Review: Donatella Di Cesare, ‘Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration’
Review of Donatella Di Cesare’s Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration (Polity, 2020), 260 pages.
Reviewed by Emmanuel Jouai
With Resident Foreigners, Donatella Di Cesare steps into the political debate about migration more frontally than with her previous works on antisemitism and terror. She also develops her own philosophy, at the crossroads of the political thoughts of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault.
In Resident Foreigners, Di Cesare articulates a philosophy of migration which she claims to take the opposite stance from analytic philosophy and, particularly, from Michael Walzer. Rather than adopting the point of view of the citizen, the nation-state, or a state-centric logic, Di Cesare approaches migration from the migrant’s perspective. Indeed, she argues, analytic philosophy always validates the exclusion of the migrant as a rule, and only works towards the definition of an acceptable limit to this practice. To do so, analytic philosophy develops so-called objective methods and norms – which Di Cesare uncovers as biopolitical techniques – to differentiate between the (good) refugee and the (bad) migrant. Di Cesare notes the failure of such methodology in “saving” even the refugee, who is now as much discredited as the migrant. On the contrary, her philosophy of migration historicises notions like asylum (from the ancient Greek asilía which explicitly did not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty) and the refugee, in order to show how political and context-dependent its meaning is. After the Second World War, when the refugees were the Jews running away from Europe, Nazism, and the Holocaust, the 1951 Geneva Convention articulated a definition of the refugee which amounted to the Soviet dissent (98). The discourse imposed at that time was therefore permeated with a liberal conception of “rights.” From the 1970s and above all after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the refugee became “less white, less educated, less wealthy,” (99) and therefore less desirable for the West.
Through historicisation of a notion like refugee, Di Cesare expects to “say more about those who use it than those to whom it is applied,” (97) thus reversing a perspective in which the philosopher observes her objects from above. Drawing from Arendt, Di Cesare wants to be a “philosopher-spectator,” someone who inhabits the same space as those she studies, someone whose perspective would be as “marginal” as the migrant’s (24). That being said, Di Cesare does not pretend to be able to put herself in the migrant’s shoes and rejects philosophical approaches inspired by cognitive sciences that resort to empathy (83). She wishes to develop a philosophy or reception which would not only be “technical-moral,” (113) but also a philosophy of hospitality which would deal with a troubling matching hostility (like for Jacques Derrida) in order to welcome extraneousness (166).
Indeed, Di Cesare wants to renew our understanding of citizenship to introduce foreignness at its core. To this end, she needs to go further than Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to dissociate citizenship and nationality. A legacy of the French Revolution, this association has condemned migrants to face exclusion as the only form of relationship they can expect from citizens. Unfortunately, Habermas’s wish to overcome it through a European citizenship has also proven illusory (195). On that point, Di Cesare is as critical of European institutions as she is of European citizens, “who have remained distant, passive, indifferent.” (204) Di Cesare actually takes a major issue with the citizens’ privilege to say who can get in and who has to remain out. This is one of the most powerful problems that her books tackles: why should we accept a situation where only some people are able to decide whether or not others can inhabit the same space as them, when they only contingently find themselves in a position of power – being citizens of a wealthy country? This excessive privilege is the foundation of a murderous, exclusionary, and unequal system that welfare chauvinism (63) and a so-called democratic protection of self-determination (47) do not suffice to make coherent.
If Di Cesare is not convinced by Habermas’s overcoming of nationalism, she is not enthused by Seyla Benhabib’s “global citizenship” either, nor by the latter’s and Derrida’s infra-national withdrawal towards cities, because she does not find “cosmopolitanism” satisfactory (197). Contrarily to Derrida, she also refuses to dwell on the aporia between unconditional and conditional hospitalities, even if this aporia is productive in many regards. She rather wants to make hospitality political, here joining contemporary French thinkers like Benjamin Boudou (2017) or Guillaume Le Blanc and Fabienne Brugère (2017), who are very close to her conception of philosophy and all published their books the same year as the original Italian version of Resident Foreigners. For Di Cesare, a political conception of hospitality takes the bodies involved in migration into account, thus making hospitality concrete and not only an abstract matter. It considers exile as the common subversion and threat migrants pose to the state-centric order. It understands the foreigner “as a foundation and criterion of community,” and does not only “eulogise the otherness of the other, in a xenophilia … which … has risked limiting itself to an ethics without politics.” (127) A political hospitality is an act of a community with, to be sure, “institutional significance,” even if, like Boudou, Le Blanc, and Brugère, Di Cesare does not count on state politics to make it happen. She argues that since the “summer 2015, Europe [has] sealed the end of hospitality,” (85) making things even worse with the 2016 treaty signed with Turkey (100).
Despite her refusal to work from Derrida’s aporetic conception of hospitality, Di Cesare articulates philosophical tensions in her work that she finds productive. Among them, the issue of rights recognition without states, her central concepts of resident foreigner and cohabitation, and the notion of return. First, Di Cesare criticises at length the logics of nation-states and of state-centrism, expressed through the citizens’ right “to impede or limit entrance onto a given territory at their own discretion” (16). But she expects her philosophy of migration to grant migrants more than the simple right to emigrate: the right to immigrate. She manages to work around this tension through a historicisation of migration and the conceptualisation of a “ius migranti,” itself in tension between its colonial past and the political-existential and contemporary appropriation that Di Cesare makes it go through (73). This ius migranti is neither a state nor a national product but comes from philosophy itself and the community, whose understanding Di Cesare draws from Roberto Esposito (200). This community is never complete and acknowledges the void at its core. Therefore, it cannot refuse entrance to the foreigner.
