Securitizing the Fences of Capital: Disposability, Racialized Border Regimes, and Absurdity as Critique in Gianna Molinari’s Hier ist noch alles möglich

Gianna Molinari’s 2018 novel Hier ist noch alles möglich is set in a Swiss factory approaching closure, narrated by a night watchwoman whose repetitive patrols along the fences defamiliarize borders and surveillance by making them visible as practices enmeshed in regimes of capital accumulation. At a time of mass redundancies, policing the factory’s fences in its dying days becomes an allegory of modes of securing the stability of capital during crisis times. I read Molinari’s allegorical aesthetics as illuminating how controlling people who are about to be rendered surplus goes hand-in-hand with displacement onto a racialized crisis of borders. Textual figuration of avoiding dealing with the root causes of surplusification emphasises the question about what has the capacity to render people disposable. Drawing on Marxist materialist methodologies, racial capitalism and critical border studies, I argue that the text’s imagery foregrounds questions of the political economy by showing the economy and border security working in tandem. Bordering and security appear as political-economic technologies that create and perpetuate the divisions upon which capital depends. Molinari mobilizes the figure of the wolf, said to be lurking around the fences, to critique the expansion of borders by showing them as a response to the crises of capitalism which does not resolve the structural contradictions but performs sovereignty through infrastructures of exclusion and securitization. The externalized and racialized figure of the wolf exposes the ways that economic turmoil is politically negotiated through displacement onto narratives of belonging and a panic about dangerous figures. The text effects a reverse displacement by foregrounding the real violence which is the rendering of populations excludable in the service of capital accumulation. The wolf refers to the institution of the ‘free’ labour market as a form of capitalist domination, as well as to how the real crisis of working people’s disposability is displaced onto a crisis about external threats. In a second critical strand, the text links the factory to the nearby airport to foreground the close relation between the fences of capital and national borders. By weaving in the true story of a stowaway, probably from Cameroon, who fell to his death from the wheel well of an aeroplane near Zürich, Molinari re-routes the criticism of capital through colonial–racial histories. Property and racialized belonging, capitalism and the state, emerge as an encompassing political-economic system. The man’s death is viewed through the fences of capital and, conversely, European capital in relation to the nation-state’s race-making. Molinari’s novel addresses in codified form the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, contemporary border enforcement and migration control, and rising ethnonationalism in Europe. My reading of Molinari, expands Swiss literary studies predominantly concerned with the construction and deconstruction of (national) identity.