The Anxious Boredom of Stateless Persons, and the Ethics of Precarity

The Republic of Cyprus was recently involved in a scandal for a scheme whereby it essentially sold citizenship.[1] An EU passport was attainable to millionaires and billionaires—often criminals and tax evaders—as long as they put a certain amount of money into Cypriot real estate. This commodification of nationality is particularly outrageous at a time when Cyprus is failing to grant asylum to the refugees flooding into the country, failing to meet basic standards of hospitality even.

States customarily grant nationality on the grounds of one of three principles: the “right of blood,” based on inheritance; the “right of soil,” based on place of birth; and finally the right of lengthy residence, conferred exceptionally on persons living in the state for a substantial duration of time.[2] Each of these is considered a “genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments” to the country and its people, and in virtue of this connection, an individual is entered into the social contract of reciprocal rights and duties.[3]

The sale of citizenship is a blatant breach of these principles, but of course, those principles are already elitist and non-egalitarian, and thus morally problematic. These definitions of nationality make an appeal to authenticity: a person can be included in a state if he or she is authentically connected with an already established “people.” This invites us to ask, with Judith Butler: “Who are ‘the people’? Have we yet posed that question?”[4] Butler goes on to note that the notion of “‘the people’ works through delimiting a boundary that sets up terms of inclusion and exclusion.”[5] It is an imaginary entity, she asserts, one that is open-ended. When invoked, it works like a “snapshot,” a “series of images,” or a “frame or set of frames” upon which we cannot rely if it is treated as an exhaustive presentation of “the people.”[6] But the phrase “the people,” argues Butler, “is always missing some group of people it claims to represent.”[7] Who are these missing and excluded people? Butler refers to those “congregated on the border in refugee camps waiting for documentation, transfer, and shelter.”[8]

Such groups are kept in exclusion not only through legal means, but also by removing them from citizens’ moral imagination. This is perhaps why the stark difference between Cyprus’ accommodation of wealthy “tax refugees” and its negligence toward actual refugees with an urgent humanitarian plight, did not cause much of a stir in the Cypriot public. The refugees are simply not present in the public consciousness. They are detained in camps, and their likenesses appear nowhere.

Efi Savvidou’s video art seeks to remedy this. It gives a concrete portrayal of individuals otherwise excluded from the category of “the people.” The impetus of her work is the conviction that ethics transcends statehood as well as that social contract which exists only between citizens. The power of these 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. In this way, Savvidou sets 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.

Interestingly, Savvidou does not portray the refugees in states of extreme suffering, but in their mundane life, waiting around for their asylum requests to be processed. Little happens in the videos; on the contrary, the persons we encounter in them are bored, albeit in a complex way. An anxious boredom, it turns out, is the essential affect of the stateless, those caught in the limbo between nations, in between social contracts, between an impossible past and an uncertain future.

Nations and Contractual Ethics

Neither geographical nor national boundaries are part of the natural world. They are arbitrary constructs, and even Immanuel Kant appeals to this artificiality in motivating the obligation to hospitality. As Reidar Maliks writes, Kant ultimately “sacrifice[d] his moral principles of personal autonomy for the sake of political order,” and ascribed to the state an absolute authority over the creation of obligations by mere choice.[9] But he still held that the enjoyment of hospitality is a right, because of the nature that precedes state territoriality. He spoke of “the right of a stranger not to be treated in a hostile manner by another upon his arrival on the other’s territory,”[10] and he justified this right on the basis that the earth’s surface is a sphere, and that “originally no one has more of a right to be at a given place on earth than anyone else.”[11]

To Butler, the failure to take the insight about the artificiality of national borders to its logical conclusion—as in Kant’s unwillingness to condemn the decisionist exclusion of certain people from “the people”—condones what is nothing less than “a genocidal practice.”[12] It means that we get to decide with whom to cohabit in a geographical area, which in the case of asylum-seekers or other extremely vulnerable people gives us the power of “deciding which portion of humanity may live and which may die.”[13] Restrictions on movement “across borders are incompatible with our deepest democratic values.”[14]

Each newborn is technically stateless; it is granted nationality by an act of the state, whereby it is included in “the people” on the basis of what the law recognizes as a “genuine connection.” The process of becoming civically subsumed involves the legal guardian of the newborn, who enters into a social contract with the state on behalf of the child. The state acts as a representative and mediator of “the people” as it signs its part of this contract. A contractual relation is thus formed as a confirmation of the “genuine connection.”

