When it comes to approaches, indeed in the plural, on the migration issue, there tends to be a lack of differentiation... “migrants, refugees, displaced persons”…
For Josefa, the challenge is to re-focus on the uniqueness of each human person in his or her own migration.
Therefore, we are trying to free ourselves from a social commitment that is radically oriented towards the other, called a “migrant”, in a gest, however “beautiful” it may be.
The other migrant becomes/will become unique, as I potentially am to him or her.
Our particular or singular migrations reveal us first to ourselves... If the prevailing discourse (“migrants”, “refugees”) abandons its magisterial tone, it will then become possible to move unashamedly away from its categorical borders, “migrants”, “refugees”, which paradoxically put us at a distance (no offense to most of us).
“Migrant as I” appears, from this angle, as a source of fertility far removed from “migrants”, which is an undifferentiated amalgam, without a name, without a face, as the media, politicians, and “expert analysts” of all stripes all too often lead us “blindly” in that direction.
“Migrant as I”: the revelation of I as a person and not as an “object” of another, however empathetic or compassionate the gaze or the action taken may be.
Question: At the heart of which intelligence(s) is built an ethics of responsibility towards others if one makes it an object (and sometimes a waste)? What will our future artificial intelligences retain in this way of thinking the world divided into two masses: on the one hand, “migrants, refugees”; on the other, another category, “indefinite”, both facing each other?
“Migrant as I”: the foundation of the creation of a we. Migration as a fundamental Common Good. A unique threshold, opening to a hospitality of our uniqueness.
Need, necessity, the law of humanity: a (social, societal, media, political, philosophical…) commitment cannot be made on “the back” of others. It is therefore urgent to free oneself from a path/voice that makes others “migrants”, who are then perceived “necessarily” as a mass, a group, affected by an a priori “vulnerability”, which is, moreover, very difficult to specify, it seems, when we talk about respecting the singularity, the dignity of each one.
“Migrant as I” becomes at the same time “I as a migrant”. I, in us, with us, disengage by not engaging in the name of others but by assuming one’s own fundamental migrant condition, without excluding possible gestures, words, acts; a condition given, open to all, and above all inscribed in each one of us. It is a matter of human plasticity, or even of the living, between times, between attentions, between space(s) of life(s).
“Migrant as I”. An agreement in itself acting. With the paradox of a disengagement that engages. A set of I(s) at stake(s) of humanit(y)(ies).
