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Australia's new other: Shaping compassion for onshorerefugeesSonia Magdalena Tascón aa Teaching and studying in the School of Social Work and Social Policy , Curtin University ofTechnologyPublished online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: Sonia Magdalena Tascón (2003) Australia's new other: Shaping compassion for onshore refugees, Journal ofAustralian Studies, 27:77, 5-13, DOI: 10.1080/14443050309387846

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Australia's New Other: Shaping Compassionfor Onshore Refugees1

Sonia Magdalena Tascón

In the Beginning there was Trauma

Since the early 1990s, this nation has had to face a new Other;2 [an]other thatarrives uninvited on its shores. Through this, the nation is forced to face earliertraumas: those arising from its origins as a modern nation-state and as a colonialoutpost of Britain amidst 'black savages' and 'yellow strangers'. The nation isforced to face the very practices that gave it birth — the invasion of [another'sspace.3 These are, however, events that have never been officially and formallynamed as traumatic. Unassimilable events of considerable violence, exclusion andcataclysmic change have been erased, undermined or relegated to the 'twilight ofknowing'.4

In order for the modern, narrativised5 sovereign state to avoid a collapse intoambivalence, it must create an Other, the 'no-go areas'6 of the nation-self.7 Thesuffering in which the Australian nation-self was involved originally has,therefore, been consigned to beyond its identifiable sphere of thinking and outsideits consciousness. The nation-self failed to engage with a link of responsibility tothat suffering, made it Other to itself, and therefore failed to formulate aconnection of responsibility to the Other and promote 'a relation to that whichclaims, calls, commands, summons, interrupts or troubles'8 the nation-self. It is atrauma that the nation-self leaves to the Other, and refuses to allow it[self] toengage in the necessary relationship of ethical responsibility we promised theworld when we signed the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951).

In this paper I engage with the ethical, a dimension that is missing in the waythis nation is officially treating the most current wave of Others: onshore refugees.I focus on Emmanuel Levinas' ethical relationship between the self and the Other.Levinas' ethics — as a pre-ontological exposure to the Other, as a responsibilityfor the Other that is situated in the Face9 — give us much with which to thinkthrough the current situation and provide us with a vision for the future of thenation. Levinas' ethics, in questioning the sovereignty of the self and placing theself in a constant response to the Other, as well as placing the self-Otherrelationship in the everyday sentient experience, repeals much of ourEnlightenment thinking — which places the self as primary — and allows us toreconstruct an 'ethics of welcome' that can only occur in the 'proximity' of the selfto the Other. This comprises a way of seeing difference as something that cannever be assimilated or integrated, and yet still connects us all through a never-ending relationship outwards from responsibility to the Other.

This proposed relationship is particularly relevant to thinking through the'refugee crisis' in Australia at the moment. Not only does it allow us to insert anethical dimension of responsibility missing in many of the discourses surrounding

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'refugees', it also calls for no discourse without face-to-face discussion with thosepeople thus labelled. It is a label which, after all, acts as a line, a border ofdefinition in order to make 'them' more easily digestible, to enable the 'non-refugee' selves to enact certain ontological 'facts', to see 'them' as victims ofglobal/national tyranny, or as perpetrators of global/national disorder. This effaceseach as a person; each human presence is reduced to a 'way of being'. Theproposed ethical relationship allows us to enact a most necessary welcome of thestranger, a central concept for Levinas in his self-Other relationship.

Levinasian Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

The definition of ethics used in this paper is more all-encompassing than normallyindicated by the term. It is what Levinas called a 'first philosophy':

not abstract systems of obligation ... rather, ethics is born and maintained throughthe necessity of performative response to the other person, and such aresponsiveness [which he calls 'responsibility'] comes necessarily before thesolidification of any theoretical rules or political norms of ethical conduct.10

It is not 'universal rule-dictated duties, but moral responsibility ... [that] resistscodification, formalisation, socialisation, universalisation'.11 It is an ethics thatinvolves the self in an eternal response to the Other, in an asymmetricalrelationship of responsibility to the Other, without an expectation of return. Thisis a Levinasian view of intersubjectivity that is radically different to other views.It is a relationship between the self and Other that places the self in constantresponse to the Other, and thus takes the autonomous individual from centre stage,yet does not efface her/him.