This contract is a response to an ethical demand, heeding the obligation to include someone within “the people” on the grounds of the “genuine connection.” This means that it is based on a prior contract, namely the state’s commitment to the “genuine connection.” Guardian and state consent to that which this prior contract dictates. The ethical schema of consent is one of decisionism, where the 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.

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.[15]

The Precontractual Ethics of Unchosen Cohabitation

Savvidou’s work confronts us with people we have notchosen to cohabit with, and who remain under the radar of public life. Are we then obligated toward these people, whom we find ourselves sharing our territory with not through choice, and with whom we have no contract? Butler references Levinas as she answers this question in the affirmative: we are obliged “to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen” to be morally bound to. We are obliged to them precontractually.[16]

The persons in Savvidou’s videos are unjustifiably excluded from the category of “the people.” These are “stateless persons,”[17] seeking asylum. They are as yet denied inclusion in the states where they reside—Cyprus and Britain, in the particular case of Savvidou’s subjects—on the basis that they lack a “genuine connection” to either of these countries.

Savvidou calls into question the ethics of contractual cohabitation when she lets her subjects solicit an affective ethical response from the viewer. Long before the present refugee crisis, Butler had written:

Sometimes, not always, the images that are imposed upon us operate as an ethical solicitation. […] [S]omething impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations that do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered.[18]

Tacitly, Savvidou, too, insists that this solicitation is justified pre-contractually. There is a genuine connection to be unearthed between people of different national origins—a much more genuine connection, in fact, than that which grounds statehood and the social contract between citizens. Once this connection is activated, it explodes constructed political contracts—the equality inherent in moral emotions belies the elitism of nation states. We are equally obliged to cohabit with “those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen.”[19]

The true foundation of ethics, as per Savvidou’s work, is the affective nexus which indicates the universal precarity and finitude of the human condition. In this she echoes Arendt, who emphasizes the unchosen character of earthly cohabitation, identifying this as “the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings.”[20] We must, therefore, articulate an ethics that will be based on unchosen cohabitation.[21] Such an ethics is grounded not on choice but receptivity and responsiveness; on passion rather than action. It precedes the ego; the ethical response is an event we find ourselves in the midst of, without having chosen the individuals to whom we are obliged.[22] We must allow our sensibility, rather than our will, to dictate ethical obligation. That means being open to our own affects. The ethics this provides for is a universalist ethics of unwilled cohabitation, based on precarity—the existential condition of finitude, which underlies the ethical response. Precarity and finitude are precisely the ontological characteristics that bind humans together. It is the crucial moral link which contractual ethics misses.

Savvidou thus joins that branch of continental philosophy which takes its ethical vantage point from an affectivity that responds to the precarity of human nature. Human existence is inherently finite, precarious and social. If we, as human beings, become properly attuned to each other’s precarity, that will make us responsive to others’ ethical claims on us.
This presupposes the (re)presentation of the other’s body. As Butler writes: “the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other; exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, and injury; exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us. In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precariousness.”[23]

The appearance of the other’s body is a precondition for ethics, then. Crucially, that representation is not an outcome of our will, of a choreographed and controlled encounter, but rather a sudden imposition where we are unexpectedly confronted with the other’s bodily existence, the other’s affective existence, his or her precarious existence. Savvidou’s work does precisely this: it presents us with the other’s bodily existence in its multifariousness: the other’s bodily movement, his voice, her mood.

As Butler argues, precarity “names both the necessity and the difficulty of ethics.”[24] How so? Because it is not only the other who is precarious; the one in power is, too. While one of the two sides has power over the other, both are dependent on externality. The other’s life is precarious because it depends on my will. But my ethical being is also precarious, for it always depends on something outside of myself, and stands to be upset by a call from the outside, the call of the other. The ethical response depends on the ethical demand, and the ethical call comes from an uncontrolled externality. Without being thus called, ethics is impossible—it has no a prioriprinciple as its basis. A principled person is ethically indifferent until they receive an external solicitation. One’s ethics is enacted via a material encounter, which is particular and contingent.

The recognition of universal precarity exposes our social nature, Butler writes: the fact that our existence “as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions […] obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms.”[25]

What, then, does Savvidou’s work compel us to do with respect to social policies? It calls us to establish institutions that will make all lives livable. It compels us to radically redeploy the notion of a “genuine link” on the basis of universal precarity. Here, we could helpfully appropriate insights from Martin Heidegger’s thought. 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—which is the foundation of a genuine community—consists, according to Heidegger, in seeing others “as similarly claimed and thus bounded by an horizon of finitude in their own right.”[26] We are inescapably finite creatures, and this is the ethical horizon against which a genuine community is affectively constituted for us.

