Bernhard Waldenfels
Borders and thresholds appear as closely connected phenomena. Yet, thresholds evoke peculiar experiences and first of all experiences of alienness or otherness. It seems difficult to consider the phenomenon of threshold without referring to alienness, though neither of these themes ranks with the basic concepts of traditional Western thinking. Disciplines like physiology of the senses or ethnology seem to be better equipped to deal with such notions of borderline phenomena. Philosophers who want to take them into account are forced to modify their approaches. As far as I am concerned, the theme of threshold became attractive as I got engaged in the experience of the alien. It became attractive for various reasons. Firstly, the threshold as a grey zone between the ordinary and the extraordinary has been mentioned, while further aspects are the passage from inside to outside, the intermediary space between individuals and cultures, the different “sense thresholds,” and last but not least a specific sort of liminal alienness, displaying its effects beneath the threshold of given orders and sliding into the abysmal and the chaotic. I will not linger on these themes here.[1]
My reflections on threshold will be focused on three aspects. First, I want to show that thresholds are deeply connected with the phenomenon of alienness. Secondly, I shall stress that crossing thresholds refers to a bodily process of going across. Thirdly, I shall take into account certain cultural and even institutional aspects such as the famous “rites of passage.” On the whole, I think thresholds as a special kind of border.
What is crucial is the basic difference between the other and the alien. Running through different ways of drawing boundaries this difference leads us immediately to the threshold of alienness we are looking for. On the one hand, there is the ontological concept of the other (heteron, aliud) which contrasts with the concept of the same (tauton, idem). This antithesis originates from a process of delimitation, which is always carried out from the standpoint of a mediating third. The apple is something other than the pear, the pear something other than the apple, but both pertain to the genre of fruits. The given relation is basically symmetrical; it can be reversed at any time: A is not B; B is not A. Otherness, taken as an individual or typical difference, pertains to the fundamental categories of ontology which reach its canonical form along the way from Plato through the Middle Ages and up to Hegel. Now, otherness in the sense of something different has nothing to do with the phenomenon of alienness which is at stake here. We should be cautious even to use the sociological concept of identity; identity arises from a process of identification, not from a primary experience of the alien.
Alienness emerges as soon as we consider another kind of drawing boundaries. The alien (xenon) does not oppose the same, but rather the self (autos, ipse), including one’s own. This becomes clear when we consider that Aristotle names the friend “another self” (allos or heteros autos), that Thomas of Aquinas calls it alter ipse, or that Paul Ricœur regards one’s own self as another (see Soi-même comme un autre). The self is not the relatum of a given duality or plurality, but it results from a process of self-differentiation. Rimbaud’s famous dictum “I is another” does not indicate a mere variant of the formula “X is other than Y.” Therefore alterity or otherness, intended as the question of the Other or the question de l’autre, should not be confused with otherness in the sense of diversity. For my part, in such cases I prefer to speak of Fremdheit, not only in order to avoid any ambiguity, but also in order to avoid limiting alienness as the personal Other (in French the autrui). But much more important than these linguistic regulations is the clarification of things themselves. The difference between one’s own and the alien originates from a peculiar process of inclusion and exclusion. This process does not involve two terms, but two topoi; for alienness does not consist in something being different from another thing, but rather in something being far from me or from us. Everything that is alien turns out to be absent or inaccessible while escaping from our grasp. Absence, remoteness, inaccessibility, and withdrawal are decisive for any experience of the alien. Thus the theme of alienness pertains to a genuine topology—or, more precisely, to a chronotopology, because spatial and temporal distances are closely connected in relation to our bodily movement.
The connection between what is one’s own and what belongs to the Other constitutes
a special kind of relation. It turns out to be an asymmetrical relation unable to be reversed following the simple paradigm: Chinese people are
different from Japanese people, Japanese people are different from Chinese people,
but both are Asiatic. This version presupposes a third who equalizes what is unequal,
neglecting the singularity of what remains unequal. Now, it is important to see that
the very experience of the alien we are faced with whenever somebody looks at us or
appeals to us has clear features of a threshold experience. We are crossing a threshold without ever standing on both sides at once. So Walter
Benjamin writes in his Passagen-Werk: “The threshold is sharply distinguished from the borderline. Threshold is a zone,
a transformation, a passage, floods are indicated in the word ‘schwellen’ (swell).”[2] Threshold means an intermediary zone which sepa-
rates two areas from each other, the one marked as one’s own and as the familiar,
the other as the alien and the heterogeneous. This implies a minimal definition of
the threshold. But when Benjamin remarks that today we are “poor in threshold experiences”
he suggests that such an experience of the alien cannot be taken as given once and
for all. Characterizing the human being as a being on the threshold one has to take
into account that we are encountering thresholds not only in one way, but in various
ways. Thresholds are going to be experienced and articulated in each case as thresholds precisely in the way as the alien is experienced and articulated as alien. The tiny phenomenological or hermeneutic “as,” functioning as the hinge of sociocultural
variations, cannot be homogenized by a sort of anthropological constant. So far we
have looked at the main lines of a phenomenology of threshold, which now have to be
detailed.
Within the field of threshold experiences one can distinguish between liminal actions, liminal figures, and liminal genres. My own attempt will primarily refer to actions. But to be more precise, it will even more elementarily refer to bodily movements which might be taken as a kind of proto-actions. This holds especially true for the act of “going” which manifests itself as a specific human kind of locomotion.[3] Such a motion is not limited to aiming at something and following certain rules; on the contrary, the personal “I go” is permanently interwoven with a sort of “it goes.” The process of going, demonstrated by Giacometti’s marching figures in their bodily concreteness, hides various forms of what Jean Paul calls “faded metaphors,” as, for example, in terms like transition, transgression, Über-gang, or meta-basis.[4] But there is one form of going which plays an eminent role in the experience of threshold, namely the process of going across (Hinübergehen).
The spatiotemporal movement which leads us across or beyond a certain border first opens a gap between this side and the other side, between here and beyond. Both sides should by no means be confused with the two sides of a coin turned around as one wishes. The movement of going beyond takes place on a borderline which emerges from the transition itself. This side is precisely the place from where the movement starts. This simple fact becomes obvious in Kafka’s famous parable Von den Gleichnissen.[5] This paradigmatic text, dealing with similes, makes us listen to the voice of a wise person who proclaims nothing but: Geh hinüber—Go across. This brief invitation calls to mind the words of the Platonic Socrates who proclaims, considering the ineradicable evil in this world “one must try to fly from here to there (enthende ekeise)” (Theaetetus 176 a–b). It is hardly possible to express the abrupt change of place more concisely than by the clash of these two adverbs of place: from here to there. But whereas Plato’s Socrates provides us with a compass, oriented towards the “assimilation to God,” Kafka’s wise man leaves us without a compass or map. Where is the beyond? Beyond is exactly there where I am going. This sounds rather tautological. The listeners in the parable, worried by their everyday pains, also oppose some “legendary or fantastic beyond,” and doing so they are certainly not completely wrong. Going beyond and going down, Übergang and Untergang, cannot be simply separated from each other as we already learn from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. However, Kafka appears as obstinate as the wise man in the parable. Another of his texts, simply entitled Aufbruch, that is, “departure” or “outset,” concludes with a sort of dispute between the author and an anonymous servant. “‘Where do you ride Sir?’ ‘I do not know,’ I said, ‘only far away from here. Always away from here, so only I can reach my goal.’ ‘So you know your goal?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘I just said it. Away from here—that is my goal.’” The Aufbruch, a departure, means a Bruch, that is, a rupture in the course of our experience. Indeed, there would be no veritable departure and no veritable break if one would know in advance what is to be expected on the other side of the threshold. We would behave like those people mocked by Lichtenberg when he writes: “In order to find something many people and perhaps most of them must first know that it is there.”[6] It would not be out of place to name an experience based in a previous knowledge as an experience without thresholds.
The two unequal sides, locating us either on this side or on the other side, join two likewise unequal spheres which make us stay either inside or outside. Ownness and alienness constitute places where we stay and from where we fly. These spheres cannot be unified anymore by reverting things, as if everything inside were at the same time outside, and everything outside at the same time inside, as Spinoza suggests. As long as one thinks in this way alienness appears as only relatively alien, subordinated to the dominant function of the own. Consequently, staying inside we would be enveloped in what is more or less familiar, feeling safeguarded and secure. Going outside we would move on to an unfamiliar terrain. The common emblem of the inside is the house (oikos) where one is literally with oneself, chez soi. What is called domestic (oikeios) means both what is one’s own and familiar and, in addition, what is convenient. What Husserl calls “sphere of ownness” expands from one’s own body, constituting an osmotic skin-ego,[7] through one’s domicile and one’s neighborhood, through one’s own city and one’s own country up to the world. The world as the universe, encompassing everything and everybody, has certain internal, but no external boundaries. From this perspective, house thresholds and threshold countries would be nothing but relative zones of transition within an all-encompassing whole. But such a cosmic and cosmopolitical order of things, delivered by our tradition, is shaken when the great order splits into a plurality of contingent orders and when every order carries with it shadows of the extraordinary. This new kind of radical alienness originates in each of us rather than anywhere. Considering that we humans are not masters in our own house, as Freud emphasized, thresholds do not only arise in the form of outer, but also in the form of inner thresholds. Through the labyrinth of the unconscious we step into a “foreign country inside ourselves.”[8] We are not only separated from others, but from ourselves too.
The basic difference between the own and the alien, which is inscribed into every kind of order, is delineated in archaic forms of alienness which permeate traditional forms of life. This includes the collectively enrooted difference between the profane and the sacred. We meet not only with house thresholds, but also temple thresholds. Far East temples, like that of Nara, provide us with impressive examples. The beam of the temple gate is so massive that it really stops our step. One enters not only a different, but a foreign terrain while stepping into the inner area. This means much more than a mere change of place which would lead to another territory—not a foreign one. The entrance in such alien spheres is traditionally supported by rituals of access, such as ceremonials of purification including taking off one’s shoes or putting on a headgear. Obviously these rituals persist today in the area of churches, synagogues, and mosques. Such thresholds are often protected by figures like the Cerberus who guards the doors of the Hades or by symbolic warriors flanking Eastern temple gates. The concierge, guarding the door threshold of bourgeois domiciles—and frequently replaced by entrance codes—can be taken as a secularized version of older customs. This leads us to the installation of prohibition barriers which keep our gaze and touch at a distance and which in archaic morality constitute the so-called taboos. Generally, thresholds do not cease to form our civilized everydayness which is never completely free of sacred and mystical elements.[9] Thresholds radiate a certain invisibility and inaccessibility. If they were reduced to something visible and touchable they would be domesticated and located in a sphere of familiarity.
But how should we understand the movement which marks the process of transition or Über-gang? If it meant nothing but a spontaneous act, carried out by our own force, everything that happens on the other side would be anticipated and mastered from this side. What is beyond would be nothing more than an expansion of our own possibilities. It would certainly include places where we are no longer or where we are not yet, but these would be places which we certainly could occupy under adequate conditions; they could be filled like white spots on a map. Thresholds would be nothing more than casual obstacles on our way; we could remove or avoid them, at least to some extent. Yet thresholds inherent to our experience of alienness are something other. We cross them every day and every night when falling asleep or waking up. They shape the course of our life from youth up to old age, from one generation to the other, from birth to death. They also articulate the public history whose time-waves permanently run against the thresholds of forgetting and expecting. In his Traumdeutung Freud refers to a “threshold symbolism” which introduces the process of waking up into various spheres.[10] As Freud remarks, the “crossing of a threshold” is followed by phenomena like “leaving one room in order to enter another, departure, coming home, being separated from a companion, dipping into water and others.” Some of these phenomena will reappear in what follows. The quality of the thresholds we are crossing varies, but in each case they lead us into spheres which recede as soon as we enter them. The hesitation which accompanies our entering an alien sphere is not due to our awkwardness, but to an inevitable state of oscillation which prevents us from coming to rest either here or there. Do we hesitate too long? “The longer one hesitates before a door, the more estranged one becomes,” Kafka writes in his text Heimkehr, that is, coming home.[11] The process of passing to the other side is not an affair of pure voluntary decisions; it is impelled by threshold affects. They manifest themselves in threshold anxiety as well as in the cautious lifting of a veil or in the secret look behind the looking glass. We try to conceive what is unconceivable. That the “unconceivable is unconceivable,” as the listeners in Kafka’s parable are ready to admit, in itself does not help. The breaking-in of the horrible which we know from ballads such as Goethe’s Erlkönig or from Poe’s Fantastic Tales is generally accompanied by phenomena of sense confusion. Paul Valéry states in his Cahiers: “The threshold is in general characterized by a loss of control. Joy, desperation, dejection, consternation—and their more harmless forms—all intensive phenomena, without any meaning except an energetic one.”[12] By pointing to an exclusively energetic meaning the author suggests that something comes up before making sense, before being submitted to a rule and being identified. Threshold experiences are not only pre-predicative, but also pre-conceptual.
Every movement that crosses a threshold is close to a stumbling; no movement occurs without an encounter with something or somebody. Thus in the mentioned text, which revolves around the narrator’s hesitation before the home door, Kafka evokes a counter-movement: “How would it be if now someone opened the door and put some question to me.” The door opens—or it does not open. We engage in something alien which comes up to us, either inspiring or threatening. As already shown, Walter Benjamin connects the threshold, in German called Schwelle, with a process of swelling. Something urges or presses across the threshold. Something overcomes us; something comes into our view or into our mind. The counter-movement of coming, which in words like Zukunft or avenir clearly shows its temporal feature, differs from our own going in terms of direction; our going from here finds its counterpoint in something coming from there.[13] This bend which splits the movement into two parts excludes the possibility to synchronize the movement’s to-and-fro; in this respect, it contrasts with the exchange of standpoints and perspectives which allows us to integrate the own and the alien into something common. We come across a constitutive asymmetry which opposes all social theories which are constructed on a symmetrical ground-plan. Between this side and the other side, between here and there a gap opens which can be crossed, but not bridged. When Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (B 811) states that all demonstrations lacking a synthetic and a priori foundation are like “water breaking its banks, run wildly across the country, wherever the tendency of hidden association may happen to lead them,” he touches on a productive “anarchy of experience,” arising from all that happens to us beyond our own control. I call this peculiar sort of happening pathos or Widerfahrnis. The pathos which comes to us and our own response which comes from us collide with each other without coming together in one and the same stream of experience, or in one and the same regulation of experience. Thresholds function as rapids; they stir up whirls making our experience pause and divide.
The real riddle of the threshold experience lies in a certain between generating a transitional place and time where the double movement of coming and going happens. To use the term “between” is not without problems. In a similar way as we are accustomed to distinguish between an operating body and a body-thing or between an operating picture and a picture-thing we can double the operating threshold by a threshold-thing. Due to its materiality the threshold pertains to a sort of Zwischendinge, intermediary things we will speak of below.
The functionality of the threshold, which constitutes the threshold as such, manifests itself in the process of transition, but it does so in various ways. The threshold turns out to be an intermediary place, an intermediary time, and an intermediary state; the threshold itself is neither located on this side nor on the other side. Every sort of identifying thought tends to take the “between” as something or as somebody placed in the middle of two other terms. But in this way the transition would be stopped. Instead, we have to assume that the operating threshold really achieves the transition from this side to the other side, from just now to forthwith, from one quality to the other. Such transitions are originally rendered by polar verbs such as waking up and falling asleep, getting ill and getting healthy, further by process verbs such as growing up and aging, or by inchoative and final verbs such as being born and dying. In this way the operating “between” reveals itself as a kind of no-thing and no-one.
Other examples can be used to illustrate this, such as that of the ecstatic moment,
the now. In his dialogue Parmenides (156 d–e) Plato conceives the change (metabolē) from rest to motion as the suddenness (exaiphnēs) of the instant: “This queer (atopos, literally: placeless) being, the instant, lurks between (metaxy) motion and rest—being in no time at all.” This important passage, which contains
the seeds for further ideas, reappears in a long footnote of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiousness where the author tries to deliver the either-or of decisions from the mediating continuity
of history.[14] The “great noon,” evoked by Nietzsche in the end of the first part of Zarathustra, is also situated on the summit of time where time, “on the way to a new to-morrow,”
is swinging beyond itself. And in Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation we read: “Everyone who is unable to settle down on the threshold of the instantaneous
now (auf der Schwelle des Augenblicks), forgetting every past, everyone who is unable to stand, without dizziness and fear,
on one point like a Victory, will never know what is happiness, and even worse, he
will never do what makes others happy.”[15] We find a last example in
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.[16] As the author tries to show, we do not see a bird that is flying, being first here, then there, but we rather see a bird on the wing, being still here and already there. This implies that the world, as it is revealed
in the perception of movement, does not primarily consist of objects, but rather of
transitions. In a similar context, Husserls speaks of a “synthesis of transition,” that is, of
a sense constituting synthesis which is not imposed to the movement, but emerges from
it.
