WALKING AROUND THE SUN. MACHINES, SPIDERS AND BUCCANEERS | NOTES ON EUROPE. THE DOGMATIC SLEEP

Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. Edited by Eduarda Neves NOTES ON EUROPE. Eduarda Neves Europe’s Sickness. Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego 014Euroamericanism. Subject & Chaos. Marcus Steinweg Deprovincializing and Denationalizing European Feminisms. Mara Montanaro Eurorenovation (euroremont): The art of concealing. Kateryna Filyuk Tremor, Uncertainty, Invention. Europe and the sea. Daniela Angelucci From Peripheral to Cosmopolitan. The Crisis-Images in Miguel Gomes Arabian Nights. Luís Miranda Europe: Univocity or Equivocity? A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. Luís Lima Cosmopolitanism, Populism, and Democracy. Andreas Michel Europe Without Organs? Opicinus de Canistris and the New Anomos of the Earth Łukasz Moll & Michał Pospiszyl European Dream. “Keep bangin’ on the wall”. Carla Cruz 004 006 014 018 030 036 042 052 064 074 088 LIST OF Then And Now: Cultural Europe in Agony on Zambrano’s Thought Paulo Alexandre e Castro Disfiguring Figures. The political potentiality of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s choreographic work. Alexandra Balona To Draw Borders and The Aesthetic Mind: Reviewing Europe With Almada Negreiros. Maria de Fátima Lambert Gerhard Richter: Between the sayable and the intelligible. Cristina Susigan Two extremes at the European Peripheries: Baltic and Iberian post-industrial cultures Inês Moreira CURATORIAL PROJECT Museum of Ancient Greek Technology - Athens Infante's House - Oporto Belém Tower - Lisbon Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design - Karlsruhe Panoptic - Hospital Center Conde de Ferreira BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 098 104 118 132 140 154 156 164 174 188 204 218 CONTENTS Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 4 NOTES ON EUROPE "In fact, the question of the essence of Europe is not mysterious or unanswerable. (...) But let us not worry about sterile questions about the true borders and ethnic entities of Europe. There is no doubt that Europe has neither a substantial popular base nor strong borders to the east and the southeast, nor an unequivocal religious identity (...) The question should not be: who, according to what criteria and what traditions, belongs to a "true Europe"? (...) but: which scenes do Europeans play in their decisive historical moments? What are the ideas that animate them, the illusions that mobilize them? How has Europe achieved its driving history and by what means does it keep moving? Where does Europe's power and unity run the risk of failing?" [Peter Sloterdijk | If Europe Awakes] "Let this new Europe keep its luminous memory this way: philosophy, democracy, the Enlightenment, and even what is called, in a very dubious way, "secularization". May it also keep its nocturnal memory, the memory of all the crimes it committed in history and which were committed in its name, all these forms of hegemony, of colonialism, and, in the course of this century, all the monstrosities of European totalitarianism: fascism, nazism, stalinism (...) But I still appeal to you, to a Europe that (...) proposes a "new international" and not a "cosmopolitanism". [Jacques Derrida | Letter to Europe] 5 NOTES ON EUROPE Eduarda Neves The notion of "Europe" has been questioned since the last decades of the twentieth century, especially in the territory of the so-called European Studies. Since World War II, Europe has lost its visionary project of a privileged race of the human kind, thanks to the consequences of its policy of self-destruction, already present in the first half of the last century, to the effects of decolonization and the loss of ethnocentrism. The convulsions at the level of world politics and geopolitics definitely change the course of history. What Europe is left after the great historical controversies that have crossed and continue to cross it? What critical framework is possible to outline today so as to understand the various interactions and disseminations that make Europe fundamentally a kind of financial and commercial brand? What place can there still exist in the world for a Europe that does not yield to the imperialist tradition? As Sloterdijk critically questions, is this commonplace that tries to formulate Europe as a "unity of differences" or "a set of contradictions" a empty one? What is the possibility of a heterotopic becoming for Europe? How to wake it from the dogmatic sleep as did Kant in respect to Reason? Since the modern age, in which European cartography has practically reduced the terrestrial globe and the representation of the world to Europe, until today, the old continent loses its enchantment, its mystical character, being increasingly challenged as a paradigm. If it is true that it will continue to be privileged, this fact can not prevent us from thinking about what we are as history, from establishing a dialogue with ourselves, a kind of personal archeology. Similarly, in the territory of art, Europe has been the subject of complex debates, in the domain of which some artists have been called in to participate, questioning both the political reorganization of postSecond World War, recent poli tical decisions, or artistic mapping based in geopolitical strategies in a global context. If European art was regarded as the world’s art, its protectorate seems to have been emptied. Will those who Sloterdijk calls "the second-rate artists" be the ones who continue to overestimate heterogeneity and otherness, making efforts to maintain the myth of the European dream? Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 6 Facultad de Belas Artes de Pontevedra – Universidade de Vigo Fine Arts School of Pontevedra – University of Vigo, Pontevedra, Spain Europe’s Sickness Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego ABSTRACT Is Europe sick? Has it always been? More than a hundred years ago, Nietzsche wrote: “Europe is a sick man, and an incurable sick one.” If so, we would like to diagnose what such a disease consisted of and still consists, and if it has a cure. EUROPE’S SICKNESS Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego 7 More than a century ago, Nietzsche wrote that Europe was a sick man, and an incurable patient. That disease that affected Europe, as is known, was nihilism; the most unsettling host. The values that had sustained civilization were exhausted and, now, the continent lacked tragic culture, and it had plenty of... reason. A reason that, furthermore, was less itself than its cult. But, even after a century and a half, Europe has not yet been able to think about its fatality. It has not been able to think, affirmatively, on its own lack of values, so that, from that point, it is be able to generate new ones. Thus, it has not been able to surpass itself. That is why it is an incurable patient. Europe, therefore, has been unable to plunge itself, with tragic Nietzschean joy, into the unknown. The torment of the unknown, the a-rational or radically random facet that always governs the becoming. It has always wanted to reflect itself in a false Greece that stood out for its harmony and serenity, but from which all the abysmatic potency, whose tumult and passion were setting fire to the Greek garden, was hidden. Europe, so to speak, has lived happily amidst its abstract intelligence, its maxims, its notes and paradoxes. That is why its world is only assumed as the world of the understandable, the rejection of mystery. The greatest mystery, as Niezsche himself noted, is precisely that God has died... by our hands. Here is one of Nietzsche’s substantial concerns, especially in the last years of lucidity, when he can, nevertheless, be masked under the figure of the mad speaker who seeks God in the midst of men’s misunderstanding, urged only by necessity, with their backs turned to everything divine: “Where has God gone? - he exclaimed -, I will tell you. We have killed him: you and me! We are all his murderers. But how could we have done it? How could we have drunk the sea? Who lent us the sponge to blur the horizon? What have we done, when we unleashed the earth from its sun? What path will it follow now? Where will we ourselves go? Away from all suns? Will we not be continuously falling? Forward, backward, sideways, everywhere? Is there by any chance an up and down, nevertheless? Do we not err as through an infinite nothing? Doesn’t the breath of empty space rub against us? Isn’t it colder? Isn’t there always night and night again? Do we not have to light up beacons at midday? Do we not still hear the noise of the gravediggers who bury God? Do we not feel, however, any odor from divine rot? Gods also decompose!” (La Gaya ciencia, § 125).¹ In this passage, Nietzsche nevertheless contemplates the death of God as the dramatic overthrow of traditional metaphysics. There is no possibility of revitalizing categories and values that nowadays are only ruins: there are no hopes. It corresponds with the decline of the world of god, but also to that of man’s domain (equivalent to the downfall of truth and, with it, also that of appearances). This black point of infinite nothingness or void, an authentic terminal episode, can only be assumed as the necessary prologue to the culmination of nihilism, the possibility of overcoming god, but – beyond that – man himself. Hence, further on, in the fifth book, at the sight of God’s throne vacancy and in the text with which precisely this begins (entitled “We, the Fearless”), he addresses this important subject again – he even calls it ‘spectacle’ - as “The greatest of last events - that ‘God is dead’, that the faith in the Christian God has become untenable.” Friedrich Nietzsche, El gay saber o la gaya ciencia, ed. and trans. Luis Jiménez Moreno, Espasa, Madrid, 2000. ¹ “A decline which is not understood loses its poetry in the ridiculous.” (Emil Cioran) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 8 What Nietzsche will be unfolding, now without any ambiguity, is an idea that works in the manner of a crucial caesura between the past and his time, which is ours. “The new - he will write in a posthumous text in the spring of 1880 - in our current position on philosophy is a conviction that no era has had yet: that we don’t hold the truth. All men in past times ‘had the truth’: even the skeptics. “But now Nietzsche does not fall into despair and, even referring perhaps to the plastic Jean Paul-like descriptions of an abysmal world, an orb taken by the most absolute devastation and the black sun of melancholy, he uses them as a pathetic scenario on which to operate his radical transformation of everything, an