ADRIANA ZAHARIJEVIĆ: WE REFUGEES: AN UNLIVABLE LIFE

2019-08-11 21:00

Cinema Square

Sunday, August 11
Cinema Square, 9 p.m.

ADRIANA ZAHARIJEVIĆ: WE REFUGEES: AN UNLIVABLE LIFE

Adriana-Zaharijevic.jpg
The lecture is divided in two related parts. The first one offers a textual chain based on the short text We Refugees written by Hannah Arendt in 1943. What does this ‘we refugees’ mean, who are those ‘we’, and could we not once also become refugees? The figure of a refugee is read through several instances of the phrase introduced by Arendt, with special emphasis on the ideas of human rights, citizenship, fear, territory, and belonging. The figure of a refugee allows us to introduce an important difference, often omitted within strictly juridical and policy papers, between the right to life and the right to a livable life. The second part of the text examines the hypothesis that a livable life requires three conditions for its possibility: equality, the absence of war, and the absence of poverty. The life of a refugee can be thought of as a retraction of these conditions, and thus as unlivable. 
 
ADRIANA ZAHARIJEVIĆ is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (University of Belgrade), and an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Novi Sad. She publishes on different topics within political philosophy (critique of liberalism, feminist philosophy, and violence), and engagement studies (agency, translation, and critique as engagement). She has published two books, both in Serbian, Becoming Woman (2010) and Who is an Individual? A Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of the Citizen (2014), and is currently working on a manuscript on Judith Butler’s political philosophy. Her texts have been translated into several other European languages.