177
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 2 | 2019 | 177–209
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Europe’s Borderland and Non-Citizen Politics
1
“A
1
specter haunts the world and it is the specter of 
migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in 
a merciless operation against it, but the movement is 
irresistible. […] The legal and documented movements 
are dwarfed by clandestine migrations: the borders of 
national sovereignty are sieves.”
2
Bordering Europe 
The 20
th
 century ended with the announcement of the realisation of two great 
utopias: the end of history and a borderless world. The zeitgeist of the fall of the 
Berlin Wall saw the world marching towards an era of limitlessness, a world 
with fewer barriers impeding the ceaseless flows of commodities, information, 
images, and persons, promising thereby the beginning of an era of “global con-
viviality.” The beginning of the 21
st
 century announced a gloomy end to these 
utopias. Far from disappearing, borders, due to the various processes and prac-
tices of re-bordering,
3
 are proliferating today to the point that one could state 
that “we live in a world of borders.”
4
 Hence, instead of fewer lines of division, 
we live in a world in which borders have spread and colonised virtually all as-
pects of our lives. As a consequence, the very concept of the border and its 
functions have changed: instead of being a mere indicator of a bounded terri-
torial jurisdiction, marking the limit of political or other authority, the border 
1
 This article is a result of the research project J6–8264 “Europe as a Philosophical Idea 
and Political Subject” and the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
2
 Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, London 2000, p. 213. 
3
 These involve, for instance, the creation of agencies for controlling the external borders of 
the European Union, the construction of the border walls in various parts of the world, as 
well as the creation and use of massive biometric databases at points of entry.
4
 Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2016, p. 1.

178
jelica šumič riha
engenders the very thing it is supposed to only demarcate and sustain. From 
this perspective, then, Nail can boldly claim: “societies and states are the prod-
ucts of (b)ordering, not the other way around.”
5
 It is precisely the primacy of 
the border and the emphasis on its capacity to engender a political-legal ter-
ritory instead of simply drawing its contours that sheds a disturbing light on 
Europe’s so-called “refugee crisis” and, as a consequence, the construction of 
the European border spaces as a response to the “crisis”. 
While in the past the issue of the border did not receive its deserved attention 
in political theory and philosophy in general, with the ubiquity, complexity, 
and elusiveness of borders, the focus of contemporary political philosophy and 
critical border studies in particular has shifted from what was considered to 
be the main function of the border: a line delimiting a territory as socially dis-
tinct, to borders considered as various practices of social division, hindering, 
bifurcating, redirecting, and recirculating the migratory movement. In order to 
better understand the momentous transformation of borders in the contempo-
rary world, it is helpful to turn to Étienne Balibar’s discussion of the question of 
borders, more precisely, of their heterogeneity and ubiquity that indicate a shift 
toward alternative modalities of borders. For Balibar, the “heterogeneity” and 
“ubiquity” of borders refer to the historical convergence of the multiplicity of 
functions fulfilled simultaneously by different borders (political, cultural, and 
socioeconomic). Yet for quite some time we have been witness to the opposite 
tendency where the many different instantiations of these functions no longer 
intersect. The result is, what Balibar calls, “a new ubiquity of borders,” as ev-
idenced by the fact that “some borders are no longer situated at the borders at 
all, in the geographico-politico-administrative sense of the term.”
6
 With borders 
becoming differentiated and multiple once again, borders, as Balibar contends, 
“constitute a grid raging over the new social space, and cease simply to border 
‘from the outside’.”
7
 Thus, according to Balibar, borders are increasingly repro-
duced both outside of and within the territory of sovereign states. Crucially, as 
Balibar claimed, “borders are no longer the shores of the political but have in-
deed become […] things within the space of the political itself.”
8
 Balibar thus 
5
 Ibid., p. 222.
6
 Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. C. Jones et al., Verso 2002, p. 84, n. 9. 
7
 Ibid., p. 85.
8
 Ibid., p. 92.

179
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
develops an understanding of borders not only as territorial demarcations but 
as “borderspaces” that include the territory beyond the borderline, as unstable 
and mutable spaces as their limits are constantly being redefined and expanded.
Balibar’s concepts of heterogeneity and ubiquity help us to further elucidate 
the border practices in the EU. The gradual dismantling of Europe’s internal 
borders and the growing generalisation of immigration controls has drawn 
attention to the various (re-)bordering processes involved. Thus, with borders 
that are no longer “at the border,” as Balibar maintains, but are instead vacil-
lating, the margins of the EU could nowadays be conceived of as such a bor-
derzone, borderspace, borderscape, or “borderland”, a zone of transition and 
mobility without territorial fixity. This does not suggest, however, that borders 
are disappearing. Indeed, it would be more appropriate to state that “ [l ]ess then 
ever is the contemporary world a ‘world without borders’.” This is because “bor-
ders are being both multiplied and reduced in their localization and their func-
tion; they are being thinned out and doubled, becoming border zones, regions, 
or countries where one can reside and live.”
9
 Borders, on this reading, are not 
fixed; rather, borders are something that fluctuates. In addition, the geography 
of borders is determined in part at least by the erratic movements of migrants 
themselves. Indeed, their movements constitute an irreducible social and po-
litical element in the making and unmaking of the European borders. In order 
to illuminate the political aspect of bordering practices in Europe and beyond, 
it is necessary to departure from the idea of borders as clearly delineated and 
segregated spatialities. 
Lacan’s neologism “lituraterre”, variously translated into English as “erasure-
land”, “stainearth”, or “deletion on the ground”,
10
 seems to capture something 
of this mutation of Europe into a vacillating border by putting into focus this 
mobility, dispersion, drawing, erasure, and re-drawing of borders. On the oth-
er hand, however, Lacan’s “lituraterre” also relates to litorarius, the Latin for 
coastline or littoral. Yet what Lacan crucially highlights regarding the littoral as 
a border or frontier is disparity of the two domains, land and sea, to the extent 
that “one domain in its entirety makes for the other a frontier, because of their 
9
 Ibid. 
10
 Dany Nobus, “Annotations to Lituraterre,” Continental Philosophy Review, 46 (2/2013), p. 
347. I am indebted to Sigi Jötkandt for drawing my attention to this essay.

180
jelica šumič riha
being foreign to each other”
11
. Lacan’s lituraterre can then be viewed as a land 
that is nothing but its own constantly “erasing” borderline. The question we 
wish to address here is the following: Is it possible to think the vacillation of 
Europe’s borderspace as a lituraterre, which, in a double gesture of writing and 
erasure, brings together two incompatible – “because of their being foreign to 
each other” – images or, rather, fantasies of Europe: the image that Europe has 
of itself, and a counter-image or fantasy of Europe brought into existence by 
the erratic movement of the refugees in their perilous journey through the EU 
territory to safety? 
It is telling that, prompted by two significant events in the recent history of 
Europe, the unification of Europe in 1992 and the current refugee crisis, a num-
ber of prominent contemporary thinkers seek a reaffirmation of Europe by re-
posing this typically European question: “What is Europe?”, and that precisely 
because, as Derrida admits, “we no longer know very well what or who goes by 
this name.”
12
 Indeed, Derrida asks, “to what concept, to what real individual, 
to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw 
up its borders?”
13
 Hence, engaging in a discussion of what Europe is involves, 
according to Derrida, a discussion with European memory. Deciding to inher-
it Europe, in all its tensions and contradictions, for Derrida, means to inher-
it two imperatives, two contradictory tasks: “The duty to respond to the call 
of European memory, to re-call what has been promised under the name of 
Europe, to re-identify Europe. […] This duty also dictates opening Europe up 
[…]; opening it onto that which is not, never was, and never will be Europe.”
14
 
Hence, for the inherited idea of Europe to be re-launched and thus reaffirmed, 
Derrida states, “a new thinking and a previously unencountered destination 
of Europe, along with another responsibility for Europe, are being called on 
to give a new chance to this idiom. Beyond all Eurocentrism.”
15
 But this also 
implies, according to Derrida, that “ [w ]e must fight for what the word Europe 
means today. This includes our Enlightenment heritage, and also an awareness 
11
 Jacques Lacan, “Lituraterre,” in Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris 2001, p. 14.
12
 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, Indiana University 
Press, 1992, p. 5 (emphasis in the original).
13
 Ibid.
14
 Ibid., p. 76.
15
 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. P .-A. Brault and M. Naas, Stanford 
University Press, Stanford 2005, p. 158.

