By Nadja Stamselberg Reflecting on the notion of movement, which strategically crops up every time the multitude needs a definition, for instance when the concept of multitude needs to be detached from the false alternative between sovereignty and anarchy calls for its definition. Leaving it undefined, Agamen claims, risks compromising our choices and strategies. He argues that the primacy of the notion of movement lies in the becoming unpolitical of the people. The movement becomes the decisive political concept when the democratic concept of the people, as a political body, is in demise. Democracy ends when movements emerge. Furthermore, if by democracy we mean what traditionally regards the people as the political body constitutive of democracy, no democratic movements exist. But then why do we keep using the concept of movement? if it signals a threshold of politicisation of the unpolitical, can there be a movement that is different from civil war? or in what direction can we rethink the concept of movement and its relation to bio-politics? Potential answers can be found in Mezzadra’s proposal to name migration as a social movement. The movement can find its own politicality only by assigning to the unpolitical body of the people an internal caesura that allow for its politicisation. For Schmitt, this caesura consists in the identity of species, i.e. racism. Analogously, the internal caesura, which allows for politicisation of the social movement of migration, is the practices of exclusion the migrant and the refugee are subjected to. The appellation of migration as a social movement can be found throughout Mezzadra’s body of work. In his call to re-address migration, one is invited to move away from the manner in which immigrants have been confronted in recent years. Despite referring to the immigrant situation in Italy, which resulted in a critique of the Bossi-Fini Law, the relevance of his observations transcends not only the Italian, but also the European sphere. Perceived as a weak subject, hollowed out by hunger and misery and in urgent need of care and help, the immigrant as Mezzadra describes him/her is an easy prey for a paternalistic logic that ascribes him/her to an inferior position, thus denying him/her any possibility of becoming a subject. The obverse face of this perception of the migrant is the emphasis of the right to difference, which characterises the multicultural understanding shared by most of the political and social Left. In view of this view of the Left, which depicts migrants as simple objects, dragged along and overwhelmed by the global mobilisation of capital, and in view of the naturalistic metaphors of the dominant public discourse, the need to revise the migration rhetoric becomes imperative. Through the prism of semantic appropriation, the migrant becomes as hazardous and in some cases deadly as the occurrences that initiated his/her exodus. Having escaped the objective causes, the migrants are subsequently objectified. As they become objects themselves, divorced from any subjective and personal dimension of being, they are subjected to a crude generalisation, numbering and classification implicit in the mainstream treatment of migratory processes. Ascribing these views to a lack of focus on the subjectivity of migrants, Mezzadra proposes to utilise the concept of what he aptly terms right to escape. Emphasising the subjective dimension of migration, Mezzadra claims, does not mean assuming the Anglo-Saxon position of considering a migrant as a rootless, nomadic post-modern subject freely crossing the boundaries between cultures and identities. For him, what constitutes the paradigmatic status of the migrant’s condition lies in instances of transformation that regard not only migrants. However, practices of exclusion, which correspond to objectivisation of migration, politicise migration as a movement, inevitably raise the question of whether subjectivisation of migration thus depoliticises it. Should we indeed read this trajectory as depolitisation, or as an invitation to interpret differently the concept of the political and the concept of democracy, and to try and articulate both concepts via the notions of gift and singularity?