Secondly, Di Cesare works towards a reversal of perspectives (between the citizen and the migrant, the host and the guest, inside and outside) in an explicitly confrontational and binary conception of politics that she refers to as “polarisation.” (79) The conflict between the two elements takes place at the border, this Foucauldian dispositif of power that allows the state to discriminate (175). That being said, Di Cesare also orientates her thought beyond binarity through the acknowledgement of in-between elements which make binary identification and differentiation less obvious. Di Cesare starts with the position of the philosopher-spectator (neither completely inside nor completely outside) and analyses the current politics of hostility towards migrants according to three layers of identification: “‘we’ [which] continually runs up against its own borders, … ‘you’ (plural) in front of us and … ‘them’ that remains in the background.” (82)
But, most importantly, Di Cesare conceptualises the “resident foreigner” as “the included third party” which challenges the “aprioristic exclusion” and “shows that the self and the other are not opposed but rather imply one another.” (207) The paradigm of this resident foreigner is without any doubt the ger, this foreigner who inhabited Jerusalem in the biblical times, and who enjoyed the exact same rights as the Jewish citizen. Indeed, the Jewish people historically emerged out of exile. The ger was therefore there to remind them that extraneousness was at the core of their community, that the limit inside/outside was only arbitrary – not necessary – and always violently exclusionary. The ger reminded the Jews that inhabiting was only ever temporary and therefore synonymous to migrating. Choosing biblical Jerusalem as a point of departure for her thought, Di Cesare once again distances herself from the traditional models of political philosophy, which usually looks at ancient Athens when it comes to citizenship. On the contrary, Di Cesare takes issue with the Athenian myth of autochthony and its confiscation of democracy.
Thirdly, Di Cesare works around the tension between democracy and sovereignty or, rather, sovereigntism. According to her, the latter has naturalised the citizens’ rights to discriminate, their ownership over the land, their phobocratic rhetoric, their claim to ethno-cultural homogeneity (where ethnos and demos overlap), and their justification of the border as a protective tool for self-determination and distributive justice. Those last two points are indeed in tension when it comes to democracy, but Di Cesare articulates a philosophy of cohabitation to overcome the challenges of sovereigntism. Only claiming the equality of all, the latter makes any declaration of human rights lie. Drawing from Arendt, she contests the liberalist and contractualist approach according to which cohabitation could be a free choice. For her, “mutual bonds precede any accord.” (212) This is tremendously powerful because “cohabiting on this Earth imposes the permanent and irreversible obligation to coexist with all the others, who have equal rights to it, no matter how unfamiliar or heterogenous they may be.” (212) There is a strong spatial approach in Di Cesare’s work, which invites to understand that migration and the consequential necessity to share territories are inevitable.
Finally, Di Cesare seems to find herself at ease in the tension produced by a simultaneous territorialisation and deterritorialisation of the migrant. Indeed, for Di Cesare, the migrant is “always determinate and contextual” (121) and does not exist ”in the absolute” unless she “indicates a tópos, a place – or better,” if she “is herself indicated by some place.” (120). Moreover, along her so-called place of origin, the migrant is produced by the border, where she emerged out of her relationship with the citizen. For Di Cesare, she even inhabits the “cross-border zone.” (17) At the same time, Di Cesare claims that “the migrant is atopos – without a place, out-of-place,” because a defined territory has limits while “she breaks apart boundaries” (16-17). This only apparent inconsistency actually reveals Di Cesare’s deep involvement with Heidegger’s philosophy and understanding of existence as “Ek-sistence.” She explains: “to migrate … shapes existence, in the ‘ec-static habitation,’ in the continual leaving of the self, the self-separation, that is perennial migration.” (135) Thanks to this approach, Di Cesare develops an understanding of return useful for her phenomenology of habitation: it is an “incessant getting-closer” (137) without ever “arriving” to her alleged origin (164). Return avoids the migrant to believe in rooted identities, it prevents her from falling into hostility towards newcomers, and it allows her to inhabit a chosen place without forgetting her own exile.
Di Cesare’s Resident Foreigners does not romanticise errancy, exile, or decentring, but seeks to acknowledge the finite presence of any subject – citizen or migrant – and wishes to make this presence enough to claim to live a liveable life.
Further reading
Bauman, Z. (2009). Seeking in Modern Athens an Answer to the Ancient Jerusalem Question. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(1), 71–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408099016
Hilgers, M. (2011). Autochthony as Capital in a Global Age. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(1), 34–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410380939
Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2012). Between Inclusion and Exclusion: On the Topology of Global Space and Borders. Theory, Culture & Society, 29(4–5), 58–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412443569
Scott-Baumann, A. (2010). Being a Stranger by Paul Ricœur. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(5), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276410380425
Sutherland, T. (2019). Peter Sloterdijk and the ‘Security Architecture of Existence’: Immunity, Autochthony, and Ontological Nativism. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(7–8), 193–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419839119
Turner, B. S. (2002). Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism. Theory, Culture & Society, 19(1–2), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640201900102
Emmanuel Jouai is a PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster (London). His thesis intends to rework the concept of xenophobia and focuses on the discursive production of threats in postcolonial France.
Email: e.jouai@my.westminster.ac.uk
Twitter: @e_jouai
