We have never owned ‘Us’: A philosophical critique of nationalist b/ordering and othering ideologies

The recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of theorising about borders. Having moved away from the positivist paradigm that views borders as static ‘lines in the sand’, a myriad of different conceptualisations of borders and their modes of operation and appearance have emerged: bordering, borderscapes, and border zones are just some of the more common ones. This paper intends to contribute to this conceptual debate on border studies by focusing on the critical potential of the concepts of community and immunity to understand (de)bordering processes. Specifically, we argue that the concept of appropriation can be illuminating to analyse and critique practices of bordering. To that end, we draw on the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito. Both agree that community – human coexistence – is not an object and therefore cannot be appropriated. Esposito takes this further by exposing the logic of immunity, by means of which the order deemed to be ‘Ours’ is meant to be protected from the disorder represented by an Other. Immunisation thus attempts to appropriate an inappropriable identity. We argue that b/ordering is exemplary of this logic, and that therefore the concepts offered by Nancy and Esposito can be highly valuable in critiquing such practices of b/ordering. Ultimately, drawing on both thinkers, we argue that such efforts are self-defeating. B/ordering attempts to enclose a supposed identity to protect ‘us’, but in so doing the ‘us’ becomes owned by this supposed identity rather than vice versa. Immunity, Esposito specifies, eliminates community, and therefore ultimately so does b/ordering.