Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity

3. Das Unheimliche

51 Chapter 3 Das Unheimliche There is no place for a homeless person. I always feel out of place, no matter where I am. I feel I shouldn’t be there, I’m not wanted there. . . . I feel I’ve lost my citizenship. I have no rights and no responsibilities. No one cares what I do. I have no connection with the society I grew up in. —A homeless person, quoted in Eliot Liebow, Tell Them Who I Am I’ve been homeless off and on since 1992. I went through three or four shelter programs before I figured out that they weren’t the answer. The problem is that we are living in a country with a political system that supports poverty and homelessness. As a homeless person, I don’t want charity. I don’t want a shelter. I want political power. I want my human rights. . . . —Dave, a homeless man, quoted in Lauren Byrne, “Homeless People Share Their Experience During the Third Annual Radio Marathon on Homelessness,” January, 2000, in Spare Change, Jan. 11–24, 2001 What is irritating about poverty is that it is visible, and anyone who sees it thinks: You see, I’m being accused; who is attacking me? —Charles Baudelaire, The Madness of the Day Introduction In Counterfeit Money, Jacques Derrida comments on the horror and contempt with which people hold beggars. They even feel self-righteous about this contempt: beggars, after all, have brought their misery upon themselves. Derrida notes that “the beggar represents a purely receptive, expending, and consuming agency, an apparently useless mouth.”1 The poor are always there; they signify endless, parasitic need. Money given to them represents a gift or a hand-out. They are different from us; they embody all of society’s pathologies: alcoholism, drug addiction, poor mothering, abuse, violence, and squalor. They are taking from us and not giving back. That is, the guilt of Schuld—which would imply a relationship , a type of responsibility and mutuality, between self and other—is transformed into debt and cements the separation of self and Other. It alters the relation from the complexity and boundlessness of human relations to a fiduciary exchange with limited roles and a beginning and end. In the modern nation-state, there are two principle reactions to the homeless and immigrants: demands for assimilation and criminalization . In either case, these demands spring from the desire to subsume the Other into the same or to radically expel the Other to maintain the purity of the (political) self. Both presuppose a radical separation of self and Other. That is, the subjectivity of citizenship is perceived as pure and unmarked by difference while difference is associated with the Other. The home as precondition for citizenship and symbol of industriousness is also idealized as “a place free of power, conflict, and struggle , a place—an identity, a private realm, a form of life, a group vision—unmarked or unriven by difference and untouched by the power brought to bear upon it by the identities that strive to ground themselves in its place.”2 Analogously, the exercise of state power in the homeland is most salient when trying to maintain stability and eradicate difference. Nevertheless , I will argue, the binary modes of self and Other that have been politicized so profoundly in modern times represent the repression (rather than the eradication) of difference, just as civil rights do not wholly solve societal problems but seemingly neutralize and displace them. The psychological split that is effected on political economic levels then allows for certain individuals to be treated as bare life. They are not viewed in human terms (as citizens) but denied the right to occupy public space. They can inhabit shelters but “Not in My Backyard” or they 52
Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity can escape political repression and wind up in a refugee camp or holding cell. In the end it is citizenship (and its preconditions) that guarantees that one can either occupy public space or move about freely in a country . In a world of increasing fluidity, citizenship is an abstraction and yet is our identitarian home. It grounds us (albeit problematically) in a world of seemingly global and impersonal processes. The historical process by which citizenship has become our most crucial identity—in either guaranteeing or precluding human existence—not only symbolizes the search for rootedness in an increasingly uprooted world, but also signifies a...