Refugees, ethical obligation and visual art

[Work in Progress]

National boundaries as contractual relations

Neither geographical nor national boundaries are part of the natural world. They are arbitrary constructs. The same is true of citizenship. Each newborn is technically stateless; it is granted nationality by an act of the state. A contractual relation is thus formed as a confirmation of a “genuine connection”: a person can be included in a state or a people if he or she is deemed “authentically connected” to either of them.

The contractual relation depends on an ethical schema of consent and decisionism, where the executive subject retains the freedom to choose who counts as “the people” and who doesn’t; who deserves to live “here in this nation” and who doesn’t. Ultimately, this ethical schema grounds ethical obligation on perceived “genuine connection”. Such a connection is deemed as missing in cases of refugees seeking asylum, and in these cases contractual relations are established in the absence of a “genuine connection”. According to this view, there is no precontractual ethical obligation towards refugees, but only contractual obligation towards international laws. As such, the issue of granting asylum remains an act of decision.

The precontractual foundation of ethical obligation

Philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt take issue with the idea that ethical obligation towards other people arises when individuals knowingly and deliberately enter into contracts or agreements of some sort with the Other. That notion fallaciously assumes that responsibility is restricted to relations codified by agreements, into which we have entered volitionally.[i]

Are we then obligated toward people, whom we find ourselves sharing our territory with not through choice, and with whom we have no contract? Judith Butler responds affirmatively: we are precontractually obliged to cohabit with “those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen.”[ii] A deeper foundation of ethical responsibility can be found once we expand the notion of genuine connection to include the affective nexus which indicates the universal precarity and finitude of all humans regardless of national origin. Once this connection is activated, it explodes constructed political contracts—the equality inherent in moral emotions belies the elitism of nation states. 

Such an ethics is grounded not on choice but receptivity and responsiveness; on passion rather than action. We must allow our sensibility, rather than our will, to dictate ethical obligation. 

Precarity and finitude as universal human condition

Despite the fact that the philosopher Martin Heidegger espoused nationalism, some of his insights regarding fundamental moods could be appropriated to the opposite direction. All human beings have a precarious existence, he notes; it is impossible to imagine a human being who is not affected by their temporal finitude and sense of alienation and homesickness. The ethical response consists, according to Mahon O’Brien, in seeing others “as similarly claimed and thus bounded by an horizon of finitude in their own right.”[iii] We are inescapably finite creatures, and this is the ethical horizon against which a genuine community is affectively constituted for us. Though an individualizing affect, anxiety does not necessarily yield a self-centered ethics. On the contrary. Seeing anxiety in the other person reveals their precarity, one we recognize from our own experience. And through this recognition, we are solicited ethically. 

In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger also highlights homesickness. He invokes Novalis, who described homesickness as “an urge to be at home everywhere.”[iv] Homesickness represents the way in which human beings are caught in between the local and the global, home and the foreign. Wherever they are, they always want it to feel like home. But we can feel alienated and nostalgic everywhere and anywhere even in what we call “home countries”.

The universally human condition is not that of being at home, but that of being always alienated and homesick, everywhere at once. We are always, all of us—citizens and stateless persons alike—homesick and precarious, in need of others.

Artistic representation and affective imagination  

Judith Butler argues that the notion of “the people” is an imaginary entity that works through delimiting a boundary that sets up terms of inclusion and exclusion. Butler uses visual vocabulary to make her point. The notion of “the people”works like a “snapshot,” a “series of images,” or a “frame or set of frames.”[v] The frame always excludes those “congregated on the border in refugee camps waiting for documentation, transfer, and shelter.”[vi] Such groups are kept in exclusion not only through legal means, but also by removing them from citizens’ moral and affective imagination. 

Video art can remedy this. It can give a concrete portrayal of individuals otherwise excluded from the category of “the people” so as to highlight our shared precariousness. The power of representations of the everyday lives of refugees lies in their soliciting an affective response from the viewer, forcing the humanity of its subjects upon viewers without regard for the latter’s consent. These representations can set the empirical stage for undermining a limited, contractual ethics. It does not merely claim but performs on its viewers the fact that ethics precedes contractual relations. And such visual representations compel us to establish institutions that will make all lives livable and to radically redeploy the notion of a “genuine link” on the basis of universal precarity.  

[i] Butler, Notes, 111.

[ii] Butler, Notes, 107.

[iii] Mahon O’Brien. Heidegger, History and the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 81-82. 

[iv] Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 5.

[v] Butler, Notes, 164-65.

[vi] Butler, Notes, 166.