ABOUT EUROPE

Philosophical HypothesesBy Denis Guénoun

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7386-7

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………xiTranslator’s Acknowledgments………………………………xvAbbreviations……………………………………………xvii1. On Beginning………………………………………….12. On the Figure…………………………………………73. Other Names…………………………………………..244. The Holy Roman Empire………………………………….325. Straits………………………………………………366. On Transport………………………………………….407. What Is an Island?…………………………………….438. On Thinking…………………………………………..489. Orient……………………………………………….5110. France-Germany……………………………………….5711. On the Kingdom……………………………………….6212. Religions……………………………………………6913. Surrection…………………………………………..7514. Nation………………………………………………8115. On Germany…………………………………………..9216. Looping Back…………………………………………10417. A Hypothesis for the Twentieth Century?…………………11418. Loads……………………………………………….12119. On Beingness…………………………………………12320. Places………………………………………………13821. Exodus………………………………………………14722. Absent from the World…………………………………15923. Black Stone………………………………………….17624. Capital……………………………………………..19025. Images………………………………………………19526. Value……………………………………………….20427. Becoming…………………………………………….21628. On Experience………………………………………..22229. ……………………………………………………231Notes…………………………………………………..237Works Cited……………………………………………..307

Chapter One

On Beginning

We may imagine the beginning as the origin—as the absolute point of departure. The beginning is an axiom: it goes without saying, on its own; nothing precedes it; it is set in the act that posits it. It finds the principle that makes it go in itself. It is immobile, the prime mover. Or else, for example, the biblical incipit that designates the pure initial start (the opening without preliminaries, the header: “In the beginning …”), the initiator without a cause (the one who begins: “God”), the first gesture (“created”— exactly this, to begin). Three times in the beginning, the beginning itself, alone, reiterated in its solitude.

But this beginning can only be grasped or put into words in a fictional discourse—a legend, fable, or parable. Thinking that intends to be theoretical never claims to reach this point of origin properly on its own (though it may dream of doing so). Scientific, philosophical, or literary beginnings spring from work, expelled after a period of gestation or a process. It takes long labor to beget the thought of the big bang. The axiom is built. The beginning finishes off: this is the second pre-hypothesis—and it is Hegel’s, for whom the beginning is the result. The science (of logic) presupposes the whole movement of phenomenology (of the spirit). The first gesture of science takes up again the last act of knowledge. The beginning is (at) the end.

Third prototype: the beginning in the middle. This is Gilles Deleuze’s supposition, and his manner. Reading him, one always has the impression of starting en route or getting there after the beginning. He recommends this formally: do not give thought to things at their origin, where they are not yet formed, but in the heart of their development, where their being asserts and shows itself. At its origin, the thing is still caught within that which precedes it; we should come aboard the process in the middle, as onto a moving train. To think in motion, in becoming—inasmuch as becoming moves along, which is to say, not in its (supposed) initial impulsion, but in the drive of its mobility. The beginning is median, as it were, yet not as a simple mean-time or inter-mediary—less than being. Or perhaps yes, precisely—it is there, within the mediation, movement, process, and non-immediate that one has to think. Nonlogical mediation—it could be the middle of the world, the driven middle, of the world on the move.

Here, of course, we prefer to take this path, the one cutting across [traverse]. But to start elsewhere than at the beginning does not mean beginning just anywhere. Such an inception presupposes that processes exist, that one latches onto them, and that one sets out to think in their midst. The wish here is to think (within and about) development, (within and about) becoming. Becoming is a matter of thought. To think about becoming means thinking, quite simply. That which wants to be thought is nothing but that which is becoming. To think means to acknowledge as thought that which is becoming. That is why the thought of becoming has to be produced on the move, on the way. One has to think as it comes to be—as it comes. But “as it comes” is not just “in any way whatsoever.” One has to come aboard what is coming and not miss it by a misstep. This implies, first, that one should not think within the residence of dead zones, or not only or mainly there. One has to think starting from living zones. Dead zones are provenances reduced to the state of origins. Secondly, do not become immobilized in imaginary zones. And this is the most difficult; one should rather think in zones of effectiveness. This is a question of the real, of the true—the most difficult question, which one certainly should not bypass or flee. What is coming—where we must climb aboard while it is moving—is truth.

