Let us briefly recall the famous passage from the monumental text Ab Urbe condita, in which Titus Livy narrates the foundation of Rome. As is well known, he presents it as the result of a fratricide committed to punish the violation of a frontier materialized in the form of a wall. Sic deinde, quicumque alius transiliet moenia mea (“So shall it end henceforth for any other who jumps over my wall”), are the unequivocal words of warning that Romulus pronounces after having killed his brother. The Latin expression moenia refers us to the “built walls” that cannot be climbed, assaulted or, in any case, crossed—Remus is killed not because he has crossed a border, but because he has crossed a wall. The sovereign power regulates the crossing of borders and denies the crossing of walls. The latter—as the tragic founding event of Rome teaches—end up destroying the relationship with the Other in its most intimate and indissoluble form, which is represented by the bond between the two brothers.
In a different scenario, the very walls of Troy ultimately decree its decline. They mark the circle of life and fertility, enclosed within the protected limits of the urban space that for nine years resisted the siege of the Achaean troops. But that boundary, rigid and hardened in solid walls, ends up killing life itself, moving the battlefield from outside to inside—outside the walls, for the Trojans, there is no other life to relate to, but only “war and death” (πόλεμος and θάνατος).
It is the paradox linked to the logic of immunization, as contemporary biopolitics has approached it in its main attributions of meaning: exposed in its simplest and most immediate formulation, the paradox resides in the fact that if one is not immunized, one dies; but at the same time, one is going to face an analogous fate if one is over-immunized. Lack of immunization and hyperimmunization are equally lethal, although in diametrically opposite ways. This is also true in the specific context of the border, always vacillating between the hyper-immunizing temptation of the wall and the anti-immunizing temptation of openness without rules and control. The art of life and of the policies linked to it should also be, consequently, the search for a delicate balance, for a just limit—and therefore, for a frontier—that makes it possible for immunization to function effectively, without becoming a deadly device for the body that it is precisely supposed to protect.
In the case of the Iliad, the line of the limit is materialized in the Trojan fortifications—where there is a defensive wall, it is assumed that everything beyond that wall may be a possible enemy, a threat to be immunized against, and not an alterity with which to relate. The wall is the first thing that has always been fighting against the enemy which, in this context, is “that which is outside” as such, perceived and rejected as a harbinger of misfortune for the Self. The just limit is thus perverted in the solitude of a civilization that, shutting itself in, withers and, finally, dies. The immune device degenerates into a fateful instrument that suffocates that which it was meant to safeguard. The wall, although in the case of Troy it is justified as a bastion of resistance against a ruthless aggressor, ends up becoming a weapon against those who use it—the exclusion of the Other becomes the segregation of the Self. Here again lies the paradox—by walling off the Other, we wall ourselves off.
The Other is not really known in his identity, but simply combated in his otherness—the relationship is always denied by the wall. This is why, in the famous passage of the Iliad (III, vv. 121-244) dedicated to “theioscopy”—that is, literally, to “observe” (σκοπεῖν) from the “wall” (τεῖχος)—Helen, summoned by Priam, helps the old man to identify from above, one by one (from Agamemnon to Odysseus, from Ajax to Idomeneus), the Achaean heroes ready for the fray. The Trojans do not know the Achaeans, and the only way to reveal their identity, denied by the wall, is to entrust themselves to a gaze that surpasses the wall itself and that comes from an identity—that of Helen—which is, in reality, different from that of the Trojans.
In contrast to the border, which serves as a relational threshold, the wall is based on a logic that we could generically define as disjunctive. Its essential characteristic consists in separating, not in order to favor a relationship between different, but rather to prevent it—the walled off wall performs its fundamental function by guaranteeing that the separated remain as such. Thus the wall, contrary to what one tends to think inertially, cannot be understood at all as a frontier between so many, nor as one of its sui generis forms, nor even as a frontier elevated to its maximum power by means of its material verticalization. With extreme synthesis, it can be affirmed that walls isolate, while borders relate.
