From Pylos to Gaza: Didier Fassin explains how we learned to tolerate death

Didier Fassin did not begin his career as a social scientist, but as a doctor.

He studied Medicine in Paris and worked as an internist. However, his experience in countries such as Tunisia, Senegal and India gradually led him from medicine to anthropology.

Since then, he has devoted his work to the study of power, inequality, migration, policing, punishment and the moral dimension of politics. Today, he is regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary anthropologists.

He is a professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the chair in “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies”.

His research is in constant dialogue with Foucauldian thought, while this year he is also curating the Collège de France’s major exhibition marking 100 years since the birth of the French philosopher and has published the book Ainsi pensait Michel Foucault. We met him in Thessaloniki on the occasion of his lecture at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall.

Our discussion centred on some of the most critical issues of our time: migration and Europe’s borders, the war in Gaza, the concept of biopolitics, police violence, and the ways in which societies decide which lives are worthy of protection and which are not.

You have said that our era has shifted from a politics of rights to a politics of compassion. Following Pylos and Gaza, we saw major mobilisations but very few institutional changes. Is this an example of how humanitarianism can function as a substitute for political responsibility?

In the 1990s and 2000s, I conducted a series of studies in France, Venezuela, South Africa and the Occupied Palestinian Territories on how societies responded to the critical situations faced by migrants, asylum seekers, victims of natural disasters, AIDS orphans and teenagers involved in the Intifada.

In all these different contexts, compassion and the provision of assistance were the norm. At the time, I spoke of humanitarian government in order to describe that historical period during which moral sentiments entered politics, often at the expense of forms of thought and practice more closely oriented towards justice.

In the period that followed, namely during the 2010s and 2020s, the attitude of political leaders and Western societies more broadly was reversed. We moved from a politics of compassion to a politics of repression. Walls and barbed-wire fences were erected, camps were created, boats were pushed back to prevent displaced people from reaching Europe, while even humanitarian organisations were obstructed from providing them with assistance.

This hardening is evident in every area: towards the poor and the unemployed, towards minorities and foreigners. Security government now prevails.

The shipwreck off Pylos and the destruction of Gaza belong to this period, in which indifference has come to dominate our societies in the face of state violence: indifference towards exiles drowning near our shores because they are denied assistance, and towards Palestinians being slaughtered with weapons supplied by our own countries.

Do symbols such as the watermelon strengthen the Palestinian struggle, or is there a risk that they depoliticise it?

The issue is not one of symbols. It is one of politics.

It concerns the failure of the European authorities — with very few exceptions, primarily Spain — to stop what the United Nations’ independent commission has described as genocide. It also concerns the sanctions imposed on those who seek to defend international law, the rights of the Palestinian people and human rights in Palestine.

History will remember the complicity of our countries — Greece, France, Germany, the United States and many others — in the crimes committed by Israel, in the destruction of an entire territory, in the extermination of civilians and in the slow death of children.

From Thessaloniki, we are only a few hours away from Evros, one of Europe’s most important borders. How do you explain the different treatment of Ukrainian refugees compared with Syrian or Afghan refugees? Is this a matter of geopolitics or a moral hierarchy concerning the value of human lives?

Greece and Croatia were described by the President of the European Commission as the bulwarks of the European Union. They are indeed the two countries through which those following the Balkan route enter European territory.

At these two borders, police and military violence is at its most severe and best documented. It is there that those attempting to cross the border are arrested, beaten, humiliated and terrorised, before being pushed back after all their possessions and even their clothes have been taken from them.

The European Union turns a blind eye to these practices, and its officials even congratulate the two countries on their harsh stance towards these new “enemies” at our borders, while remaining silent about the brutality that accompanies it.

However, this treatment applies almost exclusively to women and men from the Middle East and North Africa. The Afghans, Iranians and Moroccans I met during my research all described these abuses and humiliations.

Ukrainians, by contrast, received a generous welcome because they are considered to resemble us physically, culturally and religiously.

It is therefore not primarily a matter of geopolitics, but one of racism, including anti-Muslim racism.

The evidence for this lies in the fact that Bosnia, the only Muslim-majority European country through which the exiles pass, is the country where they say they were treated best. And almost everyone following the Balkan route is Muslim.

At Europe’s contemporary borders, we see not only the management of populations but also a hierarchy in the value assigned to human life. Is this an evolution of Foucault’s biopolitics, or something different that he did not foresee?

Biopolitics, as defined by Michel Foucault, concerns the government of populations: the way demography and epidemiology measure them, as well as the way birth control and border surveillance determine their development.

But it does not concern itself with life as such.

That is why, some years ago, I proposed that we turn instead to the politics of life, meaning the way we understand life and the way we treat lives.

This difference in grammatical number is fundamental.

I showed that, over the centuries, Western societies attributed ever greater value to life in the singular, elevating it to the highest good to be protected.

At the same time, however, they produced enormous inequalities between lives in the plural, to the point that in France, for example, the life expectancy of the wealthiest 5 per cent is thirteen years longer than that of the poorest 5 per cent.

These issues were not part of the agenda of Foucauldian thought. For me, however, they constitute one of the most important features of the contemporary world.

The families of the victims of the Tempi rail disaster managed to transform a tragedy into one of the most significant political events in modern Greece. What allows some victims to become political subjects demanding justice, while other tragedies remain merely objects of public compassion?

A tragedy that affects members of the national community usually generates feelings of empathy towards the victims and their families.

For the authorities, which are often the target of criticism, it is important to demonstrate compassion, meet the families and send teams of psychologists to the scene of the tragedy. At the same time, the media often reinforce this dynamic by multiplying emotional testimonies, supported by the interventions of experts.

As we have shown in our research, an important challenge for the victims themselves is to avoid becoming trapped in this cycle of compassion, even though compassion is a necessary emotion.

In order to demand justice, it is often necessary for them to unite in collective mobilisations aimed, on the one hand, at securing their rights and, on the other, at bringing those responsible before the courts.

In this way, these collectives can politicise empathy.

When a member of a marginalised community, such as Roma people in Greece or residents of working-class suburbs, becomes a victim of police violence, the public debate often shifts from the act of violence itself to the victim’s past. What does this need to morally assess the victim tell us about contemporary democracies?

The Roma are the most despised and mistreated population in Europe. They are the targets of the crudest prejudices and the most severe discrimination.

When they become victims of police violence, every effort is made to cast doubt on them rather than on the perpetrators of the violence.

This is what I found in the research I conducted into the death of a Roma man who was killed by an elite unit of the French gendarmerie.

More broadly, however, law enforcement agencies in most countries of the world are effectively above the law they are supposed to enforce.

When they kill, even outside the bounds of legitimate self-defence, they almost always enjoy impunity.

By contrast, the person who lost their life becomes the subject of official statements about their criminal record, sometimes even containing false information, in order to portray them as someone of questionable character whose loss is ultimately deemed less significant.

In this way, the moral assessment of individuals — even when based on false information — becomes decisive in shaping how we perceive them and judge their worth.