Elizabeth S. Anker
Embodiment and Immigrant Rights in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful
Perhaps because of their immense, near universal promise, human rights discourses and norms have since their inception been fraught with paradox. Especially with reference to their more contemporary instantiations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other related agreements, critics have widely decried the many contradictions that trouble human rights and the mechanisms of their globalization. Some of these paradoxes ensue from the many legal and practical challenges of rights enforcement, or the need to lend force and actuality to the visionary scope and reach of human rights. Yet structural tensions and inconsistencies also comprise the philosophical architecture of human rights norms and the definition of the human that organizes them.
This essay in particular addresses two of the many paradoxes that have accompanied the internationalization and other achievements of human rights. First, it contends with the plight of stateless persons, or peoples who lack the backing and protections of a sovereign state committed to the principle of human rights. This is a conundrum that Hannah Arendt famously wrestled with in The Origins of Totalitarianism, when she lamented how “the loss of citizenship deprived people not only of protection, but also of all clearly established, officially recognized identity” (287). As Arendt observed, this has entailed the reality that “[t]he Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable – even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them – whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state” (293). Whereas World War II witnessed the explosion of groups of refugees and other displaced persons, Arendt’s prescient insights continue to apply to vast classes of migrants today. It is equally true that unauthorized, or undocumented, immigrants practically speaking cannot make recourse to legal channels of enforcement, lest they risk deportation or other forms of expulsion, and this outlaw status is only compounded by the conditions of abuse and exploitation that often characterize black market and other forms of illicit immigrant labor. No doubt, this paradox is all the more striking in light of the sheer number of combined refugees and unauthorized migrants in the world today.
In addition to the many exclusions of citizenship, this essay examines another paradox that haunts the philosophical design of human rights norms. As I’ll argue, liberal accounts of human rights are riddled by a deep ambivalence about the realities of embodiment. It goes without saying that human rights norms and protections first and foremost aim to safeguard the body from forms of injury. Above all, human rights are constructed to defend the individual from abuse, torture, pain, suffering, and other corporeal hardship or deprivation. For this reason, the expectation of bodily integrity lies at the core of most definitions of human rights, structuring their larger explanatory architecture. Yet while bodily integrity and its corollary of human dignity are in many ways salutary ideals, they can and have also provided ideological sanction for a vast range of human rights abuses and other failures of social justice, both into the present and over history. As this essay will explain, to be reduced to or trapped within the body is to be relegated to a state of dehumanization, a connection that equates the body with the in- or sub-human. Most liberal theories of the human furthermore treat the body as something to be mastered and transcended through enlightened reason and mind, a teleology of progress that understands embodiment as a condition of immaturity and underdevelopment. Liberal human rights norms in many ways echo and reinforce this broad aversion toward the body. In turn, the premium on bodily integrity smuggles in an array of biases and other exclusions, which have historically authorized, and still authorize today, the denial of human rights to different populations along the lines of gender, race, class, disability, sexual orientation, species membership, and – as will be the focus of this essay – nationality, immigration status, and citizenship.
This essay explores these interrelated paradoxes of human rights through a reading of the award-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 film Biutiful. Biutiful follows the final months in the life of its protagonist Uxbal (Javier Bardem), as he dies from prostate cancer. In a storyline set in present-day Barcelona, Uxbal earns his income as a middleman who brokers the labor of illegal immigrants, and the film exposes those activities to be fueled by a series of neo-liberal fantasies that both sustain contemporary immigration policy and legalize its refusal of human rights to undocumented migrant populations. As such, Biutiful lends illustration to Arendt’s prophetic cautions about how citizenship and nationality are fated to constrict the ambit of human rights. However, Uxbal’s ailment also forces him to confront his own mortality, and that reckoning precipitates a moral awakening about the many human rights abuses on which his own livelihood and prosperity have depended, even while he himself is relatively impoverished. Uxbal’s enhanced awareness of human rights is directly fostered by his own experience of bodily disintegration and vulnerability. That embodied self-consciousness is one that González Iñárritu furthermore incarnates within Biutiful’s cinematography – with its intensely visceral, sensorily charged aesthetic. Taken together, the film’s style, tone, and storyline thus cultivate what I’ll describe as an “embodied human rights imaginary” – an imagination of human rights that carries distinct implications for expanding their protections and remedying many of their historical failures.