The nothingness of the “between,” appearing as a gap which manifests itself as being without place, time, and support, calls for substitutes which, similar to Derrida’s scriptural supplements, stand in without filling out the lacuna. To that extent, thresholds take the form of a third. But this peculiar kind of third does not mediate by providing explanations, rules, and structures; on the contrary, it merely intervenes, functioning as a substitute. If we did not have such transitional forms, we would be alternatively on this side, that is, on the side of the normal, or on the other side, that is, on the side of the extreme, and we would have no chance even to name the other side. Now, there really exist typical forms of transition. Some of them shall be heuristically presented here; they could be regarded as important parts of a differentiated sort of limnology.
In a general way we already alluded to places of transitions and to times of transition. When going more into detail we can enumerate waiting-places like the lift, the waiting-room, the stopping-place, or the antechamber; traveling places like the train compartment or the cockpit; deviant places like the sanatorium, the prison, or the home; farewell places like the platform or the cemetery; transgression places like the localities of cult or of art and so on. All this pertains to the multiplicity of an elaborated topography of the alien.[17] Spatial shifts or displacements, caused by the fact that we are never completely in place in such threshold places, create a permanent disquiet which can be felt either as stimulating or as disturbing. What suits this situation is a whole literature of waiting which is especially ripe in times of insecurity and uncertainty. One might think of Zarathustra’s waiting on the stone in Sils Maria, or of Kafka’s Before the Law, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Nabokov’s Invitation to Decapitation, or finally of Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Religious traditions present the limbo as a place between heaven and hell.
Furthermore there are hybrid forms, characterized by gliding scales which resist to a clear-cut classification. We could mention the twilight, where day and night are mixed, where the usual contours are blurred, and where we feel as being entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, as the French say, or in the lykophōs, in the wolf light, as the Greek put it.[18] We could further refer to the no-man’s land which begins with the ridges, which expands between the national boundaries and constitutes a kind of country fringe. In North Europe there were relatively wild and inaccessible boundary landscapes before borderlines were drawn and boundary stones were set.[19] The mixed forms include borderline phenomena like the doze or the daydream where wakening and sleeping are interwoven and the common threshold, separating wakening from sleeping, becomes permeable. Even Descartes’s sleepless Cogito is haunted by nightmares which dim his clear ideas. Finally, all civilizations are characterized by hybrids like chimeras, Hermaphrodites and bastards, magic creatures like witches and dwarfs, and more and more by technological monsters. The disquiet produced by such hybrids comes not least from the fact that the borderlines between humans and animals, between the human being and God, between male and female beings oscillate. Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be read as a collection of threshold stories whose coherence does not go back to previous identities, but to a permanent gestalt switch. When Aristotle opens the analysis of space in book IV of his Physics with the simple statement that the goat-stag or the sphinx are to be found in no place because they do not exist, he clearly separates logos from myth, reason from imagination. But this rationalization violates phenomena; it makes us forget that reason has its own alienness and enlightenment its own shadows. There is no real topic of the alien without heterotopias whose structures and rules differ from the usual orthotopia, and there is no topic without the atopia, the placelessness which Plato ascribes to Socrates.
Contestation and danger, produced by the transgression of the various thresholds, are mitigated by rituals of transitions which accompany each transition with interpretations and regulations. The extraordinary finds its own form by being treated precisely as something extraordinary. This does not only concern ethnological phenomena like the famous rites de passage which in traditional societies help people to get over crucial life-events like birth, death, maturation, and weddings. We should also mention inconspicuous everyday rituals, for example, “accessibility rituals” like greeting and farewell, by which social contacts are created, maintained, and renewed, and territorial claims are negotiated. In his Microstudies of the Public Order Erving Goffman shows that greetings mark the transition to a state of increased accessibility, departures the transition to a state of diminished accessibility.[20] Such “ritual clips” keep together what is to some extent accessible without belonging together. Such rituals are components of our dealing with the alien which, according to Husserl,[21] shows the paradoxical form of an “accessibility of what is originally inaccessible.” Greeting and farewell make sense only if our presence is haunted by a certain absence. Social threshold phenomena resist to a total individualization as well as to a total fusion. They represent a precarious balance between the own and the alien which is regulated by norms, but not at all created by them. The pure salutation on command pertains to a sort of institution which Goffman calls “total institution” and which could also be named institution without threshold.
As agencies of transition I characterize peculiar entities which initiate, accompany, and facilitate the passage across the threshold. Among them are transitional objects in the sense given to them by Donald W. Winnicott.[22] The psychoanalyst refers to things like stuffed animals or pillow tops which serve to create an intermediary space between the little child and its mother by substituting the absent mother and making her absence endurable. In such objects, which contribute to the playful and creative shaping of reality, the materiality of real things fuses with the child’s fantasies. Transitional objects are neither mere outer nor mere inner objects; this mode of being corresponds to the duplicity of the body as Leibkörper. We can also mention collective creations such as the gift and the pledge which according to Marcel Mauss serve to tie a social nexum; they show a hybrid form to the extent that they mix the person and the thing, the psychic and the material, the giver and the receiver. This view opens wide perspectives onto a field of “intermediary and transitional things.”[23] According to Mikhail Bakhtin it is speech itself which appears as a polylogue; with the intertwining and superposition of one’s own and the Other’s speech it takes on hybrid, heterogeneous, and responsive features. As the Russian theorist of literature remarks, vivid language moves “on the borderline between oneself and the other [. . .] The word in language is half foreign.”[24] Interruptions without which there would be no real dia-logue and no entre-tien, in Maurice Blanchot’s sense,[25] presuppose certain thresholds of alienness.
At last, on my part I repeatedly refer to transitional figures, each of them bound to specific institutions. One among them is the translator: as Heidegger puts it in his lecture on Heraclitus,[26] translating (Übersetzen) means at once passing over (Übersetzen) to another riverbank. But there are further figures of the third like the judge or the therapist whose task is to transform personal violations or sufferings into general cases of law or sickness.[27] These professional representatives incessantly transgress the threshold which separates singular and extraordinary happenings from the normality of institutional conditions. The judge who administers justice, speaking as a third party, and the therapeutic or the doctor who treats sicknesses, applying clinic skills, have their place simultaneously inside the institutions they represent and outside; this is so because they respond to claims of justice and manifestations of suffering which pass over the borders of normal regulations. The judge does not only decide a case of law, he speaks too in the name of the victim, and this precisely in a similar way as the doctor or the therapist does not only treat a sickness, but also substitutes for the patient. Extreme cases such as genocide, holocaust, or starving resist integration into normality; they clearly show that even in everyday circumstances there is more at stake than our mere everyday. If the thresholds which separate the everyday from the non-everyday are neglected there remains nothing more than social constructs such as the homo medicinalis, the homo legalis, or the better known homo oeconomicus. Here we come across a politics of threshold, corresponding to the politics of the alien.
Following Alfred Schütz, the socio-phenomenologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann like to speak of great, intermediate, and small transcendencies.[28] This sort of scaling can be applied to the phenomenon of threshold too. Small thresholds would be placed amidst our everydayness. They would be common like the various sense thresholds and inhibition thresholds with all their grades and quantifications which articulate our sense experience. One may consider the change of day and night, or the sequence of the seasons from which our course of life gets its rhythms, even if much of this is neutralized by technical arrangements. Coping with these recursive phenomena constitutes an essential part of our culture which does not cease to move on the threshold which separates and joins nature and culture, as Claude Levi-Strauss emphasizes. Intermediate thresholds correspond to greater sections of life. They are formed by the processes of aging, by stages of profession, and by the choice and change of partners, but also by the change of government or by an economic crisis. Finally, there remain the great thresholds we come across when our life or world changes as a whole. This concerns significant individual life-events such as birth, love, illness, and death. But it includes as well collective foundations in the field of politics, religion, art, philosophy, science, and technology as well as catastrophes like war destruction, genocide, expulsion, or natural catastrophes. Alfred Schütz, learning from his own destiny as a Jewish expatriate, has depicted the special experiences of threshold that the stranger and the home-comer go through due to a forced emigration or the painful return from war. The same author shows through the sad figure of Don Quixote to what extent an epoch threshold can confound people’s life by making their world derail.[29]
The criteria by which we assess whether a threshold has been crossed or not are threshold dates, which function as a sort of historical watershed; for Western people, for instance, that means before and after 1789, 1917/1918, 1968, 1989, and also after the Reformation, after Kant, after Einstein, after the invention of the steam engine or the railroad, and so on. The threshold dates are connected with threshold places where the proverbial Rubicon is passed; these crucial places are often marked by ruins and provided with monuments. Such a view, which introduces certain caesuras, is not self-evident. In the frame of the progressive and regressive conceptions of history, which are typical of Western thought, all thresholds we cross turn into steps we climb or descend. However, because all foundations of order and all break-ins of disorder appear to be contingent and irreversible, the thresholds between order and disorder can move, but they cannot be overcome or eliminated. Referring to individual cases, our distinction between minor, medium, and great thresholds cannot be drawn in a definitive way. Certain events acquire a symptomatic significance; they may look like slight changes, but at the same time they may be overdetermined to such a degree that they involve great effects. The weight that a special change has can be estimated only after the threshold has been passed over. Therefore we should remain skeptical when all too quick paradigm changes are proclaimed and when something is straight on declared as a historical event. Sometimes the Rubicon is not much more than a drain.
The question remains whether or to what extent thresholds can be transgressed. If we call thresholds insurmountable we really touch the impossible as we do when speaking of the invisible or the inaudible. Certainly, we are all too ready to keep distance from such impossibilities. Yet, when we admit the existence of contingent and limited orders, making in each case possible the one thing by making impossible others, it follows that nothing which emerges beyond the threshold of order can be completely integrated into the given order. This sort of impossibility should not be understood as an impossibility of thinking which involves us in certain contradictions; it rather constitutes a lived impossibility inherent to experience itself. It manifests itself by the disquiet we feel when exposed to what appears as alien. This disquiet is something which certainly goes beyond the controlled standards of our experience; nevertheless it is not nothing. Precisely at this point arises something like a liminal alienness. We have to distinguish on the one side the disorderly which opposes the given order in its own domain, and on the other side the unordered out of which order arises. This out-of-which, appearing in various facets, is often called the chaotic. In terms of the myths we are accustomed to speak of, we could mention the abysmal (chaos), the pell-mell (tohuwabohu or Gewühl), or the formless (amorphon). Such imaginative figures penetrate also the work of art. Consider, for example, the tension between figure and ground in painting, the predilection for the labyrinthical, or the creative deformation of given forms.
While considering the phenomenon of threshold, we finally reach a small edge which separates the excess of a unilateral rationalism from the fall into a mere irrationalism. Rationalism tends to treat the unordered as something disorderly and in doing so it cuts off orders from their origin. On the contrary, irrationalism tends to identify the relatively chaotic with absolute chaos, transforming the out-of-what into complete darkness. In the first case, everything that is located beyond the threshold would be parched like the Zuider Sea, mentioned by Freud without any reservations, and in the second case, one would take leave from reason by a salto mortale. Our phenomenological perspective looks different. Our thinking and acting should find its place on the threshold between the ordinary and the extraordinary, neither purely on this side nor purely on the other side. In any case, thresholds remain ambivalent; they allure or deter. They are like stumbling stones, causing us to trip up, but also capable of evoking new and strange experiences.
See especially my Ordnung im Zwielicht (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), English trans. by D. J. Parent, Order in the Twilight (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996), chapter A 6; Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), chapter 2; Topographie des Fremden (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), chapter 4; Sinnesschwellen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1999); Vielstimmigkeit der Rede (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), chapter 9; Bruchlinien der Erfahrung (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), 9. The present text will be published simultaneously in Hong Kong within the proceedings of the fourth Conference of Phenomenology for East Asia Circle, held in Kaohsiung (Taiwan) December 2010 under the title Crossing Borders.
Walter Benjamin, Passagen-Werk, 2 vol. (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), I, 618.
Whereas common expressions such as limen in Latin and Schwelle, threshold, seuil, or umbral in Western languages contain various connotations, the Greek word bathmos (threshold) derives explicitly from bainein (to go). Concerning the process of bodily movement see the chapter “Gänge durch die Landschaft” in my In den Netzen der Lebenswelt (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985).
See Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, Werke, Bd. 5 (München: Hanser, 1963).
See Franz Kafka, Von den Gleichnissen, in M. Brod (ed.), Beschreibung eines Kampfes, Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass (Schocken Books: New York, 1946), 95–96.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher, in Schriften und Briefe, Bd. I–II (Frankfurt/M.: Tausendundeins, 1968/1971).
See Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris: Bordas, 1985).
See Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke (London and Frankfurt/M.: Fischer), XV, 62. Concerning the interpretation of the unconscious as a specific sort of alienness see my Bruchlinien der Erfahrung (2004), chapter VII.
See Michel Leiris, “Le sacré dans la vie quotidienne,” in Denis Hollier (ed.), Le collège sociologique (1937–1939) (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
See Freud, Gesammelte Werke, II/III, 508.
Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 493.
Paul Valéry, Cahiers, 2 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973–1974), I, 937.
See my discussion in Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009).
Soren Kierkegaard, Die Krankheit zum Tode. Furcht und Zittern. Die Wiederholung. Der Begriff der Angst (Köln/Olten, 1956), 434–38.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), I, 250.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 318.
I refer to my outline of threshold places in Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), chapters 3–4; these chapters include references to authors like Marc Augé, Michel Foucault, Michel Leiris, and André Leroi-Gourhan.
Waldenfels, Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen, 203.
See Martin Warnke, Politische Landschaft. Zur Kunstgeschichte der Natur (München and Wien: Hanser, 1992), 14–17.
See Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies in Public Order (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
Edmind Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1950), I, 144.
See Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971).
See Marcel Mauss, “Le don,” in Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1950), chapter 3. See also Iris Därmann, Fremde Monde der Vernunft (München: Fink, 2005), chapter 2 and, especially concerning the status of transitional things, her Theorien der Gabe (Hamburg: Junius, 2010), chapter VII.
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogical Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293. See also my reception of Bakhtin’s ideas in Vielstimmigkeit der Rede (1999), especially chapter 7.
See Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, GA, Bd. 55 (Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann, 1979), 447ff.
Concerning the issue of original substitution, incorporated in transitional forms of substitution, see my article “An Stelle von. . . ,” in K. Busch and I. Därmann (eds.), “pathos”: Konturen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), 41–48.
See Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt, vol. 2, (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1984), 139ff.
See Alfred Schütz, “The Stranger,” “The Home-comer,” “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1 (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1962).
Alexis Nuselovici
Europe, from threshold to threshold; Europa, von Schwelle zu Schwelle; Europa, di soglia in soglia; l’Europe, de seuil en seuil. Even better: Europa, de Schwelle en soglia. Or: Europe, von seuil zu threshhold. Nothing is more precious than its (many) languages to grasp Europe’s identity, its cultural complexity. But one needs first to be clear about the nature and the function of a language. Could a language stay on a threshold? Paul Celan’s book, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold), whose title inspired mine, includes a poem titled “Schibboleth” which accounts for the condition of being on a threshold.
Schibboleth is a Hebrew word appearing in the Bible (Judges, 12:6) which tells how fighters from the Gilead tribe were recognizing their enemies from the Ephraim tribe and killed them when the latter were showing their inability to properly pronounce the first letter of the word schibboleth. Not only an issue regarding phonetics, a specific kind of speech disability, but an issue of language in general since the “Men of Gilead” and the “Men of Ephraim,” Gileadites and Ephaimites, were part of the same people and were speaking the same language. A deadly threshold was suddenly taking shape within a community.
More to the point, the poem connects the signifier with another fratricide conflict, the Spanish civil war, alluded to by the mention of the month of February, when the Republicans got in power, and by “No pasarán,” their battle cry.
Herz:
gib dich auch hier zu erkennen,
hier, in der Mitte des Marktes.
Ruf’s, das Schibboleth, hinaus
in die Fremde der Heimat:
Februar. No pasarán[1]
Furthermore, the last verse of the poem recalls other historical events of resistance and of rebellion against oppression,[2] in Spain, in France, in Austria, when history denies the right to pass through, the right to cross the threshold.[3]
Here, as in other Celan’s poems, foreign words stay foreign, they are not translated. Untranslated or translating a truth about translation? They say even more than if they had been translated insofar as the reader, facing these foreign words, stays on the threshold of the foreign tongue.
