In the Beginning there was Trauma

Since the early 1990s, this nation has had to face a new Other;2 [an]other that arrives uninvited on its shores. Through this, the nation is forced to face earlier traumas: those arising from its origins as a modern nation-state and as a colonial outpost of Britain amidst ‘black savages’ and ‘yellow strangers’. The nation is forced to face the very practices that gave it birth — the invasion of [an]other’s space.3 These are, however, events that have never been officially and formally named as traumatic. Unassimilable events of considerable violence, exclusion and cataclysmic change have been erased, undermined or relegated to the ‘twilight of knowing’.4

In order for the modern, narrativised 5 sovereign state to avoid a collapse into ambivalence, it must create an Other, the ‘no-go areas’ 6 of the nation-self.7 The suffering in which the Australian nation-self was involved originally has, therefore, been consigned to beyond its identifiable sphere of thinking and outside its consciousness. The nation-self failed to engage with a link of responsibility to that suffering, made it Other to itself, and therefore failed to formulate a connection of responsibility to the Other and promote ‘a relation to that which claims, calls, commands, summons, interrupts or troubles’ 8 the nation-self. It is a trauma that the nation-self leaves to the Other, and refuses to allow it[self] to engage in the necessary relationship of ethical responsibility we promised the world when we signed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951).

In this paper I engage with the ethical, a dimension that is missing in the way this nation is officially treating the most current wave of Others: onshore refugees. I focus on Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical relationship between the self and the Other. Levinas’ ethics — as a pre-ontological exposure to the Other, as a responsibility for the Other that is situated in the Face 9 — give us much with which to think through the current situation and provide us with a vision for the future of the nation. Levinas’ ethics, in questioning the sovereignty of the self and placing the self in a constant response to the Other, as well as placing the self-Other relationship in the everyday sentient experience, repeals much of our Enlightenment thinking — which places the self as primary — and allows us to reconstruct an ‘ethics of welcome’ that can only occur in the ‘proximity’ of the self to the Other. This comprises a way of seeing difference as something that can never be assimilated or integrated, and yet still connects us all through a never-ending relationship outwards from responsibility to the Other.

This proposed relationship is particularly relevant to thinking through the ‘refugee crisis’ in Australia at the moment. Not only does it allow us to insert an ethical dimension of responsibility missing in many of the discourses surrounding ‘refugees’, it also calls for no discourse without face-to-face discussion with those people thus labelled. It is a label which, after all, acts as a line, a border of definition in order to make ‘them’ more easily digestible, to enable the ‘non-refugee’ selves to enact certain ontological ‘facts’, to see ‘them’ as victims of global/national tyranny, or as perpetrators of global/national disorder. This effaces each as a person; each human presence is reduced to a ‘way of being’. The proposed ethical relationship allows us to enact a most necessary welcome of the stranger, a central concept for Levinas in his self-Other relationship.

Levinasian Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

The definition of ethics used in this paper is more all-encompassing than normally indicated by the term. It is what Levinas called a ‘first philosophy’:

not abstract systems of obligation … rather, ethics is born and maintained through the necessity of performative response to the other person, and such a responsiveness [which he calls ‘responsibility’] comes necessarily before the solidification of any theoretical rules or political norms of ethical conduct.10

It is not ‘universal rule-dictated duties, but moral responsibility … [that] resists codification, formalisation, socialisation, universalisation’.11 It is an ethics that involves the self in an eternal response to the Other, in an asymmetrical relationship of responsibility to the Other, without an expectation of return. This is a Levinasian view of intersubjectivity that is radically different to other views. It is a relationship between the self and Other that places the self in constant response to the Other, and thus takes the autonomous individual from centre stage, yet does not efface her/him.