It is a truism that any legal declaration or other statement of human rights contains within it a particular definition of the fully human. The basic design of a human rights covenant or decree is to enumerate a series of specific entitlements and guarantees. In so doing, however, such catalogues enshrine certain qualities and goals as vital to human flourishing, while omitting or demoting others. From one angle, critics have therefore widely debated whether human rights norms should be critiqued as culturally relative or, even worse, Eurocentric, although such debates are never uncomplicated or straightforward. But beyond the question of their sociocultural or historical particularism, liberal human rights instruments, along with the philosophical traditions that spawned them, presume a relatively narrow and contradictory conception of both human embodiment and the individual’s relationship to their own corporeal being. This inconsistent account of embodiment represents a central although relatively unexplored paradox of human rights, a paradox that this essay contends with. In general, human rights norms treat the body as an entity whose anarchic desires must be mastered or disciplined by liberal reason. While rhetorically speaking human rights are devised to protect the body from pain and injury, they do so through norms and standards that link bodily suffering with dehumanization. The liberal emphasis on bodily integrity, in other words, carries with it the inverse presumption that to be reduced to or confined within the body is to be less than fully human – especially since imprisonment within the body is seen to deprive the individual of speech and reasoned self-assertion, the core indicia of the human.123 The resultant reluctance about embodiment that inflects human rights norms reproduces the very logic that over history has permitted the sociopolitical oppression of a wide range of populations understood to be hostage to the body’s appetites and needs and therefore exiled from rational self-possession.124
To examine this bias against embodiment from a different vantage, we might say that human rights norms have tended to marshal a thin, normative, and exclusionary vision of the dignified human subject. Although legal statements of human rights codify a wide range of values, “dignity” is commonly explained as the core value that suffuses all of those disparate entitlements and protections, reconciling their internal conflicts and variances. Central to the meaning of human dignity is the notion of bodily integrity, and partner to the dual constructs of dignity and bodily integrity are a collection of what I’ll for shorthand term “liberal” expectations about the human – in particular, that legal personhood depends upon a reasoning, autonomous, sovereign, integrated, self-determining subject. Within such a liberal conceptual framework, human rights standards come to operate less as safeguards and more as benchmarks that must be attained before a subject is seen as deserving of rights. This slippage accordingly elucidates one way in which human rights norms not only become compulsory but also legitimize existing sociopolitical hierarchies and patterns of oppression.
In addition, these ideas about the self-possession of the liberal individual are cognate to views about nation-state sovereignty. Much as the rights-bearing subject must claim both a rationally ordered identity and bodily integrity, parallel assumptions undergird contemporary theorizations of the nation-state. Not only is the national community typically imagined as unified and coherent, but state sovereignty is also demarcated and verified by the border and the territorial enclosure.125 This is to say that the logic through which the expectation of individual bodily integrity serves to disavow human vulnerability, brokenness, and mortality is mirrored in dominant definitions of state sovereignty, which similarly infer a closed, defensive, organic, homogenous national community. Such formulations of political community in terms of integrity and enclosure have under many circumstances directly justified the ostracism or expulsion of populations deemed outsiders – much as the rights bearing individual must rationally subdue and exorcise those bodily energies seen as anarchic, ungovernable, or threats to liberal reason. So we see here a symmetry between, first, how liberalism explains the individual and state alike in terms of sovereign self-determination and, second, how that principle naturalizes an exclusionary logic that can warrant key exceptions to the universal protections of human rights. As such, it offers a nuanced explanation for the very exclusions of citizenship that Arendt alerts us to, while also exposing her own reasoning as complicit with those underlying biases.
