Abstract
Jean Améry argued in his essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” that there is a distinctive kind of homesickness, specific to the exile experiences of the assimilated German-speaking Jews during the war. They were dispossessed not only of their homes, citizenship, and cultural community in the present, but also of their past attachments, memories, and identifications. In my text, I discuss philosophic analyses of Améry’s exile essay and point that while they offer important insights into Améry’s validation of first-person experience for phenomenology of exile, they perhaps do not appreciate sufficiently the political undertone of Améry’s essay. I approach Améry’s text in the light of critical theorizing of the politics of exile and border-control, and with a focus on the notions of ‘undesirability’ and ‘expulsion’ that underwrite the extreme political precarity of refuge-seekers. This shows that one of Améry’s central preoccupations in his writings on exile have been political freedom and the possibility of resistance, as well as their constitutive codependence, in the oppressive context of forced exile, marked by a futility of political action. Here the act of writing becomes that of resistance and a reclamation of voice and language in the face of the fascistic powers aimed at expelling, silencing, and eliminating the ‘undesirables’.
In the final part of this chapter, I juxtapose Améry’s essay with Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018), which narrates Boochani’s firsthand experiences in Australia’s offshore refugee detention on the Manus Island. I argue that the two authors’ texts offer important insights into the politics of exile, expulsion, and undesirability, and into how such politics registers within the bodily and affective realm. The importance of the proposed approach is not only its harm-centric and experiential orientation as a way of comprehending the political stakes in state failure to protect and grant entry for the refuge-seekers in situations of extreme precarity; it is also to validate and illuminate sites and spaces of resistance undertaken by the victims of these cruel politics, no matter how tentative, short-lived, or, even, failed they might be.
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Notes
- 1.
Achille Mbembe (2003) has coined the concept of ‘necro-politics’ (‘the politics of death’) partly drawing on Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, and partly as a corrective for its overt focus on ‘life’ and sufficient focus on modern state attention to, regulation of, ‘death’. For Mbembe, ‘necro-politics’ includes, but is irreducible to, the state right to kill; it also extends to civil and social death that state imposes on its subjects, which can take the form of disenfranchisement, dispossession, and economic attrition—the subjects of ‘necro-politics’ are rendered superfluous; they are ‘let die’. ‘Necro-politics’ has been an important conceptual tool for the analyses of contemporary border-politics and forced migration (see e.g. Estévez 2014).
- 2.
In his review of Boochani’s book, Jeff Sparrow compares its analysis of the off-short detention centers to Améry’s representation of the life in concentration camps (Sparrow 2018).
- 3.
There is an interesting contrast here between Améry’s view on the loss of language by German-speaking Jews, and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on language, when she says to Günter Gaus: “[the] German language is the essential thing that has remained [for me],” and “I thought to myself, What is one to do? It wasn’t the German language that went crazy” (1994, p. 13).
- 4.
In her interview with Günter Gaus, Hannah Arendt makes a similar point in regard to adopting English as the language of her late writings. She says: “I write in English, but I never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language […]. [T]here is no substitution for the mother tongue” (1994, p. 13; see also Yeatman 2011).
- 5.
This is further reinforced by Améry’s descriptions of the camp and of torture as language-destroying experiences.
- 6.
There is an important similarity here between Améry’s thinking about and Hannah Arendt’s recognition of the importance of civic and political status for politics of resistance (cf. Arendt 1968). Resonant of Arendt’s famous statement that “[i]f one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew” is Améry’s subject of a ‘Jew without Judaism’. It isn’t only a question of inhabiting an identity devoid of any cultural or religious ‘props’, as it was the case for Améry and other assimilated and secular German-speaking Jews (what I have called elsewhere Améry’s “negative articulation of Jewishness” (see Zolkos 2014)), but also, and perhaps more importantly in this context, closely linked to his understanding of the possibility and necessity of revolt in oppressive social circumstances. In “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew” Améry says: “I became a person not by subjectively appealing to my abstract humanity but by discovering myself within the given social reality as a rebelling Jew and by realizing myself as one” (1999, p. 91; for an illuminating discussion of that essay, see Benjamin 2016).
- 7.
The use of the word entborgen is both peculiar and significant in this context. It is likely coined by Améry, who replaced the prefix ge- (in the word geborgen, ‘secure’), with the prefix ent-, indicative of removing something from the object (as in entfolgen, ‘unfollow’, or entlarven, ‘unmask’) or conversion to an opposite meaning (as in enterben, ‘disinherit’). Its English translation as ‘uprooted’ does not quite capture that connection between exile and loss of security. My thanks to Simone Drichel for her illuminating analysis of Améry’s use of that word.
- 8.
My thanks to Yochai Ataria for bringing to my attention the importance of Améry’s On Aging (Améry 1994) for the elaboration of the concept of irreversibility in his oeuvre. The concept of irreversibility frames Améry’s reflections on the self-experience of the aging subject; aging is “the burning and just as hopeless wish of those getting on in years for the reversal of time” (1994, p. 19; see also Zolkos 2010, pp. 84–86). It should also be noted that in the essay “Resentments” Améry assigns to the victims’ feelings of grievance and resentment the function of making a political demand “that the irreversible be turned around [and] undone” (1999, p. 68).
- 9.
For instance, the Viennese Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime played a key role in tracking down and preparing a dossier on the notorious employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program, and commander of the Sobibór and Treblinka concentration camps, Franz Stangl.
- 10.
While there is a great affinity between No Friend by the Mountains and the genre of magical realism, including the Boochani’s prolific use of “mythical and epic visual imagery, dream visions and mix of fantasy and reality”, Tofighian argues that the unique element that distinguishes Boochani’s writings from magical realism is the inclusion of “self-reflexive passages in the book […], [Boochani’s] interpretation of the prison […]” (p. xxix). Importantly, Tofighian delineates a network of literary references and traditions specific to the coming together of Kurdish oral and literary traditions and the Kurdish political struggle (pp. 366–368).
- 11.
I am grateful to Marguerite La Caze and to Omid Tofighian for helping me elaborate this point.
- 12.
One reason why it is important to notice the presence of children and parent-child relations in No Friend but the Mountain is that it provides a powerful counter-narrative to the position held by the Australian government who for years denied that there were children among the refugees on Nauru Island. Another reason why it is important is that Boochani makes the reader see the men on Manus as relational subjects—fathers, children, husbands, brothers (etc.)—who are to remain separated from their families by deliberate border policies that seek to make them into figures of deterrence, by imposing on them a pitiful existence and by deteriorating their mental health.
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Zolkos, M. (2019). Registers of Undesirability, Poetics of Detention: Jean Améry on the Jewish Exile and Behrouz Boochani on the Manus Prison. In: Ataria, Y., Kravitz, A., Pitcovski, E. (eds) Jean Améry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28095-6_4
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