Indeed, the significance of the notion of threshold is most important to understand the meaning of translation and vice versa since, opposite to the current ideology, translating is experimenting the threshold condition as much as performing a passing across. More than the comfort of getting on the other side, translation reflects a measure of fear, the expression of an anxiety born out of being on a threshold and facing the unknown. It is a spell, the “threshold magic” or “threshold spell,” “der Schwellenzauber,”[4] which Walter Benjamin mentions in his Passagen-Werk. In this section, entitled “The Inside, The Trace,” Benjamin depicts the thresholds leading to the modern society places of entertainment outside the city and, within the city, the threshold which is the entrance or the hallway of the bourgeois apartment. In another section he talks of a “theory of thresholds”[5] to comment on a quotation by Théophile Gauthier referring to the footboards of carriage and comes back on the issue of the “despotic terror of the hand bell”[6] and of the entertainment places while including in his typology of thresholds the city gate and the Arc de Triomphe, entrances to arcades and subway stations.[7]
Benjamin’s examination of thresholds is astonishing given that he stresses the potential threat they are carrying out, the bad omen they could herald, rather than the ideas of generosity, of welcoming, of hospitality they are commonly associated with. That is precisely the point: the welcoming should be commensurate with a sense of ill coming.[8] Order has to be disturbed by the coming of the stranger, a foreigner, or a foreign tongue. Otherwise, there is no threshold to pass but a mere transition between two spaces.
What is involved in the idea of passing across is quite complex and the concept should
not be valued without any critical examination. I assume that the Eurocrates in Brussels
did choose images of bridges and doors to illustrate the series of seven euro banknotes
for their iconic capacity to symbolize ideas of communication and passage although
I doubt that they knew about the essay that Georg Simmel published in 1909 about this
topic, “Brücke und Tür.” The theme he is addressing is particularly fitting for European distinctiveness
since he explores the dialectical linkage between relation and sepa-
ration, the “correlation of separateness and unity,” of “separateness and connectedness,”[9] which does indeed express in a nutshell the challenge of a European identity,
“Unity in diversity” according to the European Union’s official motto since May 2000.
For Simmel the difference between the two conditions of relation and separation proves
to be artificial, each notion presupposing the other one, given that human consciousness
has the privilege to connect two elements by the very fact of considering them as
separated while having to separate them in order to connect them. From a material
as well as a spiritual viewpoint, “we are at any moment those who separate the connected
or connect the separate.”[10] A bridge is a concrete example of the latter principle and therefore had easily
become a symbol of it.
However it is to the door that Simmel gives a superior heuristic value. If a bridge establishes continuity between two distinct open spaces, a door institutes and deletes at the same time—since it could be equally closed or open—the idea of a separation between inside and outside. “The door speaks”[11] by stressing the linkage between a finite inner space and the rest, that is, the whole world outside human space. By virtue of the door’s capacity to connect the inner and the outer, “the bounded and the boundaryless adjoint one another [. . .] as the possibility of a permanent interchange.”[12]
By comparing the bridge and the door and by analyzing the latter’s meaning, Simmel leads us toward a more acute appreciation of the function of the threshold. The stance induced by staying on a threshold gives a sense of what separates the finite from the infinite and such a metaphysical take relates to Benjamin’s Schwellenzauber. “Thus the door, Simmel suggests, becomes the image of the boundary point at which human beings actually always stand or can stand.”[13] Such a possibility results from the human faculty to create limits due to a sense of freedom which, conversely, allows crossing them whenever it is possible.
The human being could not only stand at the border but he or she is getting an ontological status from such a power: “And the human being is likewise the bordering creature who has no border.”[14] Just as a door opens and closes, the human being can experiment his or her freedom willingly denied or willingly enjoyed. A borderless border-being could define the European subject, as such aware of his or her particular cultural origins and free to cross them in order to experience the others’ ones, hence always standing on the threshold leading to all of them.
Identifying and accepting limits so as to be capable of crossing them, where an inside overlaps with an outside, amounts to transforming them into thresholds. Benjamin’s theorization in the Passagen-Werk is not far away: “The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle [threshold] is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses.”[15]
For the European subject, to stand on the threshold of several worlds and of several cultures allows a potential simultaneity of belongings and opens up the possibility of crossing over in as many different directions, an experience similar to the translator’s power of choice when he or she is confronted with different versions for a same original text.
In his 1923 essay on translation, Benjamin uses two images which relate to a semantic field including the notion of threshold: “However, unlike a literary work, a translation does not find itself, so to speak, in the middle of the high forest of the language itself; instead, from outside it, facing it, and without entering it, the translation calls to the original within, at that one point where the echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the foreign language’s work.”[16] Such an irreducible exteriority means in other words that the translation stands on the threshold of the original. Benjamin follows on by his thesis, so often misunderstood or wrongly interpreted, stating that the primary function of a translation is not to transmit the meaning of the original and concludes with a second spatial image related to the notion of threshold: “For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering is the arcade.”[17]
Both metaphors are supported and justified by two main tenets of Benjamin’s thinking on translation. The first one is expressed in his 1916 essay on language: “Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity.”[18] Such a continuum does create a zone, the concept understood as in Benjamin’s definition, which is a non-limited space, encompassing and constituted by a series of thresholds. To always stand on a threshold, von Schwelle zu Schwelle—this is a stance suggesting a bilateral opening, so that a language would always be on the threshold of another one, and vice versa.
The second tenet is given in the last sentence of the essay on translation, which proves its importance: “The interlinear version of the holy scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.”[19] In such a display, each line truly forms a threshold for the other one, like the drawing lines in Escher’s representations. But what does come out of this linear proximity between the biblical original and its translation?
From an empirical viewpoint, such contiguity could lead to a fusional effect which deletes the distance separating the two texts but one has to go beyond a pragmatic approach to language because any linguistic act is first and foremost an ethical act: I am always talking or writing to someone. Even more: it is because there is somebody to be addressed to that I am talking or writing. No need to hide Emmanuel Levinas’s influence here, so valuable his philosophy is to comprehend a European identity whose DNA contains otherness among its natural components. He has shown how the recognition of the other, as a basis for intersubjective relationship, involves the recognition of his or her exteriority. Without it, the relationship is soon perverted and shadowed by threats of domination. It is the vibrant function of language, the “saying” opposed to the “said” in Levinas’s terms, to maintain a distance, to perpetuate the protection of the threshold, and consequently to demonstrate that in any human relation the purpose is not a passage, for example, communicating, but that the end is the relation itself.
Likewise, for Benjamin, “a translation that seeks to transmit something can transmit nothing other than a message—that is, something inessential.”[20] The goal of the translative process is not to transfer a meaning but to put together languages through the agency of a human subject whose subjectivity lays in the matricial hollowness of their encounter, that is, in the first place, the gathering of the two languages involved and then the potential congregation of all the world languages which any translative act presupposes.
The correlated notions of threshold and of translation have the power to subvert the oppositional logics of inside/outside as does the Parisian passage—which provides the theme for the Passagen-Werk as well as its textual blueprint—which leads from one outside to another one via a fake inside. It is necessary to undermine such a logics because this is the only way to bring a rough answer to the question: how does one prevent, let us say, a British citizen from regarding a French person as a foreigner while simultaneously recognizing, accepting, and respecting his or her alterity? Such a dialectical tension between closeness and remoteness, between proximity and distance, defines European identity and the translative belonging patterns it induces. By virtue of both being Europeans, both the British and the French could see in the other one a portrait which is not their own but could have been; as European, each could see in the other’s dissimilarity a possible resemblance.
Any viewer would feel giddy when observing the long sequence of political maps of Europe since the Roman Empire. From one century to the next one, from one decade to the next one, the design is different due to the extreme mobility of its borders. Charles the Great’s Europe, Charles the Fifth’s Europe, Napoleon’s one or the Habsburg Dynasty’s one, the European Union’s territory along its successive enlargements, all those Europes produce the image of a malleable body whose astounding flexibility remains quite intriguing.
The question of the borders of Europe, essential for its identity, has been so debated that it could put off any attempt to tackle it again. Should Eurolimology—from the Latin limis—be banned the same way the Société Linguistique de Paris forbade in 1866 any discussion related to the origin of languages? Presently, a comparison between the European Union twenty-seven member-states or the Council of Europe forty-seven member-states and the fifty-one countries having entered the Eurovision competition or the fifty-three national associations which take part in the European Football Championship could be appealing but surely baffling. Calling it a “one-size-fits-all-Europe” is not good enough. Its expansibility calls for a conceptually more satisfying designation and I will propose, borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman’s terminology, to name it a liquid Europe, liquidity hinting at a spatiality irreducible to mere material topography.
How, then, will we designate the spatial condition fitting a liquid Europe? Where to find the appropriate notion for a European cultural identity not defined by strict borders? A territory implies limits while a space infers a neutral semantic value. We need a more suitable signifier to label such a space shaped by displacements and not merely hosting them, a space where the European spirit will freely blow, ignoring national signposts and local markers. “Zone” could be the desired term.
Before Benjamin, the French poet Apollinaire made use of the notion of “zone.” The year 1913 saw the publication in Les Soirées de Paris and in Der Sturm—a French review and a German one, quite relevantly for our analysis—of “Zone,” which would become the opening poem of Alcools, one of the founding books of European modern poetry. The poem was previously entitled “Cri” [Scream] which perfectly translated the anxiety permeating the verses in reaction to love sorrows as well as to the weariness of this “ancient world,”[21] the Western world. However the title “Zone” opens to another reading: in a disenchanted Paris, the poet calls upon powers coming from an outside, be it the fervor of Christian religion, the sky open by the first airplanes, images from Africa, America, or China, memories from childhood or from travels in Europe, the misery of Jewish migrants. “Farewell farewell” [Adieu Adieu], boundary lines become blurred, the territory flickers in its limits, the space is fraying; “Sun slit throat”[22] [Soleil cou coupé], welcome to the zone where new possibilities spring up, an unknown kind of blood.
Using the word “zone” is uneasy because of its ambivalent semantics. It covers a wide zone (pun intended) of meanings set around two signifying poles. One of them draws together designations of regions cut out on the earth or in the sky as well as restricted territories marked by specific activities or precise regulations; the other one relates to urban surroundings or undeveloped areas whose vagueness goes together with an idea of uncertain boundaries and with the threatening nature associated with spatial margins. While generally the lexicons of the army, of geography, or of economy understand the notion in a technical sense, imagination tends to make out of a social reality a setting for staging transgressive drives. As far as Brussel’s Europe is concerned, the first employ is prevalent and “Euro zone” or “Schengen zone” are used to describe vigilantly scrutinized and regulated spaces.
How could we reconcile the two perceptions, the strictly ruled zone and the wild one? The challenge should not frighten a European mind whose flexibility is supposed to be the first asset. Unity in diversity, the EU claims.
The dual nature of the concept of zone is a theme directly addressed by Andréi Tarkovsky in his 1979 film, Stalker. Three men—named the writer, the professor, and the stalker, both their guide and smuggler—are scouring the “zone,” a wasteland controlled by soldiers, in search of the room where the deepest desire of each of them should be fulfilled. That those three men form a community and that their search could be identified with a quest related to Europe is strongly suggested by the score of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,”[23] the European anthem, which is heard during thirty seconds or so upon the film’s last images, a long and slow sequence focusing on the figure, at the same time strong and fragile, of the stalker’s young daughter.
Commonly used syntagms like “border zone” or “limit zone” demonstrate that the semantic ambivalence could produce a valuable signification. The word “zone” is indeed quite convenient to convey the opposition inside/outside while tuning down its notional antagonism. In the same way as “Orient” and “Occident” continue to display their rhetorical efficiency even as their ideological content has been widely criticized, “Western Europe,” “Eastern Europe,” and “Central Europe” are still being employed in the sense of zones in order to neutralize the precise and potentially challenging geopolitical realities these European regions are engaged with. However, diplomatic cautiousness hardly explains the success the notion recently enjoyed in social sciences and humanities, mainly due to two influential texts by Mary Louise Pratt and Emily Apter.
In her 1991 article, “Arts of the Contact Zone,”[24] Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” “Grapple” is an interesting verb for its two significations, to hold or to struggle, underlining the duality inherent in the notion of contact zone: a confrontation which could have negative effects as in colonial situations or positive ones like in the multicultural fabric of contemporary societies, the latter often being a consequence of the former.
A most interesting aspect in Pratt’s grasp of the notion is the demographic element. In her viewpoint, a zone is not an unpopulated location but a space shaped by the human relationships it is hosting. The zone area begins to exist according to the contacts which are taking place within. Thus she starts by evoking the Spanish colonization in Peru through a text written in the seventeenth century for the king of Spain by a bilingual literate man of Andean descent and then she goes on in depicting a classroom community experience on multiculturalism, that is, a course focusing on the Americas and their multiple cultural histories which attracted students from many different backgrounds. Both are considered by Pratt as contact zones.
For “settlement area,” the French geographical lexicon says “zone de peuplement” and the idea is again of a priority given to human dimension in order to define a space. Indeed, there are many examples of populations without territorial boundaries: Kurds in the Middle East, Occitans, or Swabians in Europe, the Romani people,[25] or the Jews being the best illustrations of such a territorial identity.
The flag chosen for the European Union adequately exemplifies the idea. The choice of a strictly symbolic mode of representation and the refusal to match the number of stars with the number of member-states do show an understanding of Europe as a zone which nature does not call for any kind of structural realism. This will appear clearly from a comparison with the Dutch architect Rem Kolhaas’s proposal which, beside the fact it reminds one of an image associated with supermarket technology, the barcode, claims to objectify a supposedly measurable space. Given the difficulties Austria does know with regard to its own national identity, it may not be entirely fortuitous that this flag had only been promoted during Austria’s presidency of the European Union.
The Passagen-Werk follows a methodology which Benjamin explains in the N section, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”: “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.”[26] Now, the space created through a montage (be it pictorial, literary, musical, or cinematic) does not relate to geometric planning since it comes out of the gathering of elements; hence it could be regarded as a zone. Benjamin adds that his concern is with “the rags, the refuse”[27] from culture and history. The metaphor put forward by Benjamin is persuasive: the rag-picker does not practice his trade within a regulated system but he takes over the city like a limitless territory, a zone which he somehow takes possession of through the leftovers, the remains he finds and collects within a parallel and rebellious anti-capitalist economy. The zone is therefore inspiring an epistemological model as well as an ontological one.[28]
Such a pattern of knowledge and thinking is adopted by Emily Apter in her book The Translation Zone, in which she goes beyond Prat’s praise of diversity to reflect on “language wars” and “the balance of power in the production of world culture”[29] in a kind of performative way. “Nothing is translatable,” “Everything is translatable”—those two utterances are providing the “poles of [her] translation theory.”[30] Their apparent aporetic juxtaposition sheds light on her choice of the notion of zone which stands as an “intellectual topography”[31] to mediate between the closeness of national boundaries and the limitlessness of a globalized world. The zone helps her to designate “sites that are ‘in-translation,’ that is to say, belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication.”[32] The paradigmatic value of such an understanding of “zone” allows her to put together analyses on different topics, from literature to war and technology, related to individual subjects as well as to communities, and to show how the global use of translative practices transforms the world of today and somehow defines it.
Such lines of thinking help to conceive of the zone as a mobile territory, a territory which is moving and which moves its boundaries, a space born out of the movements it is hosting, defined not by its limits but by its functions and its capacities. Similar to the tenets grounding Benjamin’s methodology, the principles defining the zone will perceive it as a space devoid of a transcendental axiom of continuity connecting its components and only designed by their concomitance.
This allows us to draw a political application. In Europe figured out as a zone, the European subject always stands on a threshold, the threshold of the other European subject. There, is he or she less himself or herself? Quite the opposite. His or her identity will benefit from an ontological renewal, an additional measure of authenticity although free of any narcissistic pride since his or her Europeanness exists only in connection with the other subjects. All the others: the other Europeans as well as the other extra-Europeans.
Benjamin gave the following subtitle to his 1929 essay on surrealism:[33] The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia [Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz]. As expressed by the German word, a snapshot refers to the moment when a moment is seized. The Shakespearian “time out of joint” or the Benjaminian time at a standstill in which he could find the dialectical images he collected in his Passengen-Werk (see section N). Atemwende, Paul Celan would say, the moment when breath reverses:[34] essence of the moment, a schibboleth between breathing in and breathing out, between life and death—as in the narrative from Judges. The threshold moment when the translation process passes from one language to the other one, when two languages are facing each other, like in Celan’s “Schibboleth” poem.