González Iñárritu’s Biutiful poignantly exemplifies many of the foregoing paradoxes of human rights. At the beginning of the film, Uxbal is in key ways a prototypical liberal subject. His initial denial of the physical symptoms of his spreading cancer are what make his untimely death unavoidable, rendering it a direct byproduct of a refusal to acknowledge his own contingency and weakness. With an alcoholic, bipolar wife, he is effectively a single father and therefore must behave as though self-reliant. Much of the film’s footage observes him in supervisory roles either cooking, feeding, and caring for his children or attempting to provide financially for their futures – in other words, performing different indices of sovereignty. Throughout, Uxbal also fixates on the terms and nature of his own sovereign legacy, relative to both his own and his father’s paternal bequests. His illness coincides with the excavation of his father’s long dead but embalmed body when the cemetery that houses it will be leveled to create space for a new highway, in a transaction from which Uxbal and his brother expect substantial financial remuneration. Two dream sequences that dramatize his imagined interactions with his father also open and close the film, replaying one another almost exactly. As Uxbal and the ghost of his father encounter one another in a surreally lit dark wood, his father mysteriously cautions Uxbal that “Owls shoot a hair-ball when they die.” Such a line is reminiscent of González Iñárritu’s related preoccupation with the precise physiological evidence of death in his 2003 21 Grams, the title of which is an allusion to the exact weight that is purported to escape the body upon death and therefore supposedly confirms the existence of the soul.
Relatedly, Uxbal yearns to devise his father’s inheritance to his children, a yearning channeled through a ring that he is depicted twice – also in the opening and closing scenes – bestowing on his daughter. Uxbal and his daughter Ana fe tishistically meditate over the properties of this classical token of sovereignty, as Ana’s observation that “It’s bonita” is followed by her related anxiety that it might not be “real.” These parallel sequences that bookend the rest of the dramatic action both conclude as Uxbal bequeaths the ring to Ana with the incantatory words, “It’s yours now, mi amor.” Notably, the final of these two near identical scenes ushers Uxbal into actual death; to the extent the scenes contextualize and explain the rest of the storyline, they therefore impose circularity on it while also suggesting that the entire plot might be one extended hallucination of Uxbal’s as he loses consciousness. Yet regardless of their explanatory weight, the debate between Ana and Uxbal about the “realness” or materiality of Uxbal’s bequest to his children crystallizes broader desires and uncertainties about not only his own sovereign legacy but also, as I’ll argue, European national jurisdiction and dominion in the face of accelerating globalization.
Uxbal’s professional activities above all render him an apt figure for the symmetrically constituted neoliberal subject and nation-state alike. Uxbal makes a living dealing in immigrant labor, and the film focuses on his interactions with two different unauthorized migrant groups: Chinese laborers housed by their kingpins in a large, unheated, unventilated, unmarked warehouse and Senegalese street merchants who are continually on the run from the law. Initially, Uxbal facilitates trade between these different nationals by delivering the Senegalese fake Gucci handbags and other pirated goods made in a sweatshop by the Chinese. But when the Senegalese are deported after a raid, Uxbal no longer needs the good manufactured by the Chinese and therefore must find replacement labor for them, which he eventually secures at a construction site. Uxbal’s relationship to these two groups becomes newly charged when, toward the film’s denouement, he negligently contributes to the mass deaths of the Chinese. Uxbal purchases kerosene heaters, attempting to improve their living conditions in the desolate warehouse, but that gesture backfires as the heaters instead suffocate the laborers while they sleep in the warehouse’s enclosed space. This cavernous warehouse that both domiciles and kills them itself offers a metaphor for the claustrophobic, potentially lethal terms to which the unauthorized migrant must consent to gain entrance into the European community. And no doubt, this thread in Biutiful’s plot captures actual shifts in both European migration and its economic dynamics in recent years. Indeed, some estimate that human trafficking (the fate of the captive Chinese laborers) has become more profitable than selling contraband in drugs or arms, a change that aptly vivifies how and why violations of immigrant rights can proximately enrich European fiscal prosperity (Dauvergne 2008, p. 71).
