Response-ability

It is perhaps true to say that the predominant focus of this book is also the central concern articulated by postcolonial studies, from Fanon onwards: what is the nature of my responsibility to the other? Although the majority of countries today producing asylum seekers bound for the West are also former European colonies, to suppose this is the end point of responsibility would reduce a proper response to the other to a quantifiable, dischargeable duty. Such a limited understanding of responsibility barely, if at all, impacts upon how community, the constitution of a ‘we’, is understood, and instead leaves intact the asymmetry of global power relations.

The focus of this final chapter, then, is this question of responsibility posed by the presence of the asylum seeker. The difficulty of a responsibility that takes into account, but also exceeds (or, in the sense advanced by Emmanuel Levinas, fundamentally precedes) matters of context (e.g., the identity of a specific ‘I’ in relation to a specific other, within a specific relationship of time and place), can also point towards, I suggest, a way of contesting the captivity of the asylum seeker in the ban. Where the ban inaugurates the end of the outside, Zygmunt Bauman has shown how the openness of globalized societies has brought about the end of a ‘material outside’: actions in one place have (potentially) a bearing upon the lives of people in all places.