Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe

Costica Bradatan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415699198
• eBook ISBN: 9781135761233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and worth studying in its own right, but with the re-integration of the 'new Europe' into the 'old' one and the emergence on the 'Western' European intellectual scene of many authors from the 'East, ' such a culture will also shape the European mind of the 21st century.

This volume decodes and explores this culture of 'precariousness' from the complementary angles of philosophy, political theory, intellectual history and literary studies. Expert contributors look at a wide range of topics, from philosophical martyrdom to collective suffering to geographical fatalism, and explore the works of key authors in the field including Cioran, Ko?akowski, Kertész, Bauman and Žižek.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

costica bradatan

INTRODUCTION

philosophy, geography, fragility

A vos yeux, nous n’appartenons pas à la famille des Occidentaux: nous sommes des Barbares.

Adam Michnik, “Gloire au plombier polonais!”

Today, if you say a country is part of the West, it sounds like a mild form of approval; on the contrary, if it is part of the East, it sounds like mild condemnation. But all of that is the typical expression of a Western sense of superiority. There is no shame attached to being part of the East, just as being part of the West is not automatically a virtue.

Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back

I

Over the last decade the European Union has welcomed a number of new member countries, most of which used to belong to the “Eastern bloc.” While, thanks to mass media, tourism, and immigration, Western Europe has come to acquire – along with a host of prejudices – some general geographic information about these countries, relatively little is known about what happens there in terms of production of knowledge and cultural artifacts, in terms of intellectual debates and circulation of ideas. Although all of them are now part of the same “European family,” comparatively little is known in the countries of Western Europe about the intellectual and cultural physiognomy of the East European newcomers, about where they come from and what they want – about who they are, after all. This is in sharp contrast with the extent to which what happens intellectually, artistically and philosophically in Western Europe is known, disseminated, and talked about in Eastern Europe.¹ It is as though the intellectual traffic between East and West within Europe can only be one way: as if works of art and thought, ideas and intelligence can move only eastwards.

Not that West European intellectuals have little chance of coming across intellectuals from the East. They don’t even have to travel there to sample manifestations of the “East European mind.” Names such as Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugene Ionesco, Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz or Leszek Kolakowski have long been part of West European intellectual parlance. And for good reason: these people have made a significant contribution to the very shaping of Western intellectual life over the last half a century. However, no matter how familiar their names may sound today, they were not born into the family, but are adopted children; they grew up, were formed as intellectuals and some of them even lived long enough in various corners of Eastern Europe. Yet, in most cases, their relation to the world they have come from is usually bracketed, passed over in silence. Who they were before, what they left behind, why they left – all this doesn’t seem to matter very much. Nobody, or almost nobody, bothers to ask these questions in their “countries of adoption.” In a certain sense, it is as if these people come from nowhere, the offspring of the East European nothingness that they are. No significant attention is paid to their complex backgrounds, to the specificity of their cultural origins, to the unique blend of intellectual concerns, existential challenges and ethical imperatives that shaped their thinking, molded their personalities and, in the end, made them who they are.

I should also add, however, that this marked indifference is not the worst thing an East European can experience when in Rome, Paris, Berlin or London. In some cases, the mask of indifference serves only to conceal a repertoire of more vivid attitudes, ranging from that mix of distain, apprehension and sometimes curiosity that one is tempted to feel on encountering Barbarians (“nous sommes des Barbares,” chants Adam Michnik) to the slight embarrassment and condescendence one tends to display toward poor relatives. Czesław Miłosz, for instance, although recognizing Europe as his “home,” has to add bitterly that, still, this is “a home that refused to acknowledge itself as a whole; instead, as if on the strength of some self-imposed taboo, it classified its population into two categories: members of the family (quarrelsome but respectable) and poor relations.”² In between these two extremes, these lies a vast space in which, by different means and in various forms, l’Europe Orientale is being incessantly Orientalized.³

II

As irony would have it, it is not only West Europeans who don’t know who East Europeans are but also East European themselves, albeit for completely different reasons. To be more exact, in their case, it is not so much that they don’t know who they are (how could that be?), but that they are not exactly comfortable with who, or what, they are. As a matter of fact, it may well be that this very sense of metaphysical discomfort, this incapacity to come up with, and accept, a firm self-definition, is one of the main character traits of East Europeans, something that “defines” them in the end.