Boredom and Finitude in Savvidou

These insights of Heidegger’s must be appropriated and redirected along an alternative route to the one he took, toward an anti-nationalist and antiracist political ethics.[27] Heidegger uses specific examples of affects or moods which indicate our temporal finitude. In Being and Time, he identifies anxiety as the mood that discloses our “ownmost potentiality-for-Being as anticipation,” namely the anticipation of death.[28] 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.

Boredom likewise expresses our finitude for Heidegger—and this is particularly significant as we bring his ethics of precarity to bear in an analysis of Savvidou’s work.[29] Savvidou’s videos record the Amin family’s daily life in Richmond village (Cyprus) and then follows them upon arrival in Oldham, UK. A common feature of these recordings of family life is the sense of temporal protraction, endless repetition. Their lives move like a hoola-hoop, indefinitely in a circle: unremarkable, dull everydayness. The activities depicted are common chores—cleaning, packing, hair combing. The viewer is waiting for something to actually happen. And so are the real-life characters in the video. Savvidou presents boredom as the refugee’s essential predicament—in Cathryn Drake’s words, “the boredom of displacement and uncertainty, the pain of constant moving and leaving friends behind, the inability to work, and the hope for a ‘new’ life.”[30]

This boredom, though, contains a sense of suspense and bewilderment, which is really the feeling of anxiety. The bored child’s complaint—“I have nothing to do”—here takes on a profound and harrowing meaning. These stateless persons have nothing to do—there is nothing they can do to make life move forward. There is nothing for them to do: whatever will happen will be done to them. Theirs is an anxious boredom, as they wait for that decision by other people which will determine the course of the rest of their lives. As one refugee, Emmanuel Ramadan, tellingly puts it in one of Savvidou’s videos: “We’ve been living here for such a long time that it induces anxiety.”[31]

And then we have Khaled in Oldham, suffering from boredom—a boredom without anxiety. He is overcome by nostalgia for Cyprus, the country he left and now misses, a country full of potential—opportunities that passed by without ever being realized. He suffers from a boredom in which the distinction between past, present and future has been blurred. A boredom perfectly encapsulated in a typical rainy day in England as he looks outside the window.“What to do,” he says. “Every day I home, home, home, I bored of home.”[32]

This response, too, should resonate with the viewer. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger highlights also homesickness as a central human mood. He invokes Novalis, who described homesickness as “an urge to be at home everywhere.”[33] In other words, homesickness represents the way in which human beings are caught in between the local and the global, home and the foreign. But wherever they are, they always want it to feel like home. We belong in more than one place. We belong in many places at once. That is why we can be nostalgic wherever we are.

Here, we can begin to rethink “authenticity” in the sense of “genuinely connected” to a place. 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.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Carens, Joseph H. The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Castles, Stephen, Hein de Haas and Mark J. Miller.The Age of Migration.London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2020.

Gauci , Gotthard Mark and Kevin Aquilina. “The Legal Fiction of a Genuine Link as a Requirement for the Grant of Nationality to Ships and Humans—The Triumph of Formality over Substance?” International and Comparative Law Review17, no. 1 (2017): 167-91.

Goldin, Ian, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan. Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Hadjioannou, Christos. “Can Our Being in the World Remain in the Neuter?” In Towards a New Human Being, edited by Luce Irigaray, Mahon O’Brien and Christos Hadjioannou. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Maliks, Reidar. “Kant, the State, and Revolution.” Kantian Review18, no. 1 (2013): 29-47.

O’Brien, Mahon. Heidegger, History and the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Savvidou, Efi. Emmanuel 2016. In the series The Empire Is Perishing; the Bands Are Playing. Presented at The Presence of Absence or The Catastrophe Theory, exhibition at The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Cyprus, Feb.-Apr. 2018.

Scheid, D. E. “Perpetual Peace: Kant.” In Encyclopedia of Global Justice, edited byD. K. Chatterjee. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011.

Trimikliniotis, Nicos. “Country report on citizenship law: Cyprus,”[GLOBALCIT] EUDO Citizenship Observatory2015/01, Country Reports.

United Nations. The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/wp-content/uploads/1954-Convention-relating-to-the-Status-of-Stateless-Persons_ENG.pdf.