exercise of disorder embodied first of all in himself: “This wide plenitude with its rupturing, destructive, collapsing, overthrowing consequences that we now have before us: who would be able to guess enough of all this today, to become the master and preacher of this enormous logic of horror, the prophet of deep darkness and eclipse of the sun, the like of which has probably never before existed on earth? [...] We ourselves, riddle diviners by birth, who wait, so to speak, on the mountains, located between today and tomorrow and lying in the contradiction between today and tomorrow. [...] We may still be too under the immediate consequences of this event, and these immediate consequences, its consequences, are not sad and dark for us at all, contrary to what we would expect, but are rather as a new kind of light, difficult to discover, as happiness, a relief, a recreation, a sustenance, an aurora [...] Indeed we, philosophers and ‘free spirits’, before the news that the ‘old God has died’, feel as if enlightened by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, admiration, premonition and hope”. There was a good reason for that. After the eclipse, the existential horizon presented itself without any obscurity, finally free, open for a new journey to be started. Soon Heidegger, precisely in his writings on Nietzsche, will be very clear about this: nihilism “is to begin taking the ‘occurrence’ that ‘God is dead’ seriously”. So that the lack does not bring with it the lament, “but is, instead, greeted as a liberation, touted as a definitive conquest and perceived as fulfillment.” (Nietzsche II). This is similar to the hope of someone like Hölderlin, for whom, although Christ had died, at least he endured, until the day of his return, through earth’s gifts in the species of bread and wine. That is precisely why we had to remain faithful to the earth. But these verses on the impetus that Nietzsche puts in Zarathustra’s mouth are placed even further, in his speech about the donkey’s feast. Let us remind it: “While you don’t become as little children, you will not enter that kingdom of heaven. (And Zarathustra pointed it with his hands up). But we do not want to enter the kingdom of heaven in any way at all: we have become men - and that is why we want the kingdom of the earth.” The will to fulfill this purely earthly desire can easily lead to a process of self-divination of the individual self, as expressed, with gloomy resonances, by Müller/Schubert’s Winter Journey Lied: If - as The Gay Science states (§ 125) - we are the murderers of “the holiest and most powerful that the world has hitherto possessed”, if “he has bled out under our knives”, then, before such an enormous fact - “too big for us” -, there is no alternative but to “become gods ourselves” to “appear worthy of it”. That is why this event is truly supreme, a caesura that will mark a new cycle in the history of men: “There has never Let us enter the world happily against all odds! Since there is no god in heaven, we ourselves will be gods! EUROAMERICANISM SUBJECT & CHAOS Marcus Steinweg 15 Hapiness François Jullien demonstrated that the idea of happiness was among the least questioned premises in Western thought. As long as this idea remains tied to a vision of a goal in order to inscribe itself in a teleology with a happy ending, it will belong to the Europeanism of the happy life, which “singled out the idea of happiness from the continuity of process and set it forth as ‘the desirable’ par excellence.” As always, Jullien approaches the deconstruction of one of the core categories of the European history of ideas from the outside, taking a detour through China, which did not undergo the separation of day-to-day living and the desire for happiness in order to nurture life independent of happiness. Nurturing life away from happiness means living it without any particular idea of happiness, beyond the dramaturgy of unfulfilled desire, without the romanticization of happiness. One thing that’s notable about this comparison between European goal-orientedness/purposefulness and Chinese purposelessness/goallessness is that it leaves unmentioned the emergence of a conception of happiness within the field of Western philosophy that is freed from the categories of sense, from determination, and from telos. Nietzsche reactivated the antique and Spinozistic heritage of an immanence of beatitudo in the materialistic horizon of existence. Spinozistic/Nietzschean affirmationism, saying yes to life in its unliveableness, would be another strain of Western thought that locates happiness within its incommensurability—instead of construing it as beyond life. Being happy simply means living. There is no life beyond life, beyond its violence and unliveableness. Confinement Has anyone ever done more violence to logos than to confine it in the prison known as logic? And what if the speech, language, or reason known as logos were convicted of the inconsistency of its promise known as logic? Among heretics, an exactingness caused by excess is proper to thought, which tempts logos to break with its principles. Thinking means showing logos its own fragility. Enlightenment Should we call enlightenment the thing that spreads “trace elements of reason ... through the world,” or is it “trace elements of chaos ... that bring forth enlightenment”? Alexander Kluge directs this question at Heiner Müller, who recognizes that it is the “purpose of intelligence” “to create chaos” in order to “question all illusions, all coalitions, and all alliances.” Ultimately, the point is to complicate the opposition between reason and chaos. What else does reason do than bring chaos into the world, and what does chaos produce if not the hyperreasonable questioning of this chaos of reason, which is rationalistic totalism? The dialectic of enlightenment causes reason and chaos to interact in a way that does not privilege either side. We’ve gotten used to describing the birth of logos out of chaos or myth as the emancipation of thought from the irrational. At the same time, we know that the emergence of reason in the prerational sphere of chaos represented a violent event that generated chaotic effects. Translated into the system of nature/culture, that means that we distance ourselves from the myth of a culture that substitutes for “wild” nature, and cannot simply switch over to an opposing ideology of nature robbed of its “innocence” by culture. Nature isn’t wild, pure, or innocent; nor is culture civilizing or violent. To formulate it as primitively as possible: one isn’t better than the other. Nature isn’t good, culture isn’t bad; nor vice versa. Enlightenment begins with the suspension of these anthropomorphisms. Articulating oneself beyond good and evil is part of complexity. The interest-oriented, strategic, or irrational violence, brutality, and horror that happen in the name of (generally fascistic) naturalism and (ideological, religious) culturalism is the product of the subject’s exit from the dialectic of enlightenment. Instead of acting at the level of its world’s complexity, it reduces this Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 16 Courage In Kant’s essay What Is Enlightenment? (1784), Michel Foucault recognized a “call to courage.” The famed challenge— addressed to all of humanity—to emerge from immaturity implies a sapere aude: the courage to think, the emancipation from subjection to the thinking of others. Kant is touching on the human ability to become conscious of one’s own heteronomy in order to—gradually—free oneself from it. In the context of further considerations that stray from Kant, Foucault spoke of the “courage of the truth,” which is tantamount to his definition of philosophical thought. The courage of the truth turns out to be the courage of thinking. The act of thinking—which includes processuality and interminability—includes working on the truth, “analysis of the relations between the subject and truth: that of relations of power and their role in the interplay between the subject and truth.” The courage of truth must question the instrumentalization of the truth and its fusion with established power. Far from dismissing truth as a metaphysical concept—and with and without Kant— Foucault defines the task of his thought as the analysis of the truth. Courage demands this analysis, if only because as a critical project, it cannot trust any simple solutions— as far as the alliance between knowledge and power goes, for example. Strictly speaking, it can’t trust anything. The courage of truth is inherent in the tradition of enlightenment not only in the form of a challenge, but also as problem and aporia. You could call Foucault the thinker of this inherence. His entire body of thought expresses consciousness of the aporia of thought concerning the truth. This is why it is thought—because thinking doesn’t mean searching for solutions. Thinking means complexity in favor of one-sidedness that it calls truth or justice. Should it make sense to speak of truth or justice in this context, then the dialectic of enlightenment teaches us that they are on the side of complexity rather than one-sidedness. Patos Thinking that thinks itself—the self-reflection of the logos, the cogito, or the subject—implies the veritable pathos of reason. There is no doctrine of reason that is not a doctrine of emotion. The reasoning subject cannot think itself without being confronted with its own fragmentation, the pain that belongs to self-awareness. The Ancient Greek verb páschein means to suffer or to endure—and what is suffering other than an experience that pushes the subject to its limits? Pathos expresses the experience of unresolvable conflict, which is why there is no philosophy that isn’t pathetic in this sense. It may be a matter of the discreet pathos of mathematical thinking, or lines of argument strained to their breaking point. It may be the polemic pathos of reason run riot, which we are familiar with from Nietzsche’s final books and Artaud’s strident invectives (from his “animalistic and superhuman, shrieking, shrill, brutal” speech). The pathos of dry subjects, abstraction, sobriety, and coldness also expresses the pain of thought, in which it “loses itself,” as Hegel says. Thinking means getting lost again and again. The self grinds itself down on its conflicts instead of synthesizing them dialectically. The movement of reason traces its restlessness. Thinking is a passion that makes the subject tremble in the face of truths that undermine its realities. Stinging eyes To look truth in the face—that is the cliché of thought because it can only do so in the face of a truth that remains faceless. “What thing,” asks Jean-Luc