181
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
and regretful acceptance of the totalitarian, genocidal and colonialist crimes 
of the past. Europe’s heritage is irreplaceable and vital for the future of the 
world.”
16
 Seen in this perspective, the current refugee crisis situates Europe at 
the temporal disjunction between the past and the future. Yet precisely by being 
thus precariously poised between inheritance and promise, Europe is offered a 
unique chance to reaffirm itself, an opportunity, more precisely, to rethink its 
own foundations in order to rescue the emancipatory core of the idea of Europe. 
Setting out from the image of Europe as a lieu de mémoire, a place of tragic mem-
ory out of which a new community has to emerge, a Europe that is supposed to 
be capable of overcoming the differences between “them” and “us”, a cosmopol-
itan Europe of “radical tolerance and radical openness”
17
. However, the idea of 
Europe such as was set in motion in the post-war period, the idea of a European 
“unity in diversity”, was not to be viewed simply as an ethical injunction, since 
the benefit of an ontological impact is involved from the outset: in summoning 
the Member States and its inhabitants to act as if the idea Europe has of itself, a 
unity in peaceful diversity, has become a reality, it produces a coherence among 
European states and people. Hence, the very need to re-affirm Europe, implies 
that the idea of Europe is not to be simply discarded, announcing thereby that 
the task ahead is that of “Europe becoming minoritarian,” as Rosi Braidotti sug-
gests,
18
 as if all that one had to do is to overcome our Eurocentrism and to adopt 
a nomadic subjectivity in order to become part of a global multitude.
However, if the idea of Europe is still alive in a certain sense, as can be evidenced 
by the effects it produces in reality, this is not because this idea is reduced to an 
image Europe has made of itself and its role in the world, an image of an ideal 
Europe identified with the signifiers that give rise to such an ideal: memory, 
inheritance, promise, reconciliation, peaceful coexistence, hospitality, human-
ity, tolerance, Enlightenment, reason, critique, responsibility, democracy, etc. 
Because the idea of Europe or, rather, its role is both ontological and episte-
16
 Jacques Derrida, “A Europe of Hope,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 10 
(2/2006), pp. 407–412. 
17
 Ulrich Beck, “Understanding the Real Europe”, Dissent, summer 2003. http://www.dis-
sentmagazine.org/article/understanding-the-real-europe.
18
 Rosi Braidotti, “The Becoming Minoritarian of Europe” in Adrian Parr and Ian Buchanan 
(eds.), Deleuze and the Contemporary World, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2006, 
pp. 79–94.

182
jelica šumič riha
mological in yet another sense. This epistemological-onotological status of the 
idea of Europe could best be explained by referring to Lacan’s notion of fantasy 
defined as a “window onto the real” in the sense that it organises the field of 
the visible by separating what can be seen from what cannot be seen. We can 
understand the function of the idea of Europe – as a discursive apparatus that 
renders a given situation legible – in terms of the frame, as elaborated by Judith 
Butler in her book Frames of War. The frame, as Butler conceives of it, involves 
the idea of ordering and the stability resulting from the very act of framing. A 
frame, in this respect, “seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen.”
19
 
Considered as “operations of power,” frames aim to “delimit the sphere of ap-
pearance itself.”
20
 Insofar as framing is seeing, it could then be said that the 
act of framing consists in selecting and constructing what it is that the frame 
frames.
21
 The frame then is a device allowing certain images, interpretations, 
norms, or truths to become recognisable and, consequently, recognised. Or, to 
be even more precise, the frame is a condition of possibility of recognisability 
inasmuch as “recognizability describes those general conditions on the basis of 
which recognition can and does take place.”
22
 But in so doing, the frame also es-
tablishes the conditions of its own reproducibility. While the frame determines 
– discursively, visually, auditorily, and practically – the conditions of what is to 
be understood, seen, heard, or done, Butler nevertheless insists on the frame’s 
inability to frame everything. Indeed, the frame “does not quite contain what 
it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organization 
to its content. In other words, the frame does not hold anything together in one 
place, but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to a temporal 
logic by which it moves from place to place.”
23
 
Our contention in this essay is that such a breakage of the European frame is 
already taking place, but in a quite peculiar manner. Indeed, in their death-de-
fying passage through the territory of “Fortress Europe”, a violently defended 
political space, the refugees and asylum seekers are tracing out a different im-
age of Europe, one that, instead of reaffirming the idea of Europe as Europe has 
created for itself, an “area of justice, freedom and security,” constitutes a differ-
19
 Judith Butler, Frames of War, When is Life Grievable? Verso, New York 2009, p. 10.
20
 Ibid., p. 1.
21
 Ibid., p. 8.
22
 Ibid., p. 6.
23
 Ibid., p. 10.

183
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
ent logic of inscription, a frame that allows refugees to read/understand what 
Europe is, namely, a “post-colonial” and “racist Europe” rather than a “raceless 
and humanitarian Europe”, a violently divisive force, rather than a “Europe 
of a peaceful unification”, in short, a “non-Europe” of exclusion rather than 
a “Europe of inclusion and tolerance”. Hence, once what is viewed as non-Eu-
ropean and thus considered to being Europe’s constitutive outside intrudes in 
Europe’s space, becoming thereby Europe’s internal other, the “other within”, 
Europe recreates what was called “global apartheid” conditions by separating 
“wanted from unwanted, the barbarians from the civilised, and the global rich 
from the global poor.”
24
 In its response to what is called a “refugee crisis” – 
whereby the very term “crisis” already tends to obscure what is at stake in man-
aging it – “Europe” has developed techniques and practices of bordering that 
involve not only the fortification of territorial borders but also the extension 
of the borderspace beyond the territorial border of the EU. Borderspaces that 
have been created as a space for the control and regulation of migrating bod-
ies function as a fluctuating zone of exception, in Agamben’s sense, namely as 
zones where the rule, while being abolished, continues to reign over the bodies 
captured within the territory of its jurisdiction.
Balibar’s concept of vacillation, used to indicate that borders are no longer co-
terminous with territorial lines, delimiting the outer reaches of the jurisdiction 
of sovereign states, helps us to further clarify the bordering practices in the EU 
that allow borders to materialise far beyond of what is traditionally viewed as 
European space. Due to the ramification of the border’s dispositive – through the 
increasing externalisation of borders (by transforming the EU’s neighbour states 
into pre-frontiers of Europe; this being the European main strategy for contain-
ing migration and deterring unwanted migrants, a strategy that consists in not 
letting the would-be migrants to leave) and internalisation of border control that 
re-materialises borders within the EU territory (by creating detention centres for 
arriving migrants in order to limit their freedom to move) – one could say, with 
Balibar, that the territorial borders of Europe are “no longer localizable in an 
unequivocal fashion.”
25
 Ceasing to be static territorial delimitations, borders are 
24
 Henk Van Houtum, “Human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the EU’s external border 
regime,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 20 (2010), p. 958.
25
 Étienne Balibar, “The Borders of Europe,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robins (eds.), Cos-
mopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, University of Minnesota Press, Min-
neapolis 1998, p. 219.

184
jelica šumič riha
constantly being displaced and multiplied, shifting with the moving body of ref-
ugees. As Balibar judiciously remarks, the border is not everywhere for everyone. 
The “polysemic character” of borders can be seen in the fact that “borders never 
exist in the same way for individuals belonging to different social groups.”
26
 The 
polysemy of borders, alluded to by Balibar, thus involves the capacity of borders 
to actively “differentiate between individuals in terms of social class.”
27
 In bring-
ing to the fore the partitioning along fault-lines of class and race of both citizens 
and migrants into privileged, authorised communities, and abject groups con-
demned to strategies of survival through an endless process of internal borderi-
sation, marginalisation, stigmatisation, and criminalisation, Balibar denounces 
their “false simplicity”
28
. Thus, the passport of a “rich person from a rich country 
[…] increasingly signifies not just mere national belonging, protection and a right 
of citizenship, but a surplus of rights – in particular, a world right to circulate 
unhindered.”
29
 For “a poor person from a poor country,” by contrast, “the border 
[…] is a place he runs up against repeatedly,” ultimately, the border itself is rede-
signed as a “carceral system of placelessness” in order to be transformed into “a 
place where he resides.”
30
 This is not to be understood only in the sense that for a 
migrant/refugee waiting for the opportunity to cross the border, s/he has to liter-
ally reside at the border, rather, the border itself moves with migrants, inscribing 
itself onto the migrant body. It is this aspect of the border topography that ena-
bles – via the deterritorialisation of the EU’s external and internal borders – a 
transformation of borders into spaces in which migrant bodies are exposed to 
racialised violence, deportation, and, ultimately, death. 
A necropolitical lituraterre 
It is precisely at such points that there emerges what William Walters termed the 
“humanitarian border”. The term “humanitarian border” designates “the reinven-
tion of the border as a space of humanitarian government.”
31
 Humanitarianism, 
26
 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 79.
27
 Ibid., p. 82 (emphasis in the original).
28
 Ibid., p. 76.
29
 Ibid., p. 83 (emphasis in the original).
30
 Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
31
 William Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” 
in Ulrike Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds.), Governmentality: Cur-
rent Issues and Future Challenges, Routledge, New York 2011, p. 137.

