‘Mind the gap’: Responding to the indeterminable in migration

Abstract

Prompted by Miriam Tedeschi’s (2021) article, this commentary attempts to unsettle the dominant understanding of a relation in migration research that prioritises linkages between people, places, and organisations while treating boundaries as limits to overcome. Building on geographers’ earlier engagements with Adorno, Levinas, and extending this conversation to include Blanchot, the analysis attempts to move beyond the hold of mastery on a relation with alterity. This commentary argues for an interruptive non-relation that resists the appropriation and affirms the dispersion of the self by the alterity it cannot internalise. It offers an alternative response to difference in migration that avoids bringing it to unifying continuity. Instead of treating interruptions in migration as gaps to be resolved through language, I consider the possibility of a neutral writing that reflects the powerlessness to say the unspeakable. In a movement of inscription and effacement, neutral writing invokes the unspeakable pain and affliction that exceeds the concepts to which it gives rise. The neuter answers for the non-subject of loss and trauma, the nothing often haunting international migrants.