Being and not being: borders as existential suspension

The chapter furnishes some reflections on the so-called migrants’ emergency from the point of view of political philosophy, working on three concepts: existence, borders, time. The starting point is given by the capacity of transformation that borders and time exercise, producing political effects and really turning existence into a political device. Moving from Fanon and Foucault, the chapter investigates how racism permits the coexistence of necropolitics and biopolitics by introducing systems of hierarchies. Through hierarchies, racism puts itself into practice as the proliferation of borders that try to hide masses of subjects in “the shadow of Europe” (Sassen). Borders multiplication doesn’t simply concern the space, that is articulated by borders to produce both a foreclosing and inclusive praxis on different levels. Borders are social, linguistic, cultural, and temporal too. Borders vehicular life’s suspension, they certify a threshold whom overcoming implies the risk of physical death but most of all, borders are heterogeneous, they entail determinate and necropoietic negations that concern existence in her relational and inter-subjective components. On the other hand, the chapter focuses on resistance practices. The idea of migrant existence as suspended, always exceeding the classic dynamics of west political thinking (representation, democracy, trade union negotiating) obliges to think beyond these dynamics, calling into question the ways in which the subject is usually considered by a philosophical point of view. The ideas of the right to escape and freedom of movement, both in European and global context, ideas that are inherent in financial fluxes as well, contributed to challenging classical political categories like European citizenship, labor, nation, and migration, questioning the procedure of law too.