185
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
as Williams understands it, refers to “a complex domain possessing specific 
forms of governmental reason,”
32
 insofar as, at its core, it involves what Didier 
Fassin describes as “the administration of human collectivities in the name of a 
higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of 
suffering as the highest value of action”
33
, presupposing thereby the passivity 
on the part of those who receive humanitarian care. In fact, humanitarian care 
is “extended only when the migrant is removed from the body politic or when 
the migrant’s body becomes incapacitated to the point of political impotence.”
34
 
Thus, as has been rightly pointed out by several critical border theorists, far 
from being “the other pole of the mechanisms of containment and control,” 
humanitarianism emerges as “one among the most effective technologies for 
governing, selecting, and containing migrant lives”
35
. As a novel formation in 
border policy, contemporary humanitarianism that strives to provide appropri-
ate responses to irregular migrants and asylum seekers emerges as a “minimal-
ist biopolitics” that takes hold over the bodies and life of migrants. The human-
itarian government is, strictly speaking, a politics of life, as Fassin claims, yet 
what is at stake in such a “politics of life” is “the right to live as such more than 
human rights”,
36
 a politics of life, in short, that turns into a politics over life. In 
bringing together border policy and a politics of life, contemporary humanitar-
ianism is a site of ambivalence. It is in the context of such an awkward alliance 
of humanitarianism and governementality that there appears a new kind of 
frontier marking points where the Global North and the Global South confront 
one another and where the demarcation line between wealth and poverty, cit-
izenship and non-citizenship, transforms migrants into lives to be rescued or 
into excessive remainders. Hence, if certain border zones are transformed into 
a humanitarian border, this is because the whole defensive arsenal of borders 
(from advanced surveillance technology and armed guards to razor wire) are 
“deemed politically necessary and legitimate elements in the ‘defense’ of the 
32
 Ibid., p. 142.
33
 Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism: A Nongovernmental Government,” in Michel Feher 
(ed.) Nongovernmenal Politics, Zone Books, New York 2007, p. 151.
34
 Gregory Feldman, The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the Euro-
pean Union, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2012, p. 11.
35
 Martina Tazzioli, “Border displacements. Challenging the politics of rescue between Mare 
Nostrum and Triton,” Migration studies, 4(1/2016), p. 5. 
36
 Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” Public Culture, 19/3, pp. 499–520.

186
jelica šumič riha
borders of the Global North faced with an ‘invasion’ of migrants and asylum 
seekers” in order for “border crossing [to] become a matter of life and death.”
37
 
The emergence of “the border as a threshold of life and death”
38
 thus marks 
the birth of the humanitarian border as a new type of border, a kind of a zero 
degree of biopolitics, a point at which biopolitics immediately switches into 
what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics”, unmasking thereby the deadly rac-
ist enactment of the European borders. By focusing on “contemporary forms of 
[the] subjugation of life to the power of death,”
39
 Mbembe puts into focus the 
functioning of borderspaces defined as humanitarian borders in order to make 
visible what is being hidden, a “space of nonexistence” where the very fact of 
invisibility is constitutive of the state of exception. The concept of necropolitics 
enables us not only to better understand the racialised constitution of lives left 
to die, as Mbembe puts it, but to denounce the necropolitical condition that hu-
manitarianism necessarily involves as the life that must be protected is biolog-
ical life, a sheer ability to survive. Being one of the most effective technologies 
for dissimulating the veering of biopolitics into necropolitics, the humanitarian 
border can shed light on contemporary strategies of border-making in the EU. 
Using borders as filters to separate citizens from non-citizens, insiders from 
outsiders, the wanted from the unwanted, ultimately, humans from not-quite-
humans or outright non-humans, this biopolitical mechanism produces certain 
bodies as “targets” exposed to institutional violence and thereby transforms 
every borderspace into a potential “state of exception”, as Giorgio Agamben 
defines it, a space where law is suspended, yet remains in force.
40
 
With respect to the functioning of the humanitarian border as a zone of the state 
of exception, it should be noted, however, that what is at stake in necropolitics 
is not the question of the dehumanisation of the migrant bodies in borderspac-
es, but rather the continuing production and reinforcement of the conditions of 
bare life.
41
 Taking his cue from the Arendtian “right to have rights” that reveals 
37
 William Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” 
p. 146.
38
 Ibid., p. 149.
39
 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, 15 (1/2o13), p. 16.
40
 Girogio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 
and London 2005, p. 87.
41
 Ibid., p. 12.

187
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
the circularity of rights and citizenship, whereby the lack of membership in a 
political community constitutes rightlessness, thus preventing migrants and/
or refugees from claiming their basic human rights,
42
 Agamben further develops 
the constitutive exclusion of bare life under the guise of the migrant or refugee. 
Exclusion is not only a measure to make undesirable migrants unable to claim 
the “right to have rights.” By reducing human life to nothing but (bare) life, the 
latter is not entirely outside the realm of sovereign power, but neither is it pro-
tected within the given political-legal system. Excluded from and at the same 
time captured within the political order, bare life – exactly through its inclusive 
exclusion – is the constitutive feature of sovereign power.
43
 That “the production 
of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power”
44
 is nowhere seen 
more clearly than in the case of migrants and asylum seekers. The mechanisms 
of border control are biopolitical instruments in Agamben’s sense precisely to 
the extent that they are used to install the conditions of bare life in the bor-
derspace. In maintaining bare life intimately connected to the reproduction of 
sovereign power, the zone of bare life turns into the ever-politicisable territory of 
sovereignty.
45
 The borderspace as a zone of deportability is by definition a zone 
of exception not only because the state agencies involved in policing the border 
violate certain norms of treatment and deny certain rights to migrants, but rath-
er, the borderspace is a zone of the state of exception because it is a space where 
the interweaving of death and freedom renders life and death indistinguishable.
Extending Agamben’s and Mbembe’s critique of biopolitics to border policy in 
the EU the critical border studies emphasise those facets of the borderspace in 
which the differentially constructed bodies of migrants are exposed to structur-
al oppression and violence. Due to the fact that the border is in a certain sense 
immanent to the migrant body, inasmuch as the borderspace emerges when-
42
 “Rights […] are attributed to the human being only to the degree to which he or she is the 
immediately vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never 
come to light as such) of the citizen.” Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Poli-
tics, trans. V . Binetti and C. Casarino, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and 
London 2000, p. 21.
43
 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, 
Stanford University Press, Stanford 1998, p. 9. 
44
 Ibid., p. 6.
45
 Nicolas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, “Introduction” in Nicholas De Genova and Na-
thalie Peutz (eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Move-
ment, Duke University Press, London 2010, p. 37.

188
jelica šumič riha
ever undocumented, illegal migrants are present, refugees and irregular mi-
grants, being immobilised, tied to a local borderspace, in some radical sense, 
never actually cross the border, never leave the borderspace. This is because 
the borderspace, for them, is mobile, it fluctuates, and it can be enacted at any 
moment and everywhere. But precisely for being a changeable, unstable space 
that can be created anywhere, and at anytime, provided that it is populated by 
migrant bodies, the borderspace can best be described, by using Agamben’s 
term, as a zone of exception. Thus, if the borderspace, populated by undoc-
umented, irregular migrants can be compared to a state of exception, this is 
because the law, while being suspended and therefore becoming indistinguish-
able from the exception, remains nevertheless in force. 
The migrant body, reduced to nothing but “bare life”, could then be seen as a 
contemporary figure of homo sacer. Balibar seems to be joining Agamben in 
this respect since for him, the border functions “as an institutional distribu-
tion of survival and death.”
46
 While Balibar does not speak of the production 
of homo sacer as being constitutive of the production of sovereign power, as 
Agamben does, he nevertheless designates the inhabitants of the borderspace, 
this being a true zone of death, as “garbage humans”, who are “always already 
superfluous” and, because of that, “not likely to be productively used or ex-
ploited.”
47
 Considered as being superfluous, because they are not even produc-
tively exploitable, as Balibar emphasises, the death of the undocumented mi-
grants does not count, they remain in a sense “un-noteworthy”. In a remarkable 
way, the lives of the illegal migrants share some crucial traits with “infamous 
lives” described by Foucaualt: in both cases we are dealing with lives that are 
“destined to pass away without a trace” had they not – due to their “encounter 
with power” – been “snatched […] from darkness in which they could, perhaps, 
should, have remained”.
48
 For being considered (by Europe) as superfluous and 
therefore disposable, losable lives, the lives of illegal migrants, because they 
do not matter, are also ungrievable lives. These lives, as Butler describes them, 
are not even grievable as they are not lives in the true sense. Butler in particular 
emphasises that as “a living figure outside the norms of life […] it is living, but 
46
 Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty”, p. 16.
47
 Ibid., p. 25.
48
 Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Power, J. D. Faucion (ed.), Penguin Books, 
London, 1994, p. 161. 

