While the past few years have repeatedly demonstrated the weaknesses of the nation state, its defensive struggles have become increasingly violent. Financial crisis, global terrorism, a virus that catapults us back into health regimes of the 19th century, all of this is more than pinpricks in the flanks of an animal that you don’t know how long it will withstand. Hobbes’ Leviathan, the symbol of the modern state, looked significantly healthier on the cover of yesteryear.
So one should actually assume that our times are good times for a philosophy that addresses the fundamental questions of living together. She thinks about the social contract, the interlinking of protection and obedience or the sovereignty of those who command the state of emergency. In fact, however, an intellectual laziness has spread, as if one had neglected airing for too long on presentation afternoons in graduate schools. As one of the few – the Kiel philosopher and publicist Eva von Redecker (Friday 34/2021 and 40/2021) must still be mentioned – the Roman philosopher Donatella Di Cesare ventures into the present. And with reasonable academic fussiness.
Di Cesare tackles her cause from two sides, with two books published in parallel in German (the first in Italy was published in 2017). Both are, for the title of a highly influential, recently more frequently cited book (Enemies of the state, Friday 11/2020) by the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, books about a society against the state, and both trust that after the end of the nation-states it is not necessary to break in a murderous fire and apocalypse, but rather a different society, purified from its margins, is possible. That may be naive. But Di Cesare rightly identifies a mental deficiency that can be traced back to excessive corruption of the philosophers by the state. In both books she therefore promotes a new philosophy in addition to a new policy. It goes without saying that this requirement goes beyond the powers of a single author – but every Sisyphus can be happy when he gets the ball rolling.
How the state defends itself
the Philosophy of migration recognizes, based on Hannah Arendts We refugees (1943), Migration as a fundamental questioning of the current state order. From the perspective of state communities – be they despotic or democratic – the migrant appears to be an anomaly whose lawlessness can at most be averted in a humanitarian way. This lawlessness is based on the fact that human rights are proclaimed by organs of the nation states, at whose borders they fizzle out, so to speak. Paradoxically, this means that those who need rights the least get them because, second paradox, the state, in order to guarantee some rights, denies others.
Although there are rules everywhere for making people citizens, they just reproduce the asymmetry that they actually want to remedy. Conservative and liberal philosophers have devoted energy to determining the level of commitment to newcomers from the perspective of the receiving community. “The right to belong”, which the migrant claims and on what his life depends, is either trivialized as a club or initially rejected based on the genealogically transmitted appropriation of territory. The institution of the nation-state remains unquestioned. It is this presupposed unity of nation and territory that finds its legitimation in the myth of appropriation, through work and wars, and in the belief in the distributability of the earth. These myths can be deconstructed in detail, but hardly the ratio that is still hidden in each deconstruction.
Donatella Di Cesare pleads for an end to the classical nation-state by placing the anthropological constant of “living” before “citizenship”. We build because we live, wrote Heidegger. For Di Cesare this is reason enough to plead for all of us as “resident foreigners” in a culture of hospitality.
The text on Italian that appeared only last year the Time of revolt radicalizes this change of perspective from the inside out. The uprisings, flickering everywhere, would illuminate the police character of the state in their rhizomatic distribution, its “founding power”. The legal authorization to exercise extra-legal functions is part of the nature of the police and has asserted itself not least in the corona pandemic, in which, at least in Italy, was almost exclusively governed by decrees. For Di Cesare, however, the revolt is not a response to the pandemic, but is actually the state response to the pandemic, an expression of a crisis in which the state has been trapped for a long time. In order to find a way out, it is necessary to take an external perspective on the state. The philosopher does this by tracing the revolt. Understanding their practice by making it an understanding of one’s own practice is the task of a thinking that wants to prove itself in the present.
Donatella Di Cesare’s books are certainly not free from lengths, contradictions, and cumbersome derivations (incidentally, they are well balanced in the translation). But they are bold: They do not just look at the “shipwreck with a spectator”, but rather row in the place of the accident. Others should help her with this.
Philosophy of migration Donatella Di Cesare Daniel Creutz (transl.), Matthes & Seitz Berlin 2021, 343 pp., 26 €
The time of revolt Donatella Di Cesare Daniel Creutz (transl.), Merve 2021, 128 pp., 15 €
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