impossible: render suffering visible, pasts accessible, and stories legible, even as suffering, like the past, always exceeds speech, narration, and visibility (Papailias 2004; Scarry 1985). Those who fail may be cast to the margins of the city or beyond. Yet beneath the formal veneers of rights discourse and humanitarian practice, there are elements that persistently exceed such domestication, which are not redemptive but are crucial to making lives livable and may even have revolutionary potential.
Tragedy, as a dramatic genre, entails an encounter with that which is at once self and other, inside and outside the body politic. The tragic hero is often taken to represent a vision of universal humanity, but as Butler (2000) highlights in her analysis of Antigone, there is much that marks the hero as a perversion of the social order (such as Antigone’s entwinement in incestuous kinship ties, or in Orestes’s case, a family prone to cannibalism and the murder of kin). The tragic hero is thus, in part, a “stranger,” cast out of the polis or even condemned to death, a “dangerous person” (Panourgia 2009), through whom the body politic, as a normative order, is destabilized or even turned inside out. Pollution may follow him, the Furies at his heels, threatening to bring destruction and suffering to the city; or like Antigone, she may threaten to expose the social order itself as perverse by revealing the pollution that lies at the seat of sovereignty. It is no accident that these dangerous heroes are so often seekers of refuge: Oedipus invokes the laws of hospitality at Colonus; Orestes seeks protection at the living image of Athena; Antigone, perhaps, finds refuge in the tomb. Yet as Neni Panourgia (2009: 7) writes, this figure, in her very dangerousness, “transcends the polis; she becomes a part of it; she knows its inner workings, makes hiding places in its buildings, learns and produces a topography that is also a topology completely unimagined and unsuspected by the sovereign who suspects her.”
The moment of judgment marks the intervention of human and divine power in attempting to reorganize and set to right the city and the cosmos (Douglas 1966; Malkki 1995a). Orestes is cast out by the laws of both humans and gods until he is finally brought to judgment. Meanwhile, Antigone, the willing victim (Butler 2000) of an unjust verdict, is removed to the space of the tomb even in life. There is an inherent violence to this form of intervention, and its penal character is unmistakable, yet it also has creative elements. Judgment entails no simple resolution, but rather, incites an opening into a possible (though often thwarted) transformation: of self and other, of both the hero and the city itself. The dramatic action of the trial, the judgment, and its aftermath brings the audience “in,” an engaged participant (Nussbaum 2001 [1986]) in the suffering and struggle unfolding on the stage. Reason, here, is insufficient. Rather, tragedy engenders in the audience what Aristotle, following Plato, describes as catharsis: an encounter with suffering that catalyzes a cleansing of the self through the release of a spirit of excess (Lacan 1992). This point of crisis, then—the hero taken to judgment—presents an opening, a threshold, which does not erase the gap between self and other but deeply confounds it. The stranger is revealed as the hero who, in a way, she has always been: the beating heart of the polis. The Furies, with their fearful countenances, both persecuted and persecuting, make their way into the darkness beneath the city. Neither stranger nor citizen, neither actor nor audience, remains the same. This transformative potential of tragedy—an ineffable line of excess and flight—is at once the pnevma (spirit) of this book and the ghost that haunts it.
ACT I
Governance
For they will hunt you
Through all the length of the earth, as you stride onward, Over the ground worn by your feet,
Over the seas, and then, over the island cities….
Go to the city of Pallas Athena;
There clasp your arms around the ancient image,
And sit. In that place you will find judges.
—The Eumenides, 74–81
Chapter 1
European Moral Geographies
On January 21, 2011, well into the fallout from the Greek debt crisis, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a judgment on MSS v. Belgium and Greece, a case brought by an Afghan asylum seeker, Mohamed Samir Samimi, against these two EU member states. According to the list of “facts” recorded in the court’s decision, “MSS” was apprehended by Greek police after his initial crossing via sea to Lesbos, just a few kilometers of sea from the Turkish coast. There, his fingerprints were taken, and after a week he was released and issued an order to leave the country.1 He “transitioned” through France to Belgium, where he applied for asylum; he never applied for asylum in Greece. Under the auspices of the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, however, asylum seekers are obliged to apply for protection in the country where they first enter European territory, and if apprehended elsewhere in the EU, they are subject to removal to the country of entry. Thus, when Belgian authorities discovered MSS’s fingerprints registered in the Eurodac system, a trans-European database of biometric material, he was deported back to Greece, despite a number of attempts to contest his removal. Through a series of text messages to his lawyer in Belgium, he then documented in detail the squalid reception conditions he faced, the impossibility of finding housing and social support, his difficulty obtaining access to the asylum procedure, and his near expulsion back across the Turkish border by Greek authorities.2
The decision itself attests to the deeply creolized legal terrain that characterizes the case of just one asylum seeker. After this brief account of MSS movements in EU territory, the decision goes on to cite in detail “relevant” European and international law,3 then turns to “Relevant Law and Practice” in both Greece and Belgium. The section on Greece cites not just formal law but also references reports issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and various NGOs, which present the on-the-ground situation facing asylum seekers. The court ultimately indicts Greece for violating MSS’s rights on two counts: for failing to guarantee access to the asylum procedure (in violation of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms guaranteeing the right to life), and for exposing MSS to cruel and degrading treatment (in violation of Article 3). Belgium, meanwhile, is indicted for not providing the claimant with a way to contest the potential threat to his life and freedom in Greece (in violation of Article 13, which guarantees an “effective remedy before a national authority” to challenge rights violations). In its structure and content, the decision emphasizes the international and supranational legislative contexts of MSS’s case, yet in the end invokes member state obligations for upholding European rights-based legislation. Through its failure adequately to provide dignity and protection to MSS, Greece emerges as a kind of proxy for the challenges and failures entailed in safeguarding the rights of asylum seekers in the European Union.
I begin here with this ECHR decision, because it is emblematic of EU governance practices through which a particular EU member state, its government, and its citizens are held responsible for failures on a European scale. The EU relies on techniques of governance that keep unruly members states in line through legal, political, and—especially—moral forms of marginalization. The crisis of asylum in Greece—much like the current financial crisis—is not just a national predicament affecting a state on Europe’s geopolitical and economic peripheries; it is also seen to undermine the EU’s moral integrity as an area of “freedom, security, and justice.” Such narratives of crisis in turn grant moral legitimacy to Greece’s continued political, legal, and financial marginalization within Europe. The power of the ECHR decision lies perhaps even less in its material effects than in its articulation of a particular configuration of value on a European scale. Not only does the decision reassert the European commitment to safeguarding rights, but it also highlights how Greece deviates from and actively undermines these values.
In this chapter,
