Fassin,+Didier

=**Didier Fassin**=
 * (1959-present)**

Identifications
Current positions:
 * James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2009-)
 * Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1999-)
 * Visiting Professor at Princeton University and the University of Hong Kong (2010-2013)

Selected past positions:
 * Junior Doctor in Internal Medicine – “Interne des Hôpitaux de Paris” (1979-1984 and 1986-1987)
 * Assistant Professor in Infectious Diseases and Public Health – Hospital Pitié-Salpétrière (1987-1989).
 * Senior Researcher for the IFEA, French Institute for Research in the Andes – Ecuador (1989-1991).
 * Assistant Professor, then Professor (“exceptional class”) at the University of Paris North (1991-2009)
 * Administrator then Vice-President of Médecins sans frontières, Doctors Without Borders (1999-2003)

Education and training:
 * Doctorate in Medicine (University of Paris 6, 1982)
 * Master in Public Health (University of Paris 11, 1986)
 * PhD in Social Science - Advisor: Georges Balandier (EHESS, 1988)

Fields of interest:
 * medical anthropology
 * the AIDS epidemic
 * social inequalities of health
 * the changing landscape of global health
 * political and moral anthropology
 * contemporary humanitarianism
 * "[|a critical anthropology of morals]"

Influences and interlocutors

 * Michel Foucault
 * Giorgio Agamben
 * Walter Benjamin

Key works
Translated into English:
 * 2011 //Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present.// Berkeley: University of California Press.
 * 2009 //The Empire of Trauma: Inquiry into the Condition of Victims//. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 * 2007 //When Bodies Remember. Experience and Politics of AIDS// //in Post-apartheid South Africa//. Berkeley: University of California Press. Series in Public Anthropology.

**Key concepts**

 * humanitarianism/humanitarian reason
 * A major thread of Fassin's work involves the mobilization of humanitarianism as justification for intervention by governments, defined to include not only states but also NGOs and other bodies. In his view, the moral force of humanitarianism draws both from reason (appeals to the universality of humanity) and from emotion (appeals to attachment and compassion). As former vice president of MSF (Doctors Without Borders), Fassin speaks from a position that is somewhat unique for an anthropologist, having been engaged in making the very decisions that he analyzes from the perspective of politics of life (see below). In this sense, Fassin's career is emblematic of the increasing convergence of the worlds of academic scholarship, public policymaking, international geopolitics, and medicine in the endeavor that has come to be known as global health.
 * Although humanitarianism per se has a long history, stretching back to the Enlightenment and the moral philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith, Fassin notes that its contemporary form is rather unique in its focus on lives and suffering as opposed to political struggles, such as those in which Lord Byron and George Orwell engaged. Nevertheless, while Agamben and others take this observation as a sign of the divergence of politics and humanitarianism (the latter of which becomes preoccupied with 'bare life'), Fassin insists there is no space in society truly empty of politics.
 * Fassin highlights the paradoxes created by humanitarian reason. For example, humanitarianism generally operates on a politics of compassion, which involves not only the recognition of equality on the basis of shared humanity but also the identification of the most vulnerable as victims of suffering, reinforcing and renaming preexisting inequalities.
 * Another important aspect of Fassin's perspective on humanitarianism is the degree to which the distinctions between military forces and humanitarian enterprises are collapsing, even as humanitarian organizations seek to defend the apolitical nature of their projects. Not only do military interventions increasingly use humanitarian justifications for action, both military groups and humanitarian organizations also use similar kinds of population management technologies and share similar goals. Humanitarian organizations are not exempt from making political decisions, as exemplified by MSF's ability to declare or not to declare a situation to be a humanitarian crisis.
 * politics of life
 * In "Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life" (2007), Fassin writes, "What I call 'politics of life' here are politics that give specific value and meaning to human life. They differ analytically from Foucauldian biopolitics, defined as 'the regulation of population,' in that they relate not to the technologies of power and the way populations are governed but to the evaluation of human beings and the meaning of their existence." (500-01)
 * Thus, Fassin plays on the well-known Foucauldian concept of biopolitics to examine another important way in which governments relate to their subjects, in this case as arbiters of value. Governments engage in the politics of life by assigning value and meaning to human existence through their decisions.
 * Fassin identifies three concrete consequences of various politics of life in the context of humanitarian intervention in Iraq, each in the form of an inequality in the value of certain lives. First, lives that may be risked are distinguished from lives that may be sacrificed; the lives of humanitarian workers, which are put into danger as a result of voluntary decisions, are constructed as more valuable than the lives of those who are passively vulnerable. Second, among humanitarian workers themselves, expatriates are afforded greater protection than local staff. Finally, in the practice of the humanitarian as witness, there is a distinction between the humanitarian agents, who can tell their stories in the first person, and those on whose behalf the intervention is undertaken, who must allow their stories to be told by others.
 * state of exception
 * In "Humanitarian Exception as the Rule: The Political Theology of the 1999 //Tragedia// in Venezuela," Fassin again seeks to respond to and problematize a theoretical concept formulated by Agamben and others: the state of exception. The dominant narrative among scholars holds that the constitutive power of the sovereign to declare a state of exception (what, in the Roman context that inspired Agamben, allowed the state to reduce a human to bare life) has been abused to the point that the state of exception is now paradoxically permanent. The most salient evidence for this contention lies in the extended response of the American government to the 9/11 attacks. Fassin seeks to challenge "both the supposed normalization of the state of exception and the generalization of discourse on exception" (390).
 * His method is to introduce the landslides that wreaked havoc in Venezuela in 1999 as an example of a humanitarian state of exception, one motivated not by a perceived threat to public security but instead by sympathy and compassion for the victims of the disaster. Although the disaster area was declared to be in a state of emergency and placed under repressive military authority, this intervention was welcomed by the majority of the people. In fact, the whole affair was constructed by the state and experienced by the people as a trial by fire that united the population and redeemed the nation.

Interesting resources
//Borrowed from USF Medical Anthropology Wiki// A Critical Anthropology of Morals ([]) Critique of Humanitarian Reason - Lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study ([]) Conspiracy Theories in Medicine - Lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study ([]) Cultural Anthropology – The Journal of the Socieity for Cultural Anthropology ([]) Doctors without Borders ([]) Fassin, Curriculum Vitae ([]) Public Culture ([]) The Institute for Advanced Study ([]) The MIT Press ([]) The Society for Medical Anthropology ([])