On Refugees and Abjection in Austurvöllur
Emotions like disgust, or in psychoanalytic terms, abjection, is a well-known reaction to people crossing borders. What we in so-called Western societies, believed to be built on universal human rights, need to come to terms with is that the abject — the stateless refugee who is here but not really (legally) here — is a product of our own system.
This text was originally published in Byltingur, 05 (2019). It has also been published in an abbreviated and edited version in Friktion Magasin, 18 (2019).
When the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt escaped from Nazi barbarism in Germany she came to Paris. There she was without citizenship or legal documents; she was not recognized by the French state. She was neither French nor German and had no rights anywhere. In Paris the German Jews were labelled as “enemy aliens” (just as they had been in Germany) by the French state and were ordered into internment camps.
Arendt escaped from the French internment camps. The experience as a refugee marked her profoundly and influenced her thinking. In her essay „We Refugees” she writes that „contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings — the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.“[i] She insists on using the term „refugee“ rather than „migrant“ or other terms used in her time because it captures an essential experience. It is not just the experience of having to flee your home because of the violence there but also that you have an essentially different legal status in your new home. It might allow you to stay but it still considers you an alien that is not supposed to be there. It gives you protection of a sort but not recognition or rights.
She explores this further in one of her major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she criticizes the empty rhetoric of “human rights” in a system where rights are granted by states to citizens.[ii] In such a system there are no rights to those who do not have citizenship. Refugees have lost all their relationships to specific countries and now stand in their “abstract nakedness of being human” just to discover that this offers them very little in terms of rights. All the talk of “human rights” collapses and becomes meaningless when people who have nothing left but being human ask for rights. In a world of nation-states where rights are granted to citizens it is citizenship, not humanity, that gives you “the right to have rights”.
Establishing and Circumventing Rights for Refugees
But surely this has changed? In the same year that Arendt published this, the United Nations formed the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees which established rights for refugees independent of their citizenship in the country they have arrived to if they have “well-founded fear” of persecution and cannot rely on the protection of the country of which they are nationals. Iceland signed this treaty in 1955 (and its update in 1967) making it Icelandic law. Did that close the hole that Arendt was pointing to in the concept of human rights?
Not exactly. The 1951 Convention gives refugees the right to seek protection (asylum) in the country they have arrived, and to be granted basic rights like the right to work, healthcare, education, etc, and it prohibits contracting states from punishing refugees for entering or residing in the country without legal papers and from deporting them to the place where they are in danger (“refoulement”). But later treaties and state practices have severely undermined these rights.
The legal loopholes are in the terms „country of arrival” and „country where they are in danger”. Sure, the convention gives refugees the right to seek asylum upon arrival in another country, but technically it does not prohibit this country from preventing refugees from arriving in the first place. And sure, it prohibits states from deporting them back to their country of origin, but not to another country in which they may or may not receive protection. While Arendt exposed the hypocrisy in human rights discourse that allowed states to say „sure, you are a human, but not our human so you have no rights here” the same states have adopted a practice of saying “sure, you are a refugee, but not our refugee, so you have no rights here.”
European states and the European Union have established a wide-ranging regime designed to prevent refugees from ever setting foot on European soil, in order to prevent them from exercising their right to receive protection. This is not merely done by building walls and fences at the border because a refugee has the right to seek asylum at the border. So the border regimes need to be expanded outside the legal territories of the European states. This is called “extra-territorialization” or “externalization” of the borders.
Through agreements with other countries — countries where neither human nor refugee rights mean much — the EU has outsourced its moral and legal responsibility for refugees. Various deals have been made with countries such as Turkey, Libya, Senegal, Mauritania, Belarus and Ukraine, enlisting them in the enforcement of European migration policies in exchange for trade, travel visa or weapons. The task of these countries far outside the European territory is to prevent migrants from moving to Europe, using methods that would not be allowed within Europe as it would violate the international laws we have ratified. The EU is paying these countries to enforce border controls and to run internment camps outside the rule of law. We have outsourced our moral and legal responsibility allowing us to pretend we respect human rights while we pay others to break them.