Uxbal, however, believes himself to be helping these two groups – a self-deception that mirrors the paternalistic myths sustaining the neoliberal global economy. When the policeman whom Uxbal has been bribing to shield the Senegalese from legal crackdown breaks his agreement and permits their deportation, he explains to Uxbal: “there’s not enough money for everyone.” This rejoinder compels their characters to debate the circuits of corruption that they jointly participate within. Uxbal insists: “I don’t exploit them… I’m helping them to get work.” Whereas the law officer defends himself: “I can’t keep playing United Nations. I have a daughter to feed.” Here, the policeman’s more realistic take on the illicit exchanges that enable European prosperity disabuses Uxbal of the fantasies of beneficence that sanction his own reliance on the immigrant labor black market. By indicting Uxbal’s feint of benevolence for its blindness to the human rights violations it directly authors, the law officer also exposes Uxbal’s façade of autonomous self-reliance as a sham. Uxbal’s character accordingly begs to be read as a figure for the corresponding fictions of the self-determining, rights-bearing liberal subject and the neoliberal state – the fiscal welfare of which directly hinges on yet submerges the immigrant labor it preys upon. From a different perspective, Uxbal’s ruse of charity covers over the structures of disenfranchisement and violence condoned by the cognate constructs of individual bodily integrity and the territorial enclosure of the sovereign nation. A defensive immigration policy relies on insidious stereotypes about the irrational, underdeveloped status of unauthorized migrants in order to justify the exclusion them. Yet Biutiful simultaneously sheds light on the predatory, manipulative transactions that in fact incorporate those populations and their labor into the national body politic, although that labor remains undocumented and omitted from formal economic measures.
Beyond how Uxbal and his family are directly nourished by illegal immigrant labor, it is ironically Uxbal himself, the European national, whose constitutional health and fortitude is ailing. In this way, Biutiful simultaneously inverts the usual metaphors through which alien populations are imagined as diseased, corrupt, deficient, and otherwise threats to the welfare and resilience of the national body even while it grapples with the casualties of those very myths. Anti-immigrant sentiment has historically mobilized derogatory prejudices that cast foreigners as not only morally derelict but also physically contagious and lacking – or as beholden to insufficiently integrated or disciplined bodies. In turn, we can here grasp here how the ideal of bodily integrity can license the denial of human rights and other protections to certain populations, marking some categories of lives as sub-standard or insufficiently developed. Biutiful, however, reverses these common equations to instead portray the European social body in a state of unmaking, with Uxbal functioning as a figure or embodiment of the fantasies that European nationalism tells about itself. Much as Uxbal’s welfare is sustained by immigrant lives even while he enters a condition of progressive dysfunction and decay, the European nation-state is both wholly depend on undocumented immigrant labor at the same time as its own internal politics are increasingly lethal, xenophobic, and self-undermining. Within such an explanatory landscape, immigrant labor is simultaneously denigrated as unfit and what prolongs European health to guarantee its insecure future – just as Uxbal’s illegal brokering of such labor finances his intended bequest to his children.
To such ends are the features of Uxbal’s particular malady especially revealing. Uxbal suffers from cancer of the prostate, a gland that plays a central role in male sexual response and reproductive functioning. Even the etymology of the word “prostate” is here instructive, being derived from the Greek term for “protector,” “guardian,” or “one who stands before.” This symbolism, too, presents Uxbal as a figure for sovereignty in the classical sense, with that term’s coeval associations of familial belonging or paternity, individual self-determination, and nation-state jurisdiction. Uxbal’s sickness signifies a cessation of the biological processes of reproduction, impairing his ability either to actualize his masculinity or to perpetuate his inheritance. To turn again to the film’s allegorical dimensions, Biutiful registers European sovereignty in a state of collapse, with Uxbal’s prostate cancer denoting the pending failure of the European state and its ability to metabolize change. Uxbal also experiences growing incontinence, and numerous scenes in the film observe him publically soiling himself, accidents that produce profound embarrassment. Likewise, the storyline is interspersed with shots of Uxbal relieving himself, with bloody urine splattering an unclean toilet bowl. Here again, his condition encodes a breakdown in the excretory system of the body politic, which is overly excited and therefore unable to properly regulate or control itself. In Biutiful’s political context, this collapse is primarily due to an overly aggressive immigration policy, the defensive mechanisms of which belie fiscal reality.
