Rubble Walls of Contingency: Language, the Self, and the Mediterranean Imaginary

Abstract

Abstract Though I am not a linguist by trade, writing “of” (rather than “about”) literary philosophy in Maltese with the intent of exploring the interrelationship between the experience of the contingent self, displacement, and the pain of beauty, becomes a linguistic affair. In this paper I explore how doing philosophy in Maltese brings one to engage with disciplines in which one was entirely educated in other languages (in this case, primarily in English and Italian), and how this opens new opportunities that move inwards as well as outwards. This aspect of directional thinking, as it were, also enters those immanent and external spheres by which phenomenology and aesthetics are put in play. This refers to how the “musk” of one’s language (a term whose linguistic use I first encountered in Seamus Heaney’s take on poetry’s indigeneity), is bound to carry one’s aesthetic imaginary onto a wide horizon whose boundaries could only be likened to the porousness of rubble walls. Such rubble walls – these ħitan tas-sejjieħ (in Maltese) – tend to mark territories while facilitating a high degree of fluency between them, to the extent that we could speak of the pattern of bocage as a contingency of meaning just as the pattern of bricolage implies an act of an intentional weaving. This paper reflects on the process of writing in Maltese as a means by which contingency as an approach to living and thinking, remains core to the understanding of how the self is immersed in what we broadly identify with the poetics (and therefore, the making) of the Mediterranean imaginary.