A threshold is as much temporal as spatial since it invites or orders the subject to stop and, in that sense, it is a utopian notion. In Benjamin’s dialectics at a standstill, past and present clash to grasp the meaning of history as in the notion of Jetztzeit, the time of the now, he presents in his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”[35] Or else the observation point where the flâneur, the city traveler, the urban tourist, stands: “The flâneur is still on the threshold, of the city as well as of the bourgeois class. Neither has yet engulfed him; in neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd.”[36] The flâneur’s dwelling place, which is the crowd in its indistinctiveness, becomes consequently a human zone. The crowd inhabiting a city transforms it into a zone and as such the latter could claim to fit the flâneur, the one whose “basic experience” is the “colportage phenomenon of space”;[37] and whose consciousness crosses temporal strata as many thresholds: “We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment.”[38]
The flâneur’s contemplative stance belongs to a foreigner: “This poetry is not regional art; rather, the gaze of the allegorist that falls on the city is estranged.”[39] Not that much the gaze of a stranger than a gaze which has been foreignized. To stand on the threshold, to stand in the zone, means to be able to possess the gaze of a foreigner in one’s own homeland. Hölderlin’s poetry did translate this experience. Yet his was still the Romantic’s nineteenth-century Europe whereas we are inheriting another one, Paul Celan’s one. We are standing on other thresholds on which we have to learn how to inhabit in order to really dwell in our present.
To introduce his aforementioned definition of the threshold as a zone, Benjamin stated: “We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us.”[40] The expression “poor in threshold experiences” cannot but sound familiar for Benjamin readers as it echoes two essays from the same period analyzing the devaluation of experience, “Erfahrung und Armut” (1933) and “Der Erzähler” (1936). This impoverishment of our threshold experience is as well an impoverishment of our European experience, our experience of Europe as European subjects. Who else better than Benjamin, the European consciousness personified, can remind us of the task?
The duty is part of our legacy of Europe, Celan’s one. Celan, whose poetic setting is unlighted by Benjamin’s estranged gaze, der Blick des Entfremdeten: “into your alien homeland.”[41]
Heart: / here too reveal what you are, / here, in the midst of the market./ Call the schibboleth, call it out / into your alien homeland: / February. No pasarán.
Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 97. I give a more thorough analysis of the poem in my book Paul Celan. Les lieux d’un déplacement (Lormont: Éditions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2010), 152–53 and 187.
Another poem from Die Niemandsrose, “In Eins,” uses the same elements and expresses even more vigorously such struggles within history: “Thirteenth of February. Schibboleth / roused in the hearth’s mouth. With you, / peuple / de Paris. No pasarán.” (Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, 205). This later poem evokes also contemporary events in Greece and Russia.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 214.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 93.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 88.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 86–87.
See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. by R. Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Significantly, issues of languages—the foreigner’s one as well as the native one—are addressed along issues of welcoming, foreignness, and hospitality.
Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in D. Frisby and M. Festherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture. Selected writings (London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997), 172–73.
Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” 171.
Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” 172.
Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” 172–73.
Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” 172.
Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” 174.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 494. Benjamin’s etymological assertion is contested.
Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task” [Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers] (trans. by S. Rendall) in A. Nouss (ed.), “L’essai sur la traduction de Walter Benjamin. Traduction critiques/Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation. Critical translations,” Montréal, TTR, vol. X, no. 2, 159.
Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” 162.
Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 325.
Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” 165.
Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” 151.
Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, trans. by Anne Hyde Greet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 3.
Apollinaire, Alcools, 13.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from which the “Ode to Joy” is taken, is also being heard at the beginning of the film.
Mary Louise Pratt, Profession (New York: MLA, 1991), 33–40.
After the Jews half a century ago, the Romani people exemplify now the difficulties which being a zone rises for the European zone.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460.
See Irving Wohlfarth, “Et cetera? The historian as chiffonier,” in B. Hansen (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London/New York: Continuum, 2006).
Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3.
Apter, The Translation Zone, 8. The two statements are the first and the last of the “Twenty theses on translation” used as a foreword to the book (XI–XII).
Apter, The Translation Zone, 5.
Apter, The Translation Zone, 6.
Walter Benjamin, “The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 177–92.
The expression provides the title for a collection of poems published in 1967. English translation: Breathturn, trans. by P. Joris (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 253–64.
Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, 156.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 418.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 419.
Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, 156. [“Diese Dichtung ist keine Heimatkunst, vielmehr ist der Blick des Allegorikers, der die Stadt trifft, der Blick des Entfremdeten”].
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 494.
Literally: in the foreignness of the homeland [In die Fremde der Heimat].
Massimo Donà
Le sujet qui parle ici doit reconnaitre une chose: il aime à sortir d’une salle de cinéma. Se retrouvant dans la rue éclairée et un peu vide et se dirigeant mollement verse quelque café, il marche silencieusement (il n’aime guère parler tout de suite du film qu’il vient de voir), un peu engourdi, engoncé, frileux, bref ensommeillé: il a sommeil, voilà ce qu’il pense; son corps est devenu quelque chose de sopitif, de doux, de paisible: mou comme un chat endormi, il se sent quelque peu désarticulé, ou encore [. . .]: irresponsable. Bref, c’est évident, il sort d’une hypnose. Et de l’hypnose [. . .] ce qu’il perçoit, c’est le plus vieux des pouvoirs: le guérissement.[1]
Starting from André Bazin’s claim that cinema reflects the essence of reality, which cannot be transcended, with this chapter I will try to assess in which way Paul Schrader might be right too when he claims that the task of cinema is to show what takes place beyond mere reality. First of all, we should ask how cinema could be capable of capturing the transcendent. If cinema is realistic, as Bazin maintains, and if the real is untranscendable, what cinema shows represents the truth of reality. After all, reality is indeterminate, since it is impossible to find something beyond it that could exist apart from it—that is, that could be able to determine it.
Cinema, however, can connect us with that un-real which we are not able to reach by exiting reality itself, since there is nothing beyond it. The essence of cinema can be compared to the singing of the sirens evoked by Homer in book XII of his Odyssey. In that book, what is shown is the simple no-thing (nihil), namely the negation of the horizon in which we live. The singing of the sirens is perfectly translatable into the silence that Kakfa recognized between the folds of the Homeric narration, also in line with the experience lucidly described by Luis Buñuel in his The Exterminating Angel. We shall refer to this film later in the course of the chapter.
Now, even if no one stopped us from trying to exceed the boundaries of this world, we would still be unable to traverse the infinite limits of that reality which binds our lives and our efforts. Eventually, in fact, we would find ourselves in the same situation as that of the peasant who spent his whole life waiting for a permission to cross the threshold of a door which had always been open—the peasant from Kafka’s famous parable Before the Law. In truth, then, we are not capable of surpassing the limited horizon in which we are all situated, since we cannot transcend it, despite our obstinate looking for something that is located beyond it. Let us now try to find a reasonable justification for this claim.
***
Homer described a primordial scene, which can be taken to be the archetype of cinema: after all, the sirens perfectly evoke this archetype. The first spectator of this cinematic screening seems to be the insatiable experimenter sung by the Odyssey. We are obviously referring to Ulysses, who, even before those men described by Plato in his Republic, forced to watch an illusory spectacle while chained at the bottom of a cave, had the possibility to live a real cinematographic experience.
The encounter with the sirens had already been prophesied by Circe. The sirens, these crossbred creatures endowed with an irresistible charm, addressed Ulysses in the following way, promising him absolute knowledge:
“Come here,” they sang, “renowned Odysseus, honor to the Achaean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.”[2]
The sirens promised Ulysses the perfect knowledge of everything, giving him the opportunity to obtain it thanks to a unique and infallible sight. What the sirens offered Ulysses was therefore the possibility of experiencing the enjoyment of a complete gratification, which can be obtained by gaining a knowledge greater than anyone else’s—a knowledge that has nothing in common with the simple and particular knowledge that every human being might obtain.
Now, if Ulysses seems to be able to gain a perfect picture of a complete past, where everything possible is contained, the sirens represent a timeless Utopia, capable of offering a perfect and peaceful stillness. But, after all, who is Ulysses? He is the homo viator, an untiring voyager who proceeds inflexibly while trying to claw back to his starting point. Ulysses’s journey is a real nostos: a downright comeback to the origin. In short, it stands for what every true philosophy has to embrace: an adventure[3] aimed at the real “foundations” of everything, namely—in Hegelian parlance—what is before any beginning. The totality, indeed, could be actually experienced just by comprehending its theoretical structure, letting us rejoin the beginning, closing the circle.
A magician, however, warns Ulysses about the danger, telling him that something, during the way, might have tried him out. Nevertheless, only a magician could have showed him how to get past this obstacle, preventing a shipwreck. If he had not been helped (we might also say: iuxta propria principia), the Homeric hero would not have been able to resist that melos and those promises which attempted to seduce men who wanted to increase their knowledge, gaining an understanding of the whole truth. Because of such promises, Ulysses had the opportunity to exceed the limits of human nature; indeed, totality itself would have appeared, in the light of those promises, as an accessible destination.
Moreover, the sirens would have been able to convince him (and Circe knew it), for
their melos revealed the impossible which everyone who wants to obtain “virtute e canoscenza” is supposed to chase. Their melos promised an unlimited and infinite knowledge. Their promise, in truth, recalled the
A-peiron, whose boundless power would have thrown the Homeric hero into an abyss.
The sirens personify the chthonic deities which Freud brought back to that psychic magma he called the unconscious. Nevertheless, they had nothing in common with the erotic fascination of the feminine dimension, because their fascination is linked to the experience of the “unconditional,” the same experience which played a role in Kant’s reflection—even though he recognized that the human intellect did not have the power to rationalize that experience.
***
The knowledge that tries to capture the unconditional cannot become a real knowledge: it is not possible, after all, to gain it directly, without any mediation. In fact, what is not unconditional is not capable of surpassing its own conditions, since it is forced to stay within a limited horizon which cannot be transcended.
If Ulysses had not followed Circe’s advices, he would have sunk. In this case, indeed, he would have deceived himself, maybe thinking to have overcome the finiteness which characterized his own nature. The singing of the sirens, nevertheless, was supposed to be irresistible, thanks to the strength of its perfect melody. This melody expressed an unjustifiable harmony, since its single parts could not determine its absolute unity.
The power of that singing was designed to be a simple promise of a totality which could not be inhabited, which is why the sirens’ earth was an island or a separated land, namely a “different” earth from the single ones we might always reach following the usual trajectories of “our” world. At the same time, however, since this utopian island was “another” earth, located in a “different” land, it could not deflect the men from the unique course they were forced to follow.
In other respects, only a song was capable of seeming possible, but at the same time the perfect unity of its melody could not be reduced to the single parts which can be approached from the world we belong to. Such perfect melody represents the negation of givenness. The music, in fact, cannot be constrained in a simple and single signification, perhaps teaching us to distinguish between the true and the false. Even if we try to translate what is not translatable, we must know that what we translate cannot offer a precise translation of that content.
This is the reason why Ulysses needed a magician to show him the foundations of that melody. His ratio, indeed, if it had not been helped, would not have understood the terrible deception contained in the singing of the sirens. The metis of the Homeric hero would not have been enough to overcome the obstacle announced by Circe. In other words, Ulysses could not have replicated Orpheus’s triumph. The singing of the sirens would have won him over.
***
The strategy suggested by Circe embodies what we might call the prototype of the cinematographic experience. It is interesting to see that this experience was sketched out by a magician, namely someone capable of evoking what cannot be reduced to the logical dimension of language. Circe could have advised the Homeric hero, saving him from a shipwreck. In fact, she told him he should be bound to the mast of the ship in order to survive. Circe gave him a great chance, namely the opportunity of being the first spectator of a real cinematographic experience.
The strategy set out by Ulysses finds in this advice the conditions of its own possibility: thanks to Circe, he might have avoided the seduction consubstantial with the “unlimited” song of the sirens. Even if their singing did not say anything precise, at the same time they promised something that could not be reduced to the single givenness we find in our world. Ulysses, therefore, had to be tied so that he could not overcome the limits of human nature. The Homeric hero could have undergone an experience which was supposed to deny its own existential character. For this reason, he had to impose upon himself a strictly speaking inhuman conduct, since he could not have followed the kind of temptations that define human beings. If he had not taken this decision, he would have been convinced by the fascination of a totality which seemed to promise another “world,” another real possibility of living.
Only a magician was able to convince him not to follow those promises; without Circe, indeed, he would not have been capable of understanding that he could not abandon his human condition, since human nature is a condition we cannot transcend. If Ulysses had been left alone, he would have lost himself, because he could not have understood that it is not possible to exceed one’s own human nature. Therefore, he needed to find a way to listen to but not follow the allure of the sirens’ song. What he had to do was to stay within the threshold of the possibility embodied by that song.
In short, he should not have made the same mistake of Dante’s Ulysses. He had to follow Circe’s suggestion and had to let himself be tied. In fact, having seen the skeletons on that island, he had already understood the danger that lay ahead.
He had just one possibility: to stay within his own limits, perhaps proceeding from a single limit to another, since the promise of infinity is supposed to be an unquenchable desire. The content of this desire, indeed, cannot be an object that might be kept within our mind. When attempting to direct our gaze at it, we have to acknowledge our impotence. We might get an idea of it only by understanding that we are not capable of representing it. Since this infinity is not supposed to be an object—for if it were, it would not be infinite anymore—we will never be able to have an idea of it, since its own essence is something that cannot be constrained within the limits—given that it is the negation of every possible limitation—of our own nature.
This is the reason why we are supposed to remain inside the horizon of a finiteness which has to be interpreted as a threshold that cannot be exceeded. In my view, that is exactly what happens in cinema, when the viewer experiences an infinite enjoyment about something which remains definite. If we think, for instance, about the position of the film-goer, we can see that he remains invariably still, while the events described by the movie follow their own course. It is as if cinema could show us that what occurs in front of us can neither be interrupted nor changed. Thanks to the phantasmagorias described by cinema, we become aware of being part of an infinite chain of events which expresses everything that happens in our world.
For instance, 11:14 (2003)—a wonderful film directed by Greg Marcks which describes a surprising series of events kept together by a destiny that seems contingent but is actually absolutely inescapable—perfectly shows my point, namely that everything is linked, since my potential attempt at producing a change would in any case be inscribed in a series of events determined by a necessity. Here is why when we are in a cinema theatre we do not want to change things, but instead we abandon ourselves to a simple experience. In cinema, then, we are part of a horizon that cannot be transcended. Yet, although we are not capable of changing this horizon, we do not experience any lack of freedom.
When watching a film, we are like Odysseus. Though not bound to the mast of a ship, we sit on a chair from which we can see a spectacle. Before entering a movie theater, we know that we are going to watch and listen, laugh or suffer; in addition to this, we know that we cannot suddenly stand up and leave or enter after the show has started without missing out on the experience itself.
Because of the incantatory power evoked by the darkness of the screening room, it is as if we were exposed to the same warning that Circe had issued to Ulysses, trying to relive his experience. This is the reason why inside a cinema each of us becomes a “threshold,” being exposed to an extraordinary experience where our finiteness, which characterizes our nature, is not experienced as a limit that we are supposed to overcome. Only in a cinema, therefore, we might become aware of the impossibility of transcending the finiteness which defines our nature ab origine. If we perceived this situation as a limit that deserves to be transcended, we would be forced to perform that salto mortale which has already been performed by all those skeletons that lie in the foreshores on the sirens’ island.
***
André Bazin was perfectly right: cinema does show reality, the same reality we normally access via abstract reflection, which reveals it to us as finite, composed of a simple and definite givenness which prevents us from having an experience of totality. Cinema interrupts this spell, giving us the opportunity to think of reality from a different point of view. Bazin explains this in the first pages of his well-known What Is Cinema?:
The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudorealism content in other words with illusory appearances. This is why medieval art never passed through this crisis; simultaneously vividly realistic and highly spiritual, it knew nothing of the drama that came to light as a consequence of technical developments. Perspective was the original sin of Western painting.[4]
Thanks to its mechanical nature, the seventh art does not need, as an essential part of its functioning, a subject who shoots and photographs the scene. Regardless of the fact that the movie camera is controlled by a human being, the image will always be, despite every effort of the one who controls it, a reproduction of the world: this implies that the world itself makes the entire process possible. It is as if reality was reproduced while being subtracted from its natural deterioration, thus becoming repeatable ad infinitum.