* * *

Why Europe, then, to start with? So as to probe something. Europe is neither an origin nor an end. Europe is neither a foundation nor a grounding, nor a goal or a completion, but rather a median or intermediary object. A middle (in-between place [mi-lieu]). As a matter for thought, Europe is in progress, on the way—for moving across. I was not born there, as a matter of fact; I came to it, and took it along the way. Or rather Europe took me and carried me away. I was born in Africa, as were my father and my mother, my grandparents and their fathers and mothers, their grandparents, and so on, for all we know or may guess, for a long time, a very long time. Stemming, perhaps, from groups and families that had been crisscrossing the Mediterranean for centuries, many of them in Arab countries, some in the Iberian Peninsula, but coming from Arab countries, and returning after being expelled, crossing the Mediterranean or traveling along its shores, like Aeneas, like Paul, Jews like the latter, coming from Palestine long ago, they said, but living in Arab countries for centuries; coming from Arabized Jews or Judaized Berbers, or from departing Sephardic Jews, or others who left no traces. Every genealogy is an exclusion of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ancestors. I made the calculation. Let us imagine that my name is X. I can find and confirm the filiation of one of my ancestors named X—during the fifteenth century, for example. Let us call my generation g1. My parents are g2: there were two of them. Of my grandparents, g3, there were four. Of my great-grandparents, g4, eight. Let us assume there are three or four generations in each century. Since the fifteenth century, this amounts to six centuries—twenty-one generations. How many ancestors did I have at the g21 level? My calculation yields 1,048,576, with the same ranking. In the fifteenth century, at a putative moment of history, I have (arithmetically speaking) one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred, and seventy-six ancestors. And therefore, when I say that I stem from X, who during that time had the same name as I do, I am eliminating one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred, and seventy-five members from my ancestry, and additionally all those from the subsequent generational layers (situated between the two moments in time, during these six centuries). Of course, I cannot claim to know where they all lived—all those, the ones before them and after them— even supposing a high rate of endogamy that would reduce their numbers. One would have to be unbearably obsessed to take for granted that they were all Jewish, or all from Oran, or all speakers of Arabic. But it is quite likely that a good number of them hung around the Mediterranean, between one monotheism and another, various ports and trading posts, certainly more numerous in the south, returned to the south after more than one mass expulsion. What were they speaking? Mostly Arabic, and a little Spanish, and for prayers a mixture based on Hebrew, which they barely understood. I was born in North Africa, by the sea, toward the middle of the twentieth century. The legendary memory of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and beyond them said this: we have been here forever.

Now, Europe took me away in the following circumstances. All Algerian Jews became naturalized French citizens by a decree issued in Tours (France) in 1871. Within four generations, my family changed languages, thinking, and lifestyle—and finally their continent. My great-grandfather Rabbi Chalom Djian, who lived in Oran and died in 1929, spoke only Arabic, dressed like an Arab, and ate sitting on the floor. My grandmother was a pious and observant village schoolteacher, but with a sense of humor. My father was a middle-school teacher and a member of the Communist Party, with Enlightenment ideas. Then I came. I have never known a word of Arabic. The French language is my native land. I think as an atheist, there’s no going back. At the end of the Algerian war, we came to France, as did a million others. Like them, we were “repatriated.” This is the paradox: we were “repatriated” to a fatherland from which we had never come, since my ancestors—so much at least is established—had been living in Algeria long before its conquest by the French. Europe took us and carried us away on the run—and we were happy. My father, who had supported its war of independence and had paid the price for it, no longer saw Algeria as his home, our future. He was hopelessly in love with France and with Europe the beautiful: Spain, England, Italy—and Germany; the Prado, the jovial, uncompromising Churchill, Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Marx. Worshipping France as the land of the rule of law and of equality, he joyfully let himself be torn away from his ancestral shores and never returned. He is buried in Marseille.

This is not perhaps the provenance of an authentic European. Maybe. And yet the hypothesis that came to light little by little in the course of this work might be that, unexpectedly (in a transferential, nonfounding mode), such a history dovetails with, or reiterates, Europe’s primordial constitution—that Europe is not a patrimony of native people but of passengers, which it carries on board or on its deck; that every European is passing through, traversing it; and that Europe is not thinkable outside of this: crossed, which is to say, both covered or crisscrossed with roads, and as a crossing [traversée]—Europe as a passage. And therefore, Europe the provisional, to be crossed, overstepped, freed from itself. Intermediary Europe, Europe-process. Mid-way [mi-lieu].

On this (non-originary, noncompleted, an-archic) score, Europe may be a good object-of-thought—that is to say, a good vehicle—with which to begin. Let us see this as the initiatory and preliminary hypothesis— let’s say, hypothesis zero (h0).

Chapter Two

On the Figure

Here is the first hypothesis:

“Europe” is one of the names of the return to self of the universal, which is to say, of the universal as a figure. (h1)

This proposition concerns what we should understand—hear or read—in the name of Europe. Before we assess it, let us note that it posits, almost in passing, an equivalence between “return to self of the universal” and “universal as a figure.” The proposition thus assumes that the figure is equivalent to a turnaround. Now, this equivalence potentially contains another one, and it is useful to shed some light on this.

