The Open City:\tA Grammatology of Migrant-Rights Movements and the Logic of Sovereignty

In the following work I apply a grammatological method of analysis to the concomitant objects of a logic of sovereignty and migrant-rights politics. Drawing on the analytical tools of genealogy, etymology and pragmatics outlined by Jacques Derrida, I argue that a portable grammar of emplaced possibility generated by migrant-rights movements situated in cities (sanctuary politics in Toronto, Canada, the sans-papier in Paris, and Sheffield UK’s “Cities of Sanctuary” movement) give rise to novel and significant changes in political discourse, generating articulations of a democracy of strangers, common right, solidarity beyond citizenship, and an unprecedented notion of freedom. Using this unorthodox method, I find that a history of Western logocentrism is constituted by an economy of translations not exclusive to its privileged subject or territorial boundary—especially involving circuits of meaning and tracing encounters with pre-Hellenic and Arabic cultures. In turn, the traditio or ‘official tradition’ of an interiorized ‘West’ passed down from Greece to Rome to the vernacular present is the product of a logic of sovereignty through which the repetition of questions that already imply internally homogeneous community against their ‘exteriors’ also generate assumptions around the author and authority of that community from Plato onward. From this vantage point, an international system of nation-states is understood to compulsively give rise to emergent technologies of border enforcement and extra-territorialization, detention, deportation and encampment. In departure from this logic, and signaling the possibilia of radically new institutional frameworks, attention to migrant-rights movements supports a distinct grammar of cosmopolitan democracy not yet captured by scholars, including a research project uncovering genealogies of cities as already plural and interdependent, etymologies of sanctuary, hospitality and civic refuge, and prefiguring institutions of welcome within a globalized world (in particular, parliaments of unrepresented subjects, universities as everyday critical sites of public engagement, and technological networks of vigilant anticipation of the arrival of newcomers). The amalgam of these theoretical and practical elements I refer to as the open city.

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