5. Straits

Let us examine the second fracture dislocating Romanity, or the Roman world—the world as Roman. It is the fault line that opens up in the south [midi]. Islam arrives in the Roman space from the south, in a way that one could describe as exactly symmetrical to the arrival of the invaders—the “barbarians”—in the north. And yet the two events have a profoundly different impact. In what way? Insofar as Islam, when it penetrates the Roman world, does not become caught up in it, neither in its political nor in its religious mode. Islam functions as a complete theologico-political exteriority. Like the northern ones, the southern invaders fight against the authority of the empire, and subdue it wherever they are victorious. But they do not convert. They register in the space of this world as the irruption of a total heterogeneity, which revokes the theologico-political system and all its constitutive duality. Islam is the impervious stranger in its opposition to Rome.

(Does this mean, in truth, that for Rome Islam is a pure, essential exteriority? Precisely not. The relationship—religious and political—that it strikes up with the Roman world is deeply complex. It is even precisely because its exteriority is much less “essential” that its lack of submission will be stiffer. The “Germanic tribes” pouring into the Roman territory know almost nothing about this world. The Muslims know a great deal—and have even constituted themselves as such, in certain ways, by refusing and revoking this.⁸¹ That is why their struggle will be more global—in a political and religious sense—while the “Germanic tribes” undergo Christianization. Muslim exteriority vis-à-vis Rome is radical because it is based on their originary kinship. Between them, there is no heterogeneous essence, but rather a radical conflict—something altogether different.)

Islam is this outside-of-Rome that irrupts within its space and shatters it. The Germans had also previously smashed the empire. But by converting to Christianity, they redrew an internal split at the core of Romanity, doubling and accentuating the theologico-political difference. Islam shows its religious as well as its political difference: its inscription in the Roman world thus traces a purely spatial or geographical limit. Islam’s intrusion shatters the unity of the Roman space by opening a breach that separates the north and the south, henceforth set against each other as the north and the south of the sea. Something in the essence of Romanity is here torn up for good. For the Roman world, the sea was the common place—a locus of unity and exchange. After this rift, the sea becomes the border—a limit and an obstacle. Islam pushes the Roman space onto the shore and onto land. Henceforth the sea is going to be the in-between of worlds, the hollowed-out place in the world [creux-de-monde], that delimits these two facing land masses. The inscription of Europe happens precisely in this process. Europe is exactly this: Romanity (the church and the empire) pushed back toward the land, the (Roman) world re-territorialized. And since I am positing that the figure is the return, it is necessary to note, perhaps surprisingly, that Europe—the return to itself of the universal—is a return toward the land and to the land, through the very gesture that inscribes its difference and traces its figure. This return is a production of origin: the land, as land, was not there at the beginning. Nothing at the beginning was defined as land. Though there was some land, there was also water—ports: anchorages and voyages. The return to the land is the movement of (re)territorialization; it constitutes the land as the supposed origin toward which one must come back. The return to the land is supposed to be (is substantivized or subjectivized as) the primordial, original land, land of the fathers, of origins and ancestors—the fatherland. The return to the (supposed) land is a configuration of a territory, a production of fatherland. It is what happens here to the universal, and what happens to it as Europe: facing the irruption and invasion of Islam as politico-religious outsider, it represses and pulls back (returns) in its self-directed movement (toward its selfsame self, self as same, the return of its movement toward itself as identification)—through the production and configuration of its (supposedly) initial land.

Europe is the land-related figure of a fatherland of the universal. (h6)

This territorial (re)figuration produces two kinds of related but distinct effects. First, an effect of continentality. What is configured in this process is exactly Europe as a continent, keeping to its land masses, and limited to their boundaries: continentality, here, means containment. The Europe that is de-termined is Romanity turned continental, Romanity contained. And this is what makes for the extreme symbolic power of the tightest maritime boundaries of this separation by water, points eminently suited to representing the vis-à-vis or face-to-face relationship of Europe and Islam: the straits, or narrows, of Gibraltar and the Bosporus.⁸² And that is why, ultimately, after much uncertainty, the border (of Europe—the idea as well as its territorial form) stabilized there, rather than in Granada or Smyrna.

