Migration As Foundation: Hagar, the 'Resident Alien', As Euro-America's

_full_journalsubtitle: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches _full_abbrevjournaltitle: BI _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 0927-2569 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1568-5152 (online version) _full_issue: 4-5 _full_issuetitle: Migration, Foreignness and the Hebrew Bible _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Migration as Foundation _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 Migration as FoundationBiblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 439 brill.com/bi Migration as Foundation: Hagar, the ‘Resident Alien’, as Euro-America’s Surrogate Self * Yvonne Sherwood University of Kent, UK [email protected] Abstract In this paper I use Hagar as a type of the shifting modern figure of the migrant, refugee or ‘resident alien’ inside the national family. In a modern update of the productively anachronistic typologies attempted by the Church Fathers, I use the presence of the Egyptian slave in biblical-European foundations to trouble the unstable concept of Europe/Christendom founded on a (distant) Christian heritage. I also use what I’m call- ing the ‘Hagaramic’ to disturb bland invocations of the ‘Abrahamic’ on the contemporary political stage. What happens when we replace the spiritualised, fraternal/paternal figure of the Abrahamic with the Hagaramic: the immigrant mimic of the Abrahamic; the resident female Egyptian alien who is there before, and supports and enables, the ‘true’ family? How does my attempt to use this figure relate to earlier attempts (by think- ers like Sigmund Freud or Edward Said) to draw on strange old biblical figures to force European identities outside themselves? Keywords Hagar – migration – alien – refugee – Abraham – Renan – Freud – Braidotti – Brexit – Trump … * This is a short version of a book length project. The author experimented with different ver- sions of this paper at the Universities of Warwick, Exeter, Manchester and the Dublin confer- ence ‘Bible and Migration’, as well as (in an earlier form) at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin. The author is indebted to all the comments and feedback that she received. © KoninklijkeBiblical Interpretation Brill NV, Leiden, 26 (2018) 2018 | doi:10.1163/15685152-02645P02 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 440 Sherwood A spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration. Antonio Hardt and Michael Negri, Empire1 … Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in the history of culture. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe 2 … In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself, but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European3 ⸪ Figures of the Migrant (2016) This paper has necessarily been forced through several recensions, as it has run to keep up with the spiralling hysteria on the ‘refugee crisis’ and the increas- ingly graphic and draconian closing of the borders under Brexit and Trump. I was first moved to write by the millions of refugees moving into Europe – moving as the result of very specific international interventions, treaties, and political and economic strategies, but presented in the media as if ‘beyond Greece there [was] a black hole of war of devastation’ leading to the surge of people through a ‘kind of loophole’ on the Anatolian coast.4 The refugees did not begin to intrude into our TV screens until they were pressing (the usual idiom is ‘pouring’ or ‘flooding’, as if refugees were water) into the borders and beaches of Europe – and drowning and dying at the borders and beaches of 1 A. Hardt and M. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 213 2 J. Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (trans. P.-A. Brault and M.B. Naas; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 10-11. 3 E. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), p. 44. 4 S. Zizek, The Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours (Allen Lane: London, 2016), p. 49. Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 441 Figure 1 Adi Nes, Hagar (2006). Compare Dorothea Lange, ‘Migrant Mother’, 1936. Europe. They remained relatively invisible when they were simply moving, en masse, into Lebanon, Iran and Turkey (but not richer countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia). Only when the refugees became a problem for Euro-Ameri- can security and prosperity did they materialise as pixels on our television and computer screens. In a graphic performance of what Peter Sloterdijk calls the self-securitising glasshouse of the ‘world interior of capital’, inhabited by the one and a half billion winners of globalisation, as soon as they intruded onto our glass screens they were presented as a threat.5 Their appearance immedi- ately appeared to us as the question of the viability of their entrance. It was as if the edges of the glass plasma screens on our computers, televisions and iPads had become an image of the border and the ‘invisible boundaries’ that ‘are … virtually insurmountable from without’.6 5 P. Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 8. 6 Zizek, The Double Blackmail, p. 5. Biblical Interpretation 26 (2018) 439-468 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:27:14PM via free access 442 Sherwood On the outside of the glass/the border, the foreigner became a powerful figure for ‘us’, concentrating, reflecting and projecting back to us internally generated paradoxes. In her newly timely book Democracy and the Foreigner, written back in 2001, Bonnie Honig advanced an important argument about what the foreigner means to us and how the foreigner means to us. She argued that democracy and liberalism require and generate complex and divided figures of the virtual foreigner. In what she calls ‘liberalism’s own cleaned-up Sinai scene’,7 the people give themselves a law – but this law that ostensibly comes from the people also feels like an alien imposition on the people. Thus political theorists like Rousseau needed the figure of the foreign founder to express this sense of the alien law that is also the law made by ourselves (or our representa- tives, at considerable remove from ourselves). By dramatically giving the consent that is not required of the ones who are born citizens – by going through immigrant naturalisation ceremonies as a public oath and prayer – the foreigner who chooses to become citizen also reminds us of democracy’s some- times forgotten foundation on consent. In Honig’s own analogy, the figure of the immigrant foreigner rejuvenates and reanimates our investment in democracy, just as ‘the biblical Ruth’s migration from Moab to Bethlehem reanimated the alienated Israelites’ affective identification with their god’.8 The immigrant citizen also models an often-forgotten element of democracy. There is an audacity to democracy. Rights often had to be taken, without permission. The British would never have granted permission for what would become the United States of America, had not that permission been auda- ciously taken – nor would Kings and nobles have invited that new spectre of ‘the People’ to take or share power, nor would former slaves or women or work- ing-class men been invited to play an active role in that ‘People’s’ power. By taking what would not have been given, had she not come here and petitioned, the immigrant reminds us of the ‘honorific democratic practice … of demand- ing … powers, rights, privilege’.9 She reminds us of the power of audacious taking and transgression, which has the potential to build new worlds and new foundations with its ‘potentially inaugural powers’.10 Honig shows how the ‘supplement of foreignness is undecideable’ and ‘shores up and unsettles the people being founded’.11 The projected foreigner in the Brexit and the American elections of 2016 generated the same (home- grown) complex of xenophilia and xenophobia, hope and fear. But now the 7 B. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 5. 8 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 3. 9 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 8. 10 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 8. 11 Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, p. 32. Biblical InterpretationDownloaded from 26 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 439-468 12:27:14PM via free access Migration as Foundation 443 focus was primarily economic, with the emphasis less on democracy and more on wealth. Throughout the campaigns, I was struck by how the figure of the spectral immigrant (Hispanic/Muslim for the American electorate or Polish/ Muslim for the British) folded back on us, narcissistically, and allowed us to make equal and opposite statements about our resources, abilities and powers. The complaints – ‘They take our jobs’ and ‘They drain our resources’ – presented ‘our’ life as scarcity, frustration: wasteland. The glory has gone. The glory has been stolen. The time of plenitude (‘greatness’), is not here, in the present. We must try to conjure the mystical greatness and the control that was and will be again. But at the same time, the supplicant immigrant, the immigrant who is quite literally dying to get here, provides us with the very gratifying image of our overflowing wealth. The foreigner-immigrant became such an important figure because she pointed to the paradox – similar to Honig’s paradox, but in a different register – of our insecurity and our security and wealth. In an age of precarity, human capital, labour flexploitation and ‘expulsions’ of so many inside the ‘glasshouse’ from all the imagined securities of that glasshouse, an important double role was played by the spectre of the immigrant foreigner, looking (and flooding) in.12 The one who had so graphically lost her home served as an uncanny alien mirror for the ones who had lost their home through austerity, mortgage crises and the weight of national and personal debts.

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