The world leaves a trace of itself in the images created by cinema. The content of this trace is, obviously, reality itself, but a different kind of reality, one that does not necessarily obey the instrumental logic we follow in our everyday existence. At the same time, however, the content of the images produced by cinema is supposed to reflect, as faithfully as possible, the very reality of our lives (which is probably the reason why 3D movies are successful). For instance, audiences who enjoy science fiction movies as a rule prefer that the objectivity of the film images reflects that of the real world. André Bazin had perfectly understood this: it is precisely the absolute realism made possible by cinema that determines a very exceptional experience, namely an experience we do not usually have in our everyday life. Cinema, more than photography, is capable of imitating the temporality of the object, adopting its duration.
According to Bazin, cinema, nevertheless, lacks something. Differently from theater, it produces “some mysterious aesthetic short-circuit” which deprives us from “a certain tension” we might experience in a theater.[5] While theater demands a downright individual and active consciousness, cinema does not imply anything of this kind, since it merely asks for passive identification. Indeed, in a cinema we are alone, “hidden in a dark room,” and “we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe.”[6]
For this reason the “worlds” that move in front of us inside a cinema become “the” world, while the drama of single events is freed from any specific connotation, becoming a mirror which reflects a “reality” that is conceived as something that is not supposed to be transcended. In cinema, reality coincides with what appears, and the screen, differently from what usually happens in painting or in a theater, is not a frame anymore. As Bazin has perfectly grasped, “illusion in the cinema is not based as it is in the theater on convention tacitly accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it is based on the inalienable realism of that which I have shown. All trick work must be perfect in all material respects on the screen. The ‘invisible man’ must wear pajamas and smoke a cigarette.”[7]
Nevertheless, when we leave a cinema we are not leaving a specific space linked with our daily experience, but a universe of possibilities we are not able to find outside. This is the reason why, when we leave the cinema and rejoin our everyday life, we often feel a melancholic and painful sensation, as if we had lost a rare, exceptional, and unrepeatable opportunity.
Indeed, only cinema could guarantee this possibility for us, situating our experience in an indistinct totality where every event and every encounter would be part of a downright collapse into the indifferent mechanics of universality. Only in the darkness of the film theater we might feel ourselves open to this absolute negation of the entire givenness, namely the negation of the particular situations we usually experience in the course of our life. Cinema, in fact, opens up the world and denies its frames, allowing us to understand what being a threshold actually means. Only in cinema, then, reality, manifesting itself as that which does not appear real, is capable of transcending itself.
Here is why Paul Schrader was right too, despite his theory being apparently in contrast with Bazin’s. If for Bazin cinema, without giving any answer, might help us to find the “original vision,” according to Schrader, on the contrary, cinema should embody the great lesson of sacred art. Schrader believes that the director should try to transfigure the purified vision of the world in order to give the spectator the possibility of capturing that absolute otherness which the movie camera cannot show. In short, he thinks that cinema should reach that transcendental style which “strives toward the ineffable and invisible” even if “it is neither ineffable nor invisible.”[8]
Put differently, if images might be the expression of the transcendent, they cannot tell us what it actually is. Here is why Cinema should “express the Transcendent in the human mirror.”[9] According to Schrader, art and religion attempt to show the transcendent, although they are unable to describe it as a specific and determinate object. Moreover, even if we cannot exceed the immanence which defines us, we will always be expressions of the insuppressible desire to witness what is not reducible to our world.
The artist, then, has to know that “his task is futile, and that his most eloquent statements can only lead to silence.”[10] Otherwise, his efforts are supposed to be pointless, since what is useful is linked to a determinate experience, connected to something that is objectifiable. Despite that, the transcendence which is made possible by cinema does not entail the achievement of any destinations. This is the reason why the efforts of the artist will be absolutely and rigorously useless. Now, since “his most eloquent statements can only lead to silence,”[11] what the artist will be forced to witness is silence, namely the threshold located between signification and divine meaninglessness.
***
Franz Kafka suggested that the singing of the sirens did not take place.[12] According to him, Ulysses faced a simple and intolerable silence. Only that silence could represent a plausible contact with the absolutely “Other.” It is true that Kafka would have radically altered the content of the episode. For him, the singing of the sirens would have been so powerful that it “would have burst far stronger bonds than chains and masts.” More crucially, however, the Homeric hero was not aware that the sirens had “a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence.” In short, Ulysses did not realize what actually happened, since he did not understand that the sirens had not sung. The Ulysses narrated by Kafka did not wish to listen to the sirens, because he knew that even if he had been tied to the mast, he would have followed that singing, eventually. At the same time, the Homeric hero also thought he had defeated the sirens. However, precisely because of the power of their silence, the sirens triumphed over him, since they denied him the chance of discovering what was actually taking place. This silence, after all, would have defeated Ulysses anyway, because—despite the story described by Homer—he had already taken his decision of not listening to the beauty contained in that singing. He had decided, indeed, to remain within his own abstract finiteness, without trying to exceed it. With this choice, Ulysses failed to realize that even if he had listened to the sirens, that singing would not have improved his human condition at all. He did not have, therefore, the possibility of experiencing what Giorgio de Chirico—the theorist of metaphysical painting—has called the “pure silence of the existence.”
Ulysses, then, did not neutralize the powerful weapon possessed by the sirens, because the silence he heard was not produced by his own decision. The victory of these monstrous beings brought him to personify what Hegel called the abstract identity of the intellect.
Kafka, in substance, described the fateful defeat of the human way of thinking, namely the renunciation to experience the authentic novelty contained in cinema. At the same time, he evoked another possibility; events might have taken a different direction. Ulysses might have pretended not to be aware of the fact that the sirens were not actually singing. He could have tried to make them believe that he did not comprehend their deception.
Despite these different potential interpretations of the story, I want to underline a specific issue implied by them: the singing of the sirens, namely their irresistible melos, has ended up coinciding—at least, in the version of the Homeric tale suggested by Kafka—with a thundering silence. Kafka, in substance, considers that the encounter with what is most desirable turns out to be an encounter with silence. Kafka tells us that the “purpose of inhabiting the threshold” entails the effort of understanding that every word and every meaning are addressed to a silence which shows their own original attempt to transcend themselves. This silence, therefore, is an enigmatic “opening” which signals the presence of another threshold, namely a limit that is absolutely different from the single borders we might have tried to overtake before. Kafka, in fact, rewrites the encounter with the sirens along the lines of another extraordinary tale of his, the famous parable Before the Law. In this parable, Kafka narrates a situation which might seem very similar to the one we have just finished describing.
A man from the country would like to gain entrance to the law. The doorkeeper tells the man that, at that specific time, he cannot go through, but does not exclude that this will be possible in the future. The man waits in front of the door for years, and finally, when he is about to die, asks the doorkeeper the reason why no one else has tried, during the past years, to enter. The doorkeeper replies: “No one else can enter, since entrance to this door was assigned to you only. I am now going to close it.”
Even if the door was always open, the man from the country did not receive permission to go through it. But this permission, however, was not supposed to be given, and this is because there was no need for it. That door, indeed, was there just for him, and for no one else. In fact, since it was not closed, it could not have indicated a border capable of circumscribing a precise and limited region. That door and that openness just indicate the simple negation of every possible limit. This is why the door should have shown the man from the country that his finiteness had always been linked to an “unlimited openness.” In the presence of that door, not only a specific and always limited givenness had materialized; indeed, in front of that door finiteness as such had finally shown its own essence.
The man from the country had become one with the transcendental horizon of phenomenal reality. At the same time, his whole life was always supposed to embody the desire to overtake this situation. This is the aporia that constitutes our lives: the transcendental finiteness which characterizes our experience cannot avoid confronting, at one point or another, the most seductive singing ever, which coincides with its own untranscendability.
***
If the horizon in which we are located appears in an unlimited openness, the finiteness of such horizon is supposed to be thought as in-finite, since it appears as something which is not what actually is, namely as it is always-already being denied. This is the reason why this horizon overlooks an impossible dimension which cannot be imagined, because it cannot suggest an otherness located beyond itself. Kafka’s door, therefore, was always open because there was nothing that had to be hidden, and there was no border indicating a threshold that prevents us from being what, actually, we have always been.
Now, the countryman saw the door as if (als ob) it was closed because he had not comprehended that the “future” announced by the openness is not located in another world, but it is precisely what had always-already been part of him. Put differently, Kafka’s countryman did not understand that the “future” was first and foremost his own present, since he had always “belonged” to that openness, which represents the impossible that constitutes our experience. This is why he did not need someone to let him through: the openness was “his” openness, the original openness which was instituted by his own existence. Hence, nothing is beyond that threshold—nothing that might be overtaken, since the future “promised” by that door cannot be positively and really crossed. Furthermore, if the door had been identified as what it actually was, it would have been recognized as one of the infinite thresholds we try to get through during our life. In fact, it is only by trying to walk through the door that we can truly realize how the present cannot be transcended; that, in other words, we become capable of understanding how that door does not represent the limit of our horizon at all, since there is no limit inside the horizon of our possible experience. The limit, in other words, can only appear as the unlimited openness—well described by Kafka’s door—in which we all belong. Indeed, the door shows us that, beyond the threshold it defines, there is nothing else; furthermore, it shows us that nothing can determine our constitutive finiteness. Ultimately, no one could give us permission to go through the door because this going through is our original condition.
The threshold signaled by the door, therefore, does not show “something” which might be located beyond. Beyond the door there is “nothing” else; we cannot face an “otherness” which is supposed to be located in another “place,” since that otherness was always-already included in our experience. By going beyond the threshold we would not find anything different or new, even if we are waiting for something to happen from the future. In fact, we could say that we are all waiting for what will not come. We are all waiting for Godot; namely we are all waiting for the impossible which is always here, but precisely “as impossible.” To be sure, we would like to consider this thing we are waiting for as if it was coming from the future, even though we are forced to think of it as something that has already taken place. This is probably the reason why Hegel thought that, when we want to increase our knowledge, instead of simply moving forward toward the future, we should actually return to a foundation located behind us. In different words, when we think of something which is indeterminate, we have to determine it, treating it as if it were a simple otherness. If it is our practical disposition that leads us to do so, we have to understand then that we are only and simply waiting for what is not supposed to be waited for, that is to say the impossible future we already are. Hence, we wait for an impossible thing which can be defined as the Anselmian God, namely “that of which nothing greater can be conceived.”
But in truth, what we are actually waiting for is not a single and particular meaning, but the absolute negation that defines every meaning, that is, what cannot be measured and what cannot be expressed, since this negativity is not something we can identify with a specific meaning. This is why we are always waiting for the perfectly impossible, namely the impossible future that is already and actually here. This impossibility, indeed, appears only in the single negation represented by the meanings we might find, without being able to identify with any one of them.
Although the essence of this impossibility cannot be translated into the determinateness it posits, at the same time this impossibility has to appear in the very meaning which cannot reduce nor represent its own possibility. This is the reason why what is universal, as Plato pointed out, is just supposed to be remembered, since it cannot be reduced to a single and particular part of the reality it posits. The essence, as Aristotle recognized, is precisely the “what it was to be” (to ti en einai). For this reason the future we imagine testifies to the existence of a downright “impossibility.” As a matter of fact, the future confirms that the “thingness” that defines our different experiences does not exist in the way we think it exists, and this is because the ontological status of the future we described shows the aporetic structure of reality as such.
So, there was nothing behind the door, which is why it was open. The openness indicated by the door represented the constitutive indeterminateness of every defined determination we recognize. This is why the request of the countryman could not be satisfied: we cannot move beyond the threshold, because we are always-already inside-and-outside the borders set by the door.
***
Kafka’s interpretation of the singing of the sirens, read alongside his Before the Law, represents a humanity which, despite Ulysses, surrenders to the flatteries of the sirens. This humanity, indeed, hangs on its own abstractness, convinced that what is called “transcendent” has to be located in some “beyond.” This humanity reflects on the transcendent (the Anselmian “maius quam cogitare posit”) via a rational way of thinking, as if it was something universally accessible to our ratio. Such humanity, however, is not aware of what actually happens in cinema.
Paul Schrader, on the other hand, is perfectly aware of this, because he knows—despite what Bazin believes—that the spectator usually interprets rationally what is shown (Gabriele Pedullà, in his foreword to the Italian edition of Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, has pointed out this particular issue). Cinema, nevertheless, indicates a real possibility. This possibility does not consist in a simple and “abstract” overtaking of the contingent; rather, it is linked to an experience of the immutable which is “free” and “safe” from the pain and effort connected to our experience of becoming.
If we are all part of the same transcendental horizon, and we cannot move beyond it, since it cannot be transcended, cinema seems to offer us another opportunity. Thanks to cinema, we are in a position to realize that although we cannot abandon the unique horizon in which we are all immersed, we are anyway capable of identifying ourselves with the threshold described above. We can learn, therefore, how to become and not become (that is the aporia that cinema presents) those limits which seemed to define our experiences. We are talking about the real analogon of the thundering silence of the sirens, which Ulysses was able to recognize in its paradoxical excess. In short, what we have here is the experience of a future which is finally able to “give rhythm” to the present, in order to turn the latter into a real hierophany of the sacred (to use an expression taken from Schrader).
This is why cinema shows what even the countryman might have understood, even without being able to transform this experience into a lifestyle. In cinema, we do not really “live” and we are not “humans” (in the Platonic understanding of this term). In the immobility and passivity which cinema entails, we are not at the level of the original and practical disposition of truth (Plato has shown this in his Republic, when we read that both truth and beauty find their possibility only inside their practical significations). When we are in a cinema theater, we become unaware of everything, since we suddenly lack purpose (this, as underlined by Bazin, is the exceptionality of an experience in which the trace left by reality is both plausible and phantasmatic/virtual, and therefore impossible to interpret as something purposeful). Given this context, the crucial “scene” described by the Homeric tale is also the great chance it represents; and if, on the one hand, this chance revealed itself as impossible (unfeasible), on the other hand, it would realize its potential with the Lumière brothers’ invention.
Ulysses perfectly understands that the Other sung by the sirens cannot be watched as we can watch whatever otherness we might experience. It is thanks to this intuition that he decides to deny himself the act which his metis (human, all too human) would have compelled him to perform. By taking this decision, he recognizes that the silence of the sirens represents the essential truth. He knows, besides, that if he had followed that silence, he would have gained absolutely nothing, since what that silence implies is the impossible future which had always accompanied the steps of his nostos. Therefore, in accordance with this intuition, Ulysses understands that there is only one viable way to have a real experience of the sacred, which is why he decides to have himself tied to the mast of his own personal cinema, abandoning himself to the experience of an absolute negation.
***
If it is true that cinema is in some way capable of representing, with extraordinary power, the condition we have just described, there is a film which delineates this possibility with an astonishing and surprising efficacy: The Exterminating Angel (1962), directed by Luis Buñuel in Mexico.
During a formal dinner party, the guests—just when they would be expected to leave the house and return home—realize they are not capable of leaving the music room. Now, in this case too the door is open; there is nothing that prevents them from leaving. Nevertheless, no one can move beyond the threshold of the music room. The director represents an obtuse humanity which treats the threshold of its own world as if it were one of the simple borders we might always peacefully cross. Actually, they cannot go through that threshold, since they have always-already overtaken it, even if they are not aware of it. Luis Buñuel was able to show the truth of a horizon which, not being opposed to anything, represents the unconditional of the existing; he was also capable of showing the collapse of those criteria thanks to which we usually distinguish between the true and the false, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. The horizon described by Buñuel, then, puts together what we have always thought should have been separated, representing what Freud—trying to describe the inexplicable and unmentionable ground of our conscience—called “the unconscious.”
In this film, the aspects governed by their own intelligible ratio—defining the conditions of their possibility—and the aspects that our logical and
rational “tools” cannot justify are perfectly juxtaposed. What the Spanish director
was trying to show, in fact, is precisely what cinema has always tried to show, namely
that what we think as distinct is not actually distinct at all. Cinema gives us the cathartic opportunity to experience
this aporia. Cinema, in other words, gives us the chance to witness an “impossible”
condition—a condition that the practical homo platonicus could not have legitimated. Cinema, indeed, tells us that there is no real distinction
to be made, since there is nothing that can be abstractly separated or divided from
something else. Only when the exterminating angel will come to separate hate and love,
humility and pride, innocence and sin, the distinctions will actually appear; at present
(i.e., in hoc speculo), all those distinctions we believe to know in their perfect evidence are not really
the distinctions we think they are, since at present they can only exist in their
absolutely and mysteriously being denied. The inexplicable event filmed by Luis Buñuel shows that perfectly. In summary, in the transcendental
horizon in which we live, the distinction and its consti-
tutive principle (namely, the Aristotelian principium firmissimum) constitute a unique and yet real “impossible,” the same impossible that only the exterminating angel eventually will be able to
make us understand and experience, liberating finiteness from its own unsustainable
infinitude.
