Seminar: Is the Polis a Fiction? Citizenship, sovereignty, borders (prof. Mark Devenney)
Is the Polis a Fiction? Citizenship, sovereignty, borders
Thinking the political in dialogue with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

Guest lecturer: Professor of Political Theory Mark Devenney, University of Brighton.
Chair: Professor of Ethnology Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Södertörn University.

This workshop on the political fictions constitutive of Europe will be arranged at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies. Professor of Political Theory Mark Devenney draws on his current work within the Horizon Europe project The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (CAPONEU), where he is rethinking the political. His most recent research focuses on the fictions that sustain our democratic imaginaries, and the ability of certain novels to tease and dissect even our most precious of political ideals.

For this lecture he will focus on the notions of sovereignty and citizenship, drawing on the recent novels of Jenny Erpenbeck. In particular he discusses the notion of the fictional certificate, the Fiktionsbescheinigung, used to register and control immigrants to Germany. The certificate is deemed fictional as opposed to real for a very specific reason – it maintains the refugee in an indeterminate legal space, a form of inclusive exclusion, in which they are subject to the law but not subjects of the law. This in-between state is necessary for a legal order that must draw its own limits – it cannot pretend the body that has arrived does not exist for fear it will be lost to the bureaucratic procedures that determine status and in all likelihood removal. By the same token the refugee cannot become a legal person with rights – because this would require recognition under the UN convention that obliges the German state to consider asylum. Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone compels us to consider that the sovereign determination of citizenship is itself a fiction, a contingent imaginary that polices the distinction between fact and fiction. Drawing on Hobbes’ recognition that sovereignty is ‘artificial’ Devenney imagines a democratic politics beyond these fictions – without however invoking something more real that sits beneath the fictions. What this leaves us with is the centrality of fiction to the very thinking of politics.

Time: 2pm-4pm
Date: Monday 13 April
Place: F819, floor 8 in the F-building (”F-huset”) at Södertörn University

Everyone is welcome!

Please email jenny.gunnarsson.payne(at)sh.se to receive a link to sign up.

This workshop is co-arranged by the multi-disciplinary research platform Contested Democracy and the national research school Future of Democracy. It is funded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.