Nancy, “can be looked at directly in the face? If looking something ‘in the face’ means seeing its ‘truth’ or ‘evidence,’ then there is never any direct face-to-face. working through problems that elude solvability. Kant was also clear on this. The subject is in a bind. That’s what the subject’s humanity consists in: being in contact with questions and problems that it can neither dismiss nor solve. And that’s what requires courage. EUROAMERICANISM SUBJECT & CHAOS Marcus Steinweg 17 Every face is a bedazzlement, terrible and marvelous.” We know that Lacan calls the faceless face of the truth the real. Freud speaks of the unconscious, Heidegger of being that collapses into nothingness as nonbeing. There is no philosopher who hasn’t found their own term for the truth without a face. Plato evokes the image of the shining sun. Burning light that stings the eyes. The sun inflames and irritates the subject. If it does not cause blindness, then at least it bedazzles. Like Freud’s unconscious, Lacan’s real, and Heidegger’s being, it does not give of itself fully; it withdraws and withholds itself. It doesn’t divulge itself directly. The subject communicates with these entities only at the cost of relative blindness. The truth generates a subject with stinging eyes. You can also refer to “reddened eyes,” as Rancière does in a commentary on Deleuze. With Deleuze, chaos blinds the subject and causes it to slide. What Deleuze and Guattari, together with Nietzsche, call chaos can be interpreted as a translation of the Lacanian real into the dispositive of immanent thought. The planes of immanence lie like a filter or a “screen” over chaos. They muffle the contact with nothingness. Just as the antique logos already represented a neutralizing figure for the alogon, the immanence filter lies over the faceless chaos of truth in order to give it a face that stings the subject’s eyes less. To look truth in the face means assenting to being blinded, which promises some minimum of insight. This perhaps impossible promise is the promise that philosophy makes to itself. Born in 1971, Marcus Steinweg lives and works as a philosopher in Berlin. He is a Professor at the Art Academy Kralsruhe. His recent books include: “Duras” (with Rosemarie Trockel, Berlin: Merve 2008); “Politik des Subjekts“ (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes 2009); “Aporien der Liebe” (Berlin: Merve 2010); “Kunst und Philosophie / Art and Philosophy” (Cologne: Walter König: 2012); “Philosophie der Überstürzung” (Berlin: Merve 2013), “Inkonsistenzen” (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015), “Evidenzterror” (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2015), “Gramsci Theater” (Berlin: Merve 2016), “Splitter” (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2016), “Subjekt und Wahrheit” (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2018). Some of his books are published in english by The MIT Press Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 18 Université Paris 8 University of Paris 8, Paris, France Deprovincializing and Denationalizing European Feminisms Mara Montanaro ABSTRACT To rethink European feminisms on an international scale requires a powerful theoretical reworking of space. It is a question of thinking the materiality of its borders not as something fixed, given once and for all, but on the contrary, as a dimension where the feminist struggles, the new subjectivations that come out of it, the changing gender relations, constantly reformulate and rebuild its limits, its borders. Hence, the need to consider a geography capable of making space the object of a critical problematization, to show how this space - and its historicity - is affected in its geographical and cultural materiality by the postcolonial and decolonial feminist struggles. In this talk I will focus on showing how “denationalizing European feminisms” following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s invitation to provincializing Europe, means to interrogate genealogy, the very story of European feminisms, through this denationalization. If belonging to the women’s movement does not require the blind adherence to a dogma or a definite and valid representation of all times, then re-politicizing European feminisms means inventing new ways of being together, by choosing according to which priorities and by what means to tinker with fragmentary theories, or even how “to move” to implement a plural and multilingual dialogue - in short, it is a question of imagining a radically international feminism. DEPROVINCIALIZING AND DENATIONALIZING EUROPEAN FEMINISMS Mara Montanaro 19 To rethink European feminisms on an international scale requires a powerful reconceptualisation of space. To think the materiality of its borders – not as something fixed, given once and for all, but rather as a dimension where feminist struggles, the new subjectivations they entail and changing gender relations constantly reformulate and reconstruct its boundaries, its borders. This explains the need to envisage a geography capable of critically problematising space, to show how this space – and its historicity – is affected in its geographical and cultural materiality by postcolonial and decolonial feminist struggles. In this paper, I will focus on showing how «denationalizing European feminisms», following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe, means to question, through this denationalization, the genealogy, the very narrative of European feminisms. If belonging to the women’s movement does not require blind adherence to a dogma or historically determined and valid representation, then re-politicising European feminisms means to invent unprecedented modes of being together, by choosing according to which priorities and by which means to patch frag - mentary theories together, or how to «move» in order to open a plural, polyglot dialogue – in short, it is about imagining a radically international feminism. To «move» and «decentre» our gaze become the general assumptions of all critical thinking, as geographical disparities and interruptions in time throughout the history of postcolonial societies challenge the universality of the categories of Western feminism, the meaning of differences (of gender, class, race) and their importance as a key issue for our political modernity. In this presentation, I propose to do so with regard to Western feminisms, by pointing out their limitations and opening them up to other feminist histories and temporalities. Other feminist stories need to be told. Feminism is, in fact, a travelling theory, it is and must be in motion, in a constant movement of displacement. Western feminist movements have had the tendency to produce a political subject – We women – that evens out the diverse experiences of sexism, turning the experience of being a woman into a stereotypical one. As Elsa Dorlin states: This concern is at the heart of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s feminism without borders. It is, in fact, from the political urgency to form strategic coalitions, moving beyond barriers of class, race and nationality, that she raises the problem of We, women and criticises Western feminism. As the philosopher and feminist Rada Ivekovic rightly maintains, the political and epistemological task of «undoing the national framework of knowledges ¹ » is essential. Ivekovic R., «Introduction au numéro: Défaire le cadre national des savoirs. Karma, dharma et nation: une tentative de traduction», Revue Asylon, no. 10, July 2012-July 2014. http://www.reseau-terra.eu/rubrique280.html ¹ Dorlin E., «Vers une épistémologie des résistances», in Elsa Dorlin (dir.), Sexe, Race, Classe. Pour une épistémologie de la domination, Actuel Marx Confrontation, Paris, Puf, 2009, p. 10. ² «The problem is not so much that the We expressed speaks abusively in the name of all women: the problem lies instead in the fact that this We that speaks addresses the Other women as if they were objects of discourse ².» Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 20 I would now like to explore this «displaced figuration of the third-world woman», as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ³ calls it. To do so, I will concentrate on the reflections of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, still very little known in the Franco - phone world, and on the analyses by Françoise Vergès, focusing, in particular, on her latest work Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme. Moreover, to produce a true and accurate map of the insurrectionary feminists, I will show how the reflections of Mohanty and Vergès echo, come into dialogue with those of Audre Lorde, Françoise Collin, bell hooks, Amina Mana and Awa Thiam. Mohanty, heiress of Indian feminism, was one of the first to conceptualise the Orientalist tendencies of Western feminist thought. However, her definition of Western feminism does not consist in reifying it into an ahistorical monolithic bloc, but questioning instead what she terms «writings... [that] discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women ⁴. » Now, for Mohanty the problem is not so much the We expressed in the name of all women; the problem lies instead in the fact that this We that speaks addresses other women as if they were objects of discourse - namely, women in the third world. Mohanty draws attention to the fact that terms such as ‘third world’ and ‘first world’ are very problematic: both because they suggest oversimplified similarities between the countries they refer to and because they reinforce the existing economic, cultural and ideological hierarchies that this terminology evokes. Therefore, she uses the term ‘third world’ with full awareness of the problems it poses, using it critically. In her seminal article published for the first time in 1984, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, she shows, first of all, how the term ‘colonization’ always implies a relation of structural domination and the – discursive or political – suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. In 2003, she writes “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles ⁵, where she re-examines her work published seventeen years earlier, explaining the historical context of the time and the need to now update her goal and its political significance. In 1986 she had denounced the hegemonic practices of Western feminism, which made use of an assumed universalism to consolidate forms of discursive colonization of women in the third world. These women were reduced to victims of male violence, victims of the colonial process, victims of familial structures or religious beliefs and, consequently, considered objects and viewed as such. Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Decolonizing We, women Mohanty C. T., «Sous le regard de l’Occident: recherche féministe et discours colonial», in Elsa Dorlin (dir.), Sexe, Race, Classe. Pour une épistémologie de la domination, Actuel Marx Confrontation, Paris, Puf, 2009, p. 150. ⁴ Mohanty C. T., «Sous les yeux de l’Occident revisité: La solidarité féministe par les luttes anticapitalistes», in Christine Verschuur (dir.), Genre, post-colonialisme et diversité des mouvements des femmes, n. 7, 2010, Paris, l’Harmattan, pp. 203-214. ⁵ Spivak G. C., Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler?, Paris, Amsterdam, 2009, p. 89. ³ DEPROVINCIALIZING AND DENATIONALIZING EUROPEAN FEMINISMS Mara Montanaro 21 So, her purpose was to analyse the way Western feminists produced this singular, monolithic subject: the third world woman. Her definition of the term ‘colonization’ was a discursive one, i.e. showing how analytical categories adopting feminist issues as their main point of reference, just as they were formulated in the United States and Western Europe, enable a certain mode of appropriation and codification of scholarship and knowledge about women in the third world. Feminist scholarship, she maintained, as in fact all scholarship, is not only a production of knowledge about a particular subject; it is a discursive practice with direct political impact insofar as it has a purpose and defends an ideology. Her critique fell upon three assumptions that underlie Western feminist discourse on women in the third world, though it also applies to anyone else using these analytical strategies. In other words, her critique addressed any discourse that sets up its authorial subjects as the implicit referent, as a standard allowing them to encode and represent others. This is where power is exercised in discourse. I will now show you the three assumptions: 1) the first concerns the strategic location or specific situation of the category ‘women’ in the context of analysis. To postulate the category «women» as an already constituted, coherent group, without taking into account class or race specificities, implies a notion of gender difference or even patriarchy that is both universal and cross-cultural; 2) the second is the uncritical way of showing «evidence» of universality and cross-cultural validity; 3) the third is that the first two necessarily imply a homogeneous notion of the oppression of women. In short, she shows five different ways in which Western feminist discourse on women in the third world uses the category of analysis ‘women’ to construct the group ‘third world women’: 1) women as victims of male violence; 2) women as universally dependent on men; 3) women as victims of the colonial process; 4) women as victims of familial systems; and 5) women as victims of religious ideologies. What seems interesting to analyse is how Mohanty identifies a colonialist move in Western feminist scholarship and, as a result, its political consequences. To advance the idea of a common struggle of all women in the third world, regardless of their class or culture, against a general oppression (essentially stemming from the group in power, i.e. men) implies the assumption of what in the 1980s Michel Foucault called the ‘juridico-discursive model of power’, whose main features are: an insistence on the rule (which determines a binary system) and a uniformity of the apparatus functioning at different levels. As, in turn, Françoise Collin, a Belgian feminist and philosopher, founder of the first feminist journal in the French language in 1973 – Les Cahiers du Grif (feminist research and information group) – also always insisted, the commonality of oppression does not suffice on its own, since this oppression does not take the same forms across different cultures and periods in time. This concept should be constantly reactivated, re-examined and readjusted to specific, historical and contingent circumstances. Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 22 Oppression, in the strictest sense of the term – namely, that of the materiality of practices – always intimately touches each woman in a singular way. Audre Lorde, one of the leading figures of the struggles of black feminists and lesbians in the 1980s, also points out in Sister Outsider: The crux of the problem lies in this initial assumption that women form a group or homogeneous category («the oppressed»). What happens when this assumption of «women as an oppressed group» is used in Western feminist literature about third world women? This is where Mohanty locates the colonialist move, which I believe is interesting to analyse. By comparing the representation of women in the third world with Western feminists’ self-presentation in the same context, we see, Monhanty tells us, that only Western feminists become the true «subjects» of this counter-history. Third world women, in turn, never rise above the debilitating generality of their object status. From this it follows that, by applying the idea of a homogeneous category of women to women in the third world, we colonize and appropriate the pluralities simultaneously experienced by different groups of women within their social class and ethnic group; in the end, we rob them of their historical and political power to act. In other words, Western feminist discourse, based on the assumption that women form a coherent and already constituted group, placed within kinship, legal and other structures, defines third world women as subjects outside of social relations, instead of studying the way women are constituted as women through these very structures. Legal, economic, religious and familial structures are treated as having to be judged according to Western standards. By defining these structures as «underdeveloped» or «developing» and by placing women within these structures, we produce an implicit image of the average third world woman. We see the ‘oppressed woman’ becoming the ‘oppressed third world woman’. The category ‘oppressed woman’ is created, according to Mohanty, by only taking into account gender difference, whereas the category ‘oppressed third world woman’ has an additional attrvaaute – «third world difference». ‘Third world difference’ implies a paternalistic attitude towards women in the third world. ‘Third world women’ as a group or category are automatically and necessarily defined as religious (i.e. not The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. [...] Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences... [...] today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age ⁶. Lorde A., Sister Outsider. Sur la poésie, l’érotisme, le racisme, le sexisme…, Genève, Editions Mamamélis, 2003, pp. 76, 126-127. ⁶ DEPROVINCIALIZING AND DENATIONALIZING EUROPEAN FEMINISMS Mara Montanaro 23 progressive), family-focused (i.e. traditional) and lacking in legal knowledge (i.e. they do not know they have rights). This is how «third world difference» is produced. All we do is reinforce the assumption that the third world is still lagging behind the first world. This mode of analysis, Mohanty maintains, by homogenising and systematising the experiences of different groups of women in these countries, erases all marginal modes and experiences and reinforces Western cultural imperialism. The comparison between the self-presentation of Western feminists and their representation of third world women is telling. Without the ‘third world woman’, the particular self-presentation of Western women would be problematic. bell hooks, the African American feminist and a colleague of Mohanty's, also looks closely at the limitations of Western feminism, particularly with regard to the interplay between the social relations of class, race and gender within the «patriarchal, racist, capitalist and imperialist» American society. hooks stresses the extent to which feminist theories, developed in the United States by white women, reflect their own class and race values. «...when ‘women’ were talked about – she tells us – the experience of white women was universalized to stand for all female experience ⁷». As Nassira Hedjerassi rightly asserts in her preface to the French edition of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, much work needs to be done on deconstructing the category ‘woman’, in order to show that gender is not the only factor influencing the construction of ‘women’. And we could add: neither is it the only factor contributing to their oppression within a system that is phallocratic, patriarchal, imperialist and capitalist. Nevertheless, according to bell hooks, these efforts to deconstruct the category ‘woman’ led to: «a profound revolution in feminist thought ⁸». In Françoise Vergès’s words, we ought to take into account that patriarchy is racial, that we cannot deny the privileges of white women during slavery or colonialism and that we cannot universalise all female experience based on the experi - ence of white Western women. Mohanty is one of the first to criticise the construction and use of categories such as «third world women» as a singular, monolithic subject. Mohanty, bell hooks and Audre Lorde therefore all reach the same conclusion regarding the limitations of Western feminism for analysing the different and multiple experiences of women. If we move from the United States to Africa, we find that Awa Thiam reaches the same conclusion. In La parole aux négresses, this Senegalese anthropologist and feminist states: In fact, due to this hegemonism and the racist, classist implications of the term ‘feminism’, along with the stereotypes it conveys, the relevance of the term feminism in Africa was challenged by many who refused to accept this Western import and imposition. From the early 1980s, the Nigerian feminist Amina Mana, as Nassira Hedjerassi recalls in the preface to bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to B. Hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, London, Routdledge, 1994, pp. 120-121. ⁷ Thiam A., La parole aux négresses, Paris, Denoel, 1978, p. 76. ⁹ Ibidem, p. 63. ⁸ «...the plight of the Black woman is very different from that of her White or Yellow sisters... Where Black women have to combat colonialism and neocolonialism, capitalism and the patriarchal system, European women only have to fight against capitalism and patriarchy⁹ » Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 24 Center, criticised these hegemonic feminist readings by coining the term imperial feminism to signify the historical participation, however denied or unquestioned, of white women in the colonial and racial domination of black populations, even at the height of their struggle for