In this reading, what makes Eastern Europeans metaphysically uncomfortable is the inescapable feeling that they were born “in the wrong place,” “at the wrong time,” or both. Miłosz, who knew about these things only too well, regards East Europeans as being “burdened with a longing for a homeland other than the one assigned to them from birth.”⁴ It would not even be accurate to say that East European identity is defined by dislocation. It is much worse than that: it is an identity defined by a most uncanny form of nostalgia: nostalgia for deracination, a compulsive need for losing one’s roots, but without the prospect of growing new roots elsewhere. And yet, one may ask, how is this possible, how can one experience something like this? The only explanation that comes to mind is historical: for a long time (but especially during the twentieth century), East-Central Europe witnessed some of the most horrendous social and political catastrophes in European history. To illustrate this, in what follows I will make room for some prominent East European voices.

In his memoirs (Arrow in the Blue), Arthur Koestler calls Central Europe “the laboratory of our time.” The obvious implication is that of a place that is being cruelly “experimented with,” if not simply “played with.” For a quarter of a century, his personal history was inseparable from the history of this grand-scale experiment during which he first witnessed “the financial, then the physical destruction of the cultural stratum from which I came.” Koestler’s assessment is chilling, to put it mildly:

At a conservative estimate, three out of every four people whom I knew before I was thirty were subsequently killed in Spain, or hounded to death at Dachau, or gassed at Belsen, or deported to Russia, or liquidated in Russia; some jumped from windows in Vienna and Budapest, others were wrecked by the misery and aimlessness of permanent exile.⁵

Miłosz, who experienced the same events in Poland, at the other end of the same vast “laboratory,” has a similar reaction. He reads them in a theological (or, rather, demonological) key: “a curse hangs over this particular piece of Europe and nothing can be done about it.” For him, there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the very way this part of the world is set up. The only way to “fix” it would be to blow it up:

Had I been given the chance, perhaps I would have blown the country to bits, so that mothers would no longer cry over their seventeenyear-old sons and daughters who died on the barricades, so that the grass would no longer grow over the ashes of Treblinka and Maidanek and Auschwitz.⁶

Needless to say, historical misfortunes are not the exclusive privilege of Eastern Europe. However, what seems to distinguish East Europeans’ perception of their misfortunes is their character of permanence. For the Eastern European, historical disasters not only happen, they do so on a regular basis; they keep happening so stubbornly that their occurrence ceases to be seen as accidental and becomes part and parcel of life. For example, speaking of the misfortunes that have befallen his country Václav Havel recalls the long series of “weeping presidents,” always obsessed with “explaining the meaning of their capitulations.”⁷ Havel’s “weeping presidents” are only the striking visible expression of a certain pattern of failure that operates throughout modern Czech history (in 1939, in 1945, in the 1950s, and then, finally, in 1968).⁸ In Poland, Krzysztof Kieslowski finds a similar pattern and reads into it the manifestation of a certain geographical determinism: “We, as Poles, have tried to negate our historical location several times; that is, our position between the Russians and the Germans, a place through which all new roads always pass. We always lost.”⁹ This is the cunning of history.

As a result of a long series of historical disasters, some East European intellectuals have, in various forms and by different means, come to develop a metaphysical view of history as a tragic process. This historical pessimism, regardless of its local colors, articulates itself around one and the same insight: we Eastern Europeans have always failed (and will always fail) because we are wrongly placed geographically; no matter how bright, brave, hard working or serious we are, we will always be crushed by forces bigger than we are. I have already quoted Miłosz, for whom to be Eastern European is to live perpetually under a “curse.” Kieslowski professes a similar vision. For him, it would be utterly meaningless to rebel: a wise resignation in front of the vicissitudes of history is the healthiest attitude one can have here. True, Kieslowski still bears a grudge “against history, or perhaps against the geography which treated this country the way it did,” but he hastens to add that, “no doubt, that’s how it has to be – that we’ll get thrashed, that we will try to tear ourselves away from where we are and will never succeed. That’s our fate.”¹⁰ This is, again, the cunning of history.

