bloom has put it, cannot be taken as “the opposite or negation of citizenship.” Instead, it must be considered a “foundational political relation in its own right,” equal to citizenship not as its essential opposite in the constitution of the political but as one alternative ground on which politics can be based. Here, a politics constituted by authorized membership faces an ontological limit. Reframed by its dependency on a contingent threshold of exclusion, citizenism becomes unsettled as the universal ground of the political. In the same stroke that Bloom ‘de-grounds’ citizenship as the ultimate and final political relation, noncitizenship as “foundational in its own right” suggests a reimagining of the political, wherein action and agency remain independent of the condition of recognized membership. To a large extent, this is where the theory of noncitizenship politics stands today. By highlighting the nuanced action and activism engaged by those in positions of de jure or de facto exclusion, scholars have done well to recapture the political agency of those who enter into a public life from which they are denied and contribute to the democratic process of shaping its content despite their marginalized relational position in the international state system. If, however, this agent of dissensus effectively pierces the theoretical ground of an exclusionary threshold as the ontological basis for politics, what is the substance of the foundation that it affirms? That is, if noncitizenship is to be considered a “foundational relation in its own right,” it becomes imperative to outline this supposed ground of politics that it reflects, if not authorized membership. Mapping the theoretical body of such a foundation will mitigate the risk that a philosophy of noncitizenship falls back into the trap of derivativeness that Bloom has sought to escape, unable to step beyond a negation of the condition that constitutes it. The proposed paper takes up this impetus, raising an ontological question that has yet to be explored by theorists of noncitizenship. That is, what does this supposed ‘foundation’ consist of? We rely on the literature of ‘post-foundationalism’ as a potential site for the exposition of this alternative and reconstructive ground of politics. Here, we make the case that the participation and contribution of noncitizens as unauthorized democratic agents characterizes, not just the fallibility of a liberal citizenism to realize some theoretical finality for the constitution of politics through a threshold of exclusion, but that in its insurgency, such action distinctly represents a condition of nonbelonging as the basis for a reimagined politics. As we argue, it is this ground, equal in its own fallibility to be universalized, wherein a theory of noncitizenship can appropriately distinguish itself from the citizen framework, and while accepting its position as a historical product of liberal politics, it effectively rises to the challenge of antagonism.