Primitive Marks of Modernity: Cultural Reconfigurations in the Franco-Italian Fin de Siècle

Abstract

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism (Benjamin, Illuminations 256) From Kristeva's The crisis of the European subject to Samir Amin's critique of Eurocentrism (Eurocentrisme) or Chakrabarty's invitation to provincialize Europe (Provincializing), one could claim that, if the old continent is dead, its subject does not feel very well either. Even at a glance, indeed, much discourse produced not only on but also by European culture in different spheres of the humanities at the turn of the twenty-first century--despite its divisiveness--seems to revolve around two interrelated points: the demise of a stable European cultural identity, and an inevitable as much as desirable reconfiguration of the relationship between self and otherness--both inside and outside the Western cultural borders--beyond essences and binary oppositions. For Edgar Morin, for instance, in a shrinking global context that has delegitimized the Eurocentric ideology, the European identity can only be reconceived as a contradictory complex of diverse people, classes and cultures, as an unitas multiplex (Penser 27) allowing us to think l'identite dans la nonidentite (27) [identity within non-identity] ** according to a dialogical principle that does not dissolve duality in unity. For his part, Jacques Derrida denounces the programme archeo-teleologique (Autre cap 31) [archeo-teleological program (Other beading 27)] of any discourse and counter-discourse about Europe's own identification, seeing them in the service of a centralizing autobiography of Europe, be it a self-accusation or a self-celebration, while Gianni Vattimo highlights that the process of europeizzazione della terra e dell'essenza stessa dell'uomo (Fine 162) ['Europeanization of the earth and of the very essence of man' (End 154)] has reached a planetary dimension, and hence thwarts the anthropological adventure of trans-cultural understanding because it erases the difference and the distance between sameness and otherness. The possibility of an authentic encounter with alterity, be it cultural or philosophical, is in itself ideologically determined by the Western cognitive categories that have produced the anthropological and the hermeneutic discourses. Yet, for Vattimo, the cultural is not simply assimilated by a global and strong Western tradition: endorsing the standpoint of anthropologist Remo Guidieri, Vattimo contends that both the homogenizing European heritage and the allegedly radical cultural alterity are reduced to residual manifestations of a hybrid reality that is nothing more than un immenso cantiere di sopravvivenze (166) [a 'construction site of traces and residues' (Fine 160)]. Vattimo's treatment of sameness and otherness in terres of weakened and belated instances of an all-inclusive condition of marginality can also provide a philosophical framework for Armando Gnisci's critique of Eurocentrism in view of the West's decolonization from itself (Centrismo 44-45) and of the rediscovery of ourselves as meticci (45) [racially and culturally hybrid]. The mixed and decentered subjectivity--hence always already in dialogue with cultural otherness--that Gnisci invites contemporary Europe to endorse is the one embedded in the Italian pronoun noialtri and of its equivalents in several other European languages (nous autres, nos otros), a symptomatic inscription of a communitarian self that derives its sense of self-identity from the alterity that coexists with it (Noialtri 73). For Gnisci, the model for this paradoxical European identity as a condition of intrinsic plurality and otherness is offered by the general process of metissage and creolization that Edouard Glissant associates with the Caribbean experience and proposes as the cultural paradigm for the world at large in our fin de siecle. Glissant indeed highlights un sentiment de derealisation dans l'Europe actuelle, au moment ou elle tente de se faire (Traite 105) [a feeling of derealization in today's Europe, the moment Europe attempts to create itself]. …