Composing a World of Common Vulnerability: Spectral Metaphors and Disoriented Migrations in Ruth Padel's The Mara Crossing

Abstract

This essay examines disorientation as a mode of thinking and a response to the emergency of irregular migration in the Mediterranean. I argue that staying with the affective and intellectual experience of disorientation represents a means to ethically engage with the disempowered and dislocated experience of irregular migrants. Bringing together Paul Ricoeur's work on metaphor as a momentary rupture in the direction of thought that invites us to not only accommodate difference but make it the basis for relationality, and Bruno Latour's concept of politics as ‘the progressive composition of a common world’, this essay reads The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padel's recent collection of poetry and prose reflections on human and animal migrations, as composing a poetics of common vulnerability. Just as metaphor risks the decomposition of meaning in the arrangement of unlikeness, responding to the challenge to re-orient politics requires engaging with the productive potential of disorientation. In situating critical responses to the disaster of Mediterranean migration in the points of torsion that compose scenes of irregular migration as scenes of political and ethical disorientation, it is possible, I believe, to also discover a path towards a re-orientated, ethically-informed politics.