their own liberation as women. What Amina Mana has to say on the silence of white women during the colonial catastrophe can also be found if we now move to the island of Réunion, more precisely in June 1970. In her latest book, Le ventre des femmes. Féminisme, capitalisme, racialisation, Françoise Vergès shows us how in June 1970 a scandal broke in the island of Réunion: apparently thousands of unauthorised abortions were performed by doctors who claimed they were carrying out harmless operations in order to be reimbursed by the social security. Many women filed a complaint, although they were barely heard. During the trial, the accused declared they had been indirectly encouraged by the state's anti-natalist policies put in place in the overseas departments and directly encouraged by the state representatives on the island, when, as we know – these were the 1970s – contraception and abortion were criminalised and harshly repressed in France. Due to this criminalisation alone, a million women risked their lives every year by having abortions in deplorable conditions. The contradiction is only apparent. Vergès shows how the same control over the bodies of women is targeted in France and the overseas departments. However, it is not practised the same way in both places. One of the many reasons for the strength and power of this book – as Vergès herself says – is: However, what is more, she shows very clearly how the commonality of oppression does not suffice on its own, since this oppression does not appear in the same forms across different cultures and periods in time. .» This is why this concept, as we saw when looking at the positions of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, bell hooks, Françoise Collin, Audre Lorde, Awa Thiam and Amina Mana, ought to be constantly reactivated, re-examined and readjusted to specific, historical and contingent circumstances. The idea of a shared oppression prevents us from grasping the differences between the types of oppression experienced and Vergès’s analysis of the blindness of the MLF (the French Women’s Liberation Movement) shows it very clearly. In this regard, she states: Françoise Vergès. Remapping a mutilated geography of the women of Reúnion «[…] To introduce dissonant voices in the narrative of Western feminism, since women overseas – whether they are slaves, engaged or colonized – barely exist in the studies of Western feminists, who treat them as victims of various oppressions but never as people whose singular words will challenge a universalism that masks a particularism¹⁰. » Vergès F., Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme. Paris, Albin, Michel, p. 12. ¹⁰ EURORENOVATION (EUROREMONT): THE ART OF CONCEALING Kateryna Filyuk 31 The fastest empirical way to learn about Eurorenovation would be to browse numerous Ukrainian apartment rental websites, where one would find quickly diminishing category of granny’s-Sovi - et-style Khrushchevka, a relatively small category of modern apartments and the seven seas of eurorenovated flats. Built in the 60s during Khrushchev’s rule, ugly cookie-cutter Khrushchevkas visualized the Soviet idea of equality and unification under which differences were not only inadmissible but also barely impossible to achieve due to the limited market. These cheap block buildings conceived as a temporary solution of housing problem were not meant to last more than 25 years, however, to this day most Khrushchevkas have never been replaced and, as the saying goes, there is nothing more permanent than temporary. Understandably, time left its mark on them and already in 90s a prompt renovation has been required. This is one of the reasons why Eurorenovation became a predominant architectural and interior design style in all post-Soviet countries. Initially as a temporary solution in anticipation of overhaul maintenance. Aesthetically after the fall of the Iron Wall thirsty for changes and striving for Western way of life those who failed tried to imitate the latest at any costs. But they didn’t know very much about real Western life, so they created some strange copy, which to Western people seems like a bit of a caricature. The hallmarks of Eurorenovation are cheap materials, replaceable surfaces, drywall and plastic, plastic euro-windows and euro-doors, fake stucco molding, dropped ceiling, predominant The art of concealing Kateryna Filyuk Eurorenovation, mimicry, architecture, decommunisation. KEYWORDS using cheap imported materials. Strange as it may sound, but Europe – Ukraine’s role model – may have fallen into the very same trap. A tendency towards the cosmetic concealment of problem areas and patching up instead of coming up with problem-solving methodologies characterizes European governance in recent years. With that said, the Ukrainian know-how could be of practical value as well as the R.E.P. group visual research that convincingly demonstrate the dangers of the Eurorenovation approach. Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 32 colour – beige. It was an embodiment of a cheap dream, the temptation of advertising, physically displacing an unworthy reality. At the same time these techniques served to conceal unrepairable and uneven walls – the results of rushed mass-production of the 60s. Eventually, the plague of Eurorenovation has become a lifestyle or even an operational paradigm, not just an interior design solution of practical matters. It invaded TV programs and fashion as much as public politics. Gimmick mimicry, false façades with no foundation, and cosmetic renovations instead of drastic actions were exercised in various fields characterizing a new era. Although Western and namely European values had always been triggering, the Eurorenovation processes owning a debt of its name to Europe. As in many other cases and disciplines in Ukraine, initially good intentions of catching and grading up with Europe turned out to be a sheer imitation of reforms, democratisation of society and adoption of the Euro-integration path. The omnipresent corruption still intoxicates multiple sectors of the economy and private life of the people, but, thanks to the art of camouflage, the country looks quite modernized and “European”. With time, the former Soviet Union countries drifted apart, irretrievably pursuing each its own path, however it would not be too much of a generalization to say that they are still by and large governed by double standards – a glossy façade often contradicts the back stage hideousness. Arguably infamous decommunisation can be analysed through the Eurorenovation prism too. The laws of decommunisation had been adopted by the Parliament on April 9th, 2015, and, ever since its legalisation, the witch-hunt has been fully embraced and put in practice by Ukrainian bureaucrats and activists. At first, with the wiping out of Lenin’s monuments, the prosecuting pursuit soon touched upon everything that contained Soviet symbols and could be supposedly classified as Communist propaganda. The cities, villages, and streets received new names, such as one of the most populated cities in eastern Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 1. Cherepanova U. (1960s), Doppelganger: Krokodil (Crocodile) magazine. The series of caricatures illustrating Khrushchevka’s paradoxes. Even at the moment of their construction block buildings were heavily criticized and ridiculed for poor soundproofing, ugly design and the low quality of used materials Figure 2. An example of Eurorenovation interior taken from an interior design website. The title of the article is What is Eurorenovation? and it briefly explains what the term means. Source: https://dom.ria.com/uk/articles/chto-takoeevroremont-173890.html EURORENOVATION (EUROREMONT): THE ART OF CONCEALING Kateryna Filyuk 33 Figure 4 Ukraine – Dnipropetrovsk, which was renamed Dnipro. The second part of the compound word had referred to the name of the Bolshevik and Soviet Communist Party leader Grigory Petrovsky, who became one of the masterminds of the Holodomor artificial famine in Ukraine in 19321933. Hence in their pursuit of the new, stripped of dubious past identity, Ukrainians resorted to violent, uncivilized and expectedly thoughtless methods suspiciously resembling those of Eurorenovation. It’s only the façade that has to be face-lifted and covered-up, although the Soviet mindset doesn’t go away that easily. As of spring 2019, over one thousand settlements were renamed and approximately 2,5 thousand communist monuments dismantled. at the very beginning, they also successfully combined with activism. In 2010, R.E.P. initiated a long-term project called Eurorenovation aiming at identifying symptoms of this process and consequently apprehending Eurorenovation in its complexity in order to be able to describe similar socio-cultural relations in other countries. Over the following years the artists created a series of installations, where they literally copied recognizable trends in the popular interior redesign of Soviet apartments using cheap imported materials. For the first iteration of the project at Kunstraum in Munich, R.E.P. invited and interviewed a professional decorator who deals with Eurorenovation all the time. Ultimately, the work consisted of the video in which the decorator described the style and provided some historical background as well as an interior designed by her. Since then, the group has produced more than five iterations of the project, always tuning it to the current political situation or commenting on working conditions in cultural sector, etc. It comes as no surprise that the phenomenon of Eurorenovation caught the attention of the back-then-young members of R.E.P. group, which formed during social protests and whose collaboration was forged by the Orange Revolution (2004). Accordingly, socio-political issues have been the core of their artistic practice, which, Figure 3 Figure 3. The equestrian statue of Nikolay Shchors, Kyiv (2016). Ukrainian authorities decided to camouflage the monument by wrapping it up with enormous bicolour — blue and yellow — fabric, resembling the national Ukrainian flag. As the turn of events follows, the cover-up was done in order to eliminate the allegedly displeasing monuments during the Independence Day celebration (!), while, at the same time, to decorate the city with a much more cherished and pride-inducing national symbol. Four years later, the blue and yellow semi-transparent cube, with the easily recognisable equestrian silhouette inside of it, is still there. Photo by Yevgen Nikiforov Figure 4. R.E.P. (revolutionary experimental space) Eurorenovation. Cut, 2012. This installation explores the ways post-Soviet spaces are converted following an