On the (proper) citizen and the abject

This thesis is a study of citizenship and abjection which focuses on the works of Engin Isin, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben primarily. It is about marginalizing and exclusionary processes as a consequence of the conceptions and practices of 'citizenship.' Marginalization and exclusion are not understood in the mere sense of lose of a natural right at a given moment but as a constitutive process within theoretical and the political practice of citizenship. Thus, citizenship is understood not only as rules and rights but also as political practice within which subjectivities are constituted. Problematizations of abject figures of politics are inherently related to the project in that they are discursively activated to alter sedimented concepts that orient our political existence rather than being treated as political pathologies to amend. The thesis outlines a discussion of the ideal of the city seen as a breakthrough in the human subjectivity so as to discuss the myth of social contract and the social-spatial perspectives, orientalism and synoecism that founds this myth of breakthrough.