The self-Other relationship has been a subject of philosophical/psychologicaldiscussion for a number of thinkers, yet it appears that many, whilstacknowledging the need for the Other in order for the self to 'be', return the Otherto the self and thus the latter remains primary. In Emmanuel Levinas' version ofthe ethical relationship, however, the self exists only through and for the Other.The Other holds primacy in this view, and the self cannot expect a return from theOther. The relationship is asymmetrical in that the self cannot expect to beenriched by the Other:

It is I who support the Other and am responsible for him. One thus sees that in thehuman subject, at the same time as a total subjection, my primogeniture manifestsitself ... Responsibility is what is incumbent upon me exclusively, and what,humanly, I cannot refuse ... I can substitute myself for everyone, but no one cansubstitute himself for me. Such is my inalienable identity of subject. It is in thisprecise sense that Dostoyevsky said: 'We are all responsible for all men before all,and I more than all the others'.12

In Levinas' view, ethics as a responsibility for the Other is not a call for the makingof abstract rules that exist beyond the self and the other. It is something that occursin dialogue, in the face-to-face encounter: 'is constitutively linked to corporeality,the direct experience of "lived" time and place, and our affective and meaningfulrelations with concrete others'.13

Levinasian ethics is, then, a view of subjectivity and intersubjectivity thatinverts many modes of thinking. It is a view which 'directs me to the Other, and

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thus ... the Other that I cannot assimilate'.14 It formulates an asymmetricalrelationship between self and Other in face-toface, embodied dialogicalexperience. It is an experience of the human in her/his entirety, in the day-to-daycomplexity that is the lived experience of each human. It is indeed a view thatchanges radically the Cartesian and Freudian view of the human subject that 'hasbeen primarily understood as an ego or an I'.15 As such 'in a most dramaticreversal of the principles of modern ethics, Levinas accords the Other that prioritywhich was once unquestioningly assigned to the self'.16

In this sense, Levinas provides a version of ethics that is situated in the face-to-face dialogical relationship and can allow us to reconceptualise our obligationsto Others beyond modernist borders, borders that totalise, exclude, or assimilatethe other to the self. The Enlightenment subject, construed as an essentiallyautonomous, bordered self, becomes displaced in this moral universe. She/he isnot effaced, but the self's centrality is shifted; the Other does not take the self'splace, but becomes she/he to whom the self must eternally look to and act towardsin a movement of responsibility, without an expectation of return:

I am defined as a subjectivity, as a singular person, as an T, precisely because I amexposed to the other ... I become a responsible or ethical 'I' to the extent that Iagree to depose or dethrone myself— to abdicate my position of centrality — infavour of the vulnerable other.17

While there are a number of critiques of Levinas' ethics, largely to do withagency, it cannot be the place of this paper to fully address them. Suffice it to saythat in his call for a move from the self to the Other in a disinterested mode, theOther is given primacy and the 'permission' to remain eternally unknown for self-consumption, but known in her/his full humanity through human-to-humancontact, in her/his phenomenological everyday existence as experienced by theself. The 'interhuman', the face-to-face, remains pivotal to Levinas:

The interhuman, properly speaking, lies in a non-indifference of one to another, ina responsibility of one for another, but before the reciprocity of this responsibility,which will be inscribed in impersonal laws, comes to be superimposed on the purealtruism of this responsibility inscribed in the ethical position of the / qua 7.18

And it is in this that Levinas' 'ethics of welcome' makes sense, becomes acentrepiece for his conceptualisation of the self-Other relationship that does notlose the self in the Other, and certainly never the Other in the self. It is in the'ethics of the welcome',19 in being 'host' and 'hostage' to the Other, in the'hospitality' that means 'giving to the other the bread from one's mouth',20 'thatthere can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon, and proximity'.21 This versionof hospitality is never on the self's terms: the stranger is welcomed but is never'known' for self-consumption; the welcome is purely for the benefit of the Other;and her/his 'strangeness' remains, yet connects the self to the Other. Thishospitality does not exist out of pity (at least in the sense that will be consideredbelow), but opens to the stranger whatever there is to be had. Sovereignty is sojealously protected by nations that they close themselves off to criticism fromhuman rights bodies, and close themselves off to 'vulnerable others' because theyare not the Same. Only with hospitality can the 'horrors [of] modern sovereignty,in its umbilical relation with militarism and violence'22 be truly undermined.