The self-Other relationship has been a subject of philosophical/psychological discussion for a number of thinkers, yet it appears that many, whilst acknowledging the need for the Other in order for the self to ‘be’, return the Other to the self and thus the latter remains primary. In Emmanuel Levinas’ version of the ethical relationship, however, the self exists only through and for the Other. The Other holds primacy in this view, and the self cannot expect a return from the Other. The relationship is asymmetrical in that the self cannot expect to be enriched by the Other:

It is I who support the Other and am responsible for him. One thus sees that in the human subject, at the same time as a total subjection, my primogeniture manifests itself … Responsibility is what is incumbent upon me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse … I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one can substitute himself for me. Such is my inalienable identity of subject. It is in this precise sense that Dostoyevsky said: ‘We are all responsible for all men before all, and I more than all the others’.12

In Levinas’ view, ethics as a responsibility for the Other is not a call for the making of abstract rules that exist beyond the self and the other. It is something that occurs in dialogue, in the face-to-face encounter: ‘is constitutively linked to corporeality, the direct experience of “lived” time and place, and our affective and meaningful relations with concrete others’.13

Levinasian ethics is, then, a view of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that inverts many modes of thinking. It is a view which ‘directs me to the Other, and thus … the Other that I cannot assimilate’.14 It formulates an asymmetrical relationship between self and Other in face-toface, embodied dialogical experience. It is an experience of the human in her/his entirety, in the day-to-day complexity that is the lived experience of each human. It is indeed a view that changes radically the Cartesian and Freudian view of the human subject that ‘has been primarily understood as an ego or an I’.15 As such ‘in a most dramatic reversal of the principles of modern ethics, Levinas accords the Other that priority which was once unquestioningly assigned to the self’.16

In this sense, Levinas provides a version of ethics that is situated in the face-to- face dialogical relationship and can allow us to reconceptualise our obligations to Others beyond modernist borders, borders that totalise, exclude, or assimilate the other to the self. The Enlightenment subject, construed as an essentially autonomous, bordered self, becomes displaced in this moral universe. She/he is not effaced, but the self’s centrality is shifted; the Other does not take the self’s place, but becomes she/he to whom the self must eternally look to and act towards in a movement of responsibility, without an expectation of return:

I am defined as a subjectivity, as a singular person, as an ‘I’, precisely because I am exposed to the other … I become a responsible or ethical ‘I’ to the extent that I agree to depose or dethrone myself — to abdicate my position of centrality — in favour of the vulnerable other.17

While there are a number of critiques of Levinas’ ethics, largely to do with agency, it cannot be the place of this paper to fully address them. Suffice it to say that in his call for a move from the self to the Other in a disinterested mode, the Other is given primacy and the ‘permission’ to remain eternally unknown for self-consumption, but known in her/his full humanity through human-to-human contact, in her/his phenomenological everyday existence as experienced by the self. The ‘interhuman’, the face-to-face, remains pivotal to Levinas:

The interhuman, properly speaking, lies in a non-indifference of one to another, in a responsibility of one for another, but before the reciprocity of this responsibility, which will be inscribed in impersonal laws, comes to be superimposed on the pure altruism of this responsibility inscribed in the ethical position of the I qua I.18

And it is in this that Levinas’ ‘ethics of welcome’ makes sense, becomes a centrepiece for his conceptualisation of the self-Other relationship that does not lose the self in the Other, and certainly never the Other in the self. It is in the ‘ethics of the welcome’,19 in being ‘host’ and ‘hostage’ to the Other, in the ‘hospitality’ that means ‘giving to the other the bread from one’s mouth’,20 ‘that there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity’.21 This version of hospitality is never on the self’s terms: the stranger is welcomed but is never ‘known’ for self-consumption; the welcome is purely for the benefit of the Other; and her/his ‘strangeness’ remains, yet connects the self to the Other. This hospitality does not exist out of pity (at least in the sense that will be considered below), but opens to the stranger whatever there is to be had. Sovereignty is so jealously protected by nations that they close themselves off to criticism from human rights bodies, and close themselves off to ‘vulnerable others’ because they are not the Same. Only with hospitality can the ‘horrors [of] modern sovereignty, in its umbilical relation with militarism and violence’ 22 be truly undermined.

