PART III: REFUGEE VS EVACUEE

Link: hysterical blackness: PART III: REFUGEE VS EVACUEE.

A thought: On the refugee Agamben writes in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life :

"If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignity in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain ––bare life––to appear for an instant within that domain. In this sense, the refugee is truly the "man of rights," as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over."

No wonder we can't stand, but can't look away from, the refugees in our midst.

Comments

[christina]

Thank you Jodi. No wonder.