Resident Foreigners. Donatella Di Cesare
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kind to outline a ‘philosophy of migration’. Not even philosophy has thus far recognized the migrant’s citizenship rights. Only recently has it accepted her within its borders – and even then it keeps her under strict surveillance, ready to push her away again with the first expulsion order.
The first chapter reconstructs a debate between the partisans of closed borders and the champions of open borders – a very intense debate in the Anglophone and German contexts. These two positions each correspond in their own way to liberalism, and indeed reveal liberalism’s impasse: one of these positions supports sovereign self-determination, while the other demands an abstract freedom of movement. This book, for its part, is not willing to gaze out at the shipwreck from the shore. It sets itself at a distance from both positions.
A philosophy that starts out from migration, and which makes the reception of immigrants its first theme, allows migrating – released from arché, the founding principle of sovereignty – to become the point of entry, and lets migrants become the protagonist of a new and anarchic landscape. The migrant’s point of view cannot but have effects on politics as well as on philosophy, as it re-energizes both.
To migrate is not a biological drive, but rather an existential and political act. But the right to migrate is yet to be recognized. This book is intended as a contribution to the demand for a ius migrandi, in an age in which there is such a breakdown in human rights that it seems quite legitimate to ask whether the end of hospitality has already been sealed.
Looking back at our own time, future history books will not simply indulge today’s hegemonic narrative. They will have to say that Europe – the homeland of human rights – denied hospitality to people who were fleeing war, persecution, abuse and rape, desolation and hunger. The potential guest was instead stigmatized a priori as an enemy. In the pages of these future history books, those who were safe and protected by state borders will bear the burden and the responsibility for the lives – and deaths – caught up in this history.
As well as the land, the sea has an important place in these pages. It is an in-between space that both unites and separates. It is a passageway that steers clear of borders, erases any trace of appropriation, and preserves the memory of another clandestinity – the clandestinity of opposition, resistance and struggles. This is clandestinity not as a stigma – ‘the illegals’ – but rather as a choice. The sea route points to the overturning of order, to the challenge of the elsewhere and the other.
For too long, philosophy has wallowed in the edifying use of the word ‘other’. It has upheld an idea of hospitality as an absolute and impossible demand, unbound from politics and relegated to the level of religious charity or ethical engagement. This has had fatal results. Anachronistic and out of place, the acts of hospitality carried out by ‘humanitarians’ – those beautiful souls who still believe in justice – have been the target of derision and denunciation. They are first of all targeted by that politics which believes that it must govern in obedience to welfare chauvinism and the cynicism of ‘securitarianism’.
In this book, the migrant enters the gates of the City as a resident foreigner. In its attempt to understand what role this latter figure can play in a politics of hospitality, this book takes a path back in time, albeit one that does not follow any chronological order. The stages along this road are Athens, Rome and Jerusalem: three types of city and three types of citizenship which still obtain today. Distinct from Athenian autochthony, which explains many of today’s political myths, was Rome’s open citizenship. Foreignness reigns sovereign in the Biblical City, where the ger, the resident foreigner, is the cornerstone of the community. Ger literally means ‘he who resides’. This contravenes the logic of the solid fences that assign residency to the indigenous, to the citizen. The short-circuit contained in the semantics of ger, which attaches the foreigner to residency, in fact alters both terms. To inhabit does not mean to establish oneself, to settle in, to make a permanent home, or to become as one with the land. From this derive the questions that regard the meaning of ‘inhabiting’ and ‘migration’ in the present galaxy of planetary exile. Without recriminating over rootlessness, but also without glorifying wandering, it is possible to glimpse the possibility of a return. And pointing the way is the resident foreigner, who lives in the furrow of separation from the unappropriable earth and within the bond with the citizen, who, in turn, discovers that she herself is also a resident foreigner. In the City of foreigners, citizenship coincides with hospitality.
In the post-Nazi era, the idea that it is legitimate to decide with whom we should cohabit has held firm. ‘To each their own home!’ It is here that populist xenophobia finds its greatest strength; crypto-racism is its springboard. However, it is often unknown that this is a direct legacy of Hitlerism, i.e. the first project at a biopolitical remodelling of the planet, and one which purported to fix stable criteria for cohabitation. The discriminatory act claims an exclusive place for itself. Whoever accomplishes this act erects himself as a sovereign subject who, fantasizing about a supposed identity between himself and that place, demands his rights of ownership. As if the other, who has always already preceded him, did not have any rights or had never even existed.
To recognize the other’s precedence in the place in which one lives means opening up not only to an ethics of proximity, but also to a politics of cohabitation. The co- (con – with) implicit in such cohabitation should be understood in its broadest and deepest sense, not only meaning participation but also indicating simultaneity. This does not mean rigidly standing right next to each other. In a world criss-crossed by the combined paths of so many exiles, to cohabit means to share the spatial proximity in a temporal convergence, where the past of each person can be articulated in the common present – indeed, in the perspective of a common future.
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