through europe

Philosophy, in all its many and wide articulations, is perhaps too large a discipline to encompass with only one definition. It is thinking developed into understanding, and understanding unfolded as imagination. It is theory – in its etymological meaning of passionate, empathic observing – of life and of the world. Having observed life, like sailors used to do with the stars at night, philosophers draw a map for the rest of their journey, which they follow and change as their journey progresses.

Although philosophy has been often thought to have to do with understanding the world, or with changing it, I would claim that it essentially has to do with the art of inhabiting it.

 

Yet, such a fundamental discipline has long been relegated to the miserable position of an ancient dance remembered only by the elderly, or of a fast-fading dialect. Something of a secret cult to be performed far away from the world, deep inside the catacombs of academia.

 

Such a regression, I believe, originates from two main sources: one is to be found among the philosophers, the other among those who are not philosophers, and in particular non-philosophizing young people.

The Other

 

At the basis of our relationship with the Other, according to Emmanuel Levinas and to Judaeo-Christian religion, is the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

Upon encountering the Other – any human other – his/her face communicates to us something that far exceeds the limits of our rational understanding. Through his/her face, the Other reveals him/herself as an abyss of infinite mystery, and as the place in which God shows Himself as the essence of Otherness. Such an encounter comes as a trauma to the person who is faced by the Other. The Other forces us to accept that our dreams of individual autonomy were always ill-founded, and that we always carry within ourselves an infinite responsibility towards the Other-God – a responsibility that haunts us forever, to the point of being a true persecution. We are ruptured inside by the presence and the demands of the Other, yet we cannot fully comprehend him/her. We are bound to the Other, yet this burden is always excessively heavy for us to carry. The injunction ‘though shalt not kill’ reveals our most immediate reaction in the face of the revolution that the Other brings into our lives: our desire to kill the Other, so to free ourselves from our responsibility towards him/her and to be able to pursue our dreams of perfect autonomy.

 

Fleeing

 

As my troops push their assault forward, the phalanx of the Seleucids opens its ranks. It is a matter of seconds. My camera angle is low, close to the back of my soldiers, and when the elephants charge I am as taken aback as my men. It’s pure chaos. I pull back my camera angle towards the sky, where us Gods belong. I order the shaken Triarii cohort to fall on the right side of the elephants and to attack them from the flanks. A red square framing a white flag starts flashing next to their insignia. In vain, I order them again to flank the elephants. It’s too late. They have lost their cold Roman composure. They are fleeing, oblivious to the world and to the orders of their God.

 

I watch them running through the pixelated foliage of a nearby forest. I am no longer able to click on them to select the survivors. I forget the rest of the battle, still raging on the dry planes of inner Anatolia, and I lower my camera angle to follow the flight of my men.

They failed me, when all they were for was to obey me. What are they feeling right now?

Looking at their square calves propelling their run towards the end of the screen, I realize the truth.

They fear and tremble, but they have never been more true to me than now.

 

When the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling recently announced his intention to reform the British  prison system, I couldn’t have agreed more. British prisons are badly in need of reform. Since their ‘privatisation’ – that is, the wholesale of buildings and inmates to G4S, – prisons on the island have become even more overcrowded, insulting of the dignity of the inmates, and completely oblivious of any rehabilitating function that they might be supposed to have. Much like in Britain’s motherland, the US, the prison system seems to have reverted to the gruesome pantomime of a Medieval vision of hell on earth. While the British government keeps waving the supposed superiority of Western culture uber alles, its prison system has completely lost touch with those Enlightenment ideas of human dignity, that have contributed so much to the most decent aspects of our Western civilisation.

 

One would have expected Grayling to meditate cautiously on his role, possibly to read a book or two by people like Beccaria or Voltaire – Foucault might be too much for a Tory MP, – and finally to burst out in a beautiful announcement on the priority of human dignity over everything, even over the stiff rigour of the law. One would have expected Grayling to comment on the despicable regression of British prisons towards a Victorian model of workhouses, or on the highly dangerous passage of the most controversial of all State powers – the power to kidnap and enslave civilians, legally defined as ‘imprisonment’ – from the hands of the State to those of a private commercial company. In short, one would have expected Grayling to follow the claim of the Latin poet Terence that ‘I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me’ – and to act consequently.

 

A new age of monument-making is on its way. In this short article I will try to explain the geo-political, social and symbolic reasons for the (coming) renaissance of monuments as a means for political domination.

 

 

Preface: Eiffel Towers

 

When the first design of the Eiffel Tower was produced in 1884, France had just emerged from one of its bleakest periods. After the defeat against Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the wave of civil revolts that originated from the Paris Commune of 1871, the French Nation needed to prove itself again as a believable power in the eyes of the world. The times were fluid and dangerous, and the European balance of forces was being reassessed. France had to show itself as a reliable, stable, united political and economic entity – and the 1889 Exposition Universelle provided a perfect opportunity for such a display of solidity and power.

 

In October 2008, when the Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell agreed that ‘something extra’ was needed to celebrate the Olympics, the country had just begun to sink into the whirlpool of economic recession. When Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit project was selected on 31st March 2010, the country had just admitted to the world to have entered its first double-dip recession since 1975, when Britain had to beg the IMF for rescue funding. The international credibility of the old Kingdom and of its Capital City-State was in peril, and immediate measures were required to show that stability, as well as power, was still part of the character of mighty Albion. What better way of achieving this, than investing on a monumental, non-functional artefact, such as Kapoor’s reinterpretation of the Eiffel Tower?