Бежанецът – социална траектория през конститутивните фигури на чуждостта
The Refugee – A Social Trajectory through the Figures of Strangeness

Summary/Abstract: This article is an attempt at a sociological reconstruction of the refugee’s social situation – the radical historical metamorphosis of the fi gure of the ‘stranger’ in the 20th century. The analysis focuses on the fi gure of the refugee аs an absolute form of alienation (as a result of exclusion) from the social world. The first step reproduces the key moments of Georg Simmel’s study on the “sociological form of the stranger as a synthesis between remoteness and closeness”. The second step traces out the constitutive elements in Alfred Schutz’s conception of “the stranger as an adult individual of our time and civilization, who tries to be permanently accepted or at least tolerated by a group which he approaches”. The third step, through the analytical strategies of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, represents an endeavor to restore the historical conditions of possibility of the fi gure of the refugee: as a ‘boundary-concept’ which puts in question such fundamental categories as those of the nation-state, the social link between birth and nation as well as between human and citizen. Such a reconstruction promises to liberate an interpretative fi eld for categorical reactivation aiming at consistent politics where the refugee question will not be separated and excluded from the structure of the national state order, or from the logic of human rights. Nor will the refugee be an exile among insoluble ethical problems.

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