aesthetic that from an old soviet perspective appears to be in a Western style Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 34 According to group member Nikita Kadan, by scrutinizing various manifestations of Euroren - ovation, they seek to analyse genuine Ukrainian context but also: Thus for R.E.P. group the phenomenon of Eurorenovation applied to the analysis of social life opens up a broader discussion on the process of Ukraine’s post-Soviet transformation into a western neoliberal state. In a conversation that took place in 2015, the group members expressed hope that after the Revolution of Dignity, which is undeniably one of the most important political events in the history of Modern Europe, the phenomenon of Eurorenovation will subside. Resorting to the language of architecture, which is the framework of this paper, the barricades on Maidan Square symbolized pure, genuine aspiration for freedom and negation of all-permeating hypocrisy. Made of found materials and serving exclusively utilitarian goals, the tents and barricades were supposed to cancel the Eurorenovation forever. But from the Kyiv city center, the front line moved to Eastern Ukraine, where war with the Russiabacked terrorists is ongoing. The clear example of Eurorenovation mindset there is the so-called Minsk Protocol – an agreement to halt the war in the Donbas region, signed by representatives of Ukraine, the Russian Federation, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic on 5 September 2014. The agreement, signed under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has totally failed to stop the fighting. And yet, it is constantly being referred to by the Russian Federation as a viable solution. The Steinmeier Formula is a more recent example of this illusion at play. Steinmeier's formula calls for elections to be held in the separatist-held territories under Ukrainian legislation and the supervision of the OSCE. If the OSCE judges the balloting to be free and fair, then a special self-governing status for the territories will be initiated and Ukraine will be returned control of its easternmost border. In this case again, in accordance with OSCE rules and regulations, elections cannot take place in territories where regular troops are stationed. However, OSCE is ready to neglect the rules in favour of Russia, showing capitulating instead of principled stance. Allegedly these, as much as many other recent actions of Europe, are doubtful and problematic as well as hypocritical. They are merely directed toward fortifying the spirit and creating a feeling that everything is alright, building up the false façade of welfare and justice. And so the process and purpose of Eurorenovation is a powerful metaphor for the aforementioned geopolitical positioning of contemporary Europe. This early post-Soviet phenomenon rooted in the admiration of a just as well culturally and economically superior Europe has made its way back to the founder. It remains unclear what is to be spotted in this situation of innumerable reciprocal reflections Kadan referred to describing Eurorenovation project’s aim. By putting the accent on the subjectivities of post-Soviet space, we argue that it is not merely some caricatured and grotesque object for observation and that it has its own perspective on the West. And we want to show the West (in the West) the East’s view of the West. So we put up not one mirror, but two. And they reflect one another. One is located in post-Soviet space, the other in the so-called free, united Europe. And we create a situation of innumerable reciprocal reflections that with every change of context reveal new images (Kadan, 2011). 35 REFERENCES * R.E.P. Revolutionary Experimental Space (2015). The Green Box. Berlin: Kunst Editionen. * R.E.P. Group in Conversation with Larissa Babij (2011) https://artmargins.com/rep-group-conversation-larissa-babij/ * Bruno Latour (2017) Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Is a curator and art critic and currently serves as thechief curator at Izolyatsia. Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Kyiv. Prior to joining Izolyatsia, she was the co-curator of the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2017). She has participated in several internationally renowned curatorial programs, including Young Curators Residency Programme at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2017); De Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam (2015–2016); International Research Fellowship at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul (2014); and Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course (2012). She was the catalogue managing editor and discussion platform coordinator for the First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012. She holds an MA in philosophy from Odessa I. I. Mechnikov National University Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 36 Università Roma Tre - Dipartimento di Architettura e Filosofia Roma Tre University - Department of Philosophy, communication and media studies, Rome,Italy ABSTRACT Tremor, Uncertainty, Invention Europe and the sea. Daniela Angelucci In recent years the migrations that cross the sea around Europe call into question the philosophy, which is urged to think about this Outside. How can we avoid an objective discourse, but also the offence of being too familiar with situations so different from our own, as European citizens? By calling into question the category of "intercessor" proposed by Deleuze, perhaps the artistic narrative can help us in this approach. The sea as a mobile territory can then be described in the tremor that animates it (Glissant), in the uncertainty that it implies (Melville), in the invention of a new space and of a new people that it could bring with it (Deleuze and Guattari). These three characteristics emerge in the work of video artist Laura Waddington, Border, as an example of invention and intercession that makes tremor and uncertainty visible. TREMOR, UNCERTAINTY, INVENTION EUROPE AND THE SEA Daniela Angelucci 37 The situation of Europe and its borders is an urgent theme of our present, which calls philosophy into question. The most urgent event today concerns the migrations that cross the sea around Europe, and it should force philosophy to think. In 2016 more than 5000 migrants died in the Mediterranean; in 2017 more than 100,000 people landed in Italy, including about 15,000 unaccompanied minors; 3 October 2016, near the island of Lampedusa, in Sicily, 366 persons died just half a mile from the coast and the salvation. In front of the European sea, crossed by migrations, the first step of philosophy should be to think about the kind of narrative that we aim to legitimize in this respect. The question is: How can we avoid an objective discourse (what Lacan called the discourse of university), but also the offense of an excessive familiarity with situations so different from our situation, so harder than our situation, as European citizens? To borrow a concept from Deleuze and Guattari, we can call into question the category of "intercessor": becoming someone's intercessor means trying a continuous exchange of points of view, in an affective, political and stylistic adhesion, instead of speaking in his/her place. The theoretical and political sense of this concept – intercession – is that one of refuting the claim of the intellectual, of the philosopher, to speak for others, attributing to himself the right or the duty to be their spokesperson. I quote Deleuze who asks: "Who speaks and who acts? It is always a multiplicity, even in the unique person who speaks or acts”. This multiplicity is what produces a stammering, an uncertainty, for Deleuze and Guattari, a becoming-minor of the language. In the notable book Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers talks about thinking with migration, and emphasizes how thinking with migration and not about migration means questioning our position with respect to language, to our history and culture. Thinking with migrations promotes a different relationship, more disturbing, with our own philosophical background. So it needs to give up a more consequential, more structured argumentation, to adhere precisely to the uncertainty of the title, to be captured and modified from the outside and to escape the pleasure of objectification. Not to speak for anyone, nor to be someone's representative, but neither to remain at a distance: the concepts produced in the encounter between the event of the sea crossings and the philosophical practice to produce a rapprochement, an area of indiscernibility, an intercession. And maybe the artistic narration can help us in this approach, maybe it can help us speak about the sea and its contemporary situation without taking a distance and at the same time without showing an excessive familiarity. Starting from various readings, philosophical in the broad sense, but above all literary, and also visual, I propose then three characters of the sea, which speak to us of the contemporary situation and at the same time of the philosophical practice and a new way (different, disturbing, Chambers would say) of relating to it. Thinking of the sea as a territory, analogous but very different from the land, the tremor is the characteristic that we could use to express in the first place its mobility, its fluidity. Borrowing a concept by the book of Edouard Glissant, Pensée du tremblement, we can talk about a "trembling thinking" (tremblement in French is also tremblement de terre, earthquake, something that not by chance has to do with the territory). Against every dogmatism Glissant opposes the archipelagic thinking, which is declined as a tremblement, tremor: in fact, such thinking does not aim at the constitution of preconceived grids Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 38 of interpretation of reality, but adapts to an unstable perception of the world in its own changes. In the ethical field, the trembling preserves the desire and uncertainty of the discovery of the Other. It is a thinking that resists the stiffening of systemic thoughts and the impetus of systems of thought; it opens the identity to the relationship with the Other, it is “the seismic thinking of the world” that trembles inside and outside of us. Glissant affirms that we are “noble” enough, “magnificent” and “wild”, and also “miserable” when necessary, to consider our relationship to the Other and to the World as a tremor. Tremor can be used to indicate the fluidity of water and the rippling of waves, but also the movement of lives, both human and animal, that populate and cross the sea. Tremor describes the vitality of the sea, its mobility