"What About Life?" What Starts as Contingency is Understood Retroactively as Necessary

Abstract

There is an emphasis on the politics of ‘life’ through the lens of ‘marginalization’ and the giving and taking away of life with the solution being reducible to Said’s understanding of the marginalized making a “voyage in” from the periphery to reclaiming the center. While clearly these are useful political questions, they reach an impasse, which Zizek’s work while (he claims) is in favor of immigration and open borders, correctly raises some anxieties about the politics of life from a completely different perspective. This is what I want to explore in this paper, what does Zizek’s work make possible in thinking beyond the ideological way that the ‘politics of life’ has been framed, thus opening up discourses that have been ‘set’ by a limited ‘post/de-colonial-biopolitical’ set of signifiers, which to my reading of Zizek, he is right to point out, have become the ‘master’-signifiers in the ideological matrices of how the question of life is currently framed.