The refugee’s flight: homelessness, hospitality, and care of the self

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the contemporary international refugee regime is grounded in a paradigm of ‘homesickness’, which puts the refugee in an inferior position of the supplicant, whose subjectivity is framed by the regime of fixed belonging. In order to address this situation, we need to challenge the ontological primacy of homesickness and embrace ‘homelessness’, which offers the possibility of rethinking the positions of both refugees and non-refugees in ethical terms. While the responsibility of the non-refugees lies in cultivating an ethos of hospitality, the refugee can take hold of her subjectivity through the practice of care of the self. This paper first examines Nietzsche’s thought on homelessness and compares it with Foucault’s reading of the role of anakhōrēsis in the Hellenistic practice of care of the self. It then suggests how, by building on the project of universal hospitality, we can interpret the figure of the refugee through the prism of an ethic of freedom, anchored in a positive break with the city. From this perspective, the refugee regains her ethico-political agency by cultivating the relationship with her own living self, which offers new avenues for resistance against the dominant paradigm of ‘homesickness’ that governs her subjectivity today.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee
• Nietzsche
• homelessness
• ethics
• hospitality

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to the journal editors and the anonymous reviewers who have generously contributed to this paper through their comments and suggestions. This paper has also benefited from discussions with the participants of the panel on ‘Borders, Migration, and Displacement’ at the 2015 APPSA Annual Conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Inna Viriasova received her Ph.D. in Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario and currently teaches in the Department of Politics at Acadia University. Her research interests include contemporary political philosophy, non-Western and indigenous thought, refugee studies, critical theory, and the history of political thought. She has published on questions of political ontology, biopolitics, and community in such journals as diacritics, Parrhesia, and Telos.

Notes

1. See Agamben (1995, 1998). For Agamben-inspired interpretations of the refugee as ‘bare life’ or homo sacer, see, for example, Decha (2010), Diken (2004), Nair (2010), Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2004).

2. For a discussion of the appropriation of Nietzsche on homelessness in Heidegger’s philosophy, see Sluga (1997). For another examination of Nietzsche’s idea of homelessness as the condition of modern humanity, see Connolly (1988, 137–175).

3. For a detailed examination of the figure of Columbus in Nietzsche, see Large (1995).

4. In this paper, I focus on Foucault’s lectures of 1981–1982 (Foucault 2005). Of course, Foucault is not unique in his study of this Greek practice. In this regard, see, for instance, the works of Pierre Hadot.

5. In this paper, I only engage this early Greek understanding of anakhōrēsis. However, one should note another meaning of anakhōrēsis – a practice of withdrawal from community for the sake of spiritual pursuit, which was propagated in monastic communities by the early Christian desert fathers.

6. On the question of hospitality and communities of refuge, see also Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000), Levinas (1994), Eisenstadt (2003).

7. For a further discussion of the potential limitations of the ontological affirmation of homelessness as the common condition of humanity, on which the project of hospitality can be built, see Ahmed (1999).

8. Foucault suggests that the only form of knowledge that was acceptable in the Hellenistic model of care of the self was neither Platonic recollection nor Christian exegesis, but ‘ethopoetic’ knowledge – ‘prescriptive’ knowledge that had a direct effect on a subject’s way of doing things, on his ethos. ‘Knowing, knowledge of something, is useful when it has a form and functions in such a way that it can produce ēthos’ (Foucault 2005, 237).

9. However, it is worth noting that despite the presentation of the refugee as a contemporary figure of bare life (Agamben 1998), there is a sense in Agamben in which this very same figure is indicative of the promise of a new politics that is no longer defined by the exception of mere existence from its field (i.e. biopolitics), but rather by the embrace of life that is inseparable from itself – form-of-life (see Agamben 1995, 1996).

10. These two stories can be told, in particular, through the perspective of Nietzsche’s ‘The Wanderer’ (1996, 203).

11. On the Sahrawi refugees, see, for example, Chatty (2010) and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2014). Dadaab refugee camp in north-eastern Kenya (set up in 1991 as a temporary solution to conflict in the Horn of Africa) would be another interesting subject for further research examining the concrete practices of self-care that exist within refugee communities and the specific subjectivities these practices cultivate.

12. My thanks to Eric Palmer for bringing the question of the responsibility for justice to my attention.