The Inhabitants of the Camp: Homo Sacer and Biopolitical Regimes in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas

Politicization, in general, and biopoliticization, in particular, of human beings’ lives, especially those the state deems expendable, is what informs the heart of the present study. Exploring the subtle ways in which the state renders its subjects docile and at the same time divested of any subjectivity, agency, identity and human rights remarkably helps in better understanding the covert mechanisms of the biopolitical regimes operating within the ideologically-informed, discursive nexus of the sociopolitical fabric of the society. Studying Giorgio Agamben’s (1995) seminal text Homo Sacer (1995), and his theoretical reworking of Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower” alongside Carl Schmitt’s notion of “the state of exception” casts an illuminating light on how such biopolitical regimes and exclusionary states of exception operate within the narrative of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Attempts at biopoliticizing and governmentalizing Mohun Biswas, the fiction’s central character, play out in different contexts and manifest themselves within the fabric of both the microcosmic family and macrocosmic society wherein Biswas inhabits, not as a decent member, but as a subjugated inhabitant of a biopolitical camp. Having been biopolitically interpellated and reduced to an Agambenian homo sacer, Biswas is deemed outside of and beneath the law, life and citizenship, and therefore, within a sacrificial order, his life means nothing to the biopolitical state. However, some counter-discursive, counter-biopolitical spaces that Biswas uses to rally against the prevailing sovereignty of the biopolitical regimes of the state should be explored to further buttress or undermine the discursive and ontological potentiality of resistance against biopolitical oppressions of any sort.

The Inhabitants of the Camp: Homo Sacer and Biopolitical Regimes in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas Keywords:

biopolitics , state of exception , the camp , sovereignty , ideology , human rights