Grušovnik Tomaž - Borders and debordering topologies, praxes, hospitableness

Borders and Debordering

Borders and Debordering

Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness

Edited by
Toma Gruovnik, Eduardo Mendieta,
and Lenart kof

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Published by Lexington Books

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mendieta, Eduardo, editor.

Title: Borders and debordering : topologies, praxes, hospitableness / edited by Toma Gruovnik, Eduardo Mendieta, and Lenart kof.

Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009104 (print) | LCCN 2018005672 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498571319 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498571302 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Boundaries (Philosophy) | Ontology. | Emigration and immigration. | Hospitality.

Classification: LCC BD392 (print) | LCC BD392 .B67 2018 (ebook) | DDC 110dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009104

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Toma Gruovnik, Eduardo Mendieta, and Lenart kof

Edward S. Casey

Mary Watkins

Eduardo Mendieta

Helena Motoh

Victor Forte

Mary Leonard

Reingard Spannring

Toma Gruovnik

Klaus-Gerd Giesen

Petri Berndtson

Lenart kof

Sh Hawke

Toma Gruovnik, Eduardo Mendieta, and Lenart kof

In the waters of the Mediterranean Sea that serves as a border between Europe and Africa, in the hot sands of the deserts of the Middle East, where borders have burned and shifted with the fate of empires and falling nations, and arguably at the US-Mexico border, a border that until very recently was an imaginary line on the beds of drying rivers and inhospitable deserts, we are facing one of the most chilling humanitarian crisis of our recent times: the crisis of migrants and refugees. In a world in which we are witnessing other humanitarian tragedies (i.e., civil wars in many countries, resource and water wars, eco-refugees, i.e., peoples displaced by severe weather, and human trafficking, to name the most glaring contemporary cases), as well as ignorance by a large part of the policy makers about the implications of the massive and tragic migratory flows, it is important to identify those sources in political, ethical, and legal thinking that can help us face these overwhelming tragedies justly, ethically, and humanely. This edited collection is dedicated to the analysis of various concepts of borders as concepts, technologies, praxes, division lines, physical fences and wallsthat divide, denigrate, humiliate, oppress, neglect, disable, expose, and ultimately kill human beings and non-human animals. This collection, however, is also about practices and forms of worlding that could enable borders to become less fateful and lethal, less divisive and intransigent, less disabling of our encounters, and thus, perhaps empower, enable, mediate ethical subjects to deborder various layers of our ethical, social, and political lives. Borders and bordering are contingent facts, events, and practices, which, nonetheless, have, in some cases, normative claims, or claims that point to moral and legal standards and norms. The borders of a city, during the Middle Ages for instance, was the wall that defended it. The border of a nation was a manifestation of national sovereignty, which had to do with the legal and political autonomy of a people. What we may say and how we interact physically with other members of our polity, is also mapped by certain boundaries, boundaries that when violated fall under the aegis of sexual harassment or outright sexual violence. Borders have this Janus face: they are traces of history, but at some point they also have a normative face. By the same token that they are traced, erected, built, policed, monitored, and regulated, they can also be dismantled, toppled, ignored, and ultimately found to be illegitimate, illegal, unethical, and ultimately inhuman. One of the goals of this collection, then, is to unmask and expose borders to their double bind: their contingency and their need to give normative accounts of their existence, if they are to demand our deference, respect and allegiance.

It is for this reason that among the central topics this collection wishes to address are the migration crises as they appear at various bordersconcrete and visible, as well as more subtle and thus at first blush invisiblewhile also aiming to analyze the conceptual logics that command and enable various political subjects to neglect and violate basic humanitarian laws and ethical norms. In this book, then, we wish to explore different ways of conceptualizing the normative links between the migration crises, political conflicts and a more peaceful and hospitable world.

Ours are times of uncertainty, brutal facts, and lucid normative claims, which demand new answers about our increasingly precarious dwelling in the world, about unequally shared insecurities and modalities of risk of our being-in-the-world, and about the political futures we should wish to share. We always face borders in our lives, some of them visible, and some of them concealed, or even latently present in subjectivities and bodies. In this anthology, Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness , we seek to engage from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective some of the most important issues of the present, related to physical, epistemological, spiritual, and existential borders. This book addresses a variety of topics and themes connected with the role of the body at the threshold between subjective identities and intersubjective spaces that are drawn in ontology, epistemology, and ethics, as well as with borders as these are inscribed in intersubjective, social, and political spaces (such as gender/sexuality/race, human/animal/nature/technology, etc., divisions).

The first section of the volume, Bordering Topologies, is dedicated to reflections on the nature of borders and boundaries as well as their phenomenological implications for human souls and bodies. In the first chapter, Professor Edward S. Casey writes about border walls that are being erected around the globe to stem the flow of migrants. Based on his previous work on memory, place, and edge, Professor Caseys chapter sees border walls as constituting the critical edges of forced migrational movements. His phenomenological analysis understands mobility as an inherent trait of bodily existence, implying that all borders at some point yield to moving bodies and become boundaries. For Professor Casey, however, the truest opening in those walls would be hospitality . His chapter thus ends with an analysis of Derridean reflections on the aporetic nature of this notion, trying to flesh out hospitality for our troubled times, plagued with inhospitable treatment of an unprecedented number of migrants.