Alterità e schismogenesi: migranti, polarizzazione, rischio

Abstract

In the West, postmodern migration actualizes and amplifies a trend of cultural polarization between xenophilia and xenophobia. This is an archetypal schismogenetic tendency that has connoted the Western Weltanschauung since the dawn of modernity and takes the political form of the opposition between progressives and conservatives, between left and right, thus defining an internal axis of otherness substantiated by a Manichaean meta-tribal dualism in which each of these two sides represents itself ethnocentrically as the bearer of humanity and truth, representing the other side as inhuman and false. In a historical context of the hegemony of the paradigm of postcolonial critique, a regime of truth and an order of discourse based on xenophilia is determined; in this sense openness to the other as enrichment in its diversity and expiation of colonial sins is configured as an axiom that brands as xenophobic and therefore morally unspeakable any discourse oriented to highlight and problematize the possibility of the migrant's hostile foreignness. While such an arrangement protects migration from sovereignist, supremacist instances, expression of an intra-Western fascism that survives in conservatism, it also exposes the removal of the given risk of exotic fascism, which manifests itself mainly at the intersection of Sharia Islamist jihadism and basic sentiments of generic and widespread anti-Western hatred. This Manichean set-up can only be overcome by understanding that, similarly to how we combat negative generalizations of otherness and the self-serving alarmism they underlie, we should also pay attention to positive generalizations of otherness and their naive reassuranceism.