Abdelmalek Sayad: from the double absence to presentification as historical condition of migration

Abstract (en)

Bringing Sayad into dialogue with other authors, this article proposes the concept of presentification as a political use of time by nation-states, functional to the subjugation of people. European border policies, in fact, force migrant subjectivities in regimes of legal uncertainty and temporal precariousness, weaponizing time in order to abstract them from History, placing them in a reiterated present. Presentification produces absence from the historical field, while people attempt to make themselves presences.

Indeed, this condition is challenged by migrant subjectivities, which try to re-appropriate their own time, activating processes of subjectivation, emerging from the meshes of regimes of subjugation. The “provisional that lasts” produces something where it makes a presence through forms of political activation that interrupt the recursiveness produced by border regimes. This article thus moves from the dialectic between fields of force within which the game of the subject is played out: on the one hand, presentification and individuation, on the other, subjectivation and historicisation.

Keywords: Abdelmalek Sayad; temporal borders; presentification