What is a “return”? The French Le Robert dictionary classifies the senses of this word [retour, in French] in two sets of meanings. On the one hand, there are the physical or dynamic senses, which convey the general idea of a “backward movement, a displacement toward the point of departure or a change of direction”; on the other, the “abstract” senses, related to the “idea of repetition, regression, or exchange.” Let us follow the latter path, where the first sense is “return to” [retour à]. “Returning,” here, is first of all “returning to.”

What is “return to”? “To return, actively or passively (to one’s habitual or previous state, to past activities). To return to normal [retour au calme]. To return to the source. ‘Returning to nature, that is, abolishing society.'” In this abstract sense, which I shall adopt provisionally, the return (as “return to”) strongly implies a return to self. To return (to normal, to the source) is to return to what one was or was supposed to be, as one was—formerly. We cannot claim (at least not in a radical sense) that we are “returning to” (to a past time; to a place, for what took place there; to a past state of things) without wanting to find ourselves again in the position, situation, or posture that we used to occupy. The “return to” a past requires a return to a self (past, fugitive, vanished self). Now, to continue this series, “returning to” (self) implies returning in the sense of “turning back” or “reverting to” [retour sur]: to come back (now) to what one was (before) is first of all reversing something one is today, as when we say “reversing a judgment,” that is, recanting or disclaiming it. Retour sur soi-même, turning around or reverting to oneself, according to the Littré dictionary, means a serious self-examination of one’s behavior. Thus, returning to oneself in this sense first of all means turning or reverting to oneself, questioning oneself, observing, evaluating, and judging what one is today; and then coming to—as in waking up, thereby abolishing the state in which one was: sleep, intoxication, error.

I am thus positing that “return”—any return—as “return to” is necessarily a return to self, and thus in the first place a reversion to self. Every return turns around—be it a consideration, a reflection, or a self-judgment— and there is no return that does not revert back toward itself. Reverting to self is the essence of returning, in its generality. When we say that the figure is equivalent to the return to self, we are saying that it is equivalent to the return itself, as return. By holding on to both ends of this chain of equivalences, we come to the production of a second hypothesis, which we should extract for the sake of clarification, although the first one contains it:

The figure is the return. (h2)

First, we shall deal with the hypothesis about Europe (h1). The second hypothesis—its general scope—remains suspended for now.

* * *

By saying that Europe is a term naming the return to self of the universal, we imply something else about the universal; we presuppose the thought of some previous or preliminary thing in addition to this return. “Returning” comes afterward: there would thus have to be something universal “before” this return, “before” the figure—before Europe. In a first approach, the universal would be “first” (before the figure) the movement of an expansion, a widening and an enlargement, and this is the movement that a return would (possibly or necessarily?) follow.

Let me lay this out graphically. Such a sketch is also a figure—this is something for which I shall have to try to account (as well as for a certain usage, here, of philosophy with its practices and figurations). My drawing is in the shape of a loop:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A remark about this sketch: since the universal is first the movement of an expansion (shown by the lower part of the curved line), the reversion to self should aim at this movement and this line. But the return (the upper part of the line) misses its aim: it does not come back to the movement as movement, or to the expansion as a widening or process. The return comes back to the origin of the movement; it refers the movement to its origin. Now, in the movement, the origin goes missing. The return then produces the image of a point of departure, as a point and as a departure— a cutoff and a parting. That is where the arrow projects itself: toward the supposed origin of the movement, which—in the movement—is lacking. The return points to the beginning: it construes the movement as the aftermath of its departure, and constitutes its beginning as a point—an originating, abstract, and immobile locus; a fixed motor.

How is this schematization relevant for Europe? It is an invitation to think of Europe in a double fashion: within the movement of the universal (as the moment, course, and tracing of this movement), as well as (indissociably) in the retreat of this drive—its closure and sealing. This leads us to say that through this initial expansion, which holds and underlies it, Europe is always conveyed as the project of a world, and this globalizing drive toward worldhood is unassailably and inextricably linked to its very idea and its first becoming. Constitutionally (“always-already,” “originating there,” so to speak, but inasmuch as its origin fails it), Europe comes forth, producing worldhood [mondialité]. With its return, it wants to represent this universality that carries it (it wants to be its representative), and with this gesture, it gives shape to the universal—and misses it. This is what we shall call Europe’s continent-form, its continence. Europe’s continentality (its shape, its outline on the surface of the earth) is its return to itself, its backlash and failing. Having taken on this shape, Europe reconsiders the worldly globalizing movement that carries it, and rethinks (reproduces) it from its originating point, now pointed, inscribed at the heart of its continentality— starting at the point of departure. If, starting with the figure, we revisit this world-producing movement, we may understand it (being carried out) as a continental extension and expansion, and further perhaps as the clearing of land, mission civilisatrice [civilizing mission], and colonization.

* * *

How is one to understand this before/after relation, as I have just developed it? There are two overlapping but distinct ways of doing so, tracing the first on an ideal plane and the second on a concrete one.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from ABOUT EUROPEby Denis Guénoun Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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