189
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
not a life. It falls outside the frame furnished by the norm, but only as a relent-
less double whose ontology cannot be secured, but whose living status is open 
to apprehension.”
49
 
Those who have died along the European “humanitarian border” cannot be 
mourned since they are “not conceivable as lives within certain epistemologi-
cal frames, [their lives] are never lived nor lost in the full sense.”
50
 Drawing on 
Foucault’s biopolitical conception of racism that functions as an instrument 
of division since it establishes what “a biological-type caesura within popula-
tion”,
51
 Butler situates the filtering out of supposedly inferior groups of popu-
lation at the level of a differentiated perception of lives whose loss is grievable 
and others whose loss remains ungrievable.
52
 By bringing together two, seem-
ingly incompatible conceptions of sovereign power, biopolitical and necropo-
litical, racism puts into sharp relief the fact that, from the point of view of the 
contemporary sovereign power, not every life is considered to be worth optimis-
ing. To follow Foucult’s argument, “racism justifies death-function in the econ-
omy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes 
one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, 
insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.”
53
 Hence, in order to 
foster (some) life, (other) life that is always-already stigmatised as a biopolitical 
threat, supposedly endangering the life of the human species must be rendered 
dispensable and let to die. Taking her cue from Foucualt, Butler states that the 
loss of such lives is “deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living’.”
54
 
Interestingly, Butler situates the resistance of the ungrievable life precisely in 
its refusal to die, a state that resonates with the undeadness of Muselmann in 
the Nazi death camps. The exacerbated violence against those losable lives cu-
riously fails, not only because it is not possible to negate what has already been 
49
 Butler, Frames of War, p. 8.
50
 Ibid., p. 1. (Our emphasis.)
51
 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 – 1976, 
trans. D. Macey, Picador, New York, 2004, p. 255.
52
 Butler, Frames of War, p. 24.
53
 Foucault, Society Must be Defended. p. 254.
54
 Butler, Frames of War, p. 31.

190
jelica šumič riha
negated. It is also not possible to kill life that is not truly alive “since [such los-
able lives ] seem to live on, stubbornly, in the state of deadness.”
55
 
An image from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dream-Land”
56
 can shed some light 
on this “zone of deadness.” In her highly illuminating essay “Repetition and 
Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” Sigi Jötkandt reads Poe’s “Dream-Land” 
in order to confront the fantasmatic landscape depicted in Poe’s poem with 
“Norway”, the ultimate object of refugees’ desire, which guides them through-
out their risky, death-defying journey to safety. The refugees’ “Norway” is de-
picted as a place preferable even to heaven, as can be illustrated by a popular an-
ti-immigrant joke from the times of socialist Yugoslavia, yet which has become 
curiously topical in the current refugee crisis: “Mujo (short for Mohammed) dies 
in a car accident on the “Balkan refugee route”. When Saint Peter asks him: 
Where would you like to go, you wretch, heaven or hell? Mujo replies: Can I go 
to Germany?”
57
 Mujo appears to be a calculating contemporary refugee/migrant 
who instead of settling down, say, in Turkey, Greece, Slovenia, or Hungary (or 
even Italy and France) in order to save his bare life, prefers to move to Germany 
if not to one of the richer countries of Northern Europe, Sweden or Norway, 
where he expects to enjoy the privileges of the welfare state. For refugees flee-
ing war and starvation, Norway thus represents the ultima Thule, to be taken in 
the sense of the end and the ultimate reason for their journey.
What the poem’s narrator – recounting his travels towards Thule, the name 
given by ancient historians to a place beyond the borders of the known world, 
supposedly situated between Iceland, Greenland, and Norway – encounters 
instead is what Poe calls “an ultimate dim Thule,” a sublime place “Out of 
SPACE–Out of TIME.” The ultimate goal of Poe’s traveller, ultima Thule, emerg-
es before the startled traveller’s eyes as a liminal state 
55
 Judith Butler, Precarious Life, The Power of Mourning and Violence, Verso, New York 2004, 
p. 33.
56
 Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream Land”, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/
detail/48631.
57
 See Vlasta Jalušič, “Why Does Mujo Want to Go to Germany?” in Igor Ž. Žagar, Neža 
Kogovšek, Marina Hacin Lukšič (eds.), The Disaster of European Refugee Policy: Perspec-
tives from the “Balkan Route”, Cambridge Publishing Scholars, 2018, p. 157.

191
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
With forms that no man can discover 
For the tears that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging unto skies of fire;
In “Dream-Land” Thule is presented as a pre-ontological real ruled by “an 
Eidolon, named NIGHT,” a place where, as Jötkandt notes, “the very limit sep-
arating life from death […] never took place. Inhabited by strange creatures 
occupying in-between states.”
58
 Crucially, Poe’s fantasy of a “dream-land” 
forecloses in advance the possibility of escape, a possible way out. What Poe’s 
dreamed ultima Thule presents instead is “a space of nonexistence.” In this 
place between life and death, out of space and out of time, we can recognise a 
poetic depiction of the hell that awaits today’s refugees: a necropolitical “litu-
raterre”, a death zone or a state of exception where the life of the populations, 
considered as “garbage humans,” who are “always already superfluous” and 
not likely to be productively used or exploited,”
59
 to quote Balibar’s “Outlines 
of a Topography of Cruelty”, is stillborn, for the limit separating life from death 
never took place for them. 
What lesson can we draw from Poe that will help us illuminate the refugees’ 
dream of reaching Norway? No doubt, refugees, by refusing to be satisfied by a 
minimum of safety, in short, by refusing to have their life reduced to bare life, 
claim their right to take the freedom to move within Europe literally. Read in 
terms of the right to move and find a space for living in whatever country they 
choose, the refugees’ Norway dream would be the clearest expression of what 
Badiou calls the “desire for the West,” because, far from striving to change the 
world by changing the economic, social, and political conditions that have im-
posed on them the status of refugees, their only goal is to leave behind their 
devastated country and to rejoin the promised land of the developed West. 
58
 Sigi Jötkandt,“Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” in Kate Montague, 
Sigi Jötkandt (eds.), Reason + Enjoyment, Filozofski vestnik, no. 2 (2016), p. 242.
59
 Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global 
Violence,” p. 25.

192
jelica šumič riha
In response to this more or less explicit criticism of the refugees/migrants “de-
sire for the West”, Jötkandt judiciously remarks that to be able to change reali-
ty instead of chasing a nonrealisable dream of “Norway”, this would presume 
“that one knows what ‘reality’ is.”
60
 Yet the “hard lesson” we can learn from 
Freud, Jötkandt claims, is not only that the presentation of the object of satis-
faction in thought is hallucinatory. What is also illusory, Jötkandt continues, is 
our attempt “to make a real alteration” in the real circumstances, “in the exter-
nal world.”
61
 However, if we are to follow Freud’s lead, as Jötkandt’s argument 
goes, namely that “the idea of making an alteration in reality is […] equally fan-
tasmatic a solution as the refugees’ dream of Norway, should we conclude there 
is only the rule of Eidolon today,”
62
 in short, that there is no escape, no way out; 
that, like Poe’s traveller, instead of finding in the northern land a Dream-Land, 
a sublime place, the refugees seeking asylum in Europe, discover only a death 
zone in which life is still born or, at best, in statu nascendi? 
But would it not be possible to read refugees’ desire for “Norway”, their idea 
of Europe, from a radically different perspective? The change in the status of 
borders has some repercussions for the possible alternatives. For Balibar, the 
alternative is “between an authoritarian, and indeed violent, intensification of 
all forms of segregations, and a democratic radicalism which has as its aim to 
deconstruct the institution of the border.”
63
 This alternative thus indicated by 
Balibar, is curiously evocative of Lacan’s prediction according to which “ [o ]ur 
future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line exten-
sion of the process of segregation.”
64
 Balibar offers a similar argument stating 
that, for his part, he would hesitate to embrace 
a radical democracy – which is necessarily international or, more accurately, 
transnational – with the pursuit of a ‘borderless world’ in the juridico-political 
sense of the term. Such a ‘world’ would run the risk of being a mere arena for the 
60
 Jötkandt, “Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” p. 246.
61
 Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), The 
Standard Edition, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of 
Psycho-Analysis, London 1961, p. 218.
62
 Jötkandt, “Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land,” p. 247.
63
 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 92.
64
 Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, Analy-
sis, no. 6, p. 12.

