“Border” and “Frontier” are configurations that name differently the spatial dispositif that regulates and organize the relationship between inside and outside, between citizens and foreigners. My essay aims to define each one of these spatial categories on the basis of their respective ontological, political, geographical meaning and function. Starting from their original definition in ancient Rome, I analyze their function through the political forms (City, Empire, State) they determinated during the ancient and modern history. The transformations that the inclusion/exclusion dispositif has undergone in the course of history on a political, legal and geographical level —evident if one considers how these have influenced the configuration of cartographic maps— are reflected in the determination of subjectivity.
It is therefore possible to define a border subject and a frontier subject if their subjectification proceeds from the border disposif or from the frontier dispositif. On a geopolitical level, the formation of the modern state has undoubtedly led to the dominance of the border dispositif from a political and legal point of view. However, this has not led to the frontier being limited to a fundamentally symbolic
level. Rather, the frontier has been defined as a dispositif whose effectiveness can be measured in the medical and economic sphere, since the era of the emergence of the political form of the state in Europe. Moreover, the American experience of the frontier in the formation of the United States reveals the peculiarity of the frontier dispositif even in modern times. Nowadays more than in the past, it is difficult to identify and distinguish between border and frontier subject. European citizens themselves feel in their individual lives that the legal and political guarantees given to them by that citizenship which identifies them as border subjects are called into question —for example within the global labour market— by their potentially being frontier subjects.