"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
|
|
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
|
|
|
Agamben on Arendt on refugees
« Previous |
|Next »
|
|
|
May 23, 2006
Giorgio Agamben returns to an essay written by Hannah Arendt in 1943 entitled 'We Refugees'. Arendt overturns the condition of refugee and person without a country in order to propose this condition as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness. She says that 'refugees expelled from one country to the next represent the avant-garde of their people.' Her analysis highlights the paradox that precisely the figure that should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept. She says that the concept of the Rights of man:
...based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, collapsed in ruins as soon as those who professed it found themselves for the first time before men who had truly lost every other specific quality and connection except for the mere fact of being humans.
Agamben responds to this by saying that:
It is worth reflecting on the sense of this analysis, which today, precisely fifty years later, has not lost any of its currency. Not only does the problem arise with the same urgency, both in Europe and elsewhere, but also, in the context of the inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political categories, the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come. Indeed, it may be that if we want to be equal to the absolutely novel
Agamben says that though we are accustomed to distinguishing between stateless persons and refugees this distinction is not as simple as it might at first glance appear. From the beginning, many refugees who technically were not stateless preferred to become so rather than to return to their homeland (this is the case of Polish and Romanian Jews who were in France or Germany at the end of the war, or today of victims of political persecution as well as of those for whom returning to their homeland would mean the impossibility of survival). On the other hand, starting with the period of World War I, many European states began to introduce laws which permitted their own citizens to be denaturalized and denationalized. These laws mark a decisive turning point in the life of the modern nation-state and its definitive emancipation from the naive notions of "people" and "citizen." He adds that United Nations, like the League of Nations before, is incapable not only of resolving the problem but also simply of dealing with it adequately and so the entire question was transferred into the hands of the police and of humanitarian organizations.
Agamben says that:
there is no autonomous space within the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure man in himself is evident at least in the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee is always considered a temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A permanent status of man in himself is inconceivable for the law of the nation-state.
He adds that:
If in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents such a disquieting element, it is above all because by breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty. Single exceptions to this principle have always existed, of course; the novelty of our era, which threatens the very foundations of the nation-state, is that growing portions of humanity can no longer be represented within it. For this reason ---that is, inasmuch as the refugee unhinges the old trinity of state/nation/territory --this apparently marginal figure deserves rather to be considered the central figure of our political history.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
