9. Orient

When the Roman world breaks apart, it is through (“Germanic”) invasions, from the north, and, from the south, through separation (from Islam). There is nothing in the west—only the sea, without any limit or crossings, a place where the world, together with the sun, drops down, sets, and dies. The Occident, extreme boundary. And to the east?

A third fault line opens there, which bears no resemblance to the two earlier ones—unless it resembles both, precisely. It is the one that cuts off the Latin world from the Byzantine world, at the end of the Roman era. This rift shows a singular character. It is construed as a schism between east and west. The empire is dismembered and the church is rent. In each case, a new kind of entity takes shape in Byzantium: it is oriental, outside of the Latin world, and yet pretends, outwardly, to re-present its essence. Tradition and legitimacy: Byzantium, the second Rome. The Orient-Occident opposition, which designates the rift, conveys this equivocation: earlier, the Orient was the outside of Rome, which saw itself as the very west itself.¹¹⁵ The new Orient-Occident division (Byzantium-Rome) carries over to the core of the Roman world (to which Byzantium initially belongs) a previous opposition, which had been external. This fracture is like the reflection and replication within Rome (both church and empire) of the relation between Rome and its outside. The cut is both external and internal to Romanity. For a long time, the space forming there (the Byzantine Orient) will remain external and internal to its western double—within Europe and outside of it.

After the (internal) fault line in the north, and the (external) split at the south, a scission occurs in the east, both external and internal to Europe, and it gives rise to the long-lasting ambiguous form of eastern Europe—the Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Roman Empire, always laying claim to interiority but excluded. The term “western Europe” is a pleonasm, since Europe is what remains in (or of) the west after the threefold break in the north, the south, and the east—the duplicity of the link with the western alter ego (America) has to do with this doubling (the replication of another self, another selfsame) of the destiny of an absolutely singular Occidentality. As for eastern Europe, it is ambiguous in three ways.

First, there is the absence of a borderline: the borders are clear in the south (the sea and the straits); in the north, the limit is blank (there is nothing to oppose to it). The eastern border is problematic. It is undecidable (is it the Ural Mountains?) and gives rise to infinite variations (is Moscow European?)—and not because there might be any void beyond it, as in the north. Indeed, there are other territories in the east, and other peoples and beliefs.¹¹⁶ It is Europe’s obsessive fear that destruction might come from there: from Asia, the Great Other (barbarians, Yellow Peril, oriental despotism), who may come in at any time, because the limit is neither clear nor closed. Europe, paradoxically, has no continentality in the east—in the sense of boundary markers, continental de-termination, or continence. Europe is the cape of Asia, the cape of the world.¹¹⁷ Only in the west is it “itself”: Europe’s identity (its very being, its being-Europe) is its Occident. Hegel writes: “In Asia, the sea is without significance, and the Asiatic nations have in fact shut themselves off from it. . . . In Europe, however, this maritime relationship is of vital importance, and it creates an enduring difference between the two continents. The European state is truly European only in so far as it has links with the sea.”¹¹⁸

In the west, Europe is de-termined: by its maritime exteriority. And this involves its very identity: a state cannot be European unless it looks to the sea. It is inasmuch as overlooking the sea is not given to them (or that they do not know this given or gift) that the states of Asia are non-European—Asian—and it is inasmuch as they are welded by a continental bond—to Europe. The difference with Europe is this bond. Asia is Asia because it is fastened to Europe in this way, because of its absence of shores.¹¹⁹ The east of Europe is its non-Europeanism. First ambiguity: Asia is the continuation of the land of Europe, and this continuity sets them at odds.

The second scene of this ambiguity is the relationship with “Eastern Christianity.” The Eastern Orthodox Church is the sister of the other one, which is also “Christian”—a branch that grew from the same tree, stemming from the Apostles’ meal, the foundation of the church in Rome, and Peter’s heirs. But it is Rome’s adversary, its rival. Byzantium, the second Rome, assumes that Rome has fallen, and therefore that (Catholic Roman Western) Europe has usurped its destiny and legitimacy. The Eastern “Christians” are brothers of those in the west, but enemies.

So-called communism brought the third ambiguity: eastern Europe. This division came on top of the previous one: eastern Europe fit into the space of a certain oriental Christianity—though their borders were not rigorously identical: in the east, there was Catholic Poland, and in the west, Orthodox Greece—though after some uncertain times. But the center was in Moscow, the pole of Orthodox Christianity since the fall of Byzantium: Moscow, the third Rome. Communism, too, was external and internal to Europe, internal as the fruit of European history and revolution,¹²⁰ and external as the reverse of the Europe that was supposedly democratic, liberal, and bourgeois (western Europe). External and internal, as the cessation of European revolution, and only soaring with its particular form of bureaucratic totalitarianism in the filiation of this failure, without which communism is incomprehensible.

The east is ambiguous, by essence. The north is inside, the true outside is in the south, and the Orient is a deceitful equivocation. Europe is instituted in the play of this ternary structure: inside north, outside south, undecidable east. Now, it is nothing less than striking that this tripartite division today is the very shape of the world, and this may account for the concept of semi-periphery, suggested by Immanuel Wallerstein.¹²¹ Between an internal north (the rich countries of the planet: a north internal to itself, to its idea as the idea of a world construed from the north, from wealth, and thus also from science, technology—or philosophy) and a south supposedly completely other (the global south, always outdone and beside itself, the south of every kind of poverty and distress, pure danger and yet also a fantasy for every kind of youth—demographic youth, youth and future of the world), between these two opposing figures irreducibly facing each other in their powerlessness, unable to utter or produce the world as a whole, the east is the ambiguous figure of that which is neither inside nor outside, neither itself not another, the semi-periphery, which finds its place neither at the center nor at the outer limit. In this sense, the east-west relationship has always been a deceptive front: it was all about the north-south relation.¹²² The east was a fiction helping to conceal or contain actual confrontation (“containment” [Fr., endiguement], in the sense of continence, is an appropriate term).¹²³ Now that the east is gone, Europe has been facing its real barbarians, the Arabo-Islamic ones, who are now coming (back), all the way to its heart, and showing again the initial exclusion that is the foundation of Europe, its primary repression [refoulement]—if Islam makes a comeback in Europe, it is as its (archi-)unconscious. But this scene of the return is no longer only played out in Europe: the south devolves upon all in the world—what is now coming back to the world is the south, as its reverse. Since the east has dissipated, what has come back to the world is its repressed, which stood as the third world but was only the world itself seen from its other side—its founding fracture.

Why then is the world—everyone—haunted by the south? Why does this haunting return [revenance]¹²⁴ devolve not only upon Europe but upon the whole world, the whole empire, imperialism, and imperiality of the world? Is the world an extended Europe, as some colonial-continental dreamers may have believed? No. We must turn the proposition around, put it “back on its feet”:¹²⁵ “the world” is nothing but—in its imperial(ist) regime—this universal (this transport and metaphorical expansion) of which Europe was the turnaround, the containment, and the continence: the repatriated figure. What comes back again as the south of the world is the cessation of the universal that makes up Europe-itself. The failure (the reverse) of which Europe is the figure. The revenant, the repressed, of Europe-identity. What comes back again is the rest.