Cohesion in the Lives of Migrants: Migration and Existential Orientation

Migration generates two distinct dispositions. The first one involves a nostalgic desire to take with oneself the place of origin in its entirety. The other disposition, seeming to escape all that pertains to the past, answers to the imperative of being reborn and to the temptation of forgetting. Each disposition places at the heart of the existential space a problematic of orientation, from which the migrant formulates the questions of the toward-where and for-what of existence. This article attempts to situate the stakes of migration at the level of the life-cohesion of the migrant. This level enables us to reconsider the full range of the wounds inflicted by migration (melancholia and loss, guilt and remorse, frustration and humiliation). It also allows us understand how these wounds open, heal up, and possibly put behind through a management which, far from only involving the self of the migrant, implicates simultaneously both the community of origin and the community of reception.