Biopolitical Convergences: Narmada Bachao Andolan and Homo Sacer‪.‬

Taking the anti-dam movement in India ("Save the Narmada Movement" or Narmada Bachao Andolan) as a case study, this paper aims to mark the present as one of ethical indeterminacy for the social activist towards the life that the activist claims to protect through an activation of the law, i.e. the refugee and the adivasi made human through the law. Relying on Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" in Homo Sacer, I argue that the activist disarticulates "bare life" from sovereign power, thereby relying on a human rights discourse that conceives of a subject within and yet beyond the logic of the state, as a life reappropriated and redefined by state power. I end by suggesting that the activist must go beyond the contemporary ethical crisis by conceiving of a struggle that isolates the moments that make visible the indistinguishable convergence of sovereign exceptionality and life's exemplarity. Such moments involve a double move which names bare existence, not life, as outside the sovereign's juridical power and refuses to attribute this existence to activation under the name of law. Looking back, how could we not have seen that life itself has been fundamentally at stake in our politics and in our ethics? How could have avoided recognizing the political consequences of the fact that we humans have come to understand ourselves as living beings whose very vitality, longevity, morbidity, mortality can be managed, administered, reformed, improved, transformed, has a political value?