Texto de Agamben

Segue abaixo texto de Agamben de uma palestra dada em 1995

WE REFUGEES
1. IN 1943, IN A SMALL JEWISH PERIODICAL, The Menorah Journal., Hannah
Arendt published an article titled "We Refugees." In this brief but important
essay, after sketching a polemical portrait of Mr. Cohn, the assimilated Jew
who had been 150 percent German. 150 percent Viennese, and 150 percent
French but finally realizes bitterly that "on ne parvient pas deux fois," Arendt
overturns the condition of refugee and person without a country—in which
she herself was living—in order to propose this condition as the paradigm of
a new historical consciousness. The refugee who has lost all rights, yet stops
wanting to be assimilated al any cost to a new national identity so as to contemplate
his condition lucidly, receives, in exchange for certain unpopularity,
an inestimable advantage: "For him history is no longer a closed book, and
politics ceases to be the privilege of the Gentiles. He knows that the banishment
of the Jewish people in Europe was followed immediately by that of the
majority of the European peoples. Refugees expelled from one country to the
next represent the avant-garde of their people."
It is worth reflecting on the sense of this analysis, which today, precisely
fifty years later, has not lost any of its currency. Not only does tbe problem
arise with the same urgency, both in Europe and elsewhere, but also, in the
context of the inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion
of traditional legal-political categories, tbe refugee is perhaps tbe only imaginable
figure of the people in our day. At least until the process of the dissolution
of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end. the refugee
is the sole category in which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits
of a political community to come. Indeed, it may be that if we want to be
equal to the absolutely novel tasks that face us, we will have to abandon witbout
misgivings the basic concepts in which we have represented political subjects
up to now (man and citizen witb tbeir rights, but also the sovereign people,
the worker, etc.) and to reconstruct our political philosophy beginning
with this unique figure. i
2. The first appearance of refugees as a mass phenomenon occurred at the
endof World War I. when the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian. and
Ottoman empires, and tbe new order created by the peace treaties, profoundly
upset the demographic and territorial structure of Central and Eastern
Europe. In just a short time, a million and a half White Russians, seven hundred
thousand Armenians, five hundred thousand Bulgarians, a million
Greeks, and hundreds of thousands of Germans. Hungarians, and Romanians
114
Agamben SYMPOSIUM 115
left their countries and moved elsewhere. To these masses in motion should be
added the explosive situation determined by the fact that in the new slates created
by (he peace treaties on the model of the nation-state (for example, in
Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia), some 30 percent of the populations comprised
minorities that had to be protected through a series of intemational
treaties (the so-called Minority Treaties), which very often remained a dead
letter. A few years later, the racial laws in Germany and the Civil War in Spain
disseminated a new and substantial contingent of refugees throughout Europe.
We are accustomed to distinguishing between stateless persons and
refugees, but this distinction, now as then, is not as simple as it might at first
glance appear. From the beginning, many refugees who technically were not
stateless preferred lo become so rather than to return to their homeland (this
is the case of Polish and Romanian Jews who were in France or Gennany at
the end of the war, or today of victims of political persecution as well as of
those for whom returning to their homeland would mean the impossibility of
survival). On the other hand, the Russian, Armenian and Hungarian relugees
were promptly denationalized by the new Soviet or Turkish governments, etc.
It is important to note that starting with the period of World War I, many European
states began to introduce laws whieh permitted their own citizens to be
denaturalized and denationalized. The first was France, in 1915, with regard
to naturalized citizens of "enemy" origins; in 1922 the example was followed
by Belgium, which revoked the naturalization of citizens who had committed
"anti-national" acts during the war; in 1926 the Fascist regime in Italy passed
a similar law concerning citizens who had shown themselves to be "unworthy
of Italian citizenship"; in 1933 it was Austria's tum. and so forth, until in 1935
the Nuremberg Laws divided German citizens into full citizens and citizens
without political rights. These laws—and the mass statelessness that resulted—
mark a decisive tuming point in the life of the modem nation-state and
its definitive emancipation from che naive notions of "people" atid "citizen."
This is not ihe place to review the history of the various international commissions
through which the states, the League of Nations, and Inter, the United
Nations sttempted to deal with the problem of refugees—from the Nansen
Bureau for Russian and Armenian refugees (1921). to the High Commission
for Refugees from Germany (1936), the Intergovemmental Committee for
Refugees (1938). and the Intemational Refugee Organization of the United
Nations (1946). up to the present High Commission for Refugees (1951)—
whose activity, according to its statute, has only a "humanitarian and social."
not political, character. The basic point is that every time refugees no longer
represent individual cases bui rather a mass phenomenon (as happened
between the two wars, and has happened again now), both these organizations
and the single states have proven, despite the solemn evocations of the inalienable
rights of man. lo he absolulely incapable not only of resolving the problem
but also simply of dealing with it adequately. In this way the entire ques116
SYMPOSIUM Summer 1995
tion was transferred into the hands of the police and of humanitarian organizations.
3. The reasons for this impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness
of bureaucratic machines, but in the basic notions themselves that regulate
the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the legal order of the
nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled chapter 5 of her book Imperialistn. dedicated
to the problem of refugees, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the
End of the Rights of Man." This formulation—which inextricably links the
fates of the rights of man and the modem national state, such that the end of
tbe latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of tbe former—should be taken
seriously. Tbe paradox bere is that precisely the figure tbat should have incarnated
the rights of man par excellence, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical
crisis of this concept. "The concept of the Rights of man." Arendt writes,
"based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, collapsed in ruins
as soon as those who professed it found themselves for the first time before
men wbo had truly lost every other specific quality and connection except for
the mere fact of being humans," in the nation-state system, the so-called
sacred and inalienable rigbts of man prove to be completely unprotected at the
very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens
of a state. This is implicit, if one thinks about it, in the ambiguity of the
very title of the Declaration of 1789, Declaration des droits de l'homme e du
citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms name two realities, or
wbetber instead they form a hendiadys, in which the second tenn is, in reality,
already contained in the first.
