The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 268268 THE SCARS OF THE ERASURE3. Emancipation as a process of shaping the political subjectWhat message did the erased people and their collaborators transmitthrough these diverse actions? Primarily that they understood perfectly that bybeing erased from the civic norm they were also erased from the human normand had thus become “ordinary human beings” left without any other characte -ristic except that they were still human. In other words, their message is that theerasure stripped them of political life (bios) and that their biological life (zōē) wasthe only thing left to them. Even at the time when they did not know exactly whathad happened to them, and precisely because of that, as Aleksandar Todorovićemphasized, they were keenly aware of the necessity to take action and draw attentionto themselves, i.e. to publicly expose themselves. Therefore, they primarilydrew attention to their biological life by exploiting political and public action toalert the public that they still existed, that although they had been erased fromthe domain of political rights, they still existed as humans, as living beings andphysical bodies. As pure bodies, they exposed and represented themselves in variousdemonstrations and public actions in various public spaces (but primarily inthe street as the public space par excellence). What is very important, by enteringthe premises of the National Assembly, the Court, the ZLSD party, the TR3 officebuilding or the European Parliament, they were liberating the privatized and bureaucratizedspaces occupied by the political and social elite and with their actionsthey were opening and returning these spaces to the public.On the other hand, given that they could use their bare bodies only, it wasnot accidental that their political struggle began with the hunger strike by AleksandarTodorović, “the most widely recognized erased person,” and that over thefollowing years they continued to stage protest hunger strikes and exhaustingmarches including the long “Brussels Caravan.” After all, their body, physical bodywas the only thing they were left with at a certain point in time, and it was theonly instrument at all available to them for drawing attention to themselves. Byengaging their own bodies, starving them and submitting to self-destruction, theyillustratively demonstrated how “bare life” can become incompatible with thelegal and political system of a nation-state and how people without a state, i.e.citizenship, can only be people without existence. In this way they exposed theradical discrepancy between a human being and a citizen, i.e. the radical cleavageof their identity which was a consequence of the general “identity fundamentalism”(Rancière 1999, 132) or general “identity panic” (Balibar 2004b, 182),which engulfed the “majority” population and led to “identity exclusion” (ibid.).The erased people thus established themselves as a political subject within thesplit separating the signifiers “the erased” (non-citizen) and “human being” (citizen),or, by being completely dehumanized as human being they became emancipatedas political beings. Through many diverse collective actions, they alsoconfirmed Balibar’s argument that the concept of human rights should be reco -gnized as contradictory, one which always dwells on the extreme limits of demo -