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Suffering, Pity and Compassion

The person summoned to responsibility by the other is plucked out of his or hertranquillity, peace, and security and is hurled into a risky adventure, beyond thequest for personal happiness ... When the victim (the other) appears before me, Iam drawn powerfully toward the other and my spontaneity is challenged by theother's presence.23

Levinasian ethics, as a particular view of intersubjectivity, also have a particularrelation to human suffering. Levinas regards suffering as an 'unassumable''passivity', a 'submission to submission'. Suffering becomes a process ofnegation, and in that process is 'for nothing', becomes meaningless and 'is theoutburst and deepest expression of absurdity'.24 Suffering, then, is the negation ofthe person, the negation of their experience and the meaning attached to thatperson's life. It is meaningless however, only in the Other. And thus it is sufferingthat the self seeks to eradicate in the Other, because the Other obligates the self toact towards her/his suffering, her/his vulnerability,25 to give it meaning: 'The onlysense that can be made ... of suffering, is to make one's own suffering into asuffering for the suffering of others'.26 Only compassion provides the bridge, the'fraternal solidarity' for the eruption of'the humanity of man'.27 The Other's facecalls for the overturning of the narcissistic self, which acts out of her/his ownneeds with 'indifference' to the Other, and instead to understand the Other inher/his need for succour, from 'compassion which is a non-useless suffering (orlove)'.28

The call to place the Other as primary, to be held by the Other as 'hostage' asit were, avoids assimilating the Other, devouring or vomiting her/him,29 seeks truecompassion for the Other, and further welcomes the Other. They are gestures thatLevinas petitions us to have from his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor.For Levinas, the Holocaust was an example of 'the paradigm of gratuitous humansuffering, in which evil appears in its diabolical horror'.30 He experienced thehuman being in its ultimate narcissism, in hatred for another, with the will toefface her/him, to perhaps not kill, but 'enclose him forcefully in his subjectivity... [to hold] the other, still living at the verge of destruction, so that through theterrible pain of rejection and denial the other testifies to the triumph of hate'.31

Closer to home, the granting of Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) to onshorerefugees has this same effect. Allow me to illustrate: research in which I have beenimmersed recently has involved the gathering of personal narratives of onshorerefugees on TPVs. One such narrative reads:

It appeared to me very difficult to express the various things that have impacted onmy life. However, what I am sure of is that I am a survivor! I am a survivor fromthe past to the present; I want to be proud of what values combine [in] mypersonality but there is a problem here and that is that I have been generalised withothers. The case is not to be idolised, it is to be understood. I exist in this worldwithout having an identity because 1 cannot say to where I belong. I believe that tillnow what led me to Australia is the wind of life but I feel different, I want to exist;to do what a real person does. I want to be heard, to share what is inside my heart;sometimes we are the victims of an opinion that can change a life. When I faced themost horrific events in my life: going to an unsafe place & losing a member of my

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family sometimes it felt like magic, things that are supernatural. At the same timeI did not feel anything, but after a while I felt absurd.

This is a poignant story from a woman who has suffered significantly. Herexistence has been threatened, without anyone to claim her suffering. She feelseffaced and without people to claim her as a person, and thus no people to 'belong'to. Her existence and sense of belonging is attached to other people: 'I want toexist, to do what a real person does'. She feels a sense of meaninglessness in herlife; it has a sense of the 'absurd'. She wants not to be 'idolised [but] to beunderstood', not to be 'generalised with others'. She has been collectivised, heridentity now collapsed into a generalised and faceless self, that of 'refugee', andall that she has been and experienced collapsed into one label. She seeks to beenfolded within the proximity of people who accept her, welcome her, and yetfinds instead she has been objectified beyond recognition. It is a simultaneoussearch for the security of borders that enclose and welcome, and yet do not effaceher self; a need to feel others respond to her need for protection as a 'refugee' andyet be understood in her entirety, as a full person.

