<nettime> GRZINIC: Refugees, Europe, death and Covid-19,

["Marina Grzinic" <margrz@zrc-sazu.si>]

Date: 30.03.2020

 

 

Marina Grzinic

 

Refugees, Europe, death and Covid-19

 

 

Intro

 

In March 2020, at the border of Greece and Turkey a tension and a flow of
refugees trashed as bargain for dirty business between the European
Union/Greece and Turkey. At the same time, we have an outbreak of the
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in EU, where Italy is the state with a total
quarantine. On 28 March 2020, USA reported more than 100.000 infected.

 

These two situations collide and what we have in front of us still
developing transcends the easy analysis, as we can put together crumbs of
events. One thing is sure; thousands are left to die at the border in
between Greece and Turkey, again. Italy is on the other side transformed in
a middle age leprosy complete isolation. We see in the 21-century disease,
isolation and self-, let?s say, voluntary segregation that Valdemir
Zamparoni (2016) defines as methods that are central to a colonial medical
environment. We can think on this method as a form of self-segregation in
order to allow immunization. However, if we connect these two at a first
site disparate situation we see that at the border in between the European
Union/Greece and Turkey is about ?to kill,? and in Italy it is about ?to let
live.? These two sides are the depiction of contemporary neoliberal
necropolitics.

 

Reordering of spaces becomes crucial; it results in new practices of zoning
and creating corridors as circulating modes through which accumulation will
take place. I therefore focus on Europe, refugees in Europe, neoliberalism,
and racism. Furthermore, the only way to open up possibilities for white
Eastern European thought is, rather than fully embracing the old Western
matrix of knowledge that is an outcome of colonialism, to try to rethink our
conditions of potentiality together with those whose thoughts were
marginalized for far too long. Colonialism and present forms of coloniality
have not only dispossessed millions of lives and made them com­modities but
have also incarcerated their thoughts and discursivity. If Eu­rope, that is,
as a fortress Europe, the old Western world, is a provincial territory
today, then the thoughts and the intellectual repertoire that it can produce
are provincial as well. 

 

We know today that the incarceration, marginalization, and rejection of
thoughts outside the Occidental (Western) regime represent one approach
catering to the steady, discriminative, racist view of the West (Europe) in
relation to what it calls ?the others.? 

 

A dirty deal between EU and Turkey on refugees

 

In March 2020, a fierce onslaught by Syrian forces and their Russian backers
on Idlib, the last province held by Syrian rebels, has led to clashes with
Turkey, which supports some rebel groups. Turkey already hosts some 3.7m
Syrians but the conflict in Idlib has led to nearly a million more fleeing
to its southern border. Although the EU promised billions more euros in aid,
Turkey was unimpressed and last week decided to open its borders with Greece
and even force migrants to come closer to the north-western border. EU has
accused Mr Erdogan, president of Turkey, of using migrants for political
purposes. It insists its doors are ?closed.? Meanwhile, clashes have again
erupted at the land border between Greece and Turkey. There appears to have
been a change in Turkey?s position with regard to letting migrants try to
enter Greece via this route. On 28 February 2020, Turkey reneged on a deal
to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from travelling to the EU
(McDonald-Gibson, 2020).

 

Namely, in 2016, a dirty deal was reached between the EU and Turkey, whereby
Turkey would stop allowing migrants to reach the EU in return for funds from
the bloc to help it manage the huge numbers of refugees it hosts. But since
then, tensions between the EU and Turkey have flared on various issues.

 

Death, neoliberalism

Now the question of death that is brought centrally to the debate of the day
is really touching base. 

I define necropolitics as ?let live and make die.? Necropolitics confronts
us with the horrors of the human condition: death and killing, forced
enclosure, total abandonment. I talk about necropolitics and not
Thanatopolitics. If we think precisely about what is going on the border in
between the European Union/Greece and Turkey we see a new relation about
life and death where the colonial/racial division is applied. All those
there are those coming from states destroyed by imperialist Occidental
appetites, and a racial differentiation between the white occident and the
other parts of world that are seen as not legitimate members of the regime
of whiteness and its colonial matrix of power, which from the past extends
deeply to the present days. 

 

The colonial/racial division is applied to citizenship, and we have two
categories of citizenship: one is the category I will name biopolitical
citizenship (the EU ?natural? nation-state citizens), and the other is
necropolitical citizenship given to refugees and sans-papier (paperless)
after they die on EU soil. While some are made ?equal? the other Others are
left to die and are brutally abandoned, or their second-grade status as
citizens is fully normalized in the EU. An illustrative case is the case of
Italian Lampedusa, when 350 refugees from Africa drowned in a single day on
12 October 2013. 

