Registers of Undesirability, Poetics of Detention: Jean Améry on the Jewish Exile and Behrouz Boochani on the Manus Prison

Abstract

Jean Améry argued in his essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” that there is a distinctive kind of homesickness, specific to the exile experiences of the assimilated German-speaking Jews during the war. They were dispossessed not only of their homes, citizenship, and cultural community in the present, but also of their past attachments, memories, and identifications. In my text, I discuss philosophic analyses of Améry’s exile essay and point that while they offer important insights into Améry’s validation of first-person experience for phenomenology of exile, they perhaps do not appreciate sufficiently the political undertone of Améry’s essay. I approach Améry’s text in the light of critical theorizing of the politics of exile and border-control, and with a focus on the notions of ‘undesirability’ and ‘expulsion’ that underwrite the extreme political precarity of refuge-seekers. This shows that one of Améry’s central preoccupations in his writings on exile have been political freedom and the possibility of resistance, as well as their constitutive codependence, in the oppressive context of forced exile, marked by a futility of political action. Here the act of writing becomes that of resistance and a reclamation of voice and language in the face of the fascistic powers aimed at expelling, silencing, and eliminating the ‘undesirables’. In the final part of this chapter, I juxtapose Améry’s essay with Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018), which narrates Boochani’s firsthand experiences in Australia’s offshore refugee detention on the Manus Island. I argue that the two authors’ texts offer important insights into the politics of exile, expulsion, and undesirability, and into how such politics registers within the bodily and affective realm. The importance of the proposed approach is not only its harm-centric and experiential orientation as a way of comprehending the political stakes in state failure to protect and grant entry for the refuge-seekers in situations of extreme precarity; it is also to validate and illuminate sites and spaces of resistance undertaken by the victims of these cruel politics, no matter how tentative, short-lived, or, even, failed they might be.