but also the fact that it is full of living beings, animals and humans. The tremor here is closely linked to a poetics of the relationship: the trembling thinking also means living the openness to the whole world, at risk of trembling, at risk of uncertainty. There are many literary texts about the sea that describe its uncertainty, the impossibility of seeing what is hidden under the surface, the possibility of shipwreck, of dying while crossing. Carl Schmitt, in his book Land and Sea, writes that Melville, with his Moby Dick, represents for the oceans what Homer and Odyssey represented for the Mediterranean. Well, in both cases the element that characterizes the sea is that of uncertainty. In the Odyssey, the sea has the color of wine, it is infinite, dark, full of fish, but above all, with its waves and storms, it destroys any attempt by humans to follow a route. So, uncertainty is first of all the uncertainty of the sea’s conditions, given that the movement of the sea changes continuously and suddenly. But uncertainty is also the uncertainty of recognition: on the surface of the sea it is difficult to distinguish who or what may arise out of it: the white whale? the sirens? an overturned dinghy? or a boat full of humans beings? dead or alive? The Italian writer Elena Stancanelli, in the book Venne alla spiaggia un assassino, describes her experience in the autumn of 2018 aboard the ship Mare Jonio of the Mediterranean fleet, prepared to intervene in the sighting and rescue of migrants. Stancanelli describes very well the uncertainty of the sighting, but also the uncertainty about the nature and intentions of the Other coming from the sea (are these people in need of rescue or dangerous people?), as well as the uncertainty of the survival. At the beginning of the book she writes that the Mediterranean Sea is filling up with deaths, which is a sort of quotation that refers to Melville, that defined the sea floor – Ocean in this case – as “a great cemetery”. But above all the sea’s uncertainty is that of survival: in the Odyssey Ulysses, during the storms unleashed by Poseidon, often complains about the fear of not returning home. In the fifth book, which tells the departure from the island of Calypso and the path into the sea before arriving from the Phoeacians, at the court of Alcinous, Ulysses is desperate during the storm, and regrets not to have died in war, because dying at sea means not having a burial, not having marked graves. Precisely the recognition of this uncertainty, however, dictates appropriate rules of conduct, the law of hospitality towards castaways or those who come from the sea: the stories of hospitality towards shipwrecked people are many in the Odyssey, but perhaps the most beautiful verses are present in the Telemachy, at the beginning of the Odyssey, when Telemachus goes in search of Odysseus until Sparta at the palace of Menelaus: the squire asks Menelaus if he should accommodate the two foreigners or not, and Menelaus responds disdained to the idea that there may even be a doubt. Telemachus TREMOR, UNCERTAINTY, INVENTION EUROPE AND THE SEA Daniela Angelucci 39 and Nestor's son are washed, wrapped in beautiful robes and seated on two thrones, then fed and quenched with water. Only then are questions asked about their identity. The third character that I propose, referring to Deleuze and Guattari, is that of the invention of a new space and a new people. Meanwhile, the idea of the invention of a new space must be taken seriously: the experience of those bodies that come from Africa literally creates a territory, a path that was not there before. Uncertainty in fact leads to the search for an escape route, which, as Henri Laborit writes in L'éloge de la fuite (1976), is not only sometimes the only salvation, but also the possibility of gaining "unknown shores". The invention of a new, minor, nomadic people, which is missing, is a political, artistic and philosophical task for Deleuze and Guattari. Using Glissant's reading of Deleuze and Guattari, we could say it is a matter of inventing and not creating, if by creating we mean a future already included in the present. Instead, this invented people is always a “becoming people", it is in continuous change. In art, but also in philosophy and politics, the invention of a people can only take place by taking a minor position, rejecting the greater canon. From the point of view of the two French authors, minority and majority do not constitute themselves as such on a quantitative level, but on the basis of an opposition of the former to the majority character of the management and organization of society. Majority is defined through constancy, homogeneity, centrality and unification, minority is instead the disorienting, plastic and deterritorializing element of the system. Referring to the words of Iain Chambers, that I quoted before, who invites us to think with the event of migrations, we can highlight what the sea as a territory and as a border can teach to philosophy. These three concepts – tremor, uncertainty, invention – that describe the sea as a boundary can also be proposed as characteristics of philosophical work, which should expose itself to risk, accept the possibilities offered by uncertainty, give space to invention. An example of artistic invention, a filmic one, in which these three characteristics emerge clearly is the film of English video-artist Laura Waddington, Border, a great success at the Locarno Film Festival in 2004. The film seems to be a perfect example of an invention and an intercession that makes visible tremor and uncertainty. It seems to me to be particularly suitable for this occasion precisely because of the characteristics of the sea as a boundary, of which I have spoken so far. Waddington has a literary background – and maybe this is significant in respect of the kind of narrative that she chose. She travelled to Kurdistan, The Middle East, and the Balkans, researching refugee routes into Europe, and in 2002 she lived for a few months in the countryside around the Red Cross camp in Sangatte, a small French town in the Nord-Pas de Calais region, refusing to join the government-authorised news media linked to the Red Cross. There she closely followed Afghan and Iraqi refugees who were trying to pass through the underwater tunnel linking France to the United Kingdom. Joining the migrants with a small DV camera, Waddington filmed their nightly routines, escape attempts, runs through the camps, waits, police repression and clashes over the closure of the camp. The sea here is really a border, or rather a wall to be crossed, an object of desire that is never seen, however. As for the way of narration, Waddington proposes a non-objective narration, she participates and puts herself at risk, not interviewing, but running, running away with the refugees. It is not, therefore, a face-to-face confrontation with reality, but rather an intercession, an affective adhesion, as if the artist is looking for a deletion of her subjective gaze, in order to become part of those situations. Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 40 The tremor: The images, always shot in the dark and in slow motion, are grainy, confused, flickering. The tremor of life that swarms and moves in the dark, highlighted by the tremor and flashes of the same images is also noticed by Georges Didi-Huberman in his book Survivance des lucioles (2009), which cites Waddington, along with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann, tracing the lines for a survival policy: “Waddington's images like fireflies pierce slightly the darkness of the ethical void into which contemporary society seems to be plunged”. The uncertainty: the film recounts the uncertainty of these lives, it is about trying a chance that is often a failure; losing the people who travel with you; risking their lives. This uncertainty of the sea, or the experience of the border in this case, is shown in all its scope in this powerful and disorienting video. Finally, the invention: different from conventional narrative cinema, but far beyond the formalism of some experimental cinema, Waddington shoots and edits these images inventing a new, different way to tell the experience of the borders. FROM PERIPHERAL TO COSMOPOLITAN THE CRISIS-IMAGES IN MIGUEL GOMES ARABIAN NIGHTS Luis Miranda 47 a look, both graceful and crude, on its fictional forms/figures and that refers to a need to be piercing and displayer: the characters are that same characters, but also are the people who enter the movie as character-figures, but that quickly reconfigure themselves as characters-people, from the fictional form they pass to the real form and through it create a new figure-speech, the speech-crisis, which intrudes and weaves its own real fable on to the fictional film. The fiction follows the vicissitudes of a syndicalist named Luís (Adriano Luz), a nervous man, explosive and suffering from tachycardia’s, divided between the first need to calm his own heart rate - and his own imaginary, made of whale interiors - and a second one, to finance the feeding of the annual "Bath of the Magnificent", the first collective marine bath that takes place every January 1st. He is a sea-and-sand man, a thick sweater user with a wind-beaten face, a classist and vocalizer of all class struggles, but he is also taken by his apparent inability to pierce his own melancholy. The woes of others afflict him. He is the figure who guides us through the fiction and it is he who opens the door to the figures of the real, literally. These persons, whom the film calls "Magnificent", knock on the door of the union headquarters. Luis opens it. To the first, he offers tea. He drinks it. Presents himself: "commercial director of profession, unemployed by condition". Soon one cuts from the character/actor to another regime of images, no more image-fable, but image-speech. He tells of his real story: the loss of employment in the company that he helped to grow, the loss of savings due to the need to solve a loan he has endorsed, the delivery of the house to the bank and the return to the land of his parents, the difficulty in finding employment at the age of 50 years. As he speaks, the camera moves on from a long shot to an medium close shot, raw and clinical, wanting to show and approach the anguish, as real and clear as the record she films. Later, two more speeches of "Magnificent" she registers: that of a couple, also unemployed, forced to food assistance, to training courses, but certain of their mutual love and spaces of conjunction. And still another unemployed person of some duration, of broken health, but convinced of the necessity and truth of the realization of