193
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
unfettered domination of the private centres of power which monopolize capital, 
communication and, perhaps also, arms. It is a question, rather, of what demo-
cratic control is to be exerted on the controllers of borders – that is to say, on states 
and supra-national institutions themselves. This depends entirely on whether 
those on the different sides of the border eventually discover common interests 
and a common language (common ideals). But it depends also on the question of 
who will meet in those unliveable places that are the different borders.
65
After migrants have found themselves in the hell of the “borderspaces” at the 
margin of Europe, an image of a racial, post-colonial Europe emerges, an image 
that Europe is not only unwilling to assume, but strives to repress if not to fore-
close, however, without completely succeeding in this effort. This is because, as 
Butler suggests, “ [t ]he frame never quite determined precisely what it is we see, 
think, recognize, and apprehend. Something exceeds the frame that troubles 
our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to 
our established understanding of things.”
66
 The stark contrast between human-
itarisation of Europe’s borders and their divisive enforcement is nowhere seen 
more clearly than in the humanitarian project. Designated as an “uneasy alli-
ance of a politics of alienation with a politics of care”, the humanitarian border 
creates “a site of ambivalence and undecidaeability”
67
 to the extent precisely to 
which humanitarian care involves the inclusion and exploitation of the migrant 
body reduced to the passive other. 
In an attempt to break with the traditional conception of migration as a more 
or less passive reaction to economic, political or social practices of marginali-
sation and exclusion, the so-called “Autonomy of Migration” scholars consider 
migration as a positive political practice which, in prioritizing the subjective 
aspect in migratory movements, i.e., the desires, the expectations and the ac-
tions of the migrants themselves, develops into a subversive social and political 
force. Thus, in order to examine the conditions for the political mobility of mi-
grants, the AoM theorists focus not only on bordering practices as enactments 
of exclusion but also on what De Genova detects as “obscene” practices of in-
clusion. While the deportability of undocumented migrants is visibilised and 
65
 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 85.
66
 Butler, Frames of War, p. 9.
67
 Walters, “Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,” p. 145 
and 144.

194
jelica šumič riha
publicly displayed, the enactment of Europe’s border policy involves also, as 
De Genova claims, “its shadowy, publicly unacknowledged or disavowed, ob-
scene supplement: the large-scale recruitment of illegalized migrants as legally 
vulnerable, precarious, and thus tractable labour.”
68
 That the permanent threat 
of deportability, as De Genova argues, has rendered “undocumented migrant 
labor a distinctly disposable commodity,”
69
 can only be examined and prob-
lematized from a perspective of globalisation. 
In our global world, the world of capitalist globalisation, commodities circulate 
freely, but not people. Indeed, one is tempted to state that neoliberal ration-
alisation of capitalism does not necessarily imply the freedom of movement. 
By taking the freedom of movement seriously, the refugees, in contrast, aim at 
transposing free global circulation from commodities to people. From the per-
spective of global capitalism, the freedom of movement of individuals is inher-
ently contradictory: under the current neoliberal conjecture, the exploitation 
of undocumented, which is to say deportable migrants, who are purposefully 
made “illegal” through the seemingly inconsistent bordering policy, alterna-
tively marking out the porosity or impermeability of the European borders, is 
mirrored by the continuous reproduction of permanently precarious and dis-
pensable cheap labour. Capitalism thus requires an endless reservoir of cheap 
and dispensable labour force, but it can only attain this goal through new mo-
dalities of segregation and bordering that hinder the freedom of movement by 
restating deportability and thus exploitability of illegalised migrants. 
So, what lesson can we draw from the refugees’ demand for radical freedom of 
movement precisely because it cannot be met within the existing world order? 
Can refugees and migrants be seen, as Badiou does, as a “virtual vanguard of 
the gigantic mass of the people whose existence is not counted in the world the 
way it is”?
70
 In short, as a “nomadic proletariat” endowed with a tremendous, 
although still opaque emancipatory, revolutionary potential? Before trying 
to tackle this question, it should be noted that this issue will be dealt from a 
slightly different perspective, while avoiding two traps: that of romanticisation 
68
 Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the ob-
scene of inclusion’,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7/2013), p. 1183.
69
 Ibid., p. 1181. 
70
 Alain Badiou, Notre mal vient de plus loin, Fayard, Paris 2018.

195
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
of migration which would consider migrants as a “political avant-garde of the 
present” as well as that of perceiving migration as a mere reaction or response 
to various practices of exclusion (political, economic, social, etc.), an approach 
all the more problematic as it seems to pave the way to considering migrants 
from the perspective of victimisation and objectification. 
While the figure of the migrant has been extensively discussed in terms of mo-
bile social positions rather than in terms of fixed identities, there has been little 
discussion of various forms of migrants’ struggle and resistance and even less 
of the migrant in terms of political subjectivation. This neglect is surprising 
because migrant movements and their resistance are crucial to understanding 
not only the logic of exclusion that governs and determines the (bio)political 
practice of bordering in Europe today, but also the functioning of the dominant 
discourse or the “frame”, to use Butler’s term. Thus, to analyse the capacity 
of contemporary migrants to provide – through their struggle, resistance, new 
forms of organisation – an alternative to the logic of exclusion that dominates 
today, requires an in-depth inquiry into contemporary migration as resulting 
from one or a combination of several forms of exclusion (political, territorial, 
social, juridical, or economic). However, there are two aspects of the status of 
the migrant that need to be examined in order to develop a theory of the mi-
grant as a new figure of the political subject. Unlike any of the traditional po-
litical figures (sovereign, citizen, friend, enemy, etc.), the figure of the migrant 
is less defined in terms of its being, its identity or place than in terms of its 
displacement, disidentification and placelessness. 
Thomas Nail’s book The Figure of the Migrant, perhaps one of the most inter-
esting recent political theoretical accounts of the contemporary status of the 
migrant, is an attempt to address this lacuna. Refusing to consider the migrant 
“as a failed citizen” or a citizen in becoming, Nail stresses instead the migrant’s 
movement as his/her defining feature. In this respect, Nail takes his cue from 
Hardt and Negri who, in famously claiming that the 21
st
 century will be the cen-
tury of migrants, highlight not only one of the main aspects of our time, namely 
the incredible increase in human mobility, but also put into focus the migrant 
as a political figure. While seeking to examine the economic, social, political 
and historical conditions under which the figure of the migrant emerges today, 
Hardt and Negri mark a break with the traditional understanding of the figure 
of the migrant. Perceived primarily from the perspective of the state and thus 

196
jelica šumič riha
as secondary or derivative with respect to place-bound citizenship, the figure of 
the migrant, insofar as it is defined through its movement, without being rooted 
in a given social network of relations, is thus considered as a figure without 
history or symbolic existence, to the extent precisely that, as Hegel remarka-
bly clearly pointed out, “all the value that human beings possess, all of their 
spiritual reality, they have through the State alone”
71
. In contrast to this tradi-
tional way of thinking human mobility, Hardt and Negri consider the figure of 
the migrant from the perspective of movement in order to emphasise the idea 
of mobility as a creative, although imperceptible social force. In challenging 
thereby both traditional conceptions of migration and politics, Hardt and Negri 
put into focus the policitality of migration as such which allows them to rede-
fine the migrant as a new figure of the political subject. 
In the same vein, Nail sets out from “the primacy of movement and flow that 
define the migrant,” in order to explore “the capacity of the migrant to create an 
alternative to social expulsion.”
72
 It is the perspective of movement that allows 
Nail to designate the migrant as a novel figure of the political subject. Indeed, 
for him, the migrant is “the political figure of our time.”
73
 While we are reluctant 
to follow Nail in stating that “the figure of the migrant has always been the true 
motive force of social history,”
74
 we would extend our inquiry into migrants’ 
struggles not only beyond examination of the concept of sovereignty defined as 
the agency of the undecidability of bio- and necropolitics, but also beyond the 
questionable primacy of mobility and movement. 
Citizenship: A demand for being
There are many modalities in which the inclusion/exclusion divide is chal-
lenged by migrants’ struggles. However, the approach that opens such a per-
spective from which the inclusionary and exclusionary bordering practices in 
Europe can be questioned – inasmuch as they involve what Balibar terms the 
polysemic character of borders implying “different experiences of the law, the 
71
 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. L. Rauch, 
Hackett, New York 1988, p. 42.
72
 Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2015, pp. 3–7. 
(Emphasis in the original).
73
 Ibid.
74
 Ibid., p. 7. 

