Inhabiting Other Spaces

Abstract

Jacques Derrida subjects the notions of selfhood and autonomous subject to a deconstructive reading as part of his analysis of the ontotheological concepts that lie at the heart of sovereignty, be it in the form of self or ipseity, nation-state, or God. Taking my inspiration from Derrida’s understanding of sovereignty and countersovereignty, autoimmunization and unconditionality, I want to discuss the key mechanisms that operate at the heart of the sovereign European subject’s power to constitute the fiction or phantasm of an autonomous self by expelling migrancy from its so-called own space and how this fiction is inevitably interrupted by the immigrant’s presence in the European metropolitan space. I suggest that the presence of migrants in the metropolitan space of Europe is the force that lies behind the compromising of the sovereignty of the European subject and its opening up for a future. Taking my inspiration from Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of sovereignty, I will focus in this chapter particularly on the ways in which the sovereignty of the European self or the self-founding European subject is established, maintained, as well as destabilized or compromised in its encounter with the migrant other in the space of the European metropolis and in the space of ethnic tourism.