Secondly, there is an effect of originarity, or fatherland effect. The fatherland is not the land insofar as it is surrounded by water or a borderline; it is the ancestral land. The origin is what one supposes to be the beginning of genealogy, the point of the first ancestor. But there has never been a first ancestor: all of them had fathers. Which one, then, makes up the first one, the original ancestor, the ancestor at the origin? It is the one buried there, and he is revered. The founding (of a fatherland) is the burial or terrestrial in-terment of the origin. And this is the very gesture—the radical root-gesture—of any founding: the lowering into the ground, the foundation—that is, into the soil or land—of that which will constitute the origin.⁸³

Now, these two effects will not lead to the same things, even though both sets of consequences are obviously related. Europe’s continentality, in particular, could have been an obstacle to its worldwide vocation, as it relaunched (in its colonizing ways) the values of universality, if Europe had not also been able to boast of its status as the land of the origin and the place of foundation—the fatherland—of the universal. This is where all the rhetorical statements about spiritual Europe, which is not and yet also is continental Europe, will be able suitably enough to take root. Let us recall Husserl’s ambivalence about this, shifting his ground at the same time or before many others.⁸⁴ Europe is thus the figure of a return to the land, as a retreat to continentality, but also a return to the origin, that is, a production of origin, the origin of the universal, the foundation, the initial takeoff of the idea of universality.

It becomes understandable why the Greek name “Europē” was applied to this entity when it was configured toward the end of the “Middle Ages.”⁸⁵ (1) If “Europē” designates a depth of land into which one plunges, a land without boundaries—rather than terrestrial masses surrounded by water, or islands, or peninsulas, or land presenting itself to someone entering it who is coming in from the sea—this name could resonate with a (re)territorialization, the process by which Rome is pushed away from the sea and onto its shores. (2) If Europe designates the land one enters and into which one sinks in a movement precisely coming from Asia across the straits—if Europe’s name, then, comes from Asia Minor, that is, the southeast—from this region and in the direction of this axis, this name had been especially available to feature the retreat of Romanity, since Islam’s forward push was carried out at that time, in great part precisely there, and in this direction.

But one can doubtless also ask oneself what strange relationship associates Europe as the fatherland (of the universal)—this figure of the land of origins and the ancestral soil—with the myth of Princess Europē abducted from Asia. Indeed, there is a problem: for the European imaginary, Europe is Europe, and that is all. We have thus seen that Herodotus expressed surprise at the myth that makes Europē not a real European. But at another level, one can say that the myth reveals something conveyed beneath the idea of fatherland: namely, that the first ancestor, the ancestor who was buried, is the first one buried here—and therefore he came from elsewhere. We can find traces of this foreign provenance in many originating figures (e.g., Abraham, Quetzalcoatl, Aeneas), perhaps in all of them. If the founding ancestor always comes from elsewhere to become a founder, and to be buried there as the origin, what outlives him, then, is the complex and doubtless infinite play of comings and goings. We can see this movement with Europē’s basket. When she goes to play with her friends, she is holding a basket of gold, the work of Hephaestus, that had been given to her collateral ancestor Libya, and this basket is embellished with a drawing that the poet describes at length.⁸⁶ Io is the figure on the basket—another woman whom Zeus abducted. But Io’s abduction turns Europē’s around in two ways. First, Zeus is not the bull: it is Io who is the heifer. Second, the sea voyage, which the ornamental motif on the basket depicts in detail, takes place in the opposite direction: from Greece (Argos) to the banks of the Nile—where Io becomes a woman (again). Now, this tale supposedly predates the other one, since it decorates Europē’s basket. Europē’s abduction, a mise en abyme, is given its form (again) as a return: there had been, before that, a woman abducted from Greece toward Africa (or the Nile, seen as the exact boundary between Africa and Asia);⁸⁷ she was abducted as an animal and later on—over there—transformed into a woman.⁸⁸ Afterward, it was the turn of a (the) sleeping woman to be abducted and to come to Crete: to the midpoint [mi-lieu] of the sea, the median between continental areas, where the whole story starts. But all these figurations, abductions, and returns pertain to the element of myth: the re-constitution of the beginning as origin. For us, the beginning comes later, in the middle of seas, the world, and history—in the element of transport.