Yet while Biutiful’s subtle but scathing political commentary is astute, I’d like to suggest that its foremost relevance to a theory of human rights emerges on the level of not only its subject matter but also its tone and aesthetics, which enact an embodied human rights imaginary. While Uxbal’s demise and the progression of his symptoms anchor the film’s narrative, an unusual number of other dead or dying bodies populate the film, and its diegesis enacts visceral encounters with them. One of Uxbal’s sham professions is to act as a medium between the recently bereaved and their deceased loved ones, and an opening sequences follows him as he attempts to commune with the corpses of the three dead boys, trying to channel their final wishes to convey to their parents. Relatedly, the plot thread that involves the excavation of his father’s corpse requires Uxbal and his brother Tito to identify it at the morgue before its cremation. And while Tito leaves the room gagging, presumably from the stench, Uxbal approaches the embalmed body, is enthralled with it, and ventures to touch it, with the camera lingering over his hand as it hovers over the graphically decayed face. Paired with the suggestion of the corpse’s putrid smell, this scene not only immerses the camera’s vision within but also activates other affective sensorium as it stages a confrontation with the flesh in a state of wasting and degeneration.
Even more, Uxbal’s negligent responsibility for the murder of the undocumented Chinese workers induces a type of epiphany on his part. Although that reckoning is not construed as overtly political, it is nonetheless implied to unsettle certain fantasies that Uxbal maintains about himself (and, by extension, that sustain European nationalism). After Uxbal arrives at the warehouse and is accused of the deaths, the camera pans that enclosed space, lingering over individual corpses, vomit, gestures of desperation, and suggestions of final intimacies. The diegesis protracts its exposure to these dead bodies, rendering the scene excruciatingly painful. Moreover, Uxbal’s grief is so profound that he absconds with the dead body of Li, a woman he employed to babysit his children. Uxbal initially carries her corpse into his car presumably to flee with it, although he returns with it in futility, as an ensuing shot watches him tenderly caressing Li’s dead body in a type of pieta. In this way, González Iñárritu’s cinematography here, too, incites a visceral engagement with these bodies in death, as the camera pans the large room to mimic Uxbal’s experiential vertigo, and images like vomit prompt the corporeal response of disgust. The acoustic qualities of this scene further incarnate and amplify the viewing experience. The background noise first fades out as Uxbal rages in regret, again replicating his sense of disequilibrium, and thereafter garbled voices and a rushing noise sonically overtake the natural sounds of the warehouse, as the storyline apparently lapses into one of Uxbal’s hallucinations.
But what is striking here is not so much Uxbal’s remorse or enhanced moral responsibility, especially insofar as those sentiments might translate into a clear-cut politics. Rather, Biutiful’s many dead and dying bodies – including Uxbal’s own – foster a highly specific appreciation for human rights. Beyond the film’s storyline, the aesthetic features of González Iñárritu’s cinematography stage a series of encounters with the flesh in all of its exposure and vulnerability. And that absorption with the sensory and affective qualities of those ailing, decomposing bodies triggers a particular kind of human rights awareness, both in Uxbal and in González Iñárritu’s audiences. All in all, Biutiful thereby unfolds an embodied account of the human that both overwrites and reveals the folly of the dual myths of human dignity and bodily integrity that, as I have argued, lend ideological coherence to liberal definitions of human rights. By demanding that its viewers viscerally undergo the many physical dimensions of dying and death, Biutiful rebukes the expectations of reasoned autonomy and so -vereign self-possession that underwrite liberal human rights norms. In their place, it offers up a portrait of the human grounded in precarity, brokenness, and bodily unmaking, and it further gestures toward the ethical-political merit of such an embodied understanding of the human. Notably, it does so not by sensationalizing or encouraging a voyeuristic fascination with that suffering, so as to profit from human misery or manipulate its audience, a strategy NGO’s are frequently criticized for employing. Rather, Biutiful calls attention to the profound vulnerability that is constitutive of all human experience.
