Embrace the Other(s)?
courtesy of AES+F collective
this op-ed was originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (October 2015 issue)
As the European Union faced the biggest migration crisis since the end of the WWII, the problematics of ‘otherness’ revealed itself in the ‘old new’ light. Jacques Derrida praised arrival of ‘the Other’ as one of, if not the most important event(s) in one’s life. The notion of ‘stability’ and human’s inherent desire to live in the constant ‘present’ is the main enemy of better futures. Illusion of life’s course going on some kind of predictable track helps to mitigate existential anxiety.
Human life so far remains in the core of the values in the Western society. Michel Foucault, the great historian and archeologist of ‘normality’ and ‘deviations’, nailed the term ‘biopolitics’ to describe the prevailing approach to citizens by the states in postmodernity. The main value of biopolitical approach in the government planning is to create institutions of control over our health and potential hazard to it. In a way, it is something like a network of prisons (hospitals, schools, etc.) to variety of our choices about what to do with our life and health. Preservation of life at any cost as the highest goal of enlightened secular state of today.
Cameroon-born philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe recently proposed the new way to look at the evolution of biopolitical approach to managing societies, adjusting original Foucault’s writing to contemporaneity of muddy geopolitics, process of postmodern deconstruction and further inevitable reconstruction of ideologies. He introduced the term ‘necropower’ and ‘necropolitics’ as it’s functional apparatus, claiming among other things that “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror”.
The motto and guiding principle of Foucaultian biopolitics can be summarised as ‘live and let live’. We all share the same planet with quite limited resources and fragile ecosystem (that we’ve managed to fuck up quite intensively led by ultra-capitalistic greed and selfish ideological dogmatism in last centuries - but that’s another subject). The goal of each individual, as the goal of the society then, is to allow equal opportunities for the life to be preserved, to flourish and have chances to pass genes to the next generations, of how in obituaries it’s often referred - to be ‘survived’ by someone: children, spouses, etc. This ‘living and letting living someone else’ as the concept went beyond nuclear family and is considered nowadays in an enlightened society as a definition of responsible approach to coexistence of peoples.
However reality of the challenges in contemporary geopolitics present a ‘new normal’ - where ‘live and let die’ approach comes into play. Mbembe’s theoretical constructs suddenly acquire physical shapes: the EU border controls are preventing migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and other unfortunate places torn by (often inflicted by consequences of colonialism of those very EU members) all kinds of wars from ‘living’ by blocking their access to a possibility to survive. The hair-thin line of division between terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ became a battlefront that will define the number of those who will get a change ‘to live’ and those who will be assigned ‘to die’ in all by naming it like that.
While the economists, pundits, leaders of public opinion are ideologically divided on several fronts of actively-moderately-kind of defending or opposing possible details within designs of policy of granting asylum to millions of people who try to enter the EU, the underlying issue of Western world turing back on it’s fundamental principles of universality of basic values of humanism remains somehow hidden. Hypocrisy, that find itself masked by state-driven nationalism, is so crippling that it even undermines the very essence of the foundations of the European Union and even Western Enlightenment, that still ambitious enough to call itself ‘universal’.
The migrant crisis is indeed far not the only one problem, that Europe faces in the currents. However it well might (hopefully) be that very ‘alpha’ issue, that will define the future of the European project itself. Will it collapse under the pressure of inward-looking, retrograde nationalisms, that presume absence of potential for citizens of Europe to embrace the challenge of arrival of ‘the others’? Or will it use the opportunity, that was lost during Greek austerity crisis, to treat this challenge as the oh-so-needed-kick-in-the-ass of the European project?