The Place Called Refugee: Alfonso Cuarón’s Neighbor-Love Project

Abstract

This essay attempts to read Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, using as a guiding thread of analysis what Kenneth Reinhard and Eric Santner elaborate with regard to the concept of the neighbor. Reinhard argues that the politics of Carl Schmitt, which brings to the foreground the sovereign exception and the friend-enemy opposition, should be supplemented by the ethical import of the neighbor. To shed a light on the ethical dimension implied in the neighbor, Reinhard redirects our attention to what Jacques Lacan calls the logic of the not-all. Reinhard’s attempt to consider the commandment of neighbor-love in relation to the logic of the not-all takes us a step further in the direction of rethinking the concept of miracle articulated by Santner. Santner insists that a miracle happens when we are addressed by the lack within the socio-symbolic edifice and we, in some fashion, respond to this calling. For both Reinhard and Santner, the concept of the neighbor actually amounts to the interruption or suspension of the state of exception as defined by Schmitt. The topos of the neighbor, as the interruption of the state of exception, is exemplified in the character of Kee in Children of Men. Kee, as a miraculously pregnant refugee, serves as the interstitial space that remains irreducible to the very opposition of British citizen and refugee. This enables us to interpret the encounter between Kee and Theo as the situation where Theo responds to Kee’s uncanny calling. In this connection, the Human Project can be said to have already been put into practice by a series of refugees who, within the Bexhill refugee camp, are answerable to Kee.