Suffering, Pity and Compassion

The person summoned to responsibility by the other is plucked out of his or her tranquillity, peace, and security and is hurled into a risky adventure, beyond the quest for personal happiness … When the victim (the other) appears before me, I am drawn powerfully toward the other and my spontaneity is challenged by the other’s presence.23

Levinasian ethics, as a particular view of intersubjectivity, also have a particular relation to human suffering. Levinas regards suffering as an ‘unassumable’ ‘passivity’, a ‘submission to submission’. Suffering becomes a process of negation, and in that process is ‘for nothing’, becomes meaningless and ‘is the outburst and deepest expression of absurdity’.24 Suffering, then, is the negation of the person, the negation of their experience and the meaning attached to that person’s life. It is meaningless however, only in the Other. And thus it is suffering that the self seeks to eradicate in the Other, because the Other obligates the self to act towards her/his suffering, her/his vulnerability,25 to give it meaning: ‘The only sense that can be made … of suffering, is to make one’s own suffering into a suffering for the suffering of others’.26 Only compassion provides the bridge, the ‘fraternal solidarity’ for the eruption of ‘the humanity of man’.27 The Other’s face calls for the overturning of the narcissistic self, which acts out of her/his own needs with ‘indifference’ to the Other, and instead to understand the Other in her/his need for succour, from ‘compassion which is a non-useless suffering (or love)’.28

The call to place the Other as primary, to be held by the Other as ‘hostage’ as it were, avoids assimilating the Other, devouring or vomiting her/him,29 seeks true compassion for the Other, and further welcomes the Other. They are gestures that Levinas petitions us to have from his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor. For Levinas, the Holocaust was an example of ‘the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, in which evil appears in its diabolical horror’.30 He experienced the human being in its ultimate narcissism, in hatred for another, with the will to efface her/him, to perhaps not kill, but ‘enclose him forcefully in his subjectivity … [to hold] the other, still living at the verge of destruction, so that through the terrible pain of rejection and denial the other testifies to the triumph of hate’.31 Closer to home, the granting of Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) to onshore refugees has this same effect. Allow me to illustrate: research in which I have been immersed recently has involved the gathering of personal narratives of onshore refugees on TPVs. One such narrative reads:

It appeared to me very difficult to express the various things that have impacted on my life. However, what I am sure of is that I am a survivor! I am a survivor from the past to the present; I want to be proud of what values combine [in] my personality but there is a problem here and that is that I have been generalised with others. The case is not to be idolised, it is to be understood. I exist in this world without having an identity because I cannot say to where I belong. I believe that till now what led me to Australia is the wind of life but I feel different, I want to exist; to do what a real person does. I want to be heard, to share what is inside my heart; sometimes we are the victims of an opinion that can change a life. When I faced the most horrific events in my life: going to an unsafe place & losing a member of my family sometimes it felt like magic, things that are supernatural. At the same time I did not feel anything, but after a while I felt absurd.

This is a poignant story from a woman who has suffered significantly. Her existence has been threatened, without anyone to claim her suffering. She feels effaced and without people to claim her as a person, and thus no people to ‘belong’ to. Her existence and sense of belonging is attached to other people: ‘I want to exist, to do what a real person does’. She feels a sense of meaninglessness in her life; it has a sense of the ‘absurd’. She wants not to be ‘idolised [but] to be understood’, not to be ‘generalised with others’. She has been collectivised, her identity now collapsed into a generalised and faceless self, that of ‘refugee’, and all that she has been and experienced collapsed into one label. She seeks to be enfolded within the proximity of people who accept her, welcome her, and yet finds instead she has been objectified beyond recognition. It is a simultaneous search for the security of borders that enclose and welcome, and yet do not efface her self; a need to feel others respond to her need for protection as a ‘refugee’ and yet be understood in her entirety, as a full person.

