Politics and Aesthetics of Suspension: Gazes on Migrant Borders

Abstract

New migratory movements are one of the processes of globalization aiming to transform the organization of socio-economic relations. When immigration from the global South to the North is forced on the more vulnerable social classes, both authorities and media talk about a “refugee crisis”. The global flow of refugees constitutes one of the greatest challenges of today inasmuch as it revives identity questions. This very ‘crisis’ translates a clash with the applicability of the postmodern discourse of the other. This paper addresses questions of (im)migration, in order to examine their ethical implications. Secondly, it explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics on a global basis by examining a cinematic work that reveals unexpected encounters, hardships and hidden possibilities of the immigration experience. Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a day (1998) discloses the beauty that emerges in hardships and it rearticulates ethical questions that appear life-threatening. Borders cannot be crossed when they are the only territory of migrants. If the “elsewhere” is a construction of the refugee fantasy, it is a myth: a story projected into the future unfolds the set of expectations of people who lost everything but the scars on their bodies.