The treatment this woman receives officially is the opposite ofthat which shedescribes needing. This woman is on a TPV and is likely to remain on oneindefinitely. She is not entitled to the full range of settlement and support servicesthat permanent visa holders are entitled to: English lessons, accommodationsupport, the full range of employment support and education services. Thiswoman is on a 'limbo visa' that does not allow her to feel what she yearns for.Most human service workers cannot respond officially to her call for assistancebecause they work largely under the auspices of the welfare state, directly orindirectly funded by governmental authorities and guided by their policies. Thesepolicies do not have provision for assisting TPV holders. Refugees on a TPV havetheir humanity undermined, their presence becomes a 'problematic' for the nation-self and, therefore, they are silenced. That which is most central to our humanness,the ability to make ourselves known and present to others, dialogue, to be activelypresent with others, participating in everyday life and events, is undermined bothwith the detention policies and TPVs, and thus effaces onshore refugees.

It is to this that Levinas answers: to the ethico-human dimension ofresponsibility to this woman as a human being; responsibility that exists before weknow her, before she is constructed within a collective, as a label, a role, anobjective knowledge; to accept and respond to her, from compassion, on herterms, to generously give the welcome that she as a human being calls for. It isthen that we can engage in public debates that are more than technical allocationsof people into legal categories.32 It is in performing an asymmetrical relationshipof responsibility which has no expectation of return, in the face-to-face, that weavoid performing a violence to her alterity, her otherness. It is in this relationshipthat each of us can 'see' this person in her full complexity. Through it, she cannotbe objectified, and we can respond to her need for protection. This 'vulnerableother' becomes our — your and my — responsibility. She calls directly to eachone of us as a human being, to respond in our humanness to hers. It is a call towelcome her 'strangeness' into our most intimate spaces. It is from this positionthat we can begin to see the pain of the Other, indeed are called by an obligationto respond to the 'vulnerable Other's' pain.

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It is not a call for pity.33 Indeed 'the emphasis on the "height" of the other isintended to prevent me from exercising my responsibility "as pity" for theother'.34 Pity is the self's need for self-absolution through another's suffering. Pityis not wholesale compassion for the humanity of the Other in all of her/his situatedcomplexity, in their terms and for them. Pity holds the self in her/his self-interested core, venturing only so far towards the Other as is safe for the self,withdrawing quickly behind borders that protect the self from any perceived threatfrom the Other. Pity takes us only so far towards the Other. Zygmunt Bauman,following Levinas' notion of 'proximity', mentions this distance as 'cruelty':'Humanity turns into cruelty because of the temptation to close the openness, torecoil from stretching out towards the Other'.35 Pity is always remaining safe onthe self's terms. Pity only gives up what is exuberant, is excess, to the self. Writersspeak of the liberal discourses of tolerance in relation to multiculturalism inAustralia as something that was granted only so long as it could be removed.36 Aform of pity?

It is from an imperative to humanise the 'refugee story' in Australia that myresearch project came into being. Refugees and, most particularly, onshorerefugees that arrive by boat, 'boat people', are possibly one of the most objectifiedand subjectified groups in Australia. We only know their 'faces' through mediaimages. Images of violence, mutilation, dispossession and death. Their numbersare so few37 that most Australians will never meet a refugee that has arrived in thisway. And although there are large numbers of people generously giving of theirtime to assist these refugees, the number of volunteers still remains in the minorityof the total population. Yet onshore refugees receive the most negative mediaattention and some of the most punitive treatment at the hands of official bodies.This occurs with a wide consensus from the broader community. This is theeffacement of onshore refugees in their entire humanity, that Face that calls us toobligation towards other, vulnerable human beings.

