ONTOLOGIES OF ASYLUM number 91/92 • volume 23, 2018 EDITED BY LENART ŠKOF BARBARA GORNIK POLIGRAFI A journal of the Society for Comparative Religion (Koper, Slovenija) Editor-in-Chief: Helena Motoh (ZRS Koper) Editorial Board: Lenart Škof (ZRS Koper), Igor Škamperle (Univ. of Ljubljana), Mojca Terčelj (Univ. of Primorska), Miha Pintarič (Univ. of Ljubljana), Rok Svetlič (ZRS Koper), Anja Zalta (Univ. of Ljubljana) Editorial Office: Science and Research Centre Koper, Institute for Philosophical Studies, Garibaldijeva 1, SI-6000 Koper, Slovenia Phone: +386 5 6637 700, Fax: + 386 5 6637 710, E-mail: [email protected] http://www.zrs-kp.si/index.php/research-2/zalozba/poligrafi/ number 91/92, volume 23 (2018) ONTOLOGIES OF ASYLUM Edited by Lenart Škof and Barbara Gornik International Editorial Board: D. Kleinberg-Levin (Northwestern University), R. A. Mall (Universität München), M. Ježić (Filozofski fakultet, Zagreb), D. Louw (University of the Free State, Bloemfontain), M. Volf (Yale University), K. Wiredu (University of South Florida), D. Thomas (University of Birmingham), M. Kerševan (Filozofska fakulteta, Ljubljana), F. Leoncini (Università degli Studi di Venezia), P. Zovatto (Università di Trieste), T. Garfitt (Oxford University), M. Zink (Collège de France), L. Olivé (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), A. Louth (Durham University), P. Imbert (University of Ottawa), Ö. Turan (Middle-East Technical University, Ankara), E. Krotz (Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán / Universidad Autónoma de Metropolitana-Iztapalapa), S. Touissant (École Normale Supérieure), B. Mezzadri (Université d’Avignon), A. Bárabas (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Oaxaca), M. Uršič (Univ. of Ljubljana) Book-Reviews Editor: Tomaž Grušovnik E-mail: [email protected] Design: Peter Skalar, Layout: Alenka Obid, Technical editors: Barbara Gornik, Alenka Obid Proofreading: Jezikovni center Omnia (an.) Picture on the cover: Shutterstock Online edition, available at: http://www.zrs-kp.si/index.php/research-2/zalozba/poligrafi/ Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani COBISS.SI-ID=298123776 ISBN 978-961-7058-09-3 (pdf) The journal Poligrafi is indexed in: The Philosopher’s Index, Cobiss Publishing house – Orders – Copyright ©: Science and Research Centre Koper, Scientific Publishing House Annales, Garibaldijeva 1, SI-6000 Koper, Slovenia For the publisher: Rado Pišot Phone: +386 5 663 77 00, Fax: +386 5 663 77 10, E-mail: [email protected] Double issue: € 20,00 Poligrafi is published with the support of the Slovenian Research Agency number 91/92 • volume 23, 2018 ONTOLOGIES OF ASYLUM Barbara Gornik: Ontology of Asylum 3 Kelly Oliver: Carceral Humanitarianism, Impossible Testimony, and the Paradox of Refugee Detention 21 Shé Hawke: The Exile of Greek Metis: Recovering a Maternal Divine Ontology 41 Nadja Furlan Štante: Gender–Based Violence, Religion and Migration: Women as Symbols of Cultural Identity 77 Lenart Škof: Refugee Crisis, Vulnerability and Ethics of Cohabitation 95 Samo Skralovnik: ‘Under the shadow of my roof’ (Gen. 19:8). The Law of Hospitality in the Bible 105 Maja Bjelica: Asylum as Hospitality: Relistening to Derrida 125 Klaus-Gerd Giesen: A Short Essay on Statelessness and Cosmopolitan Citizenship 151 Barbara Gornik: Refugees and the Human Right to Seek Asylum: To Derogate or not to Derogate, That is the Question 161 Ilona Silvola: Asylum Seekers, the Church and Finnish Society: Understanding the Situation Through Hannah Arendt’s Concept of “The Right to Have Rights” 185 Bojan Žalec: Arendt and Refugees (at present): Personalist Anthropological Foundations of the Ethics of Refugeeism 207 Abstracts / Povzetki 227 About the authors / O avtoricah in avtorjih 239 Ontology OF Asylum Barbara Gornik Introduction Borrowing from Shé Hawke and her text on liminal subjects and re- lated ethics of hospitality, we have entitled this edited volume “Ontolo- gies of Asylum.”1 Hawke, also contributing to this volume, conceptual- izes an innovative ethical thinking of how to embody hospitality toward the liminal Other (migrant, refugee…); playing with the hospitality- hostility etymological divide, she inaugurates a new kind of thinking, being able to in-corp-orate rather than assimilate the other, by calling this move “the ontology of asylum2 - i.e. as thinking, being able to reflect upon “refugee and migrant ‘bodies’ seeking cultural in-corpo- ration.”3 Her insightful essay and the current world-wide refugee situ- ation has invited to expand on the notion of ontology of the asylum. Increasing numbers of refugees in diverse parts of the world has ini- tiated a new episode in debates about asylum and human rights issues in academic, political and legal domain that demonstrate