47
describe is fundamentally connected to transsubjective phenomena. These phenomena
may be thought of here as a complex of histories, codes, and flows, shaping knowledge
and reason. I realize I am making a leap from Nietzsche through to more recent theories
proposed by Foucault, Bourdieu and others. However, the fundamental Imderstanding of
the subject as part of an influential matrix - however one wishes to define that
relationship and that influential matrix - unites these thinkers and carries into my
intended use here. Just as Jigo is not an automaton of the collective, he is also not
independent from the world around him. The balance here lies with the conditions in
which the individual finds themselves and, arguably, with the human capacity for
creativity and critical thought.
Returning to the disengaging migrant, this does not mean that members of the
collective necessarily become negative about the group, or refuse its communicative
reason which is based, after all, on a rationality shared by all members of the collective.
Rather, safety affords the individual freedom of subjective reflexivity to reconcile the
persistent, underlying contradiction between the expected world, based on narrative and
personal history, and the experienced world - Athens. Despite the palliative affects of
living within the collective, the schism between the individual’s vision and experience of
the world persists prompting, with time, an evaluation of their criteria of truth and
success and its relationship to knowing and acting. This reflexive time can be very
traumatic for the individual, despite having achieved a level of physical safety, since
many migrants are pressed to address troubling moral questions concerning their place in
the world, throwing into uncertainty the embedded and embodied narratives and
structures of their place of origin and path of travel which, in the end, distances the