It is an act of effacement of the Other that has occurred at other times in thissame place; each event representing the ultimate imperialism of the nation-selfover the Other, and the subjectification of the Other to the Self. Sufferingperpetuated by the nation-self towards the Other goes unnoticed because thenation-self was, and is, narcissistically engrossed in pursuing its soverign needs.At the moment of colonial conquest an originary trauma was perpetrated, whenthe colonial-self met the Other[s] and attempted to devour them.38 It remainsunacknowledged trauma, suffering relegated to the Other, without a trail ofresponsibility back to the nation-self from that Other. Later in the nation's life, the'yellow peril' arose, and a more systematic way was used to vomit the Other, inthe shape of a formal document or policy — the Immigration Restriction Act of1901, or the white Australia policy. This violence was acknowledged eventuallyby the overturning of this policy in 1975 for the policies of multiculturalism.These were, however, a whitewash, an attempt at an appearance of movementtowards the pain of the Other, whilst remaining enclosed in the safety of the selfas Same. That this was the case is now evident in the manner in which onshorerefugees are treated: incarceration and limbo visas. This is the reproduction of anon-acknowledgement of trauma, pain and suffering of the Other — and thus theperpetuation of this trauma, pain and suffering. Psychiatrists now write of

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'collective depression syndrome',39 a condition specific to those in detentioncentres in the company of others similarly placed, with the result of the loss ofhope, after experiencing traumas previously.

What does this do to the nation-self, this diminished link of responsibility tothe vulnerable Other and for each of those persons' pain? The Jesuit priest Martin-Baro suggested, when writing of state violence in El Salvador, that the generalpopulation is deeply affected by state-sanctioned mistreatment of people. Hespoke of people becoming much more polarised and rigid, isolated and mistrustfulof others, and of a general devaluing of human life:

for every tortured Salvadoran, there are at least a thousand Salvadorans paralysedwith terror. For every Salvadoran killed, there are at least 10 000 who are violentlyforced to abdicate from their personal options and values. For every disappearedperson, there are at least 100 000 Salvadorans who are systematically denied theirright to conduct their own lives and to determine their life projects ... when we arespeaking of very deep psychological problems, we are talking about politicalproblems.40

And whilst this account considers effects to the same group members as thosebeing mistreated, Australia accommodates large numbers of migrants andrefugees. What the treatment of onshore refugees has produced is similar to thosedescribed above, which is, above all, fear. Fear distances each to the other, createsa lack of proximity within which to understand the Other. To be associated withthe label 'refugee' or 'boat person' creates fear, and there is, enshrined inAustralian political history, a fear of invasion from a generalisable Other whohappens to be culturally-specific.41 We were witness to these fears during lastyear's federal elections, when 'border protection' became a central piece ofrhetoric, imbued with the constructed need for internal protection from athreatening outside, which then came to be embodied within border-crossers,onshore refugees.42 And whilst the suffering that onshore refugees endure beginsin other places, this nation-self has a responsibility to that suffering, not only byreason of being signatory to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees —which is legally binding internationally — but also by virtue of their humanity. Itis certainly not suffering that can be perpetuated. The shift to ethico-humandiscussions allows this nation to enact a most necessary compassion, to see thewhole refugee 'phenomenon' differently, as humans needing assistance. It is ashift that would allow us all to see each other differently and to feel thatresponsibility that undermines fear.

The invisibility of the suffering of the Other is not a phenomenon unique toAustralia. Thousands die daily from neglect, torture and unrest without fanfare,yet millions joined together to mourn the death of one woman, Diana, Princess ofWales. It is a cultural phenomenon that has not gone without notice, one writermentioning that the images of Diana's dead body — banned from being displayedin the media — were somehow more disturbing 'than those, for example,depicting the suffering of victims of war or famine'.43 This is the totalitarian andcolonial Self engulfing the world with its own grieving, yet leaving that of theOther to the 'twilight of knowing'.

