borders
You can be a citizen or you can be stateless, but it is difficult to imagine being a border
(Green, La Folie privée, 107)
Imagine you are standing on the shore of a sea staring across at a landmass opposite, which forms your horizon. You know, although they are not visible to you, that beneath the surface of this sea are the corpses of thousands of people who tried to cross it in order to arrive where you are now standing. Your horizon, then, is a border.
(Tsilimpounidi, Carastathis, The 'refugee crisis', 405)
In addressing the question of 'what is a border?' Étienn Balibar points to the complexity of the notion and proposes three ways of understanding it: overdetermination, polysemy, heterogeneity (Politics and the Other Scene). In their long history, borders have always been overdetermined, he argues: 'no political border is ever the mere boundary between two states, but is always overdetermined, and in that sense sanctioned, reduplicated and relativized by other geopolitical divisions' (79) Their poysemic nature means that borders are never experienced in the same way by subjects with different, social, cultural, ethnic, political or gender identifications, 'they do no have the same meaning for everyone' (81) Finally, borders are heterogeneous and ubiquitous and 'some borders are no longer situated at the borders at all in the geographico-politico administrative sense of the term.' (84)