Further, should a refugee make it through the vast and continually expanding European border regime we have mechanisms for saying “still not our responsibility.” The convention prevents the UK, for example, from deporting a refugee directly to Iraq where their lives would be in danger, but it does not prevent the UK from deporting them to France, without considering their legal status in France, and France is legally allowed to throw this human ball of responsibility onwards to Greece where they might have come through without the slightest consideration of whether they would be safe in Greece. Being at the margins of the European legal territory (and having suffered an economic collapse and imposed EU austerity) Greece has no functioning asylum system and can offer little in terms of protection or rights to refugees. But it might throw the ball further and deport the refugees to places like Albania or Turkey or other places that the EU have deemed “safe third countries” even though they do not in practice live up to the demands of the convention. What then happens is beyond our responsibility. Or so we tell ourselves. The result is a long chain of everyone saying “not our responsibility” which makes the conventions and treaties legally and morally meaningless.
Iceland is not formally a member of the EU but we are certainly fully fledged members and beneficiaries of the European border regime and the denial of responsibility. We are members of the Schengen area, which grants freedom of movement for the people included in the European political body and builds (literal) walls preventing freedom of movement for those outside it. And we have signed the Dublin agreement that allows us to deport refugees to other European countries without caring about the legal status they will receive there. Being an island placed in the Atlantic Ocean we can always refuse to consider any request for asylum on the grounds that the claimant must have passed through somewhere else to get here, thus negating the responsibility we took upon ourselves when we signed the 1951 refugee convention. On paper we accept the convention but in practice we can always say “not our responsibility.”
Necropower and the State of Exception
So the situation still hasn’t changed that much. Arendt’s paradox still remains: we talk about human rights but the people who need them the most, those who are not protected by the rights of being citizen, are systematically denied this status. In 1995 the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben picked up the questions Arendt had raised. In the book Homo Sacer he returns to an ancient legal concept in Roman law: “homo sacer” — a person who has lost their legal status and is now an outlaw.[iii] In Iceland we’ve had a similar concept in the “útilegumaður” who had to live outside of society and could be killed without consequences.
The homo sacer is one who has lost their political status and are reduced to “bare life”, or being human. As such they have no rights. Agamben provides a detailed analysis of how the birth of modern democracies with the declaration of the “rights of man” was not at all the universalist movement we like to think it was but, on the contrary, the ideological linking of birth, nationhood and political sovereignty. Every man is “born free”, the 1789 declaration proclaimed, but it is only through the political association — the nation — that he is inscribed with rights. According to the declaration political authority comes out of this nationhood and sovereignty thus consists in determining who are the bearers of rights and who are not.
With the linking of birth and nation, rights are far from universal but rather dependent upon the political act of inclusion and exclusion in the political body. And as shown by both past and present events, like those that drove Hannah Arendt and millions of others to flee in the 1930s and the wars and ethnic cleansings that still affect our geopolitical landscapes today, the political status bestowed upon a citizen can always be revoked. Agamben argues that the refugee calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state. They appear as “bare life”, or as Arendt put it “in the nakedness of being human”, and reveals the fiction of human rights in this system that is not equipped to grant rights to those who are nothing else but human.
We avoid dealing with this contradiction by separating the status of refugees from question of political sovereignty and citizenship. The refugee is here, and may be tolerated, but only as “bare life”, not as part of the political body. They have no political status and are thus treated as a mere issue of “humanitarianism”. This humanitarianism that is separated from politics cannot, according to Agamben, help but reproduce the isolation and exclusion of “homo sacer” that ought to be challenged. We treat them as an exception to the system when in reality they reveal the fundamental design of the system.
As an exception, we allow them to exist as long as they remain isolated. Both politically, socially and geographically. Our political systems are not equipped to include them as full bearers of rights, so we create special laws that regulate their biological presence while still excluding them from the political sphere in general. To prevent them from becoming a visible and social presence that might form connections to the social body within the nation, we put them away in camps outside of the cities. Isolated in these legal and social camps they remain in a “pure space of exception.”
For Agamben the camp is a “biopolitical paradigm of the modern.” The camp is where we put the bare life that lives in our societies but are still excluded from it. It can only be tolerated as an exception. The camp thus becomes a place where normal laws do not apply, where humans do not have the rights that apply to citizens. The extra-legal status of the camp reveals the fragility of our legal systems in general. In the camp the state of exception, which was supposed to be a temporary suspension of the rule of law, is given a permanent spatial arrangement. Agamben argues that „The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.” States of exception have a tendency to become permanent (a topic Agamben explores further in his 2005 State of Exception).