That there is no autonomous space within the political order of the nationstate
for something like the pure man in himself is evident at least in the fact
that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee is always considered a
temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repatriation.
A pennanent status of man in himself is inconceivable for the law of the
nation-state.
4. It is time to stop looking at the Declarations of Rights from 1789 to tbe
present as if they were proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values that bind
legislators to respect them, and to consider them instead according to their real
function in the modem state. In fact, the Rights of Man represent above all the
original figure of the inscription of bare natural life in the legal political order
of the nation-state. That bare life (the human creature) which in the ancien
regime belonged to God, and in the classical world was clearly distinct (as
zoe) from political life {bios), now takes center stage in the state's concems
and becomes, so to speak, its terrestial foundation. Nation-state means a state
that makes nativity or birth (that is, of tbe bare human life) tbe foundation of
its own sovereignty. Tbis is the (not even very obscure) sense of the first three
articles of the Declaration of 1789: only because it wrote tbe native element
into the core of any political association (arts. 1 and 2) could it firmly tie (in
Agamben SYMPOSIUM 117
art. 3) the principle of sovereignty to the nation (in accordance with its etymon,
natio originally meant .simply "birth'"). The fiction implicit here is that
hirth immediately becomes nation, such that there can be no distinction
between the two moments. Rights, that is, are attributable to man only in the
degree to which he is the immediately vanishing presupposition (indeed, he
must never appear simply as man) of the citizen.
5. If in the system of the nation-state the refugee represents such a disquieting
element, it is above all because by breaking up the identity between man
and citizen, between nativity and nationality, the refugee throws into crisis the
original fiction of sovereignty. Single exceptions to this principle have always
existed, of course; the novelty of our era, which threatens the very foundations
of the nation-slate, is that growing portions of humanity can no longer be represented
within it. For this reason—that is. inasmuch as the refugee unhinges
the old trinity of statc/n at ion/territory—this apparently marginal figure
deserves rather to be considered the central figure of our political history. It
would be well not to forget that the first camps in Europe were built as places
to control refugees, and that the progression—internment camps, concentration
camps, extermination camps—represents a pertectly real filiation. One of
the few rules the Nazis faithfully observed in the course of the "final solution"
was that only after the Jews and gypsies were completely denationalized (even
of that second-class citizenship that belonged to them after the Nuremberg
laws) could they be sent to the extermination camps. When the rights of man
are no longer the rights of the citizen, then he is truly sacred, in the sense that
ihis term had in archaic Roman law: destined to die.
6. It is necessary resolutely to separate the concept of the refugee from that
of the "Rights of man." and to cease considering the right of asylum (which
in any case is being drastically restricted in the legislation of the European
states) as the conceptual category in which the phenomenon should be
impressed (a glance at the recent Tesi sul diritto d'asUo by A. Heller shows
that today this can lead only to nauseating confusion). The refugee should be
considered for what he is. that is. nothing less than a border concept that radically
calls into question the principles of the nation-state and. at the same
time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories.
In the meantime, the phenomenon of so-called illegal immigration into the
countries of the European Community has assumed (and will increasingly
assume in coming years, with a foreseen 20 million immigrants from the
countries of central Europe) features and proportions such as to fully justify
this revolution in perspective. What the industrialized states are faced with
today is a permanently resident mass of noncitizens, who neither can be nor
want to be naturalized or repatriated. Often these noncitizens have a nationality
of origin, but inasmuch as they prefer not to make use of their state's protection
they are, like refugees, "stateless de facto." For these noncitizen residents,
T. Hammar created the neologism denizens, whieh has the merit of
118 SYMPOSIUM Summer 1995
showing that the eoneept citizen is no longer adequate to describe the sociopolitical
reality of modem states. On the other hand, citizens of the advanced
industrialized states (both in the United States and in Europe) manifest, by
their growing desertion of the codified instances of political participation, an
evident tendency to transform themselves into denizens, into conformity with
the well-known principle that substantial assimilation in the presence of formal
differences exasperates hatred and intolerance, xenophobic reactions and
defensive mobilizations will increase.
7. Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is
already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to call into
question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of
state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is sufifcient here to suggest one
possible direction. As is well known, one of the options considered for the
problem of Jerusalem is that it become the capital, contemporaneously and
without territorial divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition
of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this would imply
could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two
national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could
imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus
one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities,
in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the
citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we could
look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations." whose catastrophic
results can already be perceived in the short terni. but as an aterritoriai or
extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens
and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of
European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile).
The European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between
birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known,
is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing
the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).
This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory,
nor with their topographical sum. but would act on these territories, making
holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or in a Moebius
strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this new space, the
European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality,
would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the world.
Today, in a sort of no-man's-land between Lebanon and Israel, there are
four hundred and twenty-five Palestinians who were expelled by the state of
Israel. According to Hannah Arendt's suggestion, these men constitute "the
avant-garde of their people." But this does not necessarily or only mean that
they might form the original nucleus of a future national state, which would
probably resolve the Palestinian problem just as inadequately as Israel has
Agamben SYMPOSIUM 119
resolved the Jewish question. Rather, the no-man's-land where they have found
rclugc has retroacted on the territory of the state of Israel, making holes in it
and altering it in such a way that the image of that snow-covered hill has
become more an intemal part of that territory than any other region of Herctz
Israel. It is only in a land where the spaces of states will have been perforated
and topologically defonned. and the citizen will have learned to acknowledge
ihe refugee that he himself is, that man's political survival today is imaginable.
Translated by Michael Rocke