Browsing by Author "February, Tamlyn Rachel"

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    The refugee event : negotiating European identity, sovereignty and democracy.
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) February, Tamlyn Rachel; Woermann, Minka; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Philosophy. Applied Ethics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The primary focus of this thesis is the European Refugee Crisis of 2015, where one million refugees arrived on European shores to exercise their human right of asylum seeking. European nation-states displayed an overwhelming unwillingness to receive the refugees and fulfil the duties of international law. I question why the crisis was depicted as a “crisis of contamination” of Europeanness and European identity, and importantly, how identities are perceived to be contaminable in the first place. I argue that contaminable identities are premised upon the modernist epistemology that identities are centred, fixed, essential and pure. I situate the European Refugee Crisis of 2015 and the discourse of contaminable identities in the broader global political context of the modern nation-state, which is also premised upon the modernist epistemology of identity. This is evident in the way in which the modern nation-state forges and securitises us-them and friend-enemy political identities. I draw upon the French post-structural philosopher, Jacques Derrida, to unsettle the metaphysics of presence that the discourse of contaminable identities relies upon. Derrida argues that identities are the product of a contamination of traces of differences, which undermines the logic of exteriorisation and securitisation to protect Europeanness or the nation from contamination. Derrida’s reinterpretation allows us to reinterpret contaminable identities as hospitable identities and a politics of presence or power as an ethical and just politics to come.