Of course the camps where refugees are housed in Iceland are not like the internment and concentration camps of the past (and they were not invented by the Nazis but as a product of colonialism) or like those we, through our position within Fortress Europe, are complicit in maintaining in territories outside our legal responsibility. But the purpose and function of Icelandic camps like the one in Ásbrú is precisely the same: isolation of humans from the social and the legal body; to keep them as an exception from the law within the law, and to keep the humans there in a permanent state of exception.
In which other place in Iceland are the political authorities able to tell you when you can come and go from your own home, whether and when you can have visits, etc? Where else can authorities conduct arbitrary searches of your home or take away your income for minor social infractions? Only in prisons — which are also meant to be places of exception for those who have lost political status. But while the goal of the criminal system is to rehabilitate prisoners so they can at some point become members of society again, the purpose of the internment camps for refugees is to prevent them from becoming part of society and to ensure their removal from it.
In Iceland there is no limit to how long humans may stay in this exceptional state. Many of the people in Ásbrú are people who cannot legally be deported, as that would violate our obligation to not expel refugees to places where their lives are in danger, but who are also never given the legal status of asylum. They live in this permanent legal limbo with the constant threat of violent deportation and possible death unable to make plans or entertain dreams about establishing a real life. We do not physically torture people in Iceland but the insecurity of remaining in such a legal and social limbo is a form of mental torture. The legal isolation leads to social isolation, and for human beings social isolation is a form of death. As Hannah Arendt wrote[iv]:
“Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused.”
This raises another topic: The closeness of life to death. The person who is stripped of his political status and reduced to “bare life” is also a person for whom death is much more present. Homo sacer, the outlaw, is a being who can be killed. The refugees who have fled violent death are placed in these camps where their lives are put on hold and they live in fear of brutal deportation are constantly living in the proximity of death — as witnessed by the rate of suicide attempts in the camps. This state of living, and the political system that maintains it, is what the Cameroonian philosopher Acilles Mbembe calls “necropolitics.”
For Mbembe, necropolitics or necropower, is not just the capacity to dictate who must live and who must die but also the capacity “to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”[v] Like Agamben he connects this feature to the concept of political sovereignty: The ability to decide who is included in the political, legal, and social realm, and who is not, is the ultimate exercise of political power. By excluding people from the social life, sentencing them to “social death”, they are made into a kind of “living dead”: we do not kill them but we deny them to have a life.
Becoming Political Subjects
In March 2019 a score of refugees who had been housed in Ásbrú, the former US military base outside of Keflavik, decided to break their isolation and come into the city of Reykjavik. With help from activists in the No Borders network they set up camp in the park, Austurvöllur, in front of the Icelandic parliament building. At first they were met with violent repression by the police who used chemical weapons on the refugees and local activists but a camp was established which had a permanent presence for about a week and regular protests in the weeks thereafter.
This was of course meant as a political protest. The refugees had 5 clear demands: An end to deportations, individual reviews of asylum cases, the right to work, access to health care, and closing the Ásbrú camp. Some of these are demands of basic rights, like the rights the citizens already enjoy. But before you can receive legal recognition in the form of rights, you have to become a political being. In this respect the most interesting demand is the one relating to the Ásbrú camp.
It is worth noticing the reasons given for this demand. It is not that the material conditions of the housing are bad. It is the social conditions. Being housed in an apartment complex on a former military base out in nowhere might be fine for students and researchers who have access to transportation and are part of a community. But for the refugees, who are not allowed visitors and rarely afford even the public busses, it is more like a prison (complete with security guards who record their movement, arbitrary searches, etc). In the leaflets with the demands the complaint about Ásbrú is that it “makes sure they (the asylum seekers) stay isolated and invisible to the public.”
We can conclude that the mere act of the protest achieved one of the goals. By moving themselves out of the camp and into the city the refugees broke the isolation and made themselves visible to the public. This was a direct action in that the method was part of the goal. The other demands depend on a third party, the political system, to listen and to act, but this one is directly political and transformative just by stepping into the public square and articulating it. By entering the park in front of the parliament the refugees were not just demanding to be seen, they made themselves visible in a way that could not be ignored.
The function of the refugee camp, which in Iceland like all over Europe is deliberately placed outside of society, is to isolate the people living there from social and political life. By preventing them from forming social and political ties they are kept in a state of “bare life” or “homo sacer” and can continue to live in a state of exception with the threat of violent deportation ever present and never be recognized as bearers of rights. By entering the polis the refugees broke their isolation and in effect became political beings that had to be recognized somehow.
