Giorgio Agamben - We Refugees

Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees." Symposium. 1995, No. 49(2), Summer, Pages: 114-119, English, Translation by Michael Rocke.

7. Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is sufficient here to suggest one possible direction. As is well known, one of the options considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that it become the capital, contemporaneously and without territorial divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this would imply could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we could look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations," whose catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).
This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory, nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories, making holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this new space, the European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality, would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the world

truce / sanctuary

barleys
skinge
homey
home
pax

what did you call it?
... fingers crossed

http://prism-break.org/

Desert

from
A Biblical and Theological Dictionary, John Farrar, 1884:

There is a difference between the meaning of the word desert as it occurs in Scripture, and the ordinary signification. The word generally rendered DESERT in Scripture, means a grazing-tract uncultivated and destitute of wood, but fit for pasture. The "pastures of the wilderness" are named in Scripture. Psal. lxv. 12; Joel i. 19. These deserts greatly varied with the seasons of the year. In summer they were burnt up with excessive drought; in the winter they were covered with pasturage. Whence it is that the Arabian tribes retreat into their deserts at the approach of autumnal rains, and when the drought commences they return to the lands of rivers and mountains, in search of the pastures which the deserts no longer afford. In the Bible, the different tracts mentioned as deserts are, Sin, Paran, Shur, Sinai, Kadesh, Judea, & c. The Hebrew word YESHIMON is applied to the desert of Arabia Petrea, in which the Israelites sojourned under the guidance of Moses. Numb. xxi 20; xxiii. 28. This was the most terrible of the deserts in which the Israelites dwelt: "A land of drought and of the shadow of death, a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt." Jer. ii. 6. "A waste howling wilderness." Deut. xxxii. 10

from
A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Walter Skeat, 1897:

Series, a row. [L.] L. series, a row. - L. serere, to join or bind together [pp. sertus].
desert [1], a waste. [F. - L.] O.F. desert, a wilderness. - L. desertus, waste; pp. of deserere, to desert, abandon. - L. de, away [negative]; serere, to join.

pedestrian refuge

First House

http://www.reginalibrary.ca/prairiehistory/index.html