The JEE Aspirant Experience: Power, Bare Life, and Hegemony
What does it mean to be a JEE dropper? You are 18 or 19 years old. You are not a student — no institution claims you. You are not working. You are preparing for an exam that will, in theory, determine the next several decades of your life. In the eyes of the state, what are you?
This essay — written for a Philosophical Anthropology course at IIT Jodhpur — attempts to answer that question using Agamben, Gramsci, Lefebvre, Althusser, and Veena Das. The subject matter is also, uncomfortably, my own environment.
The Dropper as Homo Sacer
Agamben’s Homo Sacer distinguishes bios — political, legitimized social life — from zoe — bare animal life. To have bios is to have a role the state recognizes: student, employee, citizen-in-function.
A JEE dropper has neither. No institution vouches for them. They exist, but they are not placed. Their legitimacy is contingent entirely on being useful to the productive structure — and that use hasn’t been assigned yet.
Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human captures something of this: the terrifying possibility of being human but not recognized as such. The dropper is in a structurally similar position — suspended between the identities the state provides.
The irony: the exam they’re preparing for is administered by the state that has temporarily stripped them of their social standing.
Hegemony is Inescapable
Gramsci’s hegemony is not just domination — it’s the way power makes itself feel natural, voluntary, inevitable. Counter-hegemonic acts don’t escape hegemony; they confirm it. They are defined by what they resist.
The clearest example from IIT campus life: smoking cigarettes. Students smoke. The institution prohibits it inside campus; outside is tolerated. Some smoke visibly in view of guards, defiantly. Some smoke secretly. Some get expelled.
But in every case — compliance, defiance, punishment — the act is structured by the rule. The norm defines the transgression. You cannot step outside hegemony by transgressing it, because transgression is still a relation to the norm.
Public Secrets and Pressure Valves
Both the state and its subjects often know about transgressions and tacitly allow them. The guard who watches someone smoke outside the gate and says nothing. The administration that knows about informal off-campus student culture and doesn’t pursue it.
This is not tolerance — it is a pressure valve. Just enough space for dissent that the structure doesn’t need to be confronted directly. Public secrets paradoxically sustain the dominant order by giving the dominated just enough agency to not demand more.
The Everyday as Site of Power
Lefebvre’s analysis of everyday life argues that power isn’t only exercised in grand structures — it’s reproduced in the mundane. Attending a festival. Choosing a table in the mess. Deciding whether to wear a lanyard with your roll number.
These micro-decisions are not innocent. They are the fabric through which ideological reproduction (Althusser’s ISA — Ideological State Apparatus) happens. Schools and colleges aren’t just places to learn; they are mechanisms for producing subjects who consent to the social order.
The IIT “Default Subject”
Veena Das’s work on othering: identity is constituted by the Other. At IIT fests, the Other shifted by context — Girls vs. Boys, PG vs. UG students, reservation admits vs. general, language communities.
What this reveals is a “default subject” against which all Others are defined: the B.Tech Upper-Caste North Indian Male. This isn’t a claim about individual prejudice. It’s a structural observation — that the institution was built around and for this subject, and everyone else negotiates their place relative to him.
Writing this as someone who is, to various degrees, that default subject felt necessary and uncomfortable.
The Right to Have Rights
Agamben, following Arendt: the “right to have rights” is not guaranteed by being human. It is guaranteed by having a recognized place within a political order.
An expelled student doesn’t just lose their status — they lose the platform from which to contest their expulsion. The legitimacy needed to be heard is the very thing that was revoked.
This is why Agamben thinks democracy has totalitarian potential, not just totalitarian enemies. The machinery for stripping bios from zoe is always already present, waiting for a justification.
Full essay available here.