 

However, the most perverse situation happened afterwards, when these
hundreds of dead bodies were given Italian citizenship (but only so that the
Italian government and the EU could bury them in Italy?it was obviously
cheaper than to send the dead bodies back to their countries of origin and
to their respective families). The Italian government decided to prosecute
the few who did survive, as they tried to illegally enter Italy and the EU.
This is the clearest sign of the perverse and violent new attitude that
Western Europe has toward human rights (after the West had been heavily
capitalizing its democracy on it for decades) and the occurrence of a new
category of citizenship?the necropolitical citizenship.

 

This shift can be captured at best through what Balibar in 2000 exposed as
the passport of a ?rich person from a rich country ? increasingly signifies
not just mere national belonging, protection and a right of citizenship, but
a surplus of rights? (Balibar, 2002, 83).

 

Death itself as I presented above had become a fallacious rite of passage in
modernity?s instrumentalization of humanity.

 

Massimo Recalcati (2019) in his Le nuove melanconie: Destini del desiderio
nel tempo ipermoderno speaks that melancholy is no longer what it used to
be; as melancholy, as Freud argued, involved a sense of guilt, but today
melancholy has acquired new declinations, characterized by a fundamental
lack of awareness for a life and also of keeping life in its transmission
from one generation to the next. 

 

Freud talks about melancholy; the old melancholy brings a feeling of guilt
in front of the laws that are too severe, but contemporary melancholy is
coming from an incapacity to give meaning to the ? I will add ? ?Occidental?
experience. 

 

The relation in the Occident between subject and object can be put in a
genealogical line as a series of discontinued modalities.

 

In the 1960s and 1970s the western youth tried to distance themselves
primarily from the fetishism of the objects. In the 1990s, after the fall of
Berlin Wall, I will say, consumer hedonism was pushed on the forefront and
has replaced political passion. 

The former East of Europe entered fully and speedy in this process. In the
2000s we rely on objects heavily, they are mobile, transversal; our
smartphones and technological gadgets are a hyper overabundance of objects
to such an extension that the social online platforms display an
incommensurability of emptiness, loss of meaning, the disappearance of
ideologies, loneliness and self-quarantine condition (not only due to the
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). This condition Recalcati names new
melancholy. He talks about a life connected to the senselessness. 

 

Without a desire, life is directly connected to senselessness; the body is
dead weight to be moved, pushed around. This Occidental subject is incapable
of relate to alterity, otherness. It is symbolically reduced to a proper
border of impossibility, and clinging on these borders is the last
possibility of a proper salvation. Recalcati writes: ?The absence of
boundaries inherent in the freedom of the hypermodern turbo consumer has
gradually translated into a widespread feeling of anxiety caused by the loss
of stable symbolic reference points, but above all, has given rise to a new
demand for protection and security. We have thus gone from the manic
emphasis relating to the dissolution of banks and borders to the need for
their re-establishment and security enhancement? (Recalcati, 2019, p. Ivi,
translated by Grzinic).

 

Again, we see this so palpably clear as that when stay silent, inert in
front of what is going on with the refugees (in March 2020) at and on the
border in between Turkey and Greece. We witness, as Recalcati says, the
syndrome that has at its centre the protection. This protection is fully
embedded in the barbed wire and the closure is all emblems, deadly emblems
of our time. We have a passage from an unlimited enjoyment, to borders, to
walls, fortresses, as new objects of investment. 

 

What is going on with the refugees or migrants, as they are named, is
actually deeply connected with the Occident. In the classical Freudian
psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (German Todestrieb) is the drive
toward death and self-destruction. Under this death drive force we see an
excess of immunization that transforms into an autoimmune illness. An
autoimmune disease is a condition in which our immune system mistakenly
attacks a proper body. This could be seen also in relation to the state
quarantine, a new type of quarantine camp ? that is what Italy is
transformed into in March 2020.

 

Therefore to return to necropolitics and the emphasized difference to
Thanatopolitics: 

 

THANATOPOLITICS IS ON ONE SIDE:  IT IS A PURE WESTERN, OCCIDENTAL CATEGORY. 

 

It resides in the Occidental subjective intimacy. The death drive opposes
Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative,
life-producing drives. It is a change from preservation to destruction. In
Thanatopolitics death is not an enemy that undermines life from the outside
but something internally produced by life. Both are not one in front of
another but are in reciprocity. Thanatopolitics is the knot that ties the
death drive and the desire to live. 