[1] I am indebted to Nicos Trimikliniotis and Marina Christodoulidou for feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. Special thanks also to Ulrika Carlsson for her insightful feedback. My essay has been partly inspired by the work of Greek philosopher, Gerasimos Kakoliris (National & Kapodistrian University of Athens)

[2] Nicos Trimikliniotis, “Country report on citizenship law: Cyprus,”[GLOBALCIT] EUDO Citizenship Observatory2015/01, Country Reports. Retrieved from Cadmus, European University Institute ResearchRepository at: http://hdl.handle.net/1814/34479; see also Gotthard Mark Gauci and Kevin Aquilina, “The Legal Fiction of a Genuine Link as a Requirement for the Grant of Nationality to Ships and Humans—The Triumph of Formality over Substance?”, International and Comparative Law Review 17, no. 1 (2017): 167-91.

[3] See the celebrated decision by the International Court of Justice in Nottebohm (my emphasis).

[4] Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015): 164-65.

[5] Kant, very much ahead of his time, was writing during an era quite different from ours, before the establishment of immigration controls. Many speculate that Kant was moved by the Peace of Basel, a peace treaty under construction at the time between France and Prussia, signed on April 5, 1795(D. E. Scheid, “Perpetual Peace: Kant,” in Encyclopedia of Global Justice, ed. D. K. Chatterjee [Dordrecht: Springer, 2011].) The current regime was established between the two world wars (Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011]: 69-93); Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas and Mark J. Miller,The Age of Migration(London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2020): 84-101). The global system of asylum and refugee law was established during this time, promising protection for forced migration, refugees, stateless persons and others for whom the principle of “non-refoulement” applies.

[6] Butler, Notes, 164-65

[7] Butler, Notes, 166.

[8] Butler, Notes, 166.

[9] Reidar Maliks, “Kant, the State, and Revolution”, Kantian Review 18, no. 1 (2013): 29.

[10] Immanuel Kant, Towards Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, trans. David L. Conclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 82.

[11] Kant, Perpetual Peace, 82.

[12] Butler, Notes, 111.

[13] Butler, Notes, 111.

[14] Joseph H. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 254.

[15] Butler, Notes, 111.

[16] Butler, Notes, 107.

[17] I do not mean this in the strict legal sense of stateless persons as provided in international law, but in a broader philosophical sense, referring to persons who do not enjoy the protection of the state in which they were born. The definition of statelessness is provided in The1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/wp-content/uploads/1954-Convention-relating-to-the-Status-of-Stateless-Persons_ENG.pdf. The Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons under 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, issued by the UNHCR, notes the following: “Statelessness arises in a variety of contexts. It occurs in migratory situations, for example, among some expatriates who lose or are deprived of their nationality without having acquired the nationality of a country of habitual residence. Most stateless persons, however, have never crossed borders and find themselves in their ‘own country’. Their predicament exists in situ, that is in the country of their long-term residence, in many cases the country of their birth. For these individuals, statelessness is often the result of problems in the framing and implementation of nationality laws” (3).

[18] Butler, Notes, 100-101.

[19] Butler, Notes, 107.

[20] Butler, Notes, 111.

[21] Butler, Notes, 111.

[22] Butler, Notes, 102.

[23] Butler, Notes, 108-109.

[24] Butler, Notes, 109.

[25] Butler, Notes,119.

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

[27] Heidegger was indeed guilty of espousing the Nazi genocidal ethics which excluded several groups of people from having a right to authentically participate in the German nation. In particular, he had identified “Semitic nomads” and “the Slavic people” as groups that cannot form an authentic community because they suffer from “rootlessness” (i.e. a lack of “genuine link” to the topos). But this goes against other insights he had, which are the ones I am appealing to, and which can form a solid basis for an egalitarian ethics of inclusion rather than exclusion.

[28] Christos Hadjioannou, “Can Our Being in the World Remain in the Neuter?” in Towards a New Human Being, ed. Luce Irigaray, Mahon O’Brien and Christos Hadjioannou (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 188.

[30] Efi Savvidou, “Emmanuel 2016,” from the series The Empire Is Perishing; the Bands Are Playing (presented at The Presence of Absence or The Catastrophe Theory, exhibition at The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Nicosia (Feb.-Apr. 2018).

[31] Emmanuel 2016 (my emphasis).

[32] Reference missing.

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

Christos HadjioannouDecember 8, 2020