The treatment this woman receives officially is the opposite of that which she describes needing. This woman is on a TPV and is likely to remain on one indefinitely. She is not entitled to the full range of settlement and support services that permanent visa holders are entitled to: English lessons, accommodation support, the full range of employment support and education services. This woman is on a ‘limbo visa’ that does not allow her to feel what she yearns for. Most human service workers cannot respond officially to her call for assistance because they work largely under the auspices of the welfare state, directly or indirectly funded by governmental authorities and guided by their policies. These policies do not have provision for assisting TPV holders. Refugees on a TPV have their humanity undermined, their presence becomes a ‘problematic’ for the nation-self and, therefore, they are silenced. That which is most central to our humanness, the ability to make ourselves known and present to others, dialogue, to be actively present with others, participating in everyday life and events, is undermined both with the detention policies and TPVs, and thus effaces onshore refugees.

It is to this that Levinas answers: to the ethico-human dimension of responsibility to this woman as a human being; responsibility that exists before we know her, before she is constructed within a collective, as a label, a role, an objective knowledge; to accept and respond to her, from compassion, on her terms, to generously give the welcome that she as a human being calls for. It is then that we can engage in public debates that are more than technical allocations of people into legal categories.32 It is in performing an asymmetrical relationship of responsibility which has no expectation of return, in the face-to-face, that we avoid performing a violence to her alterity, her otherness. It is in this relationship that each of us can ‘see’ this person in her full complexity. Through it, she cannot be objectified, and we can respond to her need for protection. This ‘vulnerable other’ becomes our — your and my — responsibility. She calls directly to each one of us as a human being, to respond in our humanness to hers. It is a call to welcome her ‘strangeness’ into our most intimate spaces. It is from this position that we can begin to see the pain of the Other, indeed are called by an obligation to respond to the ‘vulnerable Other’s’ pain.

It is not a call for pity.33 Indeed ‘the emphasis on the “height” of the other is intended to prevent me from exercising my responsibility “as pity” for the other’.34 Pity is the self’s need for self-absolution through another’s suffering. Pity is not wholesale compassion for the humanity of the Other in all of her/his situated complexity, in their terms and for them. Pity holds the self in her/his self-interested core, venturing only so far towards the Other as is safe for the self, withdrawing quickly behind borders that protect the self from any perceived threat from the Other. Pity takes us only so far towards the Other. Zygmunt Bauman, following Levinas’ notion of ‘proximity’, mentions this distance as ‘cruelty’: ‘Humanity turns into cruelty because of the temptation to close the openness, to recoil from stretching out towards the Other’.35 Pity is always remaining safe on the self’s terms. Pity only gives up what is exuberant, is excess, to the self. Writers speak of the liberal discourses of tolerance in relation to multiculturalism in Australia as something that was granted only so long as it could be removed.36 A form of pity?

It is from an imperative to humanise the ‘refugee story’ in Australia that my research project came into being. Refugees and, most particularly, onshore refugees that arrive by boat, ‘boat people’, are possibly one of the most objectified and subjectified groups in Australia. We only know their ‘faces’ through media images. Images of violence, mutilation, dispossession and death. Their numbers are so few 37 that most Australians will never meet a refugee that has arrived in this way. And although there are large numbers of people generously giving of their time to assist these refugees, the number of volunteers still remains in the minority of the total population. Yet onshore refugees receive the most negative media attention and some of the most punitive treatment at the hands of official bodies. This occurs with a wide consensus from the broader community. This is the effacement of onshore refugees in their entire humanity, that Face that calls us to obligation towards other, vulnerable human beings.

