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Abstract
This paper discusses questions of borders, communities, and refugees through an examination of the work of film director Theo Angelopoulos, in particular his so‐called “Balkan trilogy,” which includes Eternity and a Day. In these films, Angelopoulos looks at the nature of borders and communities and at what they do to people in general and refugees in particular. I argue that the refugees cannot be placed in any straightforward fashion according to the logics of political sovereignty and national divisions. They are a heterogeneous excess from the constitution of borders and divisions, yet by making visible this heterogeneity, Angelopoulos shows the contingency of political and national borders. As a consequence, the critique of the injustices resulting from existing borders must start from what is heterogeneous to them. Only in this way is it possible to transform existing structures. However, this does not mean that politics should aim simply at the elimination of borders and exclusion. Rather, we must accept the ineradicability of borders and exclusion while contesting any particular ones.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Lars Tønder, Beatriz Martínez, and an anonymous participant at the Rhetoric, Globalization and Culture conference in Salamanca, Spain, December 2002.
Notes
[1] See Laclau (Citation1998) and Pessoa, Hernandez, Lee, and Thomassen (Citation2001). The notion of heterogeneity can also be found in Jacques Derrida’s work (e.g., Derrida, Citation2002). However, in Laclau’s work it is explicitly brought to bear on issues regarding the identities and limits of communities.
[2] On Angelopoulos in relation to Balkan cinema, see Iordanova (Citation1996).
[3] This is why it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between (political) refugees and (economic) immigrants, as if the former were a matter of life or death and the latter merely a matter of economic comfort. As a consequence, I use the term “refugees” to refer to both groups.
[4] For a similar reading of The Suspended Step of the Stork, see Ishaghpour (Citation1992), although he distinguishes between the guards guarding the border, the refugees who are looking for a home, and the disappeared politician, whom the journalist has come to find, and who has rejected the ideology of home and of the “propre” (idéologies du “proper”; p. 168).
[5] See also Hannah Arendt’s (Citation1943) assertion that the refugee is the paradigm for thinking politics and the state today.
[6] On the relation between global capitalism and nationalist ideology, see Žižek (Citation1999).
[7] Angelopoulos says the same about himself: “I have always felt as if I were in exile in my own [propre] pays, a kind of interior exile. I have never found my home [domicile], a place where I feel in harmony with myself and with the world. Like my characters, I feel lost” (Angelopoulos, Citation2004, my translation).
[8] For a related analysis of the use of “home” in political discourse, see Honig (Citation1996). See also Derrida (Citation1992b) on the idea of identity as always different from itself.
[9] The protagonists in the three films in the Balkan trilogy (who are all called Alexander) are all transformed in one way or another by the journeys they undertake.
[10] The difference between the two interpretations of Angelopoulos’s films is the difference between Heidegger’s and Derrida’s views of language—see Angelopoulos’s comments on Heidegger and language in Schulz (Citation2001). See also Ravetto’s comments (Citation1998).
[11] For a discussion of Laclau’s theory of hegemony and the notion of heterogeneity in relation to inclusion and exclusion, see Thomassen (forthcoming Citation2005).
[12] The heterogeneous elements can be the points of departure for the reading of a text or a film, because they open up the representational framework of the text or film. As such, they are points of entry for a writerly reading of a text or film.
[13] For instance, Angelopoulos suggests that the positive aspect of the European Union is that it leads to the abolishment of national borders. The problem, he argues, is that so far this has only happened at an economic and not at a political level (Fainaru, Citation2001a).
[14] See also Horton (Citation2001), where Angelopoulos opposes Athens to life outside the city, where the former is a deformed and distorted version of the true Greece represented by the latter.
[15] For an interesting argument about this in relation to apartheid discourse, see Norval (Citation1994).
[16] Of course, there is nothing inherently heterogeneous about refugees, and refugees “are” not heterogeneity. The term “heterogeneity” is merely a non‐synonymous substitute I use to refer to things that occupy a certain position in relation to conceptual and representational distinctions within a given discourse.
