Critically Mediterranean

Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis

yasser elhariry, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, yasser elhariry, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319717630
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319717647
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Traversed by masses of migrants and wracked by environmental and economic change, the Mediterranean has come to connote crisis. In this context, Critically Mediterranean asks how the theories and methodologies of Mediterranean studies may be brought to bear upon the modern and contemporary periods. Contributors explore how the Mediterranean informs philosophy, phenomenology, the poetics of time and space, and literary theory. Ranging from some of the earliest twentieth-century material on the Mediterranean to Edmond Amran El Maleh, Christoforos Savva, Orhan Pamuk, and Etel Adnan, the essays ask how modern and contemporary Mediterraneans may be deployed in political, cultural, artistic, and literary practice. The critical Mediterranean that emerges is plural and performative—a medium through which subjects may negotiate imagined relations with the world around them. Vibrant and deeply interdisciplinary, Critically Mediterranean offers timely interventions for a sea in crisis.

© The Author(s) 2018

yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (eds.)Critically MediterraneanMediterranean Perspectiveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Critically Mediterranean: An Introduction

yasser elhariry¹ and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev²

(1)

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

(2)

Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

They wait for the boat then cast the heavy cordage which unfurls in the air, lasso-like, their movements are splendid […] they make memory emerge, they cut through the continuity of time to make the island’s memory surface through their movements, and they do it all in the present of the instant; when I set foot on the concrete pier, I am short of breath, my heart starts beating wildly, and I remember this moment in exacting detail, it stands in my memory like an inaugural scene.

Maylis de Kerangal, à ce stade de la nuit ( 2015 : 50)

End Abstract

This foundational episode anchoring Maylis de Kerangal’s reflection on the Mediterranean’s memorial density provides a striking illustration of the fundamental tension underlying most historically bound investigations of the Mediterranean in modernity . On the one hand, the narrative stages the romanticized portrayal of the Stromboli sailors to whom the narrative voice alludes, a revisitation of well-known orientalist tropes that relegate the Mediterranean region outside the purview of history : there, the Mediterranean figures a site of uninterrupted continuity, both impervious to change and ensnared in a circular temporality at cross purposes with the ever-unfolding telos of North-Western European modernity.¹ On the other, and at the extreme end of de Kerangal’s historically bound, linear chronology, stands the instant, the present in its most elusive form, the now, throbbing with a sense of urgency crisscrossed with indeterminacy—the mark of unfathomable, endless contemporaneity. For de Kerangal , who like any North-Western European visitor to the Mediterranean engages the grand narrative of history from the privileged perspective of agency, the instant purveys delightful disorientation, an exhilarating loss of coordinates conducive to an affective rerooting of her distressed, modern subjectivity in the nurturing strata of Mediterranean “memory .” (She even speaks of her excavation of the affective resonance of the Mediterranean as a stratigraphie [51].) Yet through the filter of her narrative’s temporal dichotomy, the instant of this encounter, though ripe with temporal possibilities, loses its sharpness; it folds back into the dense texture of the Mediterranean’s stillness, short-circuiting any attempt to reshuffle the distribution of historical agency and temporal existence between the two groups. At the antipodes of de Kerangal’s mode of dwelling in the instant—the foundation of her relation to and relation of Mediterranean reality—the sailors’ entrapment in the infernal tyranny of the everlasting present begrudges them the same recognition as historical beings that the narrator is afforded. De Kerangal’s binary temporality purveys either precise coincidence with the unfolding of teleological time in the case of the narrative voice, or perfect exclusion from the order of historical existence in the case of the sailors. Her perspective can only conceive of historicity as a zero-sum proposition, which echoes the inured dichotomies that have historically pitched a hegemonic North-Western Europe against its contiguous Mediterranean peripheries.

Counter to de Keragal’s dual temporal mode, French historian François Hartog has forcefully delineated the contours of a new contemporary experience of time dubbed “presentism”: a temporality of crisis featuring novel collocations of past, present, and future, in which “the distance between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation has been stretched to its limit, to breaking point” (2015: 17).² Hartog takes account of the disengagement of historical time from future-oriented politics . In his presentist model, praxis remains irremediably mired in the inconsequentiality of a never-ending present, thus posing the question of a suspended “production of historical time” within our contemporary moment (17). Hartog suggests that

perhaps this is what generates today’s sense of a permanent, elusive, and almost immobile present, which nevertheless attempts to create its own historical time. It is as though there were nothing but the present, like an immense stretch of water restlessly rippling. So should we talk of an end of, or an exit from, modernity , from that particular temporal structure we call the modern regime of historicity? It is too early to tell. But we can certainly talk of a crisis. “Presentism” is the name I have given to this moment and to today’s experience of time. (17–18; our emphasis)

By placing the spotlight on the fundamental insufficiency of “the modern regime of historicity” to adequately engage the temporal aporia of our contemporary moment and its ensuing epistemic stagnation, Hartog propounds a pluralized vision of history resting on “the idea of degrees, of more or less, of mixtures and composites, and an always provisional or unstable equilibrium […] a way of linking together past, present, and future, or of mixing the three categories” (xv). His outlook places emphasis on the intrinsic anachronism of our contemporary critical present, on its interwoven texture as resurgent stories irrupt in its distended fabric, as its possible future instantiations retrospectively color it. For, according to Giorgio Agamben,

those who are truly contemporary , who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are thus in this sense irrelevant [inattuale]. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. (Agamben 2009: 40)

This sedimented, gaping present forms the basis of a jerky, fragmented, unsynchronized temporality, one that exceeds the kind of duality exposed by de Kerangal: historically bound, linear chronology on the one hand and the instant, the now on the other. Such a present is deeply attuned to subjective temporal experiences, to internalized, past moments of crisis —those reverberating traumas that modernity has occasioned and whose ripple effects can be perceived in multiple contemporary presents.³

Cutting across rigid taxonomies that deploy time along a linear, teleological axis of transhistorical progress, Critically Mediterranean adopts as its main ordering principle the prevalent state of crisis—humanitarian, economic, political, aesthetic, literary, as well as temporal—that has engulfed the Mediterranean in the time-space of modernity . Pursuant to this theoretical premise, this volume’s methodology deploys a specifically critical engagement with time—that is, one that finds its methodological mooring in the state of crisis identified by Hartog .⁴ As such, our critical project counters and complicates the exhausted teleological historical narrative that has undergirded the unfolding of modernity . By echoing Wendy Brown’s denunciation of the exhaustion of history as a narrative of emancipation and social progress in her evocatively titled Politics Out of History (2001), we foreground an alternative epistemology of time, one engaged in the subjective experience of temporal frames and dedicated to the reclaiming of historical agency in the quandary of current-day Mediterranean politics . This volume’s contributors thus expose and engage the entanglements between aesthetic production, philosophy, literature, and the arts in the Mediterranean, and collectively proclaim the emergence of a critical Mediterranean: a temporal, cultural, literary, and artistic field of inquiry, and a cross-disciplinary site of knowledge production that both builds on and am...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Critically Mediterranean: An Introduction
• Part I. Mediterranean Modernities: Immanence and Dynamics
• Part II. Mediterranean Temporalities: Remembrance, Haunting, Slow Time, Anachronism
• Part III. Deployments
• 14. Afterward: Critical Mediterranean Times
• Back Matter