Donatella Di Cesare - Resident Foreigners

In this book, the migrant enters the gates of the City as a resident foreigner . In its attempt to understand what role this latter figure can play in a politics of hospitality, this book takes a path back in time, albeit one that does not follow any chronological order. The stages along this road are Athens, Rome and Jerusalem: three types of city and three types of citizenship which still obtain today. Distinct from Athenian autochthony, which explains many of today’s political myths, was Rome’s open citizenship. Foreignness reigns sovereign in the Biblical City, where the ger , the resident foreigner, is the cornerstone of the community. Ger literally means ‘he who resides’. This contravenes the logic of the solid fences that assign residency to the indigenous, to the citizen. The short-circuit contained in the semantics of ger , which attaches the foreigner to residency, in fact alters both terms. To inhabit does not mean to establish oneself, to settle in, to make a permanent home, or to become as one with the land. From this derive the questions that regard the meaning of ‘inhabiting’ and ‘migration’ in the present galaxy of planetary exile. Without recriminating over rootlessness, but also without glorifying wandering, it is possible to glimpse the possibility of a return. And pointing the way is the resident foreigner, who lives in the furrow of separation from the unappropriable earth and within the bond with the citizen, who, in turn, discovers that she herself is also a resident foreigner. In the City of foreigners, citizenship coincides with hospitality.

In the post-Nazi era, the idea that it is legitimate to decide with whom we should cohabit has held firm. ‘To each their own home!’ It is here that populist xenophobia finds its greatest strength; crypto-racism is its springboard. However, it is often unknown that this is a direct legacy of Hitlerism, i.e. the first project at a biopolitical remodelling of the planet, and one which purported to fix stable criteria for cohabitation. The discriminatory act claims an exclusive place for itself. Whoever accomplishes this act erects himself as a sovereign subject who, fantasizing about a supposed identity between himself and that place, demands his rights of ownership. As if the other, who has always already preceded him, did not have any rights or had never even existed.

To recognize the other’s precedence in the place in which one lives means opening up not only to an ethics of proximity, but also to a politics of cohabitation. The co- ( con – with) implicit in such cohabitation should be understood in its broadest and deepest sense, not only meaning participation but also indicating simultaneity. This does not mean rigidly standing right next to each other. In a world criss-crossed by the combined paths of so many exiles, to cohabit means to share the spatial proximity in a temporal convergence, where the past of each person can be articulated in the common present – indeed, in the perspective of a common future.

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