Recognition is a necessary but difficult and painful process. On the one hand many citizens of Reykjavik came out in support of the refugees, or at least came to visit in order to see them as human beings, as individuals with lives and needs, rather than the anonymous and easily-forgotten statistics that are housed away in our camps as a mere temporary and exceptional state that doesn’t affect our normal order. Shortly after the Austurvöllur camp was established the school students had the strike and demonstration for climate action in the same place, and afterwards many of them stayed to join the refugees in recognition of the mutual cause: the struggle for a world we can all live in, in safety and without fear. And when the state machinery decided to deport the family of a student in a Reykjavik school it was clear that the refugees are also fighting to protect our friends and our neighbors; the entire school came out in solidarity.
But of course not all have expressed their recognition in such affirmative ways. Besides the police repression and harassment of the refugees who have dared to take political action (they are being punished with arbitrary searches, followed by plain-clothes etc) there has also been a few cases of physical assault and verbal abuse by random strangers who are upset by the political decision of the marginalized to become visible. Fortunately, Iceland does not have much of an active and organized fascist movement but the few cowardly members of the Nordic Nazi terrorist organization that do exist here have been putting up stickers and painting graffiti in the area around Austurvöllur.
It is not from these sources that the main threat and intimidation against the refugees were coming though. Open hostility is one thing, and one it is much easier to deal with as it is premised upon a sort of recognition. The one who treats you as an enemy at least has to acknowledge you. That type of honesty is rare in Iceland where we shy away from open conflict and prefer to whisper rumors and display our discomfort in passive-aggressive ways that can be just as hurtful as the direct assault but more difficult to manage. While the internet as well as the physical space has been overflowing with support and solidarity, a stew of contempt has also been brewing on platforms like Facebook and the newspaper comment sections.
This contempt is almost never expressed honestly and directly. Unlike those racists who if nothing else are at least honest, the majority of Icelanders would never come out and say “I do not want other people here; I do not want us to give protection to refugees; I do not acknowledge their human rights.” Instead the complaints are always directed at other things in a round-about way: “It is disrespectful to stand up and be visible; how dare they complain and imply we have done something wrong? They are rude; they are noisy; they are dirty; they are a disturbance.” Of course these types of complaints can always be directed at any form of political action intended to bring injustice to the forefront of public consciousness and to change the order of things. Reactionaries have always expressed their contempt at troublemakers who fought for an expansion of rights in their time while at the same time enjoying the rights that were established by past troublemakers who did not listen to those who said that it is worse to be rude than it is to accept the status quo.
Horror and Abjection in Austurvöllur
One of the complaints is of particular interest though. One that got a lot of traction on social media and succeeded in feeding the flames of hate. A politician and former minister of Church and Justice wrote a blogpost leading with an innocent quote from a veterinarian talking about measures to prevent bacterial contamination in meat products imported from abroad. Then he switches topic to the refugee’s protest camp in Austurvöllur. [vi] Thus, in a leap of association he manages to connect non-citizens with germs and diseases and the expulsion and detainment of foreigners with hygiene control and disease prevention. The implied message is clear: To preserve the health of the national body foreign elements must be kept out and contained.
We could talk about the obvious historical parallels with the rhetoric in this post but I’d rather approach it from a different angle. The intention and function of the blogpost is of course to induce emotions into the readers, in particular emotions like fear and disgust, in order to channel these into a political orientation. The political function of affective states like disgust is fascinating and well-documented (see, for example, research by scientists like Read Montague, David Pizarro and many others[vii]). Disgust is a deep-seated emotion that triggers our desires for protection and purification and animosity against that which is different and thus threatens the stability and purity; it is therefore no surprise that it is known to amplify more authoritarian and conservative views.
In the book Powers of Horror the French-Bulgarian literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has written extensively on affective states like repugnance, disgust and, in particular, abjection.[viii] Abjection literally means the act of throwing something out, rejecting or expelling it, and as such it seems immediately relevant for the topic of refugees who were at first pushed out of their own states, then arrived in Europe where they are expelled from society and risk being pushed out again by forced deportation. In modern English though, “abject” is used to refer to the state of humiliation and hopelessness which is certainly also relevant for this topic. But in psychoanalysis it has a somewhat different use.