the complex- ity and salience of migration challenges for contemporary societies on one hand and indicate the emergence of new conceptual and political vocabularies in asylum rhetoric the on the other. The refugee crisis in Europe points to the thought-provoking argument that “organizations as well as the single states – all the solemn evocations of the inalien- able rights of human beings notwithstanding – have proved to be ab- solutely incapable not only of solving the problem but also of facing it 1 See Shé Hawke, “Graft versus Hoft: Waters that Convey and Harbors that Reject Liminal Subjects – Toward a New Ethics of Hospitality,” in Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness, eds. Tomaž Grušovnik, Eduardo Mendieta and Lenart Škof (Lanham, Boulder and New York / London: Lexington Books, 2018). 2 Ibid. See xiii (Introduction), and p. 198 for the ontology of asylum. 3 Ibid. 3 POLIGRAFI in an adequate manner”, as Agamben put it.4 The need to revisit the notion of asylum taking start from different humanistic and social sci- ence viewpoints therefore comes timely and foremost as a necessity to investigate the ontologies that constitute asylum, focusing particularly on its social, cultural, religious, legal, political and ethical dimensions. Hence, the current special issue of Poligrafi devotes attention to assess- ing theoretical foundations, philosophical categories, ethical presuppo- sitions, moral logics, legal and practical conditions, which the notion of asylum rests on. When coming across the notion of asylum many of us most likely think of contemporary refugees and migration movements. Several of us probably also think of human rights, not surprisingly of course, since Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) advo- cates for everyone’s right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution, which was framed as a response to the atrocities and horrors of the Second World War, when the world faced a large number of refugees and stateless people in need of protection. While it is true that the rights of refugees were legally formalized in contemporary form with the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951 (the UN Refugee Convention) – under which seeking asylum came to be understood as a fundamental human right that states have to provide universally without distinction – one must not neglect the fact that idea of asylum has a long philosophical and political history.5 Mark Goodale offers particularly valuable characterization of hu- man rights, which can be constructively extended to ontological un- derstanding of asylum; as he says, human rights may be approached broadly – as “the phrase that captures the constellation of philosophi- cal, practical and phenomenological dimensions through which uni- versal rights, rights believed to be entailed by a come human nature, are enacted, debated, practiced, violated envisioned and experienced.”6 4 Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” in Radical Thought in Italy, eds. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 160. 5 Matthew E. Price, Rethinking Asylum: History, Purpose, and Limits (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2009). 6 Mark Goodale, “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights,” in Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Mark Goodale (Chichester and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 378. 4 ONTOLOGY OF ASYLUM What is evident from his standpoint is a claim that human rights, in- cluding the right to seek and enjoy asylum, involve concepts, practices and experiences, which are prior to and go beyond the merely instru- mental or legal aspects of rights. In line with this argument, the Poligrafi special issue has been initiat- ed precisely to bring attention to the ontological aspects of asylum, not take it for granted or given but to consider the underlying presupposi- tions that determine what is to count as an asylum, how it is brought into being, what are its categorical and existential preconditions, what concepts it is comprised of, how it is practiced and so on. While ac- knowledging that asylum exists as a result of historical conditions, ethi- cal frameworks and socio-political circumstances, which had affected manifestations of asylum concept in variety of historical context,7 this introductory article however follows a different quest – drawing from Foucault’s theoretical framework, it principally aims to elucidate the right to seek asylum as framed in international law, particularly in rela- tion to contemporary politics and legal practices and to some extent also, our present everyday lives. Outline of Ontology of Asylum If ontology is a basic “doctrine of being,” then countless classical and contemporary