One unavoidable corollary of such a vision of history is nihilism. It is probably no accident that E.M. Cioran, one of the most charming nihilists of the twentieth century, came from Eastern Europe. He refers endearingly to Romania (his country of origin) as “le Néant valaque.” Perhaps in an attempt to limit the damage of such a devastating nihilism, Mircea Eliade (another Eastern European) frames this issue in such a way as to find some redemptive meaning behind the “terror of history.” In his classic, The Myth of the Eternal Return, addressing the question of whether historical (profane) time can be made to acquire a redemptive (sacred) dimension, Eliade talks at one point of “the sufferings and annihilation of so many peoples who suffer and are annihilated for the simple reason that their geographical situation sets them in the pathway of history.”¹¹ Their only “fault” is that they happen to be “neighbors of empires in a state of permanent expansion.” As an example, clearly with his native Romania in mind, Eliade talks about Southeastern Europe, which:

[H]ad to suffer for centuries – and hence to renounce any impulse toward a higher historical existence, toward spiritual creation on the universal plane – for the sole reason that it happened to be on the road of the Asiatic invaders and later the neighbor of the Ottoman Empire.¹²

Eliade’s conclusion, which may be of little consolation to some, is that in the absence of a superior, transhistorical framework of reference, “the catastrophes and horrors of history” suffered by Eastern Europe through history would remain utterly unredeemable.¹³ Almost needless to say, this is the cunning of history.

Another corollary of this East European vision of history is an all-pervading sense of fragility – fragility as a mode of historical existence. The Eastern European modality of insertion in the world is a paradoxical one: it always presupposes the expectation that the world can collapse at any time. In Eastern Europe, everything barely exists. If tomorrow the universe were to fall back into nothingness, this would hardly surprise anyone here: the dividing line between existence and nonexistence is always blurred, and that is exactly what makes everything (institutions, people, ideas, projects) so fragile. The following fragment from Milan Kundera’s controversial essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” conveys some of this East European atmosphere of universal fragility:

Boxed in by the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, the nations of Central Europe have used up their strength in the struggle to survive and to preserve their languages. Since they have never been entirely integrated into the consciousness of Europe, they have remained the least known and the most fragile part of the West – hidden, even further, by the curtain of their strange and scarcely accessible languages.¹⁴

In this self-representation, Eastern Europe is a world of permanent improvisations, of temporary solutions and provisional arrangements. It is a world of fluid ontologies and ambiguous relations. Everything here starts anew every day and sometimes does not last until evening. If something does last, that’s grand occasion to celebrate. One author, for example, finds it amazing that Bucharest still exists. The city’s most remarkable feat is that it has managed to survive after all it has had to go through:

Bucharest’s greatest merit is that of having survived all the natural and historical catastrophes that have struck it in abundance: fires, floods, earthquakes, plagues, the corrupt rule of foreign princes, the exploitation of Ottoman and Russian empires, and, more recently, the disfiguring and destructive drive of a megalomaniac Communist president.¹⁵

And this is, of course, yet another manifestation of the cunning of history.

III

One of the most consequential historical misfortunes to befall Eastern Europe in the twentieth century was the imposition of communism by the Soviet Uni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Philosophy, Geography, Fragility
• 2. Interwar Southeastern Europe Confronts the West: The New Generation: Cioran, Yanev, Popović
• 3. Poststructuralism in Georgia: The Phenomenology of the “Objects-Centaurs” of Merab Mamardashvili
• 4. What is Eastern Europe? A Philosophical Approach
• 5. On the Meaning of Life in the Age of the Most Meaningless Death
• 6. Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in Imre Kertész’s Fateless
• 7. On Happiness in Unusual Places: N. Steinhardt’s Uplifting Lesson
• 8 The Fragility of It All
• 9 Familiar affairs: Tracing Croatian Theoretical Normality
• 10 Latin as a sign of life? The reception of the ancient tradition as a marker in the analysis of the Sovietization process in Poland
• 11 The Revolutions of 1989: Twenty Years Later
• 12 Marx on 1989
• 13 Jamming the Critical Barrels: The Legacies of Totalitarian Thinking
• 14 Voices from Central Europe: Bauman, Kertész and Žižek in Search of Europe
• 15 Europe in the Mode of As If: Józef Tischner’s Góral Philosophy
• 16 Europe Speaks: Linguistic Diversity and Politics
• Index