In Kristeva’s writing abjection refers to our reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. One of her examples is the loathing of certain types of food that can cause the body to convulse and gag in order to abject the foreign element such as when an infant expels the milk it both needs and desires. She writes:
“Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.”
The reason she puts the word “I” in scare quotes is that this reaction is prior to the formation of the self as an independent subject. There is no autonomous self who performs the act of abjection of an independent object; on the contrary, the revulsion and discomfort is caused by the lack of separation between subject and object and the desire to establish a border between them. The infantile disgust the former politician is expressing and appealing to is one relevant to those who have not yet established a sense of self that they are comfortable with and therefore feel compelled to define themselves against others — by abjecting the other they seek to establish themselves.
When horrified Icelanders are sharing pictures of refugees camping in Austurvöllur they are of course not truly reacting to an imagined lack of hygiene. Kristeva writes that it is: “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” It is the fact that the refugees are here and yet not here, they are in Iceland but not accepted in Icelandic law, they are trapped in an in-between and draw attention to the holes in the Icelandic and European system. Both the holes that allow some to come in because they have human rights, and the loopholes in the system that deny them full rights. They are neither outside nor inside and we do not know how to cope with that.
This is truly sickening not just for the refugees but also for the citizens and the isolation camps are a means for the state to prevent the citizens from having to face the reality caused by the state itself: to prevent them from growing up. The infantile mind can learn to paraphrase meaningless sentences like “we believe in human rights” while at the same time believing that only citizens have rights as long as those humans who fall through that system are kept in a permanent state of exception. But when they present themselves in front of you as real humans who are denied rights by the state that claims to protect human rights you have to somehow cope with that naïve contradiction. That can cause pain because it means you have to give up a part of yourself: your self-identification with a political system believed to be perfect. You have to abject yourself in order to gain yourself.
It is not those who do not fit the system who have a health issue but those who want to maintain that system by any cost. The object of abjection is not relevant to the deject — the one who abjects. The deject is one who has not found himself. He is not concerned with who he is, Kristeva writes, but obsessed with where he is: “the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines — for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject — constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh.” As long as his search of identity is based on the exclusion of others he will never find peace, there is always a border to police and another “other” to abject.
The deject is a neurotic desperately and constantly seeking establish borders but who is really sickened by the borders themselves. The border shows that there is always something on the other side, an object that can neither be fully assimilated nor fully excluded. There is always something threatening his subject-formation. So he goes on building borders. Borders between them and us, between subject and object, between citizens and humans. The borders of Fortress Europe that started in the Mediterranean but have now expanded far into Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
And when the borders have encroached upon all our neighbors we let them permeate our own societies: We make ID laws and allow police to stop people on the street to prove their right to exist, we give up the right to privacy and allow the police to search our homes to find refugees. We make our whole society into a border-regime which is a state of exception: The border is the in-between where you have to prove your right to enter one system from another but what happens to your rights when that regime is everywhere? Kristeva writes that “the most sickening of wastes is a border that has encroached upon everything.”
What we need to come to terms with is that the abject — the stateless refugee who is here but not really (legally) here — is a product of our own system. The disgust we may feel at being faced with them being visible in the public, disturbing our sense of order, is not caused by them but by ourselves. We produced the humans who do not have human rights, the homo sacer. They are not outsiders coming in threatening our “order” but results of that “order”; they are the insides becoming visible. There is no clear line between subject and object here, but there is no need to be threatened by that. We can continue to be disgusted by the byproducts of our own faulty system, or we can grow up and take responsibility for it.
References
[i] Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal 31, no. 1 (1943): 69–77.
[ii] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (United States: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1973).
[iii] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998).
[iv] Arendt, “We Refugees.”
[v] J.-A. Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (March 25, 2003): 11–40.
[vi] Björn Bjarnason, “Frysting eyðir ekki smithættu,” Björn Bjarnason — bjorn.is, accessed April 24, 2019, https://www.bjorn.is/dagbok/frysting-eydir-ekki-smithaettu.
[vii] Woo-Young Ahn et al., “Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology,” Current Biology 24, no. 22 (November 17, 2014): 2693–99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.050; David Pizarro, Yoel Inbar, and Chelsea Helion, “On Disgust and Moral Judgment,” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 (July 2011): 267–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073911402394.
[viii] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982).