Let me further analyze the slow progression of Uxbal’s corporeal unmaking in order to elucidate how Biutiful incarnates its conception of the human and thereby generates a more robust account both of the human and of human rights. From the outset, the film refuses its audience emotional distance, instead concentrating on and protracting the throes of Uxbal’s suffering. Its storyline begins as he visits the doctor to report his different symptoms. The camera first observes Uxbal’s face as he undergoes what is presumed to be a rectal exam and then follows a nurse’s extended effort to draw blood. The camera zooms in on the needle, with a female nurse initially trying to find a vein while Uxbal dramatically flinches. Subsequently, Uxbal himself takes the syringe, quickly locates a vein, and punctures his skin (in a seeming allusion to a past heroine habit), with a close-up of blood filling the vial as Uxbal clenches and unclenches the muscles in his forearm. Needless to say, this intense focus on the needle penetrating his skin will make even the most resolute of viewers squeamish. Similarly elongated attention to other signs of Uxbal’s spreading cancer consumes much of diegesis, whether outward manifestations of pain on his face or more extreme symptoms such as vomit. Such reminders in effect punctuate and organize the other plot developments, rendering his body and its symptoms independent characters of sorts in the plot. Many episodes find him at the hospital as he submits to chemo-therapy or other treatments, for instance in one clip showing Uxbal entering an MRI as its loud hum drowns out all other sound.
As I’ve already noted, numerous scenes involve him either accidentally soiling or relieving himself, with bloody urine splashing about in an unclean toilet bowl. Notably, the latter such shots are filmed from overhead with a high-level camera angle, simulating Uxbal’s own vertigo and prompting a response in the viewer akin to nausea. The affective sensorium that González Iñárritu’s cinematography harnesses, as such, activate a corporeal engagement that mirrors Uxbal’s progressive agony, aesthetically incarnating his suffering. To such ends, I should further note that much of Biutiful is shot with grainy film stock and dark background lighting, and that muted tone often requires the viewer to struggle to perceive the outlines of human shapes, subordinating vision to other sensory stimuli. Relatedly, many of the final segments that depict Uxbal on the verge of death are entirely devoid of dialogue and extra-diegetic sound. In effect, González Iñárritu’s cinematographic style demotes the importance of sight to instead animate auditory and other visceral registers of involvement.
The vision of the human that Biutiful portrays is, as a consequence, not the abstract, reasoning individual of much social contract, rational choice, or discourse-based democratic political theory. Similarly, the human body that it depicts is not the artificially purified one implied by the twinned constructs of bodily integrity and human dignity. Here, the film’s title with its subversion of standard spelling is significant. Much as it phonetically captures the word “beau-tiful”’s sounds while refusing to abide by standardized spelling, it denotes a conception of human beauty that resists artificial, sanitized conceptions of the human form. The film depicts the flesh in all of its messiness, disorder, and precarity, and it enlists the viewer’s participation with that vulnerability on a corporeal level. In so doing, it implicitly attests to the worth of such an embodied portrait of the human.