***
Cinema possesses a redemptive quality; in a secular way it offers us the possibility of reaching a sort of redemption. Our task can be compared to the chance to transform the tragedy of Mr. Palomar (namely, of a man who wants to define the complex phenomena of being according to a unique and fundamental truth) as described by Italo Calvino.[13] As a matter of fact, this man was confronted by nothing but failure, since his meticulousness did not really belong to this world. Nevertheless, we should attempt to transform his tragedy, recognizing behind the intolerable noise which accompanies our existence the obscure foundation of this world, namely the shady ground which, from the Greek sophists till the pseudo-atomism of Giacomo Leopardi has always been defined as a simple and disturbing senselessness. We are referring to the same senselessness which, as Leopardi, himself has shown, might be tolerable just by describing it through a poetic experience.
Thanks to cinema, in short, we might live as the Homeric Ulysses, that is to say as a sort of Janus Bifrons who is aware of the fact that totality (a totality meant as something located beyond our possible experience) cannot be gained. Cinema represents a wonderful opportunity for us to grasp that there is no future totality or saving plenitude awaiting us as the final accomplishment of a painful and impervious journey. In truth, we already are that future, and for this precise reason we should not wait for it. We might become aware of this via the passivity of the cinematographic experience: just like Ulysses was taught a lesson by Circe, we are taught a lesson by cinema. Through this liberating passivity, then, we might free ourselves from the unilateral domination of totality.
Now, if we go back to what we have said about the door and the threshold, we must add that even Jesus, in the Gospel of John, presented himself as a door: “I am the door: if any one enter in by me, he shall be saved” (10:9). More generally, it may be useful to consider that the openness of a holy door has often been linked, in many different cultures, to the beginning of a feast. Jesus presents himself to his disciples and to the entire world as an open door—a door that anyone can enter, since nothing would stop them. Moreover, what Jesus says about his kingdom may be reduced to this: while his kingdom does not belong to this world, at the same time we should not forget that the beatitude promised by his Father is supposed to be realized here, in this world. We should therefore consider ourselves as concretely called to achieve our task in this world.
By incarnating a door, Jesus does not invite us to believe that what we do in this world is negligible if compared to the light that is awaiting us in the afterlife. (The myth of Janus, with his double-faced head, alludes precisely to this particular and ambivalent condition whereby what unites actually divides, and vice versa; it is not by chance that this Latin God was supposed to control, as if he were Hermes, doors and borders). In sum, it would be impossible to deny that only by inhabiting the threshold we might acquire the ability to abandon all those prejudices that prevent us from confronting the other that we always-already are.
Here, in the light of what we have just said about the threshold, the cinematographic experience could become healthy for us, revealing our real essence to us. Cinema might become an antidote against a tendency that seems universally inscribed in the logic of things. If—as Luis Buñuel has taught us—time radicalizes and extends the limits that compose space, cinema could be taken as a metaphor for a new spatial order, namely a space that might be able to deny the existence of any frame whatsoever. If this were possible, we would have a space which, delineating a distinct possibility from the ones that are necessarily linked to the practical dispositions of the human experience, might be capable of revealing the unsolvable paradox represented by a space that only the time of the screening can transform. Thanks to cinema, then, the unique aporia of which everything is an original expression could be finally revealed.
Originally published in Italian as “Il canto delle sirene,” Soglie, ed. Mauro Ponzi and Dario Gentili (Mimesis Edizioni srl, 2012). Translated by Alfredo Gatto and Fabio Vighi and reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Roland Barthes, En sortant du Cinéma, in Communications, n. 23, Paris, 1975, 104–7 (104). “Your speaker likes to leave a movie theatre. Back out on the more or less empty, more or less brightly lit sidewalk (it is invariably at night, and during the week, that he goes), and heading uncertainly for some café or other, he walks in silence (he doesn’t like discussing the film he’s just seen), a little dazed, wrapped up in himself, feeling the cold—he’s sleepy, that’s what he’s thinking, his body has become something sopitive, soft, limp, and he feels a little disjointed, even [. . .] irresponsible. In other words, obviously, he’s coming out of hypnosis. And hypnosis [. . .] means only one thing to him; the most venerable of powers: healing.”
Odyssey, XII, transl. by S. Butler, classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html.
About this particular issue, see Massimo Donà, Filosofia. Un’avventura senza fine (Milan: Bompiani, 2010).
André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005 [1967]), 12.
Bazin, What Is Cinema? 98.
Bazin, What Is Cinema? 102.
Bazin, What Is Cinema? 108.
Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 3.
Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 6.
Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 8.
Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 8.
Franz Kafka, “The Silence of the Sirens,” in The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. by W. Muir and E. Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).
Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, trans. by W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
Félix Duque
From 1945 to 1989, a battered and convalescent Europe had to suffer in its own land a long and tortuous cold war. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall and its surprising aftereffects that the continent began to flourish again. We are unsure about its complete recovery—nor do we know if it would be desirable; on the other hand, we are pretty sure—and it seems highly desirable—that Europe has learnt a lesson in relation to the stupid race for global supremacy. Today, Europe seems to have chosen for itself the identity of a strange and difficult “ensemble,” playing a “musical theme” through the different nations of an unconsolidated European Union, a theme that only exists in its different variations. It seems that this Europe would only be recognizable as branching off from its common culture, whose constitutive motivation (its “hard-core,” as it were) is available only as a “polyphonic ideal.” Such ideal is not established as a melody built on some kind of pre-established harmony (in a similar way to the famous “orchestral” example of Leibniz’s monads in his Discourse on Metaphysics); such ideal is established through competence, through the tensions at work on a continental level among companies, associative movements, parties, and unions, all of them interacting in the different nations under the regulatory factor of training and public education; such ideal seems to be painfully establishing, as in a jam session, the face of Europe.
In sum, it is a matter of trying to bring together the dialectical content that operates at the foundations of any social order. Indeed, against essentialism (which leads in extremis to fascism), it would be appropriate to point out what seems most obvious, that is, that nations are not one and indivisible ab aeterno entities (nor closed commercial states, as Fichte wanted). Instead, they only exist via reciprocal influence, creating a real compositum—as Kant would put it—in terms of inherence, consequence, and formation.[1] Through inherence, the nation appears as a group of relationships, subject to codification, between the state and society at large. This implies the introjection of the dominant ideology (without necessarily the pejorative connotation) in the body of the social and, at the same time, a manifestation,[2] that is to say an exteriorization of the class struggle for economic and political power—a struggle that, at the same time, is the result of the absorption, elaboration, and reformulation of more basic and “archaic” conflicts: clan rivalry, tribalisms, regionalisms, and nationalisms. Could we therefore think the relationship among the member states of the European Union, and with the Union itself, in terms of inherence and subsistence? I do not think so. That would be the case, rather, of the Federal Republic of Germany, in which every Land (apart from the Freistaat Bayern and the recognition of its differential traits) enjoys relative autonomy, although their actions and guidelines are submitted, ultimately, to the central government and have to subsume and resolve their own particularities under the dual control of the two chambers: the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. Quite differently, the third point of the preamble of the Charta of European Identity (1995) specifically states:
The Union contributes to the preservation and development of these common values [in relation to the fundamental rights, F.D.] and, at the same time, respects the diversity of culture and traditions of the peoples of Europe, as well as the national identities of the Member States and the organization of their public authorities at national, regional and local levels.
Obviously, after this solemn declaration of principles, it would also be inadequate to conceive a (future?) statute in which we would have a united Europe,[3] following the relational category of causality and dependence—despite the fact that, in this respect, there are indeed outstanding tensions, both ad intra and ad extra.
At the intra-communitarian level—and keeping in mind recent diatribes due to, on one hand, the public deficit in the German economy and, on the other hand, its stance against intervention in Iraq—it has been taken for granted that the German Federal Republic should constitute the “locomotive” of the Union, without undermining the interested support of France, who did not want to lose its former grandeur. This was revealed by the intervention of Jacques Delors in Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, before the crucial Treaty of Maastricht:
If the European Community really has ambitions of its own, then a political identity is required. These ambitions themselves are the ones that will confer sense to the anchoring of a united Germany inside the borders of a united Europe, and that will grant greatness to both. The Intergovernmental Conference will discuss in December [1991] these ideas on the common policy [of Europe].[4]
It is easy to notice that the idealized comparison that may be drawn between the present (the reunified Germany, since 1989) and the desired future (a unified Europe) evokes a promise of reconciliation between the “sacred heart of the peoples”—as Hölderlin would put it—and the Europe that the Nazis decisively contributed to destroy, which, however, hides a (well-meaning) fallacy in the use of the adjective vereignit for both Germany and Europe. Ultimately, Europe is supposed to be a project for the future, given that Europe has never been unified (in spite of the efforts of Charlemagne, Charles V of Germany, and Napoleon). On the other hand, Germany would be the recomposition of a past integrity (without, however, important territories given up after the reunification, since today’s Germany is by no means similar to the Germany of the Second Reich). Beyond the aforementioned reconciliation, one can only suspect that the long-awaited “anchorage” of a new Europe entails, ultimately, the shaping of Europe under a novel “two-headed eagle,” namely Germany and France.
There is also the fear that other nations of the continent may be “gobbled up” by the EU, especially the former “satellites” of the late Soviet Union, which now, because of such fear, “flirt” with the former rival, the United States of America (this is particularly the case with Poland). This fear has been prudently acknowledged by Jacques Delors too, when he used the following words to explain the matter in a realistic but not very encouraging way:
Today we do no longer talk about the “other Europe” as we used to do, but rather speak about the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Countries), although I fear that this jargon reveals a latent belief that these countries are not yet integrated in our world. Yet much remains to be done and, let us not fool ourselves, the aim is not merely the enlargement of Europe, as we did with Western Europe when the Community increased from six to nine members, and then to ten, twelve and fifteen. Our mission is to reunify Europe on the basis of common values whilst respecting their diversity.[5]
It is not only the fear of becoming new satellite states (in this case, more economic than political), according to an embarrassing plan of passive dependence, that is, of intra-European neo-colonialism (countries used for cheap labor and as a source of raw materials), but also the fear of being weakened politically and militarily. Given the little political emphasis the Union places on the importance of presenting itself as the basis of a future united Europe, these countries seem to have been abandoned to their own internal demons. This was already the sad image of impotence projected by Europe vis-à-vis the Balkans conflict, which far from being resolved would seem to languish in a lethargic state. This image of impotence throws into relief the difficult relationship among the European nations in terms of mutual solidarity; we could even speak of an impossible relationship. To begin with, the new Europe wants to establish itself on the basis of nations understood as demos, that is, collective centers of representation, decision, and participation, what we commonly know as liberal democracies; against this idea, however, we have nations that would favor the ethnos, the gens, or Volk—countries with a strong bond of common ties, customs, and traditions. Therefore, Europe is terrified by the prospect that the plague of the so-called “ethnic cleansing” may continue to spread within its borders; meanwhile, Europe is also disturbed by internal insurrections, which are barely neutralized by the label “terrorism.” In order to avoid crimes against humanity, Europe believes to be morally entitled to intervene in the Balkans, if only as a minor participant in an external event, outside the common European space. At the same time, Europe has to accept that the Balkans do not merely constitute some kind of Europe’s “backyard,” but that the conflict is painfully domestic. This is obvious not only geographically, but also geopolitically. What is at stake is the perspective of the prolongation of a typically European secular rivalry, which would seem to originate in questions of causality and dependence: the symbolic belonging (to avoid speaking of a “protectorate”) of Slovenia and Croatia to the Germanic hegemonic sphere, of Serbia to Russia, and Bosnia and Kosovo—together with Albania—to the “Sacred Door” that is the Ottoman Empire. This rivalry had already begun with the independence struggles within Greece, and continued with the First World War.[6] But these considerations could apply not only to the Balkans: will Europe extend its frontiers to Russia—that transitional and uncertain place among the East and the West—to Turkey and the new Caucasian countries?[7] What role can Europe play with regard to Greece, when the country sees its northern borders threatened by Macedonia and is reduced to being a powerless witness of the splitting of Cyprus (whose “Greek” side has also joined the EU) and the closeness of the former enemy, mythically “alive” in the collective imaginary (not only for Greece) since the Persian Wars?
In primis, and not even by exclusion, we are forced to think of the present and future of Europe in terms of composition between nations in equal terms, following the concept of “reciprocal action” (Wechselwirkung). After the shipwreck and failure of the present project of the European constitution, this seems highly problematic. Leaving aside the punctum dolens of the distribution of the power according to the countries’ number of inhabitants, we face also a more latent fact, which is very relevant from a theoretical but also logical perspective. It has to do with the difficult amalgamation of various national identities (many of which are fictitious, even secondary in relation to others that seem dangerously “basic,” i.e., linked to the land, the frontiers, the shared language and “blood”) within a supranational identity in statu nascendi. This identity should neither superficially unite the citizens of the Union (on the basis of the demos values already mentioned, consolidated by the free market economy and its consequences: the free moment of people, goods, and cultural products) nor combine them de profundis in a primitive and native lineage (if not in terms of territory, at least in terms of ethnicity, as Ortega y Gasset still thought when he opposed the vigorous Francs to the latinized and effeminate Visigoths) that would bring together the “Indo-European races”—an attempt that various fascisms tried to carry out. What kind of average identity could this be, built on the selfish and reasonable cells—supposedly individualistic—of cold and mechanical shared interests, but also on the all-too-passionate organic connection (“¡Todo por la Patria!”) of leave-members on a tree belonging to a forest—a humus—called Western Culture?[8]
Spain is a good example of the difficulties of building a national identity, the desired
moi commun dreamt by Rousseau. As to the topic of the state, Spain did not experience a revolution
(not a creative one, like the United States, nor a uniting one, like France) and did
not rise from one either (like Belgium in 1830 or Switzerland in 1848). Spain did
not have to fight to unify what was politically dispersed, in a Kleinstaaterei; nevertheless, it had to combine culturally and socially, like in the Italian risorgimento or the German case. Spain has suffered wars upon its own territory, for instance,
the so-called Independence War, but has not taken part in any modern international
war, whose results have been bitter but have led to the recognition of fixed frontiers
ad extra and to the people’s attempt to conceive of a mutual enterprise ad intra. Spain’s only “great war” has been its civil war—a conflict that would seem to persist
today—fought among internal nationalities. We could even speak of intimate nationalities,
as there is no need to distinguish among “true” nations—that is, those that are recognized
by the state—and “unredeemed” ones; they are all fictional. Paradoxically, this intimate
conflicting situation could explain, at least to some extent, the passionate Europeanism professed by Spain (to some other extent, it could also be related to the fear of
a resurgence of the military and of national-Catholic groups), in opposition to the
euro-skepticism of the UK or the Scandinavian countries. Spain, then, may be considered as analogatum in order to face the problematic situation of the EU, before it expands to twenty-five
members. After all, it seems a commonplace, whenever we discuss the two world wars
and also the
Franco–Prussian War, to speak of a European Civil War. In that respect, the balance of power so laboriously established by the Congress of Vienna (1815) sank and, as a consequence,
Europe suffered the highest humiliation: the descendants from far away, the United
States and the USSR, occupied militarily its territory and defined, in Yalta, the
new cartographic configuration of the continent (and, consequently, the new colonial
territories that were up to that point dependent on European powers). But it was also
as a consequence of this double occupation, and because of the military protection
of the Americans, that the old dream of a united Europe (from Abbé de Saint-Pierre
[1713] to Kant [1795], up to Nietzsche in 1880) could be dreamt again.
