The aim of the paper is to look closely at forced detention for the undocumented and uncover the way in which detainees make use of their bodies as a practice of dissent. Dissent is read not simply as a demonstration of the sovereign failure of governing national communities through a politics of the camp – which seems to obey to the identity/alterity nexus rather than to economic and security issues – but also as the capacity of the ‘Others’ to resort to violent corporeal practices for reclaim their participation as political beings. The internees’ claims that their human rights should be respected and their being political recognised work as a powerful reminder to the sovereign entity that the political capacity of the excluded is not simply defined in respect to their nationality but also, and perhaps more importantly, by the way in which they constitute themselves as new political subjectivities. If the capacity of acting and speaking as political subjects determines their being political, then a focus on practices, and not simply on their legal attributes or resident status, should be taken into greater consideration. Contrary to Ellermann analysis, dissent inside the camps should not be read as simply ‘individual acts of desperation’ but as important acts of protest, which go beyond individual cases. The absence of any possibilities of dissent through their voice – the political tool par excellence in a liberal-democracy – has made their bodies to speak. It is their bodies – through self-mutilation, hunger strike, lips and eyes sewing, and suicide attempts – which tell the many stories of abuses and deprivation committed by camps’ administrators. The sovereign attempt to make them silent – ignoring any verbal protests or request of help – has not made them speechless, but indeed politically active through the only instrument left to them: their own body.
