The Mediterranean Sea as a space of address

In this paper, I argue (a) that refugees and migrants coming to the shores of Europe are the bearers of a claim, addressed to anyone but, more specifically, to European citizens and institutions; (b) that some people, such as rescuers, are willing to acknowledge it even though they may be unable to fully meet its demands and this has a cost for their lives; (c) that most people look away by placing the survivors’ plight in the background and focusing on the concerns of their daily lives; (d) that, in so doing, they indirectly acknowledge the legitimacy of the claim they neglect and transform Europe into a fortress and the Mediterranean Sea into a wide moat; (e) that a fortress is dispossessed of the sort of porosity that is constitutive of the experience of homeliness; moreover, (f) that it can hardly provide the sort of protection it is designed for, since the reason why the secondary expectation was disregarded in the first place applies within a fortress as well; (g) that only by acknowledging the claim that the dead and the survivors make on Europe —and thereby recognizing the Mediterranean Sea as the space of address that it truly is—, can we begin to build a home where one could live.