197
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
civil administration, the police and elementary rights” for different groups of 
people
75
 – is one that considers migrants’ struggles as being always situated and 
context-specific. Thus, just as divisions and segregations enacted in Europe’s 
borderspaces materialise in various spatial and temporal modalities in order 
to determine who belongs to Europe’s community and who must be excluded, 
migrants’ struggles mobilise, in life-threatening conditions, various spatiali-
ties and transversal temporalities in order to create alternative spatial arrange-
ments, literally “other,” heterotopic spaces
76
 in which their being “otherwise” 
can only be re-invented. It is precisely in such heterotopic spaces created within 
Europe through the migrants’ struggles themselves that the idea of Europe cen-
tred around peace, unity, and humanity, finds itself radically put into question. 
Foucault can help us to understand how a fragile, provisory “we” is created 
through migrants’ resistance. According to Foucault, 
the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within 
a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; 
or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible, by 
elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the “we” must not be previ-
ous to the question; it can only be the result – and the necessarily temporary re-
sult – of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it.
77
The possibility of becoming-other, according to Foucault, depends on our abil-
ity to “imagine and to build up what we could be,” to the extent precisely that 
“the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
78
 
This refusal or, rather, this setting in motion the practice of desubjectivation is 
precisely what is involved in migrants resistance today. Although Rancière‘s 
conceptualisation of politics is in many respects opposite to Foucault‘s under-
standing of politics in terms of power and resistance, the bringing together of 
both perspectives allows us to explore some of the most interesting modalities 
of migrants‘ struggle. As Rancière himself points to some of the key divergences 
between his understanding of politics and Foucault‘s notion of biopolitics, the 
question of politics, for him, “begins when the status of the subject able and 
75
 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 81.
76
 See Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Diacritics, no. 16 (1986), pp. 22– 27.
77
 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel 
Foucualt,” in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), Penguin, London 1991, p. 385.
78
 Michel Foucualt, “The Subject of Power,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), p. 785.

198
jelica šumič riha
ready to concern itself with the community becomes an issue.”
79
 And while for 
Foucault, as Rancière reads him, the question of political subjectivation is not 
central to his understanding of politics that revolves around the question of 
power, for him, by contrast, politics is primarily a question of knowing which 
parts of society are capable of counting for something, and which ones are not. 
“Politics,” according to Rancière, “is primarily conflict over the existence of a 
common stage and over the existence and status of those present on it.”
80
To formulate the question of emancipatory politics in terms of “political sub-
jects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscriptions of the count of 
the uncounted,”
81
 means, according to Ranciere, to acknowledge that the prop-
er place for emancipatory politics is the very terrain in which the system of the 
dominant divisions between included/excluded operates, a system that radi-
cal political theorists characterise alternatively as a system of representation, 
identification, or counting. At present, however, this question of counting the 
uncountable, crucial for emancipatory politics, cannot be raised at all to the 
extent that globalisation means that everybody is always already included. If 
everybody is included, this obviously means that the exclusion of the uncount-
ed has become invisible. Which is why the problem we are facing today is not 
that of opening the closure, but, rather, of making this supposedly all-inclusive 
universe legible. It is on this situation that migration, and more specifically 
migrants’ struggles, can shed some light.
For something has radically changed with the globalisation of the capitalist dis-
course. Globalisation, in this respect, does not mean simply that nothing is left 
in its place as no trope seems to be capable of controlling the unending move-
ment of displacements and substitutions. Indeed, in the current space of dis-
cursivity, the notion of place itself is strangely out of place. What is more, with 
the category of place thus rendered inoperative, it is one of the key categories 
of emancipatory politics, the notion of lack, necessary for the subject to sustain 
itself in the symbolic Other, which as a result becomes obsolete. There are two 
structural consequences of this. The first is that, contrary to the sovereignty dis-
79
 Jacques Rancière, “Biopolitics or Politics? ”, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. 
Corcoran, Continuum, London 2010, p. 93.
80
 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, University of Min-
nesota Press, Minneapolis 2004, pp. 26–7.
81
 Jacques Rancière, “Onzes thèses sur la politique,” Filozofski vestnik, no. 2 (1997), p. 99.

199
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
course, which assigns its identity to the subject; in the capitalist discourse the 
subject appears to be disidentified. By situating, in the place of the agent, the 
barred subject that is essentially guideless, caught in an infinite quest for the 
missing signifier, the one that could at last name him, the capitalist discourse 
exploits the lack it installs in the subject as a way of reproducing itself.
The cunning of the capitalist discourse then consists in exploiting the structure 
of the desiring subject: by manipulating his/her desire, i.e. by reducing it to de-
mand, the capitalist discourse creates the illusion that, thanks to scientific de-
velopment and the market, it is able to provide the subject with the complement 
of being that s/he lacks by transforming the subject’s lack of being into the lack 
of having. In this view, “having” is considered to be a cure for the lack of being 
of the subject of the capitalist discourse. The second structural consequence is 
that the subject of the capitalist discourse is completed by products thrown on 
the market. That is why Lacan named the subject of the capitalist discourse, 
the subject that is the embodiment of the lack of being, “the proletarian”. As 
the dominant structure of social relations, the capitalist discourse provides the 
conditions for an obscure subjectivation that depends on the conversion of the 
surplus-value, that is to say, any product thrown on the market, into the cause 
of the subject’s desire. It is precisely this indistinction between the surplus-val-
ue and the surplus-enjoyment that makes it possible for the capitalist produc-
tion of “whatever objects” to capture, indeed, to enslave the subject’s desire, its 
eternal “this is not it!”. 
What is thus put into question is precisely the social bond. Or to be more pre-
cise, the social bond that exists today is one presented under the form of dis-
persed individuals, which is another name for the dissolution of all links and 
the unbinding of all bonds. Both of these features of the capitalist discourse 
could, then, be brought together in a single syntagm of the generalised pro-
letarisation. In the words of Lacan, “there is only one social symptom: every 
individual is really a proletarian, in other words has no discourse with which 
to make a social bond.”
82
 Ironically, proletarisation remains a symptom of con-
temporary society. Only, this proletarisation is of a particular kind, one that, 
by being articulated with the intrinsically metonymic nature of the capitalist 
discourse, has lost all its subversive effectiveness, all its revolutionary poten-
82
 Jacques Lacan, “La troisème,” Lettres de l’Ecole freudienne de Paris, no. 10, 1975, p. 187.

200
jelica šumič riha
tial. This contemporary proletarisation can shed some light on the difficulties 
of contemporary emancipatory politics in finding a way out of the present im-
passe.
As noted, capitalist globalisation does not abolish borders, it makes them in-
visible by blurring inside-outside distinctions that enable the placing of ex-
clusions that occur within and beyond European space. It is here, obviously, 
that questions of how to filter, regulate, monitor, or deter migration reveals the 
complexity of the border issue in contemporary Europe. For the question of 
how to govern migration mobility ultimately revolves around the issues of the 
supposedly non-existent divisions between inclusion and exclusion, belonging 
and non-belonging. Thus, to take the freedom of movement seriously, the fun-
damental presupposition of migration, already implies that we should view mi-
grant mobility as being inherently political. It is political precisely to the extent 
that it necessarily challenges the demarcation that defines the realm of belong-
ing and non-belonging, the realm of citizenship and the realm of non-citizen-
ship, ultimately, the realm of existence and the realm of nonexistence. By put-
ting into question the belonging/non-belonging dichotomy, migration resist-
ance undermines the supposed normality of division that includes some and 
excludes others. From this perspective, the starting point of migrants’ struggles 
is the irreducible gap between the subject’s being, his/her bare life, and his/her 
symbolic existence, or, as in the case of refugees and asylum seekers, inexist-
ence or non-existence. The crucial question for every migration struggle worthy 
of the name is of course: How can that come into being which, within the exist-
ing European border dispositive or regime, does not exist or is discarded as not 
really existing?
Here, we will briefly discuss a case of migrants’ struggles, that of the struggle 
for citizenship of the “Non-Citizens” in Germany.
83
 By refusing to be defined by 
83
 For information about the Non-Citizens struggle see, for example, “March for Freedom”, 
General Flyer, Strasbourg-Brussels May-June 2014; Non-Citizen Struggle Congress Munich, 
“Frist Statement”, http://refugeecongress.wordpress.com; Non-Citizens, “On the position 
of asylum-seekers and asylym seekers” struggles in modern societies”, http://regugeet-
entaction.net; Non-Citizens, “Fifth Stetement”, http://www.refugeetentaction.net/index.
php?lang=en; Non-citizens, “Refugees Revolution Demonstration,” http://refugeesrev-
olution.blogsport.de/downloads; Non-Citizens, “Striking Non-Citizens of Rindermarkt 
– Analysis and Persectives!”, http://www.refugeetentaction.net/index.php?lang=en; 

