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[Musings] Homo Europaeus: Does European Culture Exist? scrap
by Julia Kristeva
April 11, 2017
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Homo Europaeus: Does European Culture Exist?1
It is possible to rethink European heritage as an antidote to tensions of identity, both ours and others. Without enumerating all the sources of this questioning identity, let us remember that ongoing interrogation can turn to corrosive doubt and self-hate: a self-destruction that Europe is far from being spared. We often reduce this heritage of identity to a permissive “tolerance” of others. But tolerance is only the zero degree of questioning; when not reduced to simply “welcoming” others, it invites them to question themselves and to carry the culture of questioning and dialogue into encounters that problematize all participants. This reciprocating questioning produces an endless lucidity that provides the sole condition for “living together.” Identity thus understood can move us toward a plural identity and the multilingualism of the new European citizen.
More than ever, Europe’s plurilinguistic space calls upon the French to become polyglot, explore the diversity of the world, and bring their specificity to the understanding of Europe and the world. What I say for the French holds for the other twenty-eight languages of the European polyphony. It is by making incursions into other languages that a new passion for each language will arise (Bulgarian, Swedish, Danish, Portuguese, and so on). This passion will not look like a shooting star, nostalgic folklore or vestiges of academia, but will function as the index of a resurgent diversity.
When a psychoanalyst treats a depressed patient, she begins by shoring up her self-confidence. This establishes a relationship between the two protagonists of the cure in which the spoken word becomes fecund once again, enabling a critical analysis of the suffering. Similarly, the depressed nation requires an optimal image of itself before being able to take on, for example, industrial expansion or a better reception of immigrants. “Nations, like men, die of imperceptible impoliteness,” wrote Giraudoux. A poorly understood universalism and colonial guilt have led politicians and ideologues to behave with “imperceptible impoliteness,” often disguised as cosmopolitism. They act with arrogant spite towards the nation. They aggravate the national depression and infuse it with a maniacal exaltation, both nationalistic and xenophobic. Europe needs national cultures that feel pride in themselves to bring to the world the cultural diversity we have mandated UNESCO to protect. A national cultural diversity is the only antidote to the evil of banality, or this new version of the banality of evil. “Federal” Europe, thus comprised can play an important role in the search for global balance.
Contrary to the curious, playful, pleasure-seeking child who wants to know where he comes from, the adolescent is less a researcher than a believer: she needs to believe in ideals to move beyond her parents, separate from them and surpass herself (I’ve named the adolescent a troubadour, romantic, revolutionary, extremist, fundamentalist, third-world defender). But disappointment leans this malady of ideality towards destruction and self-destruction, by way of exaltation: drug abuse, anorexia, vandalism, and attraction to fundamentalist dogmas. Idealism and nihilism, in the form of empty drunkenness and martyrdom rewarded by the absolute paradise, walk hand in hand in this illness affecting adolescents that explodes under certain conditions in the most susceptible among them. We see the current manifestation of this in the media: the cohabitation of Mafia traffic and the jihadist exaltation raging at our doors in Africa and Syria.
If a “malady of ideality” is shaking up our youth and with it, the world, can Europe possibly offer a remedy? What ideas can it offer? Any religious treatment of this malaise, anguish, and revolt proves ineffective before the paradisiacal aspiration of this paradoxical, nihilistic belief held by the de-socialized, disintegrated teen in the unforgiving globalized migration. This rejected, indignant fanatic can also threaten us from the inside. This is the image we have of the “Jasmine Revolution,” brought about by youth avid for freedom and the recognition of its singular dignity, but that another fanatic need to believe is snuffing out.
Europe finds itself confronted by a historic challenge. Is it able to confront this crisis of belief that the religious lid can no longer hold down? The terrible chaos of the tandem nihilism-fanaticism, linked to the destruction of the capacity to think and associate, takes root in different parts of the world and touches the very foundation of the bond between humans. It’s the conception of the human forged at the Greek-Jewish-Christian crossroads, with its graft of Islam, this unsteady universality both singular and shareable which seems threatened. The anguish paralyzing Europe in these decisive times expresses doubt before these stakes. Are we capable of mobilizing all our means—judicial, economic, educational, therapeutic—to accompany with a fine-tuned ear and the necessary training and generosity, the malady of ideality which disenfranchised adolescents, even in Europe, express so dramatically?
At the crossroads of Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox), Judaism, and Islam, Europe is called to establish pathways between the three monotheisms—beginning with meetings and reciprocating interpretations, but also with elucidations and transvaluations inspired by the Human Sciences. A bastion of secularism for two centuries, Europe is the place par excellence to elucidate a need to believe, which Enlightenment, in its rush to combat obscurantism, greatly underestimated.
Countering the two monsters, the political lockdown by the economy and the threat of ecological destruction, the European cultural space can offer an audacious response. And perhaps the sole response that takes the complexity of the human condition seriously, including the lessons of its history and the risks of its freedom. 
Writer 필자 소개
Julia Kristeva
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