It is an act of effacement of the Other that has occurred at other times in this same place; each event representing the ultimate imperialism of the nation-self over the Other, and the subjectification of the Other to the Self. Suffering perpetuated by the nation-self towards the Other goes unnoticed because the nation-self was, and is, narcissistically engrossed in pursuing its soverign needs. At the moment of colonial conquest an originary trauma was perpetrated, when the colonial-self met the Other[s] and attempted to devour them.38 It remains unacknowledged trauma, suffering relegated to the Other, without a trail of responsibility back to the nation-self from that Other. Later in the nation’s life, the ‘yellow peril’ arose, and a more systematic way was used to vomit the Other, in the shape of a formal document or policy — the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, or the white Australia policy. This violence was acknowledged eventually by the overturning of this policy in 1975 for the policies of multiculturalism. These were, however, a whitewash, an attempt at an appearance of movement towards the pain of the Other, whilst remaining enclosed in the safety of the self as Same. That this was the case is now evident in the manner in which onshore refugees are treated: incarceration and limbo visas. This is the reproduction of a non-acknowledgement of trauma, pain and suffering of the Other — and thus the perpetuation of this trauma, pain and suffering. Psychiatrists now write of ‘collective depression syndrome’,39 a condition specific to those in detention centres in the company of others similarly placed, with the result of the loss of hope, after experiencing traumas previously.

What does this do to the nation-self, this diminished link of responsibility to the vulnerable Other and for each of those persons’ pain? The Jesuit priest Martin-Baro suggested, when writing of state violence in El Salvador, that the general population is deeply affected by state-sanctioned mistreatment of people. He spoke of people becoming much more polarised and rigid, isolated and mistrustful of others, and of a general devaluing of human life:

for every tortured Salvadoran, there are at least a thousand Salvadorans paralysed with terror. For every Salvadoran killed, there are at least 10 000 who are violently forced to abdicate from their personal options and values. For every disappeared person, there are at least 100 000 Salvadorans who are systematically denied their right to conduct their own lives and to determine their life projects … when we are speaking of very deep psychological problems, we are talking about political problems.40

And whilst this account considers effects to the same group members as those being mistreated, Australia accommodates large numbers of migrants and refugees. What the treatment of onshore refugees has produced is similar to those described above, which is, above all, fear. Fear distances each to the other, creates a lack of proximity within which to understand the Other. To be associated with the label ‘refugee’ or ‘boat person’ creates fear, and there is, enshrined in Australian political history, a fear of invasion from a generalisable Other who happens to be culturally-specific.41 We were witness to these fears during last year’s federal elections, when ‘border protection’ became a central piece of rhetoric, imbued with the constructed need for internal protection from a threatening outside, which then came to be embodied within border-crossers, onshore refugees.42 And whilst the suffering that onshore refugees endure begins in other places, this nation-self has a responsibility to that suffering, not only by reason of being signatory to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees — which is legally binding internationally — but also by virtue of their humanity. It is certainly not suffering that can be perpetuated. The shift to ethico-human discussions allows this nation to enact a most necessary compassion, to see the whole refugee ‘phenomenon’ differently, as humans needing assistance. It is a shift that would allow us all to see each other differently and to feel that responsibility that undermines fear.

The invisibility of the suffering of the Other is not a phenomenon unique to Australia. Thousands die daily from neglect, torture and unrest without fanfare, yet millions joined together to mourn the death of one woman, Diana, Princess of Wales. It is a cultural phenomenon that has not gone without notice, one writer mentioning that the images of Diana’s dead body — banned from being displayed in the media — were somehow more disturbing ‘than those, for example, depicting the suffering of victims of war or famine’.43 This is the totalitarian and colonial Self engulfing the world with its own grieving, yet leaving that of the Other to the ‘twilight of knowing’.

If we turn to the global dimensions of this suffering, it is suffering that, historically, has seen no precedent in the sheer numbers of people involved. The world:

in thirty years has known two world wars, the totalitarianism of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia. This is the century that is drawing to a close in the obsessive fear of the return of everything these barbaric names stood for: suffering and evil inflicted deliberately, but in a manner no reason set limits to, in the exasperation of a reason become political and detached from all ethics.44

The conditions that allow the suffering of the Other to continue remain. Zygmunt Bauman reminds us that:

none of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible has truly disappeared, and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities and principles from generating Auschwitz-like catastrophes; as Leo Kuper has recently found out, ‘the sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of its sovereignty, the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres, against people under its rule’.45