Since we are speaking of a fictional identity—a somewhat tertiary identity that would come after the national and traditional or ethnical ones—it will be very convenient to disclose briefly the general sense of this formation, in which ad extra individual values of identification and of self-esteem go together with a sense of belonging and of adhesion ad intra. First, ethnicity clearly seems to be some sort of primary institutional framework devoted to the “construction” of individuals. In that respect, we would have to point out that no immediate individual exists: the composition of the name “in-dividual” brings about that the self rises by exclusion and differentiation, as Aristotle knew when he spoke of the “last subject of predication,” which may not be predicate for some other subject (the side of the distinctio). On the other hand, every individual, in order to be so, must tend to identify himself asintotically with those properties that determine him (the side of the claritas: individuum qua existential omnimode determinate). It is this second point that allows for what is known as intersubjectivity, to which communication, collaboration, and solidarity depend. To this end, several cultural models are available, from the myth to the legend, the familiar ideological transmission, the teaching or the mass media that generates the “public opinion.” The ethnical substratum, considered as the deepest foundation of any sense of belonging (and, at the same time, as an exclusion of the “other,” of the foreign), by no means disappears in our advanced societies, governed by the demos ideal and by a symbolic communication asintotically frictionless (Habermas), free of domination. Quite on the contrary, the typical form of this stage rests on the elaboration of economic exchange (typical of the bourgeois society, Hegel dixit) and, at the same time, it founds itself on the richness of the ethnical and national material; “national” in the sense of locus naturalis of every quisque (as it is underlined by the noun “state”). The emotional burden and the motivational capacity that draws the citizens together belongs to that primordial magma, filtered and controlled by the public institutions. By itself, the rational idea of the citizen as a subject of rights and responsibilities, as a subject participant of the election of its rulers and an indirect instigator of the res publica, may not drive anyone to action and even less to solidarity.
The problem of a potential European identity should by now be clear. It seems obvious that, if the secondary sense of belonging (or to say it with Habermas, the “constitutional patriotism”) suffers from a cold type of formality that can only “warm up” to economic and ethnic interests, the identity that conforms itself to the democratic and capitalist form, again in line with the diverse identities of every national state, will be even more exhausted, incapable of moving its European citizens to take part in the mutual enterprise of the construction of such an unprecedented entity. As a consequence, we may note the lack of interest that regularly accompanies the campaigns for the European elections, or the election of those politicians that are candidates to be members of the European parliament, who are regarded as technocrats only paying attention to balance sheets while remaining indifferent to grassroots sentiments or ideas (or, even worse, they are seen as politicians who take advantage of their position to nepotistically benefit their countries).
Up to today, solutions have been as unimaginative as the antithetic logic from which they come. We see that rigid criteria of identity are determined according to the modern conception of enlightened despotism, in which roles are fixed a priori within organization charts that effectively belong to the business world rather than to governments, which in any case act more and more as promoters (or, in the worst-case scenario, as meddlers) of multinational corporations (without mentioning the different religious confessions and sects which only survive, and indeed prosper, when embedded in the show business). On the other hand, we may accept the postmodern attitude which sees us tied to a “recreational logic” (rather than to a nihilistic one); we may therefore decompose the individual kaleidoscopically in a flexible network where identities constantly change, embrace differences, and turn into malleable entities. In this case, we miniaturize and interiorize the identity problem inside every individual. As a consequence, exchanges and “libidinous flows” might be observed as purely accidental and random, which would confirm Kant’s second antinomy whereby microscopic exchange units must be simple, or identical to themselves. On the other hand, we may consider, as Lyotard did, microidentities and fluid exchanges as conforming to the somehow schizophrenic logic of the markets, thus returning to the modern position though presented in a much more picturesque and flighty way.
The problem seems even more urgent given that the so-called formation of the “national spirit,” as it was called in darker times, or the Bildung, has always taken place through violence, since it involves a process of destruction of values and beliefs which are considered as obsolete or resettable, and a reconstruction of the individual as an image of the new determinatio omnimoda (insofar as it deals with a global and exhaustive connection, the neutral or anodyne values bring about a new constellation, one that may still have to do with the old values of the land, the prince, and the church, which merely change their meaning; they are assumed as a new metavalue, or, as Hegel would put it, they are aufgehoben). At present, however, it is a matter of creating a much more complex feeling of belonging, as solid as that of each national membership but also understanding of other nations and ethnic groups: a European sentiment.
Here, we must bring forward an example that seems highly relevant. Europe’s formation, at the level of what today we consider as Realpolitik, takes place after the Peace of Westphalia in Münster (1648), which ended the Thirty Year’s War. With this acceptance of the status quo among Catholic and Protestant countries, which are forced to unite to withstand the Turkish threat (as evidenced in the siege of Vienna), a distinction between republican regimes (sensu kantiano, as England, Sweden, and the Netherlands) and absolute monarchies (with the French’s Sun King at the front) emerges. The libellous propaganda of William of Orange, William III of England, will bring about (to Novalis’s disgust), the word “Europe” to replace “Christianity,” supposedly identifying, rather than a territory, a common cause or mutual beliefs, a subtle and unstable balance achieved by means of negotiations, agreements, and armistice among sovereign nations, settled by the cartographic establishment of frontiers that would also be subject to dispute and negotiation. Only after this negotiation (a fetish of the historical conscience) a patriotic feeling appears, regarding a sense of belonging and exclusion.
It can be easily seen how this crucial substitution of a homogeneous entity, previously represented in spectral form by the moldy Sacrum Romanum Imperium, with a power balance (i.e., the substitution of a substance for a relationship or Wechselwirkung) based in commercial and colonial supremacy rather than in military power (a lesson that medieval Spain refused to learn) implied the persecution or, at least, the distrust of those who were trapped inside the national frontiers and did not agree with the new dogma (the last tragic avatar of this sentiment of persecution and rootlessness can be found in the unhappy life of Paul Celan). These were the minorities, necessarily and tautologically “ethnical,” whose membership criteria were not approved as one of the “legitimate mediation” to conform the national identity, but that, at the same time, were absolutely necessary in order to create the outside or other of the collective popular belief in the given identity. This issue may be related to several examples, for instance the Catholics who lived in the Netherlands, the “marrano” conversion in Catholic Spain, the peasants at La Vendée in the time of the French Republic, the Jews in the 1920s and 1930s (not only in Germany, but also in France and Russia, among other places), or the illegal immigrants in the contemporary EU.
A second kind of violence is carried out against those outside, crowding the borders of the new entity and permanently threatening it, mostly forged ideologically by the new entity itself. Only from the outside does it seem possible to “sculpt” a frontier inside from which the individuals seem identified in opposition to—following Carl Schmitt’s well-known claim. It is obvious that, in the European case, the Islamic world—given its religion and “medieval” habits—and Latin America in a more partial and specialized way (prostitution mafia, drugs, and extortion) are the enemies to be watched . . . and to be constantly re-created in order to generate enough attachment to the supranational unity through fear, in the same way it was done with the Ottoman Empire (we may finally consider that it seems as if Europe is continually repeating the Persian Wars).
Finally, a third type of violence has been recycled pro domo for the formation of the European spirit. This violence has to do with a vaccine inoculated in the veins of the system against the last universal and omni-comprehensive ideology, the last meta-narrative: scientific socialism or, as it is widely and inappropriately known, communism. The dismemberment of the former USSR, the emergence of rogue states within itself, the internal decomposition of power into mafias, the gradual conversion of conventional war into guerrilla warfare within their disobedient territories, or what is known as counterterrorism . . . all of this functions a sensu contrario in the young, neonatal Europe as symbolic violence against the communist violence that at present seems phantasmatic but no less effective in the collective imagination. It is a violence (whether it is symbolic or real) against an obsolete violence, fueled again and again ideologically, as if there was a chance for it to resurrect (is not the ghost considered as a revenant?).
How may all this violence, so difficult to uproot, be alleviated? This violence seems to have contributed to the creation of the first glimmer of the European conscience. An average “European” is an individual of democratic and neoliberal convictions that is “disturbed” by fanatic terrorists living inside (known as nationalists) or outside Europe (international terrorism, especially Islamic). This individual is, annoyingly, forced to live with ethnic minorities (waste of a historical continuum that has not yet come to an end, pace Fukuyama) and with immigrants who, to make it worse, are often illegal: delinquents in potentia. It could be argued that this wide description may also work for Americans, Japanese, Australians, and for new Zealanders (covering all the Western world). From my point of view, a restrictive consideration must be stated that may be taken for an acceptable criterion of demarcation, if only we compare the United States and the EU. EU citizens cherish a multiple co-belonging sentiment, however latent this may be, that requires a positive attitude towards minorities, an attitude of acceptance and further differential proliferation, of tolerance and of mere resignation too. This is because, firstly, these minorities may belong to one of the member states (like the Catholics in Holland or the Orthodox in Germany) but they may constitute the majority, thus forging a national identity, in another state; second, the necessary and convenient trend of integration of immigrants on the basis of work opportunities does not reach (and will never reach) a full assimilation of the dominant values, as is the case of the American melting pot where primary identities are reduced to mere folklore (Italian-American citizens brag about being better than their European counterparts at cooking spaghetti or honoring San Gennaro); third, there are differences in habits, traditions, and language, as well as ethnical differences, that divide a territory of twenty-five nations into three great blocks: the Germanic, the Latin, and the Slavic one. These differentiations are taken into account and promoted as a paradoxical sign of distinction with respect to the United States, and as a unique trait of the identity of the new Europe. They also prevent the formation of a lingua franca (i.e., English) that would impose its hegemony and, consequently, its “ontology,”[9] especially when this is the language of Empire—democratic suo modo—from which Europe tries to distinguish itself.
Therefore, in my opinion some “desired traits” start to appear in relation to the stillborn European identity. Firstly, and in a negative way, the motivational burden of the European identity should be considerably lower compared to typical patriotic nationalism, considering that the “return” to the source of passion (land, blood, and language) would have to be carried out not by one but by twenty-five nations. It seems offensive and ridiculous that a European, a citizen of the Union, may think through old-fashioned canons of “civil religion”: Wrong or right, my country! The daily contact with immigrants that come from the old colonies (or from the destruction of the Iron Curtain), similarly, seems to be increasingly, and fortunately, eroding the stigmatization of the foreigner as barbarian, reaching in some cases a degree of almost illegal fraternization with individuals negatively labeled as clandestine immigrants—even though recent laws on immigration attempt to covertly introduce a new and more subtle form of apartheid (incidentally, it may be interesting to point out a tendency in Spain—typically pro-Europe—to be more tolerant towards immigrants from Eastern Europe rather than from Latin America, even though such tendency has a racist component that cannot be discounted: an Argentinean or a Chilean is more easily accepted than an Ecuadorean or a Dominican).
From my point of view, what seems crucial in this respect is to realize that this type of stigmatization was proper to the colonial period, while today the western countries of the Union are in a postcolonial phase, characterized by a reverse movement that would have shocked Kant, since his solution to rampant colonialism was to limit the right of hospitality to the crossing of a territory, with the consequent prohibition of acquiring lands or to establishing factories. Currently, what we observe is exactly the opposite. Former colonies, excluding perhaps the Islamic fundamentalists, would be very happy to see their old colonial powers invest in their territories rather than import a cheap labor-force to their cities.
An immediate consequence of this postcolonial feeling (to feel “invaded,” not without anxiety, alla rovescia) should be the primacy of increased and improved human rights and, especially, the citizenship and residential right for the immigrant, in opposition to the excluding sentiment of belonging to a nation. It should not be, on the other hand and as Lenin would put it, that every individual working in a country (take, e.g., Catalonia) is already, eo ipso, from that country (therefore, a Catalan wearing a red beret). The worker should be asked whether he wants to be that or if he is satisfied with his rights as an undisturbed citizen, retaining and promoting his primary identity (this issue may be illustrated perfectly by the current conflict in relation to the chador in the French schools and the tricolor scarf used—between pride and parody—by the young Muslims: these women accept the French Revolution’s principles but, at the same time, do not feel primarily French; they do not feel Norman even though they may work in Caen, nor Perigordian while stuffing geese in Sarlat). It may be even possible (why not?) that they desire to maintain a secondary national identity (although, given the shariya, that distinction could not be applied to Islam; it would be different for the Latin American countries) while enjoying the “hospitality” of the country where they work. Think of the current 13 million immigrants living in the European Union and the internal barriers that must be broken down. These barriers separate, axiologically and hierarchically, the Community citizens from the citizens that do not hold EU citizenship, who are different also in cultural terms which cover—or, more precisely, reveal—extreme economic differences: a Swiss or a Norwegian working in Spain as an executive in a multinational company is not the same as a Romanian Gipsy that sells La farola[10] in the streets in order to survive.
In that regard, the immediate enlargement of the EU may promote the European identity sentiment and the acceptance of the immigrant otherness (they both represent the head and tail of the same solidarity coin), increasing in return the exclusion feeling—almost xenophobic—in relation to the “old” immigration from the Maghreb region or Latin America. Indeed, with the enlargement different logics are at work. The first was the substitution of the labor force from the Maghreb or Turkey with workers from Eastern Europe (initially these workers came from Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic Republics; afterwards they were from Romania and Bulgaria; and finally, there was the “core” of the Balkans’ workers, from Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia). Second, measures to relax border controls have been promoted. These measures help to introduce capital in the country, encouraging investment, the establishment of multinational companies, and favoring a future redistribution of wealth (but also, let us not fool ourselves, an ongoing rampant enrichment of very few). Third, the enlargement aims to avoid any future collisions with Russia while bringing within the Union (whose core has been the “free world,” i.e., Western Europe) the former satellite countries that had to be, at the same time, separated from the “American friend” (still with little success, especially while NATO exists and with no semblance whatsoever of a European army). Finally, with the enlargement the farthest bordering countries (Morocco, Turkey) will be encouraged to reform politically and economically in order to obtain admission—provided they meet the minimum democratic requirements . . . as well as those of the market!
On the other hand, these features will lead to predictable outcomes that are undesirable: the increase of poverty and, therefore, of radicalism, in Islamic countries which are the sources of emigrations (just consider the dramatic increase of pateras, makeshift rafts); the increase of fundamentalist cells (hence, crypto-terrorists) by Muslim groups living in European countries; and, last but not least, the isolation of Russia, with the southern and eastern side falling apart, and without a possibility to expand to the west. The outcome may be social division and further disintegration into mafias.
All these factors lead to a picture of the future Europe that may be named in Spanish la suerte de Europa, the fortune of Europe. The word suerte is not only a synonym of “chance” or “fortune.” Its Latin origin, sors, shows the derivation from the verb sero, which commonly means “to link” or “to bind” things that in themselves are heterogeneous. We can find here an analogy with the Greek term metà-phorà, which means “what is moved far from itself” and only this way becomes, paradoxically, itself. Hegel already mentioned the commercial and industrial advantages of a coastal country as opposed to a country closed in the continental oîkos.[11] In this sense, a quick glimpse of the European map shows this geopolitical advantage. Europe appears as a sort of spearhead, as if it “flees” from an old Asian mother to go beyond the ocean, leaving far behind the last Thule (“last” it will never be again, plus ultra) to re-create a new world, in its own image and likeness (on the one hand, Catholic and medieval; on the other, Puritan and modern).
The fortune of Europe has been to live always “outside itself,” always portable as stated in the splendid metaphor of Gracian’s El criticón. Europe has been able to return to itself, renewed and redeveloped, stringing together the strangeness, building itself on the basis of constantly incorporated differences: from habits to food (could there be anything more European than potatoes or tomatoes?). Europe has been able to differentiate itself internally by differentiating itself externally, although from time to time it has fallen for racist prejudices, as we have seen. This may be the common defining feature of Europe: the continual malaise, the typically “modern” commitment to live projectively, in an always-already retroactive future. To the extent praised by Nietzsche, the fortune of Europe resides in its incurable illness (in its infirmitas), in its never resting on its notion (Kant already stated that the thing-in-itself was unknowable, a limit concept, horizontic, to spur knowledge further): “Europe should be highly thankful for the incurable character of its illness—said Nietzsche—and for the eternal transformations of its afflictions; as a consequence of these, new possible situations are brought about that lead, at the same time, to new dangers, pains and cures and, therefore, create an intellectual stimulus that may be as good as the genius, and would be, in any case, mother of any genius.”[12]
This malaise, this “modern unrest” (modern Unruhe),[13] may save Europe from its Amerikanismus, its opulent and “successful” descendent, a latent inclination, always present, that may oscillate, as we saw, between the democratic imperialism and a disengaged discouragement: the tiresomeness of a mechanical and routine life, described by Nietzsche as “European Buddhism,”[14] but that would seem more proper to describe the current American way of life.
Today, Europe is—happily?—debilitated due to its own extroversion (as Spain was in America), by its own power of “exporting” the exploitation of the land as well as the capitalistic tendency to the single world market; by its ability to align scientific techniques with democratic and parliamentary politics. For Heidegger that would have been the catastrophe, the Heimatlosigkeit[15] that would not be instigated by deliberate human intentions (i.e., by the Europeans) but would have been based on the Seinsverlassenheit des Seienden, the abandonment by which being leaves entities, the oblivion of being by man. Heidegger would only consider the entity. Die Heimatlosigkeit wird ein Weltschicksal. I do not believe that statelessness is the world’s fate. I believe that an almost pathological patriotism (that can be seen in the morbid attention devoted to the Deutschheit, or the Spanishness) may be mitigated, if not completely abolished, only when it is “picked up” and subsumed (again, aufgehoben) by an entity sui generis that does not need to be superior, but is instead satisfied with being open to differences (which does not happen with American patriotism: we all know that God bless America must correspond to In God we trust!). Maybe feeling the absence not only of the country but also of the European landscape was conducive to “cutting the wings” of the nation-state, thus avoiding being trapped in its American version, corrected and expanded to exasperation.