Analyzed in its pure objectuality, the wall verticalizes the border by projecting it towards the sky; and, at the same time, it materializes it by making it impassable through the impenetrable solidity of the stone. By virtue of the double determination of materialization and verticalization, the wall can concretely fragment space according to a disjunctive logic. This form is expressed, in its most immediate form, in the impassable antithesis between the here and the hereafter. From this perspective it is easier to understand that an indispensable characteristic of the wall is its structural ambivalence, intrinsically connected with the disjunctive power that distinguishes it—the perspective changes radically from the point of view from which the wall is viewed, which may seem protective, for those who are more here, or excluding, for those who are confined beyond. Just as it divides the territory in two, the wall also breaks the vision of things in two ways. In this way, the wall reconfirms itself as the child of an unresolved oppositional dialectic between Friend and Enemy.
The border carries with it, as its inescapable specificity, the duplicity of delimiting and crossing, of separating and uniting. If this intrinsic duplicity is broken, the frontier is lost and, with it, its logic. One would thus have the unilaterality of walled confinement when the dynamic of separating prevails; and one would obtain, on the other hand, the univocity of invasion in the case where the tendency to cross takes the lead. Also from this point of view, the wall allows to understand more deeply, by contrast, the function of the border, in particular not to be a space of blockage, but of transition, in which—writes Sandro Mezzadra—“different forces and subjects enter in relation, confront each other and meet, in any case putting into play and modifying their own identity.”
To clarify from a different plane the relationship between the wall, the invasion and the border, an impressionistic reference to the biological dimension may be useful. As we know, the cell of living organisms is delimited by the lining of a very thin plasma membrane. The latter separates the cell from the external environment and regulates the exchange of elements and chemical substances. If there were no membrane, the cell would be overwhelmed by the external environment and simply could not exist as a self-contained entity. Similarly, if the membrane were impenetrable and thus prevented the relationship between the inside and the outside, the cell could not survive. Following this analogy, the border appears as a porous membrane, which defends life precisely because it does not allow it to dissolve in otherness and, at the same time, makes possible its incessant exchange with otherness itself.
A similar discourse could reasonably be carried out around the skin that covers our body and which is, so to speak, the porous border that regulates its relations with the outside. As Debray has suggested in Éloge des frontières (In Praise of Borders), “the skin is as far removed from the idea of an impermeable curtain as a border worthy of the name is from a wall. The wall impedes the passage, the border regulates it,” by means of a double movement that we could approximate with the alternation of systole and diastole.
As has already been pointed out, the quid proprium of the border as Grenze is its traversability; that is to say, its character as a door that closes and, at the same time, opens to the Other-of-Itself. The border is a negotiable limit that, under certain conditions, can be crossed. It is a door that separates but, at the same time, opens: and it opens in the form of an opening subject to rules, which allow the separated to relate without ceasing to be separated and, therefore, each one being Itself. For its part, given its compact physicality, the wall finds its own essential foundation in non-transpassability—it closes and separates in an unconditional and non-negotiable way.
Materializing a pre-existing frontier, the wall makes it powerful to the point of taking it to the extreme in the form of an impassable door; with this the frontier is strengthened in a paroxysmal way, until it is—paradoxically—annulled in its essence. From this point of view, one could rightly understand the wall, rather than as a border realized in material form, as a border that, through its own materialization, has been stripped of its fundamental prerogatives. And, in this way, it has denied its own essence, becoming something else.
The border, as an immaterial limit that allows a regulated crossing, is a requisite for any possible relationship between identity and otherness—it is a sine qua non condition for the Other to be Other (foreigner, in political terms) and for the Self to be Myself (citizen, in political terms), but also for there to be a relationship, an exchange, a recognition between the two parties. The raising of a wall petrifies in unconditional, definitive and non-negotiable opposition the difference between identity and otherness, between citizen and foreigner, between Self and Other-of-Self.
It is therefore necessary to question the definition of the wall as the materialization of a border. Such a definition, in the light of what has been said, asks to be incorporated in the following way—the wall materializes the border and, in doing so, does not realize it in an improved form, but annihilates it in its essence.