They are societal conditions that, over time, have altered people’s relationships with each other. The divine has been replaced by the human, the emotive/intuitive by the rational, the communal by the individual, the bodied by the disembodied, the ethical by the hyperreal, the moral by the aesthetic.46 The Enlightenment heralded a new set of ways of seeing the world, its subject, and therefore the social. This has radically altered how human beings see one another and deal with one another. Zygmunt Bauman speaks of the shift from the divinely-mediated relationship of obligation from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have nots’ to a purely human and economic one. This shift saw the suffering of the poor as the ticket to salvation for both groups become an irksome economic ‘glitch’ that needs to be ‘solved’.47

The more recent replacement of direct relationships of moral obligation with ones that do not require any manner of physical interaction has meant that ‘the experience of the simulatory social is grounded in the aesthetic, not the moral’.48 The moral dimension and person-to-person human contact are lost and, thereby, human relationships are altered. The direct, face-to-face encounters are replaced by mediated, disembodied experiences of the Other and of the Other’s suffering, where the self is aware of the Other only at a distance. Objectification and pity is easy within such a lack of ‘proximity’ to the Other — and then yet easier to subjectify. The Other becomes but a statistic, a variable in an experiment, a knowledge to be intersected with power. Others’ suffering becomes images on our television, one-dimensional effigies of ourselves, known and consumed for half an hour each night along with dinner, and excreted a few hours later. Refugees’ suffering, the violence perpetrated against them becomes a mere cultural ‘production of violence as spectacle’.49 Lip-sewing then is transformed into a consumable, to be used by a fashion magazine, Australian Style, to ‘inspire’ fashion, sanitised against the backdrop of ‘cultural diversity’.50

[An]Other Reading

In this historical moment when the moral and the human dimensions are under siege, when the world is being divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, when the old borders of certainty between the sovereign nation-self and the Other are being made fluid for capital and information,51 a call for the sovereign nation-self to turn its gaze to the suffering of the Other is most urgent, but from compassion, not pity. It is only from this position that the Other’s suffering will be attended to, will indeed not be perpetuated, because it will become the self’s suffering also. The outside, the Other, that which the self is not, loses its fear — it is no longer the darkness of the unknown, that which needs to be made into the familiar, or expurgated. This is the point where the stranger in her/his fullness, as a complex human being, with all her/his alterity, is accepted and welcomed. It is the point where compassion reaches out to the Other and invites the dependence 52 of the Other. This act is a corollary of responsibility for the Other — as humans needing other humans, our humanness becomes an ethical endeavour, but from the Other, beginning with the Other. As liberal discourses construct us as autonomous, self-fulfilling, self-sufficient subjects, we need to return to the view as Zygmunt Bauman frames it; that dependence of the Other to the self is not a technical ‘problem’ to be eradicated.53 And although we may all function in socio-cultural contexts where human dependence is seen as a technical problem to be ‘fixed’, it is this dependence, as inter-dependence, which connects us with each other — but it begins with the Other and is for the Other.

Levinas’ ethics helps us by encouraging a focus on the suffering of the vulnerable Other. Such ethics enable each human being to be seen and understood before they are constructed within a label, as an aggregate of so many saleable and interchangeable ‘roles’. Levinas’ ethical model lets ‘us’ accept and respond to ‘the stranger’ on her/his terms, to give the generous welcome that she/he as a human being calls for. It is only then that the human presence, in all its complexity — complexity that can only be known by the face-to-face, without the knowing to consume — becomes love for the Other. It is a love that does not discard human beings as only serving the needs of our self, or only accepting each human being as and when she/he coincides with our sameness. It is from this position that we can begin to enact compassion with each other, feel a connection and a responsibility to eradicate the suffering existent in the world, and perform the necessary human love that is compassion for onshore refugees, a ‘love of one’s neighbour … love without Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect, love without concupiscence’.54