As a strong antibiotic—possibly even too strong—against the imperialistic temptation, we may follow the insolent Nietzsche whenever he scandalously philosophizes with the hammer, far away from political correctness. Some devastating passages from the large and crucial paragraph of The Gay Science titled Wir Heimatlosen (“We who do not have a homeland,” or even: “We, the homeless”) may be emphasized:
We “keep” nothing, we do not want to return to a given past, we are not “liberals” at all, we do not work for the “progress” and we do not need to cover our ears against the future market’s sirens. [. . .] We do not find desirable the establishment of the reign of justice and harmony in the world [speaking against Kant’s “reign of the Lord in this world,” F.D.] (since that would be the reign of mediocrity and unvalued). [. . .] We are not humanists (Wir sind keine Humanitarier), and therefore fail to hold forth our “love for Humanity.” [. . .] We are not comedians enough, we are not Saint-Simonianists enough, we are not French enough. [. . .] No, we do not love Humanity (Nein, wir lieben die Menschheit nicht). But we are neither “German” enough to open wounds and infecting hearts with nationalism and racial hate, which are guilty for setting up today in Europe barriers of people against people as in a quarantine. [. . .] We that do not have a homeland are in relation to race and origin far too mixed, far too plural, as “modern men” that we are (Wir Heimatlosen, wir sind der Rasse und Abkunft nach zu vielfach und gemischt, als “moderne Menschen”), to fall in the self-admiration of the race, in that obscenity (Unzucht) that can be seen today in Germany as a sign of the German convictions, which is doubly false and indecent when speaking of the people of the “historical sense.” We are, in one word—and let it be our word of honor!—good Europeans, the heirs of Europe (die Erben Europas).[16]
From my viewpoint, this admirable anti-humanist pamphlet,[17] although a bit excessive, has only one weak point. This has nothing to do with his critique of socialism (especially the French one) as some might think, nor with his refusal to rejoice in a future reign of justice and harmony that would be, in actual fact, a boring world, built by the “last man” according to his own will. The weakness comes from the fact that Nietzsche himself believes he is a homeless individual, the outcome of several blends from diverse countries and backgrounds. What precisely may be the most significant thing in this warlike statement of principles is, at the same time, its weakness, truthfully a punctum dolens. As he recognizes, the solution against racism and the exaltation of one’s ethnicity must not coincide with a mere return to the past in which the different people of Europe lived in peace and without borders—happily as separated people. The “hybrid” that “modern man” is could not have appeared from this peaceful phase (which was praised by Novalis in Die Christenheit oder Europa, although he also recognized, as Hegel did, that it had to be overcome). And it could not have appeared from the “good European” dreamt by socialism (today we would speak of social democracy) either—this is a future in which the wolf would live side by side with the lamb and, as a consequence, each of them would stop to be what they are to become breadcrumbs in a silly soup. So then, where do these wondrous individuals come from? Is it by chance that they exist? Are they self-made individuals? But are they not the result of several mixtures?
In this respect, Nietzsche seems to forget that the result of a blend is, in turn, another blend, another mixture, and not an individual! In order for an individual to appear from such a mixture, we will have to accept not that the most active and intense component emerges as the hegemonic one in order to control and even eliminate the rest (consider this as a caution against the supposed right—handed down by history, culture, and economy—of the Franco-German bloc to be the “locomotive” of the Union;[18] as for democratic imperialism, the United States are more than enough) but . . . a mutual shell, a skin as steady as superficial which may let the body “members” express themselves through it (the same applies to the nations and nationalities or regions that compose it). It seems necessary to give everyone what they deserve (which does not in any way imply the irrelevance of the averaging justice despised by Nietzsche), that is to say, to dissolve frontiers (as a sign of centralism, hierarchy inside and exclusion outside), which does not imply the leveling down of life at all levels.
It seems necessary, when focusing on the metaphor of the fortune (suerte) of Europe, that the member states of the EU yield a large proportion of their sovereignty. This concession to solidarity may be possible via an enveloping cohesion that prevents internal stiffness as well as external violence. Between the plural interior of the European body (the “blood and land” of the nationalists) and the external, individual action (of a proactive entrepreneur), there is the skin. Not only Spain is a bull’s skin; Europe may become a set of reverberating skins, tremulous when in contact, as the translucent pages of an anatomy book, of which each page would be a sort of parchment-palimpsest that may refer to a mutual and blurry background, read in each case differently, according to the overlapping of the pages.
However, there is a point that requires us not to take the “skin” metaphor too far. The skin analogy could make us believe in a single Europe, understood as a superior vertebrate organism (as the Spain portrayed by Ortega y Gasset in La España invertebrada). To that regard, it seems accurate to admit that the symbolic confusion between biology and politics has been extremely harmful (there are two types of big mammals: the herbivorous, clumsy and stuck to the land; and the carnivorous, predators at the expense of the herbivorous—that was the case too with the nomad highlanders as opposed to passive, sedentary people). But neither the future Europe nor the present national States are hierarchical super-individuals, vertical entities with the head on top, the feet at the bottom, and the belly in the middle. Communication theories and those linked to the new technologies suggest an analogy which seems more plausible: the members of a multimedia system are in some way a multi-cellular organism, with a flexible and lax organization (think about business joint ventures) in a reticulated structure. Therefore, in our case we should perhaps speak of a craggy and landscaped “osmotic membrane” rather than of a “skin.”
Between the withdrawal of a body (with the danger of consumption due to encapsulation) and its outward enlargement (with the opposite danger of dispersal and evanescence) there is a mid-point. Or, even better, the only thing that really occurs is a middle: a membrane (significantly, the word derives from the Latin membrum) that wraps the members in order to shape a single articulated body (and not a flat surface). Membranes are the tegument and the parchment: the support to writing, thresholds of transition and transaction. Why then should we not consider metaphorically—if Aristotle’s dictum that thinking means creating fine metaphors is true—that people’s primary identities flourish only if they become transparent to a membrane that is no longer a limit or a frontier, since it covers all the national territory (its skin)? Could Europe be a membrane forged by membranes? In that case, communication among nations would be osmotic. At least, in the so-called Schengen area there is no inside or outside, but a membrane through which fluids circulate and are transformed the very moment they pass through the different sections.
***
The term “osmosis” denotes the passage of liquids of different density through a semi-permeable membrane. It seems of foremost importance to reflect on both the difference density of liquids and the semi-permeable character of the membrane. In any case, the fruitful dialectics of membranes (in opposition to borders, which imply inclusion and exclusion, belonging, and hostility) means that the survival of the distinctive features of people and individuals included in it depend, on the one hand, on the “aggressive” character of exportation (sensu latissimo) and, on the other hand, on the “accommodation” and transformation of the imported. It is its own distinctiveness that permits and encourages such operation.
Therefore, we will not discuss Heimatlosigkeit any longer (whether it is against Nietzsche, who praises such negative condition, or against Heidegger, who complains about it), and we will not consider the essentialist patriotism either. To be part of a country does not mean to be a “good patriot”—and this has nothing to do with elevating oneself to the level of “being European.” Why should it be—pace Nietzsche—“good” to belong to Europe and “bad” to belong to the Humanity? Considering that in both cases the differences are blurred—though not for Nietzsche—why should we prefer one to the other? If we are talking about belonging to a large territory, it would be preferable to be Russian, Chinese, or an inhabitant of the Sahara. This issue can only be solved by imagining a Europe of membranes: a composite Europe built on its differences and interchanges rather than a supposedly abstract Europe, or western world, or “Humanity” (as if to be “European” or “human” meant not to be this or that but almost anything, on condition that one does not bother other individuals: a temptation entertained by some pious defenders of “human rights,” an idea logically fallacious because if there were “other individuals,” “one” could not be “one among others,” homogeneous to the “rest,” and in that case everyone would be superfluous).
Europe will be a discordia concors and not a concordia discors. We should agree while dissenting (what else may “freedom of movement” mean?), looking for agreements understood as “traffic laws” which will, in turn, create unique, increasingly specific, and refined imbalances branching off into other agreements. We should not advocate a notion of progress intended as perfectibility toward a goal, but instead the disquieting transformation of the European peoples through an unlimited branching off (which may be planned only starting from the gap between the a priori and the concrete developments).
To sum up, we could say that under the sponsorship first, and rivalry after, of the new (undoubtedly democratic) Empire, Europe ceases to be an “idea,” an “image” or “work in progress” to establish by itself as an economic, political, and plurinational—though also supranational—reality, an osmotic membrane bringing together the different nations that weave it. It is not an Empire, but a “republic” in the classical sense of the term: a res publica taken care of and promoted in a polymorphic and a perspectivistic way.
Liberated from its “friendly guardians” (for Europe itself in the second half of the twentieth century was an American and Russian protectorate, thus getting a taste of its own medicine), Europe now needs to confront the problem of assuming otherness without being assimilated by it: Europe needs others in order to expand economically and industrially and to disable the “fundamentalist” traits of Islam, the neighbor and former rival.
In the midst of crisis and distrust, in the midst of the US military interventions pro domo and the sudden resurgence of nationalisms (which seem purely xenophobic since there is no nationalism without exclusion), the great dream and hope of Europeans would be, as Nietzsche says, that the good Europeans do not see themselves as “Muslims,” “Jews,” or “crusaders.” We do not follow the Book because we have already read it (even if the flesh continues to be weak). The reason why we are not followers anymore is that we have learnt to distrust the call of heaven, even when this call concerns our earth (let us not forget the barbarous, bloody war for the “Holy Land”!). That would mean that we have learnt the lesson (or have we? Europe’s future depends on it), in other words that we do not believe we are either native inhabitants (one with our land) or uprooted subjects waiting for a Messiah to redeem us, since we are unable to do it ourselves. We cannot and should not take possession of either of these features, nor take responsibility for them.
With this in mind, is it possible for a united Europe to host the three religions of the Book, as it is thought to have occurred in the Middle Ages? I believe this is a difficult proposition; I am not even sure it is a desirable one. Are Jews, Muslims, and Christians—the orthodox ones—prepared to behave with each other as osmotic membranes in the hope of transforming into some kind of sponge, penetrating and being penetrated? The first thing to do is get rid of our belief in salvation (whether a hardly fought or a merciful one), that is to say, in the restitutito ad Unum. We would therefore have to get rid of integralist beliefs and their consequence, fundamentalism.
But, could the economy by itself “tame” religion without us ending up as cyborg-consumers, controlled by technocrats entrenched in Brussels? Vaclav Havel already foresaw this very problem in 1994, as he exposed it to the Parliament in Strasbourg: “I think that the most important enterprise in relation to the European Union would be to develop a truly clear and new discussion on what is known as European identity. [. . .] In spite of its historical importance, the Treaty of Maastricht will not bring together enthusiastic pro-European Union supporters. No patriots will be obtained.”[19] It seems obvious that the former president of the Czech Republic was right, although I do not understand why good Europeans should be considered as patriots. If today it seems hardly acceptable that member states are called homelands, Heimat—unless profiteers and fanatics use the term—can we get passionately attached to Europe as a super-homeland or a homeland’s homeland?
However, will not local interests cause the membrane to burst? Or, on the contrary, will the membrane burst due to the irruption of desperate people from outside? What can be done with those borders where hunger and desire heap up? Is not the membrane “drying” at these borders, in the sense that it is changing into a European fortress? And, to avoid all this, would it not be a good idea to progressively and slowly increase the dose of vaccine within the European membrane and, where possible, extend it like an appendix, if it is true that Europe should not be regarded as a territory, but—in Nietzsche’s words—as a compound of value judgments?
I do not know what Europe will become, for “the mind is ignorant of future fortune” (nescia mens sortis futurae, as Virgil would say). What I do know is that in order for us to remain in sight of that future fortune, it would be necessary to immediately create new connections and bonds, with generosity and prudence.
This chapter was translated by Carlos Bueno Vera and Fabio Vighi.
See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft A 214s/B 261s.
This simultaneity is what allows us to speak of nation, something permanent through change. Thus, following from the quotation in the previous footnote: “But this is a reciprocal influence, that is, a real community (commercium) of substances; without it the empirical relation of coexistence could not concretely take place. Through this commercium the appearances [. . .] constitute a composite (compositum reale).” Substances would be, in this case, the nations within the European Union, while Europe would be the “composite.”
I am aware of the hesitations pro domo regarding the premature equivalence between Europe and the European Union. On the other hand, in the quoted preamble we observe that, when speaking of “the peoples of Europe,” there is a desire for a future integration of the whole continent.
Europa und die deutsche Wiedervereinigung. Speech at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, June 6, 1991, quoted in Henrik Lesaar, “Semper idem? The Relationship of European and National Identities,” in Petr Drulák (ed.), National and European Identities in EU Enlargement: Views from Central and Eastern Europe (Prague: Institute of International Relations, 2001), 188.
Reuniting Europe: Our Historic Mission. Speech at Aspen Institute, November 14, 1999, quoted in Lesaar, “Semper idem?” 194.
In this context, let me refer to my Los buenos europeos (Oviedo: Nobel, 2003), chapter VIII, 3.1 “La historia interminable: los Balcanes.”
If we believed what Ramón Tamames stated (Proposition 13, in 24 Propuestas de los profesores Jean Monnet de España sobre la gobernanza europea y la CIG, 2004), the entrance of Russia in the EU would be impossible: “In 2020 there will be ten more member states after a transitional period: Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Albania, as well as some republics of the old Yugoslavia. [. . .] An additional possibility may be considered if the Euro-Turkish controversies reach some kind of solution. This big Eurasian country (with an estimated population of 70 million inhabitants by 2005) might become a member of the EU with important demographic consequences. On the other hand, Russia will not become part of the EU, not even in 2020. Its geographical space is too wide for us to consider it just another member state; furthermore, the Russians will attempt to [. . .] become a world power in its own terms.” (We should take into account that the report was written in 2001 and that in no more than five years all the countries of the first group were already in the Union, with the exception of Albania and the addition of Slovenia, which was not mentioned in the report.)
In 1957 (twelve years after the end of the war, with Germany right in the middle of its “economic miracle”) Heidegger quoted the following arboreal metaphor from Johann Peter Hebel: “We are plants that—whether we acknowledge it or not—need to have our roots in the soil in order to grow, flourish in the ether and bear fruit” (Hebel—der Hausfreund; in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, GA, 13, 150). The idea of the tree-man comes from Plato, but he understood it the other way around: as good “sons of the sky,” men would carry the roots on the head (whose filaments would be the “neurons,” the strings through which the Gods control us) whereas the branches (the legs) would be in contact with the soil. It is therefore a matter of perspective: they both share an understanding of a relationship whereby “human belonging” is related to something that surpasses, predetermines, and marks him.
Anthony D. Smith, “National Identity and the Idea of European Unity,” International Affairs 68/I (1992) 55–76, especially 68.
La Farola is a Spanish newspaper sold by the homeless and the immigrants.
See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 247.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 24.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I, § 285. Nietzsche adds soundly and premonitory enough: “Keine amerikanische Zukunft! . . . Ich denke, wir wollen uns weder in christliche noch in amerikanische Perspektiven einengen.”
See the impressive fragment 2 [144], 1885/1886 (Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA] XII, 138) where Nietzsche seems to miss the tragic and terrifying essence of Christianity, which has been substituted by the “opiatischen Christentum,” whose primary task is “kranken Nerven beruhigen,” and which quietly passes by the “furchtbare Lösung eines ‘gottes am Kreuze’ [. . .] weshalb im Stillen überall der Buddhismus in Europa Fortschritte macht.”
Martin Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus, in Wegmarken, GA 9, 339.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Book V, § 377. KSA 3, 629–631.
I defend a more moderate, but maybe more effective, kind of anti-humanism in Contra el humanism (Madrid: Abada, 2003).
Nietzsche’s lists of “superior human beings” are populated only by French and German people. The most complete list is probably the one in the Jenseits von Gut und Böse (KSA 5, 201ff), where Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer are mentioned, as well as the “französische Spätromantik” (we could guess they are Delacroix, Flaubert, and Baudelaire), and—“generously”—Wagner.
Quoted in Lessar, “Semper Idem?” 188.