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europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
a depoliticized figure, the victim, and choosing instead to be something other 
than mere survivors, the Non-Citizens resistance represents a challenge to the 
current borderisation of Europe, combining a practice of economic apartheid, 
protecting the “citizen” from the (criminalised) “migrant”, with a deliberate 
policy of deterrence indifferent to the loss of human lives that are deemed to 
be expendable. By calling for equality, political rights, and inclusion, the Non-
Citizens’ acts of “unbordering” render visible and challenge those socio-politi-
cal conditions that have forced them into “non-citizenship”, into non-existence. 
What we find particularly interesting in the case of the Non-Citizen movement 
is the way in which they publicly staged their politicality, demanding to be 
heard and seen as political subjects, in particular by staging their demands for 
citizenship and the rights that follow therefrom.
At first sight, it may well be strange if not counter-intuitive to consider their 
demands for citizenship as politically emancipatory, indeed, constitutive for a 
radical politics today. Presented as a cut separating the pole of full rights from 
the pole of complete illegalisation and invisibility, citizenship constitutes that 
technology that renders certain populations as legitimate bearers of rights, and 
other populations as inexistent. Dimitris Papadopoulos, Nicholas De Genova, 
and Martina Tazzioli are among those “ Autonomy of Migration” scholars who are 
sceptical of the emancipatory impact of the citizenship demands.
84
 Considering 
citizenship primarily as a divisionary policy, De Genova, one of the most prom-
inent the AoM theorists, highlights the deadly effects of borderisation at the 
margins of Europe, in order to draw the following logicaly irrefutable conclu-
sion: “if there were no borders, [… ] there would indeed be neither citizens nor 
migrants”
85
 Rather than striving to expand the limits of citizenships, the AoM 
Non-Citizens, “European States are not in the position to render a judgement about our 
forced migration!”, Flyer, 2014; Non-Citizens, “No Justice No Peace”, Leaflet (2014).
84
 See Martina Tazzioli, “Border displacements. Challenging the politics of rescue between 
Mare Nostrum and Triton”, Migration Studies, 4 (1/2016), pp. 1–19; Martina Tazzioli, Spaces 
of Governmentality. Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings, Rowman and Littlefield, 
London 2015; Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos, “After citizenship: autonomy of 
migration, organistiona ontology and mobile commons”, Citizenship Studies, 17 (2/2013), 
pp. 178–196; De Genova, Nicholas, (ed.) The Borders of “Europe”. Autonomy of Migration, 
Tactics of Bordering, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2017.
85
 Nicholas De Genova, “Extremities and Regularities: Regulatory Regimes and the Spectacle 
of Immigration Enforcement,” in Y . Janssen et al (eds.), The Irregularization of Migration in 
Contemporary Europe, Rowman and Littlefield, London 2015, p. 13.

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jelica šumič riha
scholars examine the political, which is to say, emancipatory potential of the 
freedom of movement, a “defiant remainder that the creative powers of human 
life [… ] must always exceed every political regime,”
86
 in order to put into focus 
the freedom of movement as a force capable not only of changing the existing 
situation but also of making (new) worlds. 
The AoM theorists certainly have a point since all-inclusive citizenship is con-
tradictory, in the same way as the notion of a borderless nation-state is con-
tradictory. In view of this scepticism vis-à-vis citizenship it is all the more im-
portant to figure out what exactly is at stake in the Non-Citizens’ demand for 
citizenship. If Rancière’s conception of politics provides precious indications 
that help us to understand the rather exceptional political phenomenon that 
represents the Non-Citizens’ struggle, this is because it sheds light not only on 
their particular mode of struggle but also on the enactment of Europe’s border 
policy that relegates them to the public invisibility and inexistence. In openly 
confronting the state and its police in order to provoke a response to their ac-
tions and political demands, Non-Citizens set in motion what Rancière desig-
nates as the “process of a wrong, in the construction of a dissensus.”
87
 Through 
various strategies of resistance that include stating openly their demands, 
hunger-striking, occupying public spaces, sewing their lips together, etc., 
Non-Citizens have practiced political disruptions that resonate with Rancière’s 
conceptualisation of dissensus thought as “a division inserted into “common 
sense”: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see 
something as given.” Thus, just as Olimpe de Gouges and feminist activists in 
the time of the French Revolution, Non-Citizens could be considered to act “as 
subjects that did not have the rights that they had and that had the rights that 
they had not.” In so doing, they have succeeded in creating “a dissensus: the 
putting of two worlds in one and the same world.”
88
 In setting in motion of a 
“process of a wrong” via “an intervention in the visible and the sayable,”
89
 Non-
Citizens could be said to have acted as political subjects. Thus, if politics, as 
86
 Nicholas De Genova, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of 
Movement,” in Nicolas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, (eds.), The Deportation Regime: 
Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, p. 59.
87
 Jacques Rancière, “Who is the subject of the rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 
(2–3/2004), p. 69.
88
 Ibid.
89
 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses On Politics,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, p. 37.

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europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
Rancière understands it, begins with “the manifestation of dissensus as the 
presence of two worlds in one”,
90
 the intervention in the distribution of the sen-
sible, organised by what Rancière calls “the police”, a structuring principle that 
attempts to include that which is by classifying and allocating ways of being, 
seeing and saying to different parts of the existing community, a political sub-
ject, as Rancière defines it is nothing but “a capacity for staging scenes of dis-
sensus.”
91
 Against the logic of the police as a distribution of that which is there 
in order to exhaust that which can be, “politics proper” emerges as “a gap in the 
sensible itself”, an intervention that “makes visible that which had no reason 
to be seen”.
92
 
What is worth remarking on regarding the Non-Citizens’ struggle is the perform-
ative aspect of their interventions that construct “the encounter between two 
heterogeneous processes,” the policy’s process of governing and the process 
or rather the demonstration of equality. Hence, Non-Citizens bring, through 
their acts of dissensus, the logic of the police and the logic of the politics of 
emancipation into conflict. Put otherwise, Non-Citizens, being those who take 
part there where they are not supposed to, in so doing verify “the equality of 
any speaking being with any other speaking being.”
93
 Non-Citizens in acting 
politically as those who, strictly speaking, are not “qualified” to act, as they 
are not German citizens, in acting nevertheless, therefore mark an antagonistic 
division between citizenship and non-citizenship, bringing thereby into focus 
the always-existing condition of equality. On this reading, that follows closely 
Rancière’s theory of politics and equality, their demand to be included as mem-
bers of a political body in Germany, constitutes the equality test in Rancière’s 
sense, since through their demand they demonstrate their equality to anyone 
else (German citizens). The Non-Citizens’ struggle to be included as members 
of the German citizenry demonstrates how the excluded, invisible, non-exist-
ent can claim and enact their status as political subjects, while being socially 
and politically marginalised, illegalised, or even criminalised. From such a 
perspective it is then possible to claim citizenship without necessarily legally 
possessing the status or even believing that this aim is achievable in order to 
90
 Ibid.
91
 Rancière, “Who is the subject of the rights of Man,” p. 69.
92
 Rancière, “Ten Theses On Politics,” p. 38.
93
 Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” The Identity in Question, 
no. 61 (1992), p. 58.

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jelica šumič riha
produce a political impact in contemporary Europe, for what is crucial in such 
public demands for citizenship is the visibilisation of the inside/outside divide.
In revealing the antagonistic division between citizenship and non-citizen-
ship, German Non-Citizen activists constitute themselves as political subjects 
in Rancière’s sense. That is to say, by enacting their capacity to stage scenes 
of dissensus they bring up two supposedly incompatible worlds: the world 
of rights, visibility, and existence, and the world of no rights, invisibility, and 
non-existence. In aiming to include by force in the German political community 
that which does not seem to belong there, Non-Citizens practice what Rancière 
refers to as a “heterology”, defined as a form of political subjectivisation that 
begins by the act of a refusal of “right names” assigned to the speaking being by 
the police order. As Rancière argues, what political subjectivisation involves is 
never the simple assertion of an identity; it is always at the same time, the de-
nial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy. Policy 
is about “right” names, names that pin people down to their place and work. 
Politics is about “wrong” names – misnomers that articulate a gap and connect 
with a wrong. Second, it is a demonstration, and a demonstration always sup-
poses an other even if that other refuses evidence or argument. [ … ] Third, the 
logic of subjectivization always entails an impossible identification.
94
From this perspective, the Non-Citizens demand for gaining the status of citi-
zens is at the same time a demand for gaining an “other name”, better, for gain-
ing “the name”, one that enables all other names: citizen. Citizen is a name that 
allows them to reject the names that were given them insofar as, being speak-
ing beings who are allocated to the places of invisibility and inexistence, these 
names were given to them as “not-really existing”. In calling themselves “Non-
Citizens”, they give themselves a misnomer or a wrong name, to use Rancière’s 
terms, an ambivalent name in order to mark that all other names that have en-
tailed their social, political, in short, their symbolic existence, have been lost 
for them. Thus, in choosing for themselves a non-name as a political name – be-
cause they are considered as “an other that has no other name becomes the ob-
ject of fear and rejection”
95
 – they re-pose the question that signals, according 
94
 Ibid., p. 62.
95
 Ibid., p. 61.