Notes

1 Although this term refers strictly to those people who arrive ‘on shore’ seeking refugee status and are granted this status, I am using it more broadly to include all onshore arrivals, whether they are eventually granted refugee status or not. This collapses the distinction usually made between the asylum-seeker and the onshore refugee, which is largely a legal one. I use the term more broadly because the experience of most onshore arrivals is the same, that is, detention and the granting of a Temporary Protection Visa. Another reason is my belief that the legal distinction made between asylum-seeker and refugee obfuscates the human dimension of fleeing one’s country to seek refuge in another.
2 I am here referring to ‘boat people’ coming largely from the Middle East. There have been other waves of boat people, such as the 1970s wave of Vietnamese and the 1980s wave of Cambodians. These also produced internal tensions for the Australian nation, yet this current wave has produced the most active drafting and enactment of official policies to detain and reject them. For example, the policy of mandatory detention was introduced in 1992, and the policy enacting Temporary Protection Visas (Visa 785) for 3 years was introduced in 1999. Most recently, in 2001, amendments to the Migration Act enacted what has come to be called the ‘Pacific Solution’ and the extension of TPVs for consecutive three-year periods indefinitely. cf. for example Claudia Tazreiter ‘History, Memory and the Stranger in the Practice of Detention in Australia’, in Jumping the Queue: New Talents 2002, University of Queensland Press, 2002, pp 3–12.
3 Ghassan Hage made an interesting point in relation to this at a public lecture entitled ‘Let’s Talk About Race’ in Perth, Australia on 12 September 2002. He mentioned that there appeared to be an added layer of anxiety in the manner the Australian government was treating asylum-seekers. He felt that this was attached to the original colonial ‘stealing of land’; this originary act in the birth of the nation has produced an embedded anxiety about uninvited arrivals.
4 Anna Haebich, ‘Twilight of Knowing’, public lecture given at The University of Western Australia, August 28, 2002.
5 Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction: narrating the nation’, in Homi Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1990.
6 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 1991, p 8.
7 When I use this term I am referring to the narritivised fiction of unified nation, the fantasy of wholeness. And most of the practices I refer to in using this term relate to the official policies and practices enacted in the name of all those people living in Australia without consent.
8 Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, Verso, London and New York, p 195.
9 The concept of the Face is of particular importance to Levinas. In a simplified explanation, the Face is not the Other’s physical appearance per se, but rather her/his presence, the experience of the Other in its fullness, that demands the self’s attention.
10 Jeffrey Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998, p 34.
11 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford and Cambridge, 1993, p 54.
12 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, Richard A Cohen (trans), Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1982, p 101.
13 Michael Gardiner, ‘Alterity and Ethics: A Dialogical Perspective’ in Theory, Culture & Society, vol 13, no 2, 1996, p 122.
14 Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1993, p 25.
15 Peperzak, op cit, p 25.
16 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p 85.
17 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Dialogue’ in Richard Kearney (ed), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, 1981, quoted in M Jamie Ferreira ‘“Total Altruism” in Levinas’ ‘Ethics of the Welcome’, in Journal of Religious Ethics, vol 29, no 3, p 454.
18 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’ in Entre Nous, op cit, p 100.
19 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Dialogue: Self-Consciousness and the Proximity of the Neighbour’, Of God Who Comes to Mind, Bettina Bergo (trans), Stanford University Press, California, 1986, cit in Ferreira, ibid, p 455.
20 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Otherwise than Being’, Of God Who Comes to Mind, op cit, p 79. 21 Levinas, ‘Otherwise than Being’, op cit, p 117.
22 Anthony Burke, ‘The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty’, Borderlands (e-journal), vol 1, no 2, 2002, p 23. URL 23 Enrique Dussel, ‘“Sensibility” and “otherness” in Emmanuel Levinas’, Philosophy Today, vol 43, no 2, 1999, p 128.