 

NECROPOLITICS IS ON THE OTHER SIDE:  IT IS AN EXTERNALIZATION OF
THANATOPOLITICS. 

 

It spreads as a deadly contagious virus from the intimacy of the Occidental
subject into the neoliberal global world. Necropolitics is the regime of the
war death machine that literally exports contagion into other places, or
this contagion was already contracted through the legacy of western
colonialism (Africa). The vertiginous presence of death is the result of a
life without consciousness of a proper vulnerability that is pathological,
centred onto itself, incapable of the relation to the others. 

 

Neoliberalism?s fake vitalism has cut also the ties with the categories of
the negative.

As captured precisely by Recalcati: 

 

?The apparently manic inclination of the capitalist's discourse has
reinforced a neo-melancholic inclination in young people who tend to let
themselves be absorbed by the ever-present presence of the object,
transforming the object into an object-Thing. It is no longer the object
that appears against the background of the mourning of the Thing, but it is
the object-Thing that melancholically denies that mourning. While the
exciting impulse of the maniacal discourse pushes towards the unceasing
exchange of the object in a succession of fragmented presents without
historical continuity, this new and particular adhesiveness to the object ?
for example, to the technological object ? reveals the undercurrent of this
euphoric thrust: the neo-melancholic bonding to the object, the
impossibility of sustaining its loss, the rejection of the mourning of the
Thing. [?] The most emblematic clinical example is that of the regressive
withdrawal of many teenagers who desert social life to remain glued to the
virtual world, which ensures them of the ever-present presence of their
objects. The world of the object-Thing replaces the world of encounter with
the Other and its inevitable turbulence? (Recalcati, 2019, p. 141,
translated by Grzinic).

 

Coda

 

These processes of invigorated control of borders, expulsion of refugees,
etc., are judicially, economically and, last but not least, discursively and
representationally (as different semio-technological regimes), ratified,
legislated, and normativized. Today it is central to draw a genealogy of
racism that parallels capitalism?s historical transformation and
historicization. 

 

On one side we have the state institutions and the necropolitical
sovereignty that is sovereignty of an intensive racialization, ghettoization
and expulsion, and on the other, the formation of not a monumental
landscape, but, on the contrary, a deathscape (that is again a
necropolitical measure). 

 

Neoliberal global necrocapitalism mixes different forms of dispossession
(providing accumulation) and therefore we see how the question of
citizenship is embedded in the processes of dispossession, privatization and
racialized specialization.

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES

 

Balibar, É. (2002) Politics and the Other Scene. London and New York: Verso.

 

Grzinic, M. (2020) ?Introduction: Burdened by the Past, Rethinking the
Future. Eleven Theses on Memory, History, and Life?, in Grzinic, M.,
Pristovsek, J., Uitz, S. (eds.) Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and
Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 1?21.

 

Grzinic, M. and Tatlic, S. (2014) Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global
Capi­talism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art,
and Life. Lanham: Lexington Books.

 

Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California
Press. 

 

Mbembe, A. (2003) ?Necropolitics?, Public Culture, 15(1), pp. 11?40. doi:
10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.

 

Mbembe, A. (2013) ?The Negro, Figure of Human Emancipation?. Interview by
Rosa Moussaoui. The Economic & Social Justice Reality Report (ESJRR), 2013.
Available at:
<http://www.esjrr.org/2013/12/achillembembe-negro-figure-of-human.html>
http://www.esjrr.org/2013/12/achillembembe-negro-figure-of-human.html
(Accessed: 14 July 2017).

 

McDonald-Gibson, C. (2020) ?Why the E.U. is doomed to repeat the mistakes of
the 2015 refugee crisis?, Time, 10 March 2020 [online]. Available at:
<https://time.com/5800116/eu-refugees-turkey-greece-border/>
https://time.com/5800116/eu-refugees-turkey-greece-border/ (Accessed: 13
March 2020).

 

Recalcati, M. (2019) Le nuove melanconie: Destini del desiderio nel tempo
ipermoderno [The new melancholies: Fates of desire in hypermodern time].
Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2019.

 

Zamparoni, V. (2016) ?Lepra: doença, isolamento e segregação no contexto
colonial em Moçambique? [Leprosy: Disease, isolation and segregation in the
colonial context in Mozambique], História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 24(1),
pp.13?39. doi: 10.1590/s0104-59702016005000028.

 

 

 


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