Biutiful’s focus on Uxbal’s bodily disintegration, in turn, signals far more than a macabre fascination with human suffering and death. Rather, Biutiful’s embodied account of the human contributes to a distinct conception of social justice that works to correct a number of the neoliberal assumptions that, I have maintained, have helped to authorize many contemporary failures of human rights. At this point, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology will prove instructive. For Merleau-Ponty, art and aesthetic experience are unrivaled in their abilities to actuate embodied perception, much as I have been arguing about Biutiful. In particular, art induces the self’s different sensory faculties to collaborate, reversing liberalism’s usual privileging of mind and exemplifying how embodied perception can foster community and selfhood alike (see “Eye and Mind”). Within such an understanding of the human, the body offers vital contributions to both selfhood and interpersonal engagement, reversing the conventional stigma that treats the body’s appetencies as chaotic forces requiring mastery by liberal reason. For Merleau-Ponty, the body’s faculties of involvement productively interpenetrate one another and collude to structure human experience in ways that model the self’s relationship to the surrounding lifeworld. Much as the senses intertwine, so, too, is the individual subject embedded within and materially dependent on other lives. A phenomenology of embodied perception thus culminates not with the sovereign, autonomous subject of liberal individualism but rather with an image of interpersonal solidarity grounded in shared vulnerability and brokenness.126
Two additional aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thought are helpful for analyzing Biutiful. First, while Merleau-Ponty celebrates embodied perception as a route to co-belonging, he does not naively romanticize the human condition or cleanse it of contradiction. To the contrary, corporeal experience remains a source of profound paradox – of the kind that Biutiful wrestles with. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty describes the phenomenological method itself in terms of paradoxes that are analogous to those animating embodied perception. He construes the goals of phenomenological inquiry as “thoroughly to test the paradoxes it indicates; continually to re-verify the discordant functioning of human intersubjectivity; to try to think through to the very end the same phenomena which science lays siege to, only restoring to them their original transcendence and strangeness” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 97). Second, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology carries distinct implications for theorizing political community, even while overt political questions were often peripheral to or submerged within his thought. As I’ve maintained, one corollary of the premium on bodily integrity is that the nation-state is defined in cognate terms. Whereas within the liberal tradition the individual subject entitled to rights must possess a fully integrated, rationally ordered, and autonomous body, nation-state sovereignty casts political community as closed, insular, and governed by the politics of the territorial enclosure or border. Yet for Merleau-Ponty, the embodied subject is not atomistic or isolated but rather ensnared within the surrounding world and therefore constitutively intertwined with other beings. By extension, then, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy suggests how we might reconfigure political community to instead think about its jurisdictional reaches as open, dynamic, and permeable. No doubt, such a formulation of national community as fluid and porous would provide a basis for critiquing the exclusionary immigration policies that trouble Uxbal in Biutiful and that are shown to authorize a spate of human rights abuses. The kind of explanatory framework suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s thought would not only overturn the conventional stigmatization of immigrant populations as captive to unwell or unfit bodies but also explode conservative figurations of the nation-state as unified, homogenous, and familial – instead envisioning the nation as absorbent, inclusive, and accommodating. In sum, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology suggests how a greater theoretical attention to embodiment might provide a metric for remedying many contemporary human rights violations and the biases that subtend them.
To conclude, Uxbal’s encounters with dying bodies, including his own, over-ridingly depict embodiment as a source of torment. That said, certain sequences in the film simultaneously present corporeal perception as a font of profound interpersonal connection. Perhaps not surprisingly, Uxbal’s interactions with his children above all lead him to experience his embodiment, in all of his vulnerability, as generative of solidarity and hence meaning. For instance, the corresponding sequences that follow his two donations of his own father’s ring to his daughter depict their hands and limbs interlacing, with that imagery concretizing their emotional connectedness. Yet perhaps most revealing is the sequence in which Uxbal’s daughter Ana first learns of his pending death. As they embrace, the sounds of a racing heartbeat overtake the background noise, and that heartbeat both indexes and heightens the emotional intensity of this exchange, with its sonic amplification inducing a corporeal response in the viewer. Such scenes recruit all of the body’s faculties of perception, inciting vision and hearing to collaborate with the physical sensation of touch and causing those sensory registers to interpenetrate one other.
Through such modalities of imagination does Biutiful incarnate its own aesthetic to craft an embodied account of the human and, by extension, of human rights. González Iñárritu’s cinematography harnesses not only auditory and visual registers of the viewer’s engagement but also smell, touch, and other affective sensorium. In the process, the film implicitly demonstrates the value of these habits of participation that liberalism has traditionally denigrated, showing how they nurture a particular awareness of human vulnerability as well as of the larger community that embeds the individual. The recognitions fostered within Biutiful thereby stage a rebuke to the myths of sovereignty, autonomy, dignity, and bodily integrity that typically sustain liberal definitions of the human and of human rights. As a consequence, it is not accidental that Uxbal’s own bodily disintegration as he faces death is partner to a moral awakening concerning the human rights abuses that have enabled his very lifestyle, with those dual recognitions together unfolding an embodied human rights imaginary.127
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