24 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, op cit, p 93.
25 Jacques Derrida, ‘At this Very Moment In this Work Here I am’, Ruben Berezdivin (trans), in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas, Athlone, London, 1991.
26 Richard A Cohen, ‘What good is the Holocaust? On suffering and evil’, Philosophy Today, vol 43, no 2, p 179.
27 Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, cit in Cohen, op cit, p 179.
28 Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, op cit, p 100.
29 Z Bauman, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’, in Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, Zed Books, USA, London, 1997.
30 Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, op cit, p 97.
31 Roger Burggraeve, ‘Violence and the Vulnerable Face of the Other: The Vision of Emmanuel Levinas on Moral Evil and our Responsibility’, Journal of Social Philosophy, vol 30, no 1, Spring, 1999, p 39. Noreen O’Connor makes a similar point in relation to hatred: ‘In hatred, I desire the death of the other only in wanting to inflict death as a supreme suffering. While the aim of hatred is to reduce the other to the status of an object, yet he must recognize this reduction, which means that he must subject. Ultimately, hatred is absurd in that it is satisfied only when it is not satisfied, since the other satisfies it only by becoming an object’, ‘Who Suffers’, in Re-Reading Levinas, op cit, p 231.
32 Moira Rayner, Acting Commissioner, Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, interview on Radio National 16th September, 2002.
33 Luc Boltanski, using Hannah Arendt, distinguishes between pity and compassion; pity being that which is distant, whilst compassion arises from closer encounters. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Graham Burchell (trans), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
34 Ferreira, op cit, p 460.
35 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, op cit, p 89.
36 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998; Jon Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis, Pluto, Sydney, 1998.
37 Although the number of onshore refugees arriving by boat has steadily increased over the last 4 years, they still remain a small percentage of the overall immigration intake. In 2000/01, the number exceeded four thousand, from a low of less than two hundred in 1997/8. Even at the highest number, they still comprise some 3%–5% of the total migratory intake.
38 Bauman, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’, loc cit.
39 Derrick Silove, ‘The Asylum Debacle in Australia: A Challenge for Psychiatry’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 36, 2002, pp 290–296.
40 I Martin-Baro, ‘The Psychological consequences of political terrorism’, presentation made at the Symposium on the Psychological Consequences of Political Terrorism, 17 January, Berkeley, California, 1989, p 5.
41 Although this paper has not engaged with the issue of Race and racism/‘culturalism’, these are crucial aspects in the analysis of the treatment of refugees in Australia. For a discussion of these aspects see Don McMaster, Asylum-Seekers: Australia’s Response to Refugees, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001; Don McMaster, ‘White Australia to detention: restriction and racism’, in Mots Pluriels, no. 21, May 2001; and Sonia Magdalena Tascón, ‘Refugees in Australia: Border-crossers of the Postcolonial Imaginary’, Australian Journal of Human Rights, vol 8, issue 1, pp 125–135.
42 Tascón, loc cit.
43 Scott Wilson, ‘The Indestructible Beauty of Suffering: Diana and the metaphor of global consumption’, Theory and Event, vol 1, issue 4, 1997.
44 Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, ibid, p 97.
45 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 1989, p 12. 46 Bauman Postmodern Ethics ibid; Jon Stratton ‘Serial Killing and the Transformation of the Social’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol 13, no 2,1996, p 79.
47 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘The World Inhospitable to Levinas’, Philosophy Today, vol 43, no 2,1999, pp 151–167.
48 Stratton, ‘Serial Killing and the Transformation of the Social’, ibid, p 79.
49 J Pugliese, ‘Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality’, Borderlands (e-journal), vol 1, no 2, 2002, p 6 URL 50 Editorial, Australian Style, no 61, April 2002, p 8.
51 S Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996.
52 Bauman, ‘The World Inhospitable to Levinas’ op cit.
53 ibid.
54 Levinas, ‘Philosophy, Justice and Love’, op cit, p 103.

Originally published in Richard Nile (ed), Strangers and Sojourners: Journal of Australian Studies no 77, St Lucia, UQP, 2003.