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europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
to Rancière, the act of political subjectivation: “Do we or do we not belong to 
the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this?”
96
As we have seen, politics in Rancière’s conceptualisation is not to be determined 
by a certain type of political action, nor a specific demand, nor by the involve-
ment of a particular group (the “excluded”, for instance), but depends instead 
on the active appearance of a singular demand temporarily identified with the 
universal claim to be recognised. Such a demand is the demand for freedom 
of movement insofar as advocating and practicing it is based on the desire to 
create conditions that allow anyone to move and reside anywhere for whatever 
reasons. Indeed, the emergence of politics, we would argue, is the moment at 
which the existing socio-symbolic order is challenged not by specific, concrete 
content, whatever that might be, but by the fact that the demand is perceived 
by the state to be a sign of an insatiable More! that no amount of giving or con-
cessions on the part of the political Other could satisfy. The mere fact that the 
demand could persist, insist beyond all particular content, that it could live on 
despite its fulfilment requires – at least in politics – that we make a rigorous 
distinction between two structurally different demands. There are indeed two 
quite distinct demands: a demand for having and a demand for being.
The elementary form of demand is situated at the level of having. Whenever we 
demand something, whatever that might be, we not merely express our lack of 
having but also suppose that the big Other, the State, has ‘it’. Every demand, in-
asmuch as it is formulated in terms of the lack of having, is directed at the Other 
that is supposed to have what we lack. By making the subject dependent on the 
Other – since in order to obtain what one is lacking it is necessary to presuppose 
an Other that lacks nothing – a demand for ‘having’ is therefore constitutively 
alienating. A demand for ‘being’, in contrast, is a demand that, properly speak-
ing, makes no claims addressed to the Other as the one who ‘has’. Rather, it 
is articulated to the Other’s lack. To take again the Non-Citizens’ demand for 
citizenship: such a demand is paradoxical since it cannot even be perceived, 
received, as a demand by the state. Instead, it is considered to be foolish, unre-
alistic, or utopian if not simply irrational.
96
 Ibid., p. 60.

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The mere possibility of expressing such a demand indicates that one cannot 
find one’s place in the Other, such as it is. And, indeed, non-citizens cannot 
exist in a socio-political space in which social and political existence depends 
on one’s status as a citizen. The crucial point here is that whereas a demand 
for having allows the Other to gain a tighter grip on the subject, a demand for 
being involves the subject’s separation from the Other. It is for this reason that 
a demand for being is intrinsically subversive, revolutionary.
As such, a demand for being is a paradoxical demand. It is paradoxical, first of 
all because it can never be expressed as such. Strictly speaking, a demand for 
being cannot be articulated at all. Indeed, if it were articulated it would have to 
be articulated in the language of the Other. And, indeed, political intervention, 
as Rancière understands it, i.e., the bringing of two incompatible worlds into 
one, is grounded on “a logic of the other”.
97
 This is the reason why a demand for 
being is always ‘dressed up’ in a demand for having. In a certain sense, it can 
only assert itself as a demand for something, whatever that might be, a having 
which is a stand-in for the unsayable demand for being: the Non-Citizens’ de-
mand for citizenship. A demand for being is, in the strictest sense, a demand 
for an impossible having, that is to say, a demand which, under the existing 
positive social order, has to remain unfulfilled.
A demand for being is a paradoxical demand for yet another reason. On one 
hand, a demand for ‘being’, as any other demand, is addressed to the Other. 
Only here the very fact that it is a demand for being, for citizenship, signifies 
that there is no room for the subject in this Other, to which the subject address-
es its request. A demand for being is addressed to the Other by an inexistent 
element of sorts, those who are denied an identity in a given social order, that 
part of society that is in excess of the classification, unaccounted for by the 
dominant discourse. Which is why Non-Citizens occupy public spaces in order 
to make their invisibility visible, their absence present. In this view, a demand 
for being is not a demand for something in particular, the satisfaction of which 
would depend on the Other’s ‘good will’, for it is quite clear that the satisfac-
tion of the demand for being, for instance, the demand (say, for citizenship) 
made by the inexistent part of society, those who are not entitled to citizenship, 
one which is uncounted and unaccounted for in the given structure of assigned 
97
 Ibid.

207
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
places, would have the effect of making the Other disappear, a disappearance 
by which the whole of its order would be annihilated, too. To regularise all 
non-citizens, obviously, would be the end of the nation-state. To follow the log-
ic of the Non-Citizens’ demand for collective regularisation would lead to the 
abolishment of the existing nation-state space insofar as it is grounded on the 
division between belonging/non-belonging.
This means, of course, that to find one’s place in a given symbolic order, if this 
place is not already provided by the Other itself and assigned by it to the sub-
ject, therefore requires that the subject bore its way into the Other, to carve a 
place for itself in the Other and situate itself in that place. There is perhaps no 
better illustration for such an inexistent place created by the act of political sub-
jectivation than what Foucault called “heterotopia”. In occupying public spac-
es Non-Citizens transform them into heterotopic spaces that have “the curious 
property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, 
neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or 
reflect.”
98
 In intruding in public spaces, Non-citizens produce heterotopias that 
displace or distort the “normal” function of public spaces and in so doing call 
the presumed distinctness of spaces into question.
It is, therefore, only to the extent that being itself is at stake in the demand for 
being that the mere fact of expressing such a demand can bring about a radi-
cal modification of the connection between the subject and the Other, refugees 
and asylum seekers, and the state. A demand is, as such, always addressed to 
the Other. All demands call for a response from the Other. This explains the 
panic on the part of the German authorities and the excessive use of force in 
the eviction of the “occupied zones”. What this immediately implies is that for 
a demand to be recognised by the politico-social Other in the first place, it has 
to be reduced, downgraded to a “lack of having.” This may be why in an era 
of a proliferation of demands, all these demands, inasmuch as they are made 
in the name of belonging to some already existing group, in the name of some 
communal identity, such as is represented in the current governmental regime, 
can, in principle, be acknowledged by the latter.
98
 Foucualt, “Of other spaces,” p. 24.

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We would therefore conclude that it is this particularity of a demand, its funda-
mental dependence on the Other, that a demand for being subverts by revealing 
that a demand issued from some unthinkable place, literally a non-place, to 
be precise, since it is made by an instance which, being a waste product of the 
constitution of the social order, cannot, by definition, have a place within it. 
A demand for being cannot be recognised by the Other as a legitimate claim 
since it is made by something which, from the standpoint of the Other, counts 
as nothing – this is exactly the position of the Non-Citizens as the actual ‘un-
counted’, a remaindered excess, that which, from the standpoint of the Other, 
is considered to be inexistent. This means that in order to make itself be there, 
i.e. to be included in the Other’s order, the subject first has to make a place in 
which to inscribe its being. For instance, by intruding corporeally – through 
the occupation of public spaces, through the setting up of tents or lieux de vie, 
spaces not deemed theirs. One might even add here that there is no demand for 
being that does not in some sense create the space in which it is to be inscribed. 
One can therefore argue that the emancipatory subject speaks out or makes its 
demand for being from the point at which the Other falls silent.
However, no demand can be made if one does not exist. Strictly speaking, there 
cannot be a subject of any (political) demand except through a proclamation 
of existence: “nos sumus, nos existimus”,
99
 a proclamation that signifies that 
something which, for the Other, does not exist at all, which was therefore mute, 
starts to speak out. The subject speaks out as if it already existed – as a citizen 
endowed with certain rights that follow from this legal status. In truth, the dec-
laration “we are, we exist” can be issued at the moment in which the subject 
who claims to exist, does not yet exist, because, in the socio-political configu-
ration established by the Other, there is no possible place for it to be situated in.
Hence, the subject can speak out only by making holes in a given order of power, 
or better still, by adding something that, with regard to this order, is regarded 
as superfluous, in excess, a disturbing surplus that should not be there in the 
first place, indeed, that which, from the moment the Other acknowledged its 
existence, would cause the disappearance of that Other. In some sense, there is 
no appropriate, adequate regulation, directive, measure, or law that would al-
low the massive regularisation of non-citizens that now find themselves in the 
99
 This formulation is borrowed from Rancière’s Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, p. 36.

209
europe’s borderland and non-citizen politics
zone of illegality or criminalisation. The massive recognition of the demand 
for citizenship, the regularisation of their illegal status, would mean that the 
nation-state as we know it is done. In this sense, we would argue that when-
ever the demand for being succeeds in forcing the socio-political Other to ac-
knowledge it, this necessarily involves a complete reconfiguration of the ex-
isting socio-political framework, thus engendering a new Other; ultimately, it 
involves the creation of a new order. This is perhaps the most precious lesson 
to be drawn from migrants struggles. This would imply that, instead of viewing 
migrants as passive, vulnerable victims, we should view them as political sub-
jects, as agents of the construction of a new, non-segregative European commu-
nity rather than its constitutive “outside”.