A State of Refugees? Agamben and the Future of Europe

Abstract

In the article, the author continues his recent discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s proposal to rethink anew Western political philosophy on the basis of the figure of refugee. In this first part, the article critically overviews Agamben’s criticism of biopolitical concepts of human rights, citizenship and the nation-state through the lens of Freudian-Lacanian theory of repression. If, as Agamben maintains, bare life is a “vanishing presupposition” in the constitution of the citizenship and the nation-state, it can be regarded also as primal repressed signifier in Freudian sense, which is then represented by the signifier “citizen” in the symbolic political-juridical order of the nation-state. In turn, refugees or stateless people in general, appear on the scene as the “return of the repressed” insofar as they embody the affective substitute of the primal repressed signifier. Against the background of this preliminary critical overview, the article proceeds further by examining Agamben’s idea of “aterritoriality” or “extraterritoriality” of the state as corresponding to the political community founded upon the figure of the refugee. It is in this deterritorialized or “curved” topological space that the subjective destitution of the nation may occur by way of untying the biopolitical nexus state-nation-territory. The article concludes by proposing such a subjective destitution of European nations to be the mode in which Europe could and should re-constitute itself.