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ABSTRACT
Mezrak Allouache’s Harragas [dir. 2009. Harragas. Algeria: Librisfilms. Baya Films and France 2 Cinéma] and Philippe Lioret’s Welcome [dir. 2009. Welcome. France: Nord-Ouest Productions] have entered into the debate concerning the global migrant crisis, not only by portraying the issue from the point of view of the migrant and French society, but also by challenging (in the case of Welcome especially) laws concerning immigration. While interesting work has already been done through postcolonial readings and by looking at the role of hospitality in the films, this article will be considering them in relation to the provocative work being produced by philosophers Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben, whose concepts of the event, the act, and state of exception respectively will inform its discussion of Harragas and Welcome, and the politics surrounding them. Although all three (Badiou, Žižek, and Agamben) have written about cinema, it is not their cinematic analyses that are of specific interest here, but rather their more general philosophical concepts as enumerated above. This article, therefore, has two related goals in considering the ontologically based concepts of event, act and state of exception: How useful are these concepts in reading the films? And how useful are these concepts in imagining and even actuating political change?
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Joseph Krause and Nabil Boudraa and all the participants of the 2014 NEH Summer Institute ‘Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: Literature, the Arts, and Cinema since Independence’ for providing the intellectual stimulation and collegial atmosphere necessary to produce this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 With Žižek (Citation2008) dedicating In Defense of Lost Causes to Badiou in Citation2008 in addition to writing a chapter on him entitled, ‘Alain Badiou, or, the Violence of Subtraction.’
2 See the ‘NGO Statement on International Protection’ (Citation2008) to the UNHCR.
3 Tunander (Citation1997) has an extended discussion of ‘the wall’ in the history of geopolitics, and claims that the more accurate term for what is going on at the time of her writing is not a ‘Mediterranean Wall’ or new ‘Berlin Wall’ but actually the ‘Ceuta Wall’ (named after one of the Spanish enclaves in Morocco) due to its funding by Spain (Tunander Citation1997, 17–44).
4 From the Arabic ح - ر – ق ‘to burn.’ As Allouache has noted in interviews and a short documentary (The Making of Harragas posted on YouTube as Harragas: Behind the Scenes, parts 1 (Citation2009) & 2 (Citation2009)), the term originated in Morocco.
5 Which had grown since Gaddafi was no around to help control the southern banks of the Mediterranean. Information about Gaddafi’s deal with former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been reported widely in the press. See for example Laurence Peter’s 4 October Citation2013 article on the BBC website entitled, ‘Lampedusa Disaster: Europe’s Migrant Dilemma.’ Tunisia had a similar agreement reaching back as far as 2008 to accept back Tunisians and third-country nationals to be placed in Italian funded detention centres in Tunisia. While the new Constitution of January 2014 does provide greater guarantees for citizens to exit and return, ‘irregular exits’ are still considered criminal (‘Tunisia Detention Profile’). Despite guarantees in the 2011 Constitution and attempts in 2013 by the current king at reform, laws regarding ‘irregular exits and returns’ still remain complicated and potentially harsh for Moroccan nationals (Morocco Detention Profile). Laws and treatment of third-country nationals is harsher still throughout North Africa.
6 Documented in the film The Land in Between by Melanie Gartner (Citation2012). The Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes or CETI reception centre in Ceuta was originally built in 2000 to replace the tents of refugees that had sprung up in this Spanish enclave which, like Melilla, is located on the coast of Morocco. CETI was meant to serve as a temporary holding centre for immigrants, but its purpose has warped as it is now holding people not for ‘days or weeks’ but rather ‘months or years’, some of whom were sent there instead of the Spanish mainland when picked up in boats.
7 In a VOX (American digital news website) article from 29 October 2014, the journey from North Africa to Europe was identified as ‘the most lethal migration in the world’, having killed 20,000 migrants over the last twenty years (Lind Citation2014). The Mare Nostrum rescue project of the Italian government (soon to be defunct and replaced by less well funded and scaled down Frontex operation) claims to have rescued over 150,000 migrants in the last twelve months.
8 For example, on 10 August of this year the ‘Calais jungle’ was the subject of a UK Guardian video and photo essay (Smith Citation2015).
9 Although according to a statement from the French police the situation was normal: ‘We are seeing the usual phenomenon – some migrants are trying to climb into lorries stopped in traffic jams on the motorway leading to the tunnel’ (‘Migrants Storm Trucks in Calais Port Strike’, par. 13).
10 In 2015 three major events took place: the Charlie Hebdo shooting on 7 January 2015, a coordinated Paris attack at multiple locations on 13 November and the San Bernadino attack on 2 December. Since then other attacks have occurred in both France and the US, each resulting in a fresh wave of anti-refugee/migrant rhetoric.
11 Ben Jelloun comments on this directly in his novel Partir; ‘Tu sais, du Maroc on voit l’Espagne, mais la reciproque n’est pas vrai. Les Espagnols ne nous voient pas, ils s’en foutent, ils n’ont que faire de notre pays’ (qtd. in Abderrezak Citation2009, 465).
12 For discussion on hospitality, law and philosophy in Welcome see Dahlberg (Citation2014) which shows how artists, activists and philosophers have intervened in statist constructions of the migrant to introduce one that is more ‘hospitable’ and ‘humane’ with real life consequences. The article also maps out the history of the statute commonly known as the ‘hospitality as criminal offence’ statute which is part of the French article L. 622-1, the Code of Entry and Sojourn of Foreigners and of Right to Asylum (CESEDA), which Lioret’s film was expressly challenging. Until its most recent amendment in 2012, and at the time of the making of the film, it was still illegal to help migrants even for humanitarian or non-profit purposes, and those convicted could face fines of 30,000 Euros and a two-year prison sentence (Dahlberg Citation2014, 50).
For discussion on hospitality and migrants in France see Still’s (Citation2006) ‘France and the Paradigm of Hospitality.’
13 A French Canadian lawyer and academic educated in Canada and France.
14 As mentioned in Dahlberg (Citation2014, 63), Derrida discusses hospitality in terms of language: ‘For Derrida, not only is language a site of hospitality – as when we invite the other into a conversation – but it is also a practice that requires mastery.’ Perhaps the lack of mastery of both Simon and Bilal of their language of communication, English, is part of what allows their relationship to develop.
15 Although they do provide a translator at Bilal’s court hearing to make sure that he understands the charges against him, making him in a sense complicit in agreeing that an actual crime has been committed. It is in the same hearing that the judge fails to have Bilal’s public defendant’s request to have him placed in a hostel for minors translated thus preventing Bilal from participating in decisions directly affecting him, while also answering for him that he has no desire to be placed in a hostel.
16 Of course, they are actually heading for Spain, but few wish to remain there, preferring to go to France where they often have relatives and friends.
17 It should be noted that the larger goal of Calcagno’s (Citation2008) article is to draw on and challenge Badiou’s positions.
18 In a note (19) Gausch (Citation2016) writes ‘By way of political critique, the vast majority of feature films, including Mezrak Allouache’s Harragas (Citation2009), emphasize the dangers inherent in clandestine immigration, the desperation of the migrants, and the disappointments of those who succeed in crossing only to encounter more misery. Only in comedy targeted obviously at regional audiences is success permitted’ (Gausch footnote 19)
19 For an interesting debate between Žižek and Critchley on possible forms of political resistance to authority, see Žižek’s Citation2007 ‘Resistance Is Surrender’ and Critchley’s Citation2009 ‘Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Žižek.’