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If we turn to the global dimensions of this suffering, it is suffering that,historically, has seen no precedent in the sheer numbers of people involved. Theworld:

in thirty years has known two world wars, the totalitarianism of right and left,Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz andCambodia. This is the century that is drawing to a close in the obsessive fear of thereturn of everything these barbaric names stood for: suffering and evil inflicteddeliberately, but in a manner no reason set limits to, in the exasperation of a reasonbecome political and detached from all ethics.44

The conditions that allow the suffering of the Other to continue remain. ZygmuntBauman reminds us that:

none of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible has truly disappeared,and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities andprinciples from generating Auschwitz-like catastrophes; as Leo Kuper has recentlyfound out, 'the sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of itssovereignty, the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres,against people under its rule'.45

They are societal conditions that, over time, have altered people's relationshipswith each other. The divine has been replaced by the human, the emotive/intuitiveby the rational, the communal by the individual, the bodied by the disembodied,the ethical by the hyperreal, the moral by the aesthetic.46 The Enlightenmentheralded a new set of ways of seeing the world, its subject, and therefore thesocial. This has radically altered how human beings see one another and deal withone another. Zygmunt Bauman speaks of the shift from the divinely-mediatedrelationship of obligation from the 'haves' to the 'have nots' to a purely human andeconomic one. This shift saw the suffering of the poor as the ticket to salvation forboth groups become an irksome economic 'glitch' that needs to be 'solved'.47

The more recent replacement of direct relationships of moral obligation withones that do not require any manner of physical interaction has meant that 'theexperience of the simulatory social is grounded in the aesthetic, not the moral'.48

The moral dimension and person-to-person human contact are lost and, thereby,human relationships are altered. The direct, face-to-face encounters are replacedby mediated, disembodied experiences of the Other and of the Other's suffering,where the self is aware of the Other only at a distance. Objectification and pity iseasy within such a lack of 'proximity' to the Other — and then yet easier tosubjectify. The Other becomes but a statistic, a variable in an experiment, aknowledge to be intersected with power. Others' suffering becomes images on ourtelevision, one-dimensional effigies of ourselves, known and consumed for half anhour each night along with dinner, and excreted a few hours later. Refugees'suffering, the violence perpetrated against them becomes a mere cultural'production of violence as spectacle'.49 Lip-sewing then is transformed into aconsumable, to be used by a fashion magazine, Australian Style, to 'inspire'fashion, sanitised against the backdrop of'cultural diversity'.50

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[An]Other Reading

in this historical moment when the moral and the human dimensions are undersiege, when the world is being divided into 'good' and 'evil', when the old bordersof certainty between the sovereign nation-self and the Other are being made fluidfor capital and information,51 a call for the sovereign nation-self to turn its gaze tothe suffering of the Other is most urgent, but from compassion, not pity. It is onlyfrom this position that the Other's suffering will be attended to, will indeed not beperpetuated, because it will become the self's suffering also. The outside, theOther, that which the self is not, loses its fear— it is no longer the darkness of theunknown, that which needs to be made into the familiar, or expurgated. This is thepoint where the stranger in her/his fullness, as a complex human being, with allher/his alterity, is accepted and welcomed. It is the point where compassionreaches out to the Other and invites the dependence52 of the Other. This act is acorollary of responsibility for the Other — as humans needing other humans, ourhumanness becomes an ethical endeavour, but from the Other, beginning with theOther. As liberal discourses construct us as autonomous, self-fulfilling, self-sufficient subjects, we need to return to the view as Zygmunt Bauman frames it;that dependence of the Other to the self is not a technical 'problem' to beeradicated.53 And although we may all function in socio-cultural contexts wherehuman dependence is seen as a technical problem to be 'fixed', it is thisdependence, as inter-dependence, which connects us with each other — but itbegins with the Other and is for the Other.

Levinas' ethics helps us by encouraging a focus on the suffering of thevulnerable Other. Such ethics enable each human being to be seen and understoodbefore they are constructed within a label, as an aggregate of so many saleable andinterchangeable 'roles'. Levinas' ethical model lets 'us' accept and respond to 'thestranger' on her/his terms, to give the generous welcome that she/he as a humanbeing calls for. It is only then that the human presence, in all its complexity —complexity that can only be known by the face-to-face, without the knowing toconsume — becomes love for the Other. It is a love that does not discard humanbeings as only serving the needs of our self, or only accepting each human beingas and when she/he coincides with our sameness. It is from this position that wecan begin to enact compassion with each other, feel a connection and aresponsibility to eradicate the suffering existent in the world, and perform thenecessary human love that is compassion for onshore refugees, a 'love of one'sneighbour ... love without Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspectdominates the passionate aspect, love without concupiscence'.54

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