The bilateral nature of the border, its porosity, its negotiable and traversable character, its capacity to close by opening and to open by closing, but also its essence as a door that looks out on one side and the other, delimiting them and placing them in a relationship of recognition according to their own specificities and in accordance with a potentially peaceful and horizontal nexus; all this is neutralized by the wall which, simply, in a materially definitive and non-negotiable way, closes without opening, places the parties in a relationship of mutual exclusion and, with the verticality of its structure, hierarchizes a relationship between elements that are not supposed to communicate. With the wall, “the border is sclerotized, it becomes hermetic,” losing that porosity which is its essential feature. If it is true that, as porous, the border defines identities by putting them in relation to each other, the wall is confirmed as the φάρμακον (“poison”) that kills the border precisely when it wants to protect it.
If, as Debray explains, “a recognized border is the best vaccine against the epidemic of walls,” it is also true that the epidemic of walls destroys the prerogatives of the border which is, moreover, a more specific determination of the boundary. We could, in synthesis, define the border as the actively controlled boundary or, also, as the gate that expressly regulates the passage and the exchange between the two parts divided by it. The boundary is structurally based on the idea of the “cum-finis” (limit, border, edge, frontier), it separates two entities in the very act with which it places them in relation. Still today, if we look closely, border zones exhibit their character of places of “contact” and, therefore, of coexistence of the different, separated and, at the same time, put in communication by the border itself.
This is what anthropology, among other disciplines, also suggests to us. Fredrik Barth—to whom we owe the thematization of the concept of “ethnic boundary”—stated in his work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969) that every boundary is a “double boundary,” because two realities are united and separated by their presence. Through the practice of the “social production of cultural difference,” Barth explains, the “ethnic boundary” allows a group to develop a clear self-definition, which enables its members to interact with members of other groups who define themselves differently; and this to ensure that identity itself is the axis of that exchange and that relationship between groups, which could not occur in the absence of the “ethnic boundary,” thus defined, between different groups.
This means that the border, making me “what I am” by comparison and distinction with “what I am not,” is already by its essence a form of sharing of the world between relational identities. Thus understood, the cum-finis coincides with the point at which I touch the not-I, the Other-of-me; just as the skin of our body coincides with the point at which I touch and am touched and, therefore, at which the I and the Thou meet, similarly the border is the space by definition of encounter and not of opposition, of conjunction and not of disjunction. The truth is that there can be no contact beyond the space of separation, without which, in fact, there is no contact, but the undifferentiated identical. In its most general definition, reality could be understood as the relation of entities to each other, united as parts of a single reality precisely because they are separated and in contact with each other. Borders are, in the same way, what separates and unites the whole of humanity: separates it by distinguishing it in its cultures, and unites it as the relation between the differences that together make up the differentiated totality of humankind.
As Nancy has emphasized, if properly conceived and thus properly distinguished from the wall, the border is not a barrier that excludes and through which the other is walled off, while at the same time being walled in oneself: it is, au contraire, what makes possible that continuity and that proximity of being beside the Other and with the Other, expressed by the “cum”—from cum-finis (border)—as a unifying force. If the logic of the wall is disjunctive in a paroxysmal way, that of the border—despite always dragging with it the possible temptation of the wall—is a unitive logic through dialogue, and a logic of proximity through differentiation.
Popular language and common sense can help us. It is proverbially said that “good borders make good neighbors,” because they are the fruit of a shared will and mutual recognition. In a diametrically opposed way, walls almost never make good neighbors. They testify, on the contrary, that relations between neighbors are anything but idyllic. Indeed, if the border were recognized bilaterally, what need would there be to build a wall to emphasize it and make it impassable? Precisely in this lies a further difference between the logic of the border and that of the wall: the first, precisely because it is recognized biunivocally by the two parties it divides, can be crossed while respecting certain rules. The second, however, since it is generally established unilaterally, cannot be crossed and reaffirms a relationship of hostility with the other party.
This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
Featured: City walls of Rome seen from the campagna, by “C.H.” Painted ca. 1840.
