Agamben from Means Without Ends, quoted in Rothenberg’s The Excessive Subject.
I’m no Agamben buff, but the relevance of this quote to topical Australian political debate seems glaring. The inability to move beyond the deadlock of “offshore” and “onshore” processing is thrown into its true light by this.
The Right is right, in so far as the refugee is always a threat to the stability of the nation, which is only ever a fragile sovereignty tied to land and bundled together by imagined communities: they intuitively know that the community is fearful of the (momentarily) devastating psychic cost of a shift in the organisation of society; they know the precarious, thin sense of belonging in Australia is always cloaked by an awareness (even when forgotten or disavowed) of dispossession. Hence, send the fuckers offshore—the most bloody-minded solution to the threat that they pose. The piffle about “people smugglers” plays to notions of sovereignty too, most nakedly articulated by Howard’s “we will decide” slogan of some ten years ago…
The Left is right that a progressive politics needs the refugee to destabilise the nation in order to rework and reimagine it. Hence, bring ‘em in, set ‘em free.
Media chatter about “policy settings” can only ever cover over this fundamental dispute in the orientation toward the refugee as a figure and as actuality.