the human being through work. The three discourses are three tracking shots, are shots and images-duration of words that are pungency and force. While filmic inlays of real stories, they shape this other need, that of leaving alive the memory of the suffering, of those who have lost what they had, all those who are beyond economic-financial calculations. This was the filmic and aesthetic politics of Miguel Gomes, in this sequence: to make it fluid and clear, because it is there, in what is said, the truth of what happened, the crisis that took everything away. There is, however, something profoundly positive and human about these discourses. Belief in something better. When one arrives at the real "Bath of the Magnificent" and in it the actors are involved, no longer representing, but being between, the sound disappears, only the water and the bodies are left, looking and gesticulating towards the camera, breaking the line between the fiction and the documentary, showing more than just letting us see only a film. Analysis Two: From The 1001 Nights, Volume 2 - The Desolate One, the sequence The Owners of Dixie. If the previously analyzed sequence referred to a hope, despite all its crudeness, these one already Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 48 has a twilight imagery. Here, the figure that drives the connections and reconnections between the various characters is that of a small dog, named Dixie, who, throughout the sequence, moves from owner, from floor to floor, from tower to tower, in a Lisbon’s suburban neighborhood. Once again, we have what we do not see: depression, melancholy, oblivion of a suburbanity to the top, shaped in the figure of the “Suburban Tower”, high and divisive, made of cubes, parallelepipeds and other geometric solids that fit in order to separate and draw labyrinths, to enumerate and to name families by the number-letter of their respective apartments. If the translation to the suburban is a phenomenon of economic migration and the form of a daily trek of wage-earners to the work-center and from this to the dormitory-spaces, made up of tiredness and repetitive alienation, it is not about them that this sequence speaks, but rather on those that are already permanently installed, crystallized and forgotten in the suburban tower. The forgotten suburban dwellers that these sequence follows are: an elderly couple, Humberto and Luísa, retired, sick and longing for older times and a young couple, Vasco and Vânia, former drug addicts and with very few means of subsistence. Through Dixie's races, they get to know each other and their lives are linked. If clearly we still speak of crisis-images, made of low retirement pensions and total lack of income, the images that make this segment are images-melancholy, they are void lost gazes, repeated rituals, fumes, vapors, corridor curves, balconies too high. If Humberto hears the songs that are no longer heard, which had an "echo" placed in their voices and, therefore, so emotionally charged, he refers to the emptiness of making these other songs and albums, more current, now so digital and cold and no longer warm like his. The age gap and the disconnection of the generations are marked and creased in consumer products: the older ones advocate certain modes of manufacturing and reception and the young ones others. Humberto's vinyl will never be a teenager's digital file. Differentiation that equates to separation and this to oblivion. In the end, Humberto and Luísa decide for the total oblivion. They kill each other. Before that, they offer Dixie to Vasco and Vânia. And the little canid - perhaps the only cheerful character in the segment - so soon loves his new owners as he forgets the old ones. Forgetfulness upon forgetfulness. The pact of suicide, not said, but alluded, is perceived by the young couple. Despite their warnings, only 16 days after their death, the bodies of Humberto and Luísa are found. They were forgotten, in their geometric figure called apartment, the box inside the tower. Dixie ends up migrating to other owners. Runner, panting and happy, the positive denial of suburban negativity. From the analysis of the two sequences, which sought to find some of the crisis-images, which are revealing of the real crisis-narratives, both the most apparently social and the most clearly personal, what can be left to a reflection is: first, the need for artistic responses that capture the meaning and the perceptions of the times, what Miguel Gomes seems to achieve, in his merging of the fantastic imaginary, of fiction and documentary; secondly, the ability to - always from the periphery, always from what is forgotten - achieve a story of stories that can be architected from Conclusion FROM PERIPHERAL TO COSMOPOLITAN THE CRISIS-IMAGES IN MIGUEL GOMES ARABIAN NIGHTS Luis Miranda 49 and to a broad cosmopolitanism, as we understand it today, as a politics and an act of openness to the world; third, that in what concerns the European doubt, what this film presents as its political answer is one that stresses the need to return to a relational and social matrix that is such as to be pan-inclusive, a return to a collective of persons, one that makes in itself, the collective-continent that is a real union of Europe, since The response through art is always one that aims at the creation of an aesthetic so that it is in the act of being in the world. The possibility of a political form here is that of a politics of appreciation, towards the other, European and non-European, especially cosmopolitan and multi-continental. as soon as Europe awakens, the questions of truth will return to the great politics. In the long term, Europe's success will depend on the ability of Europeans to believe in their rights to success. The formulation of human rights includes a cipher that designates the right to success and that they oppose to the whole world. When times change, the meaning of these rights must be expressed again. Europe's deepest thought is that one must resist contempt. If this reflection is inescapable, it is because it also remains true for the tired and defeated beings. In the last translation of the Empire in Europe, its refusal of the contempt of the human, contempt that inhabits all imperialisms, must thus assume a political form. (Sloterdijk, 2008, p.59) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 50 *Derrida, J. (2014). Carta à Europa – Dupla Memória. In Coimbra’s Philosophical Revue volume # 46 (pp. 471-480). Coimbra: Coimbra University Press. *Gomes, M. (2013). Synopsis/Director’s Statement of the film Arabian Nights. Production document. Lisbon: Miguel Gomes/O Som e a Fúria – Produção Audiovisual, Lda. *Kaklamanidou, B. & Corbalán, A. (Ed.). Contemporary European Cinema: Crisis Narratives and Narratives in Crisis. New York, NY: Routledge/The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture. *Lazzarato, M. (2012). The Making of The Indebted Man: An Essay on The Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series. *Morin, E. (1988). Pensar a Europa. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América. *Sloterdjik, P. (2008). Se a Europa Acordar. Lisbon: Relógio D’ Água Editores. *Sloterdjik, P. (2011). Spheres – Volume I: Microspherology. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agent Series. R E F E REN C E S R E F E REN C E S 51 Lecturer and film and video director. He is a Cinema and Video instructor at Escola Artística de Soares do Reis. He is an Assistant Lecturer at Escola Superior Artística do Porto's Bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Audiovisual. Director of more than 100 films and videos, he holds more than 650 credits in film and video production and has multiple participations and awards at national and international film and video festivals. He holds a master’s degree in Contemporary Artistic Practices (FBAUP), a licentiates’s degree in Art and Communication – Audiovisual and a bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Video (ESAP) FROM PERIPHERAL TO COSMOPOLITAN THE CRISIS-IMAGES IN MIGUEL GOMES ARABIAN NIGHTS Luis Miranda Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 52 Europe: Univocity or Equivocity? At the end of his book, La Chair des Mots, politiques de l'écriture (1998), Jacques Rancière evokes a wall, a frontier, in the nomad and plastic thinking of Gilles Deleuze. The approach is twofold: on the one hand, literary, summoning affections and concepts but, above all perceptions, these conceptual characters that Deleuze inaugurates in a between-two of philosophy and literature, «philosophiture», he would say, or «literasophy»; on the other hand, it is political, evoking the horizontality and verticality, equality and difference of a people to come. In both cases, Rancière envisions the possibility of a Deleuzian wall, which would be something of the order of the frontier. We know how Deleuze abhorred frontiers and, at least, among it, he would agenciate cracks and lines of passages, lines of escape, lines of flight. To retake the idea that Jacques Rancière explores in his text entitled Deleuze, Bartleby, and the literary formula, there would be a wall in Deleuze's thought, a limiting barrier of his own thinking. The end or the cut of the flow, according to Rancière, is stated as it: «The strength of any strong thought is also the ability of disposing itself its aporia, the point where it no longer passes». Now, Deleuze avoid the point, «to make the point» repulses him, always prefering the line. So this wall-end-point could not be a strong aporia in the bosom of a strong thought without also being a line of escape, a passage, an opening or a pause before gaining speed again. A wall of slowness to better accelerate. Here is what this article proposes to enunciate: from the characters that Deleuze extracts from the novels of the authors and the literature he appreciates to reach the haecceities, these a-subjective singularities that are not identities but are perfectly individuated, to assure them a territory and a voice, the possibility of the univocity of an European people to come. Eurorenovation, mimicry, architecture, decommunisation. KEYWORDS CEAA/ IC.NOVA/ UAL, OPorto-Lisbon, Portugal ABSTRACT EUROPE: UNIVOCITY OR EQUIVOCITY? A READING BETWEEN GILLES DELEUZE AND JACQUES RANCIÈRE Luís Lima 53 A reading between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière Luís Lima This article is an attempt to conclude what seemed to us an unconcluded text by Jacques Rancière about deleuzian proposal of a literary formula in Melville’s Bartleby novel. At the end of his book La Chair des Mots, politiques de l’écriture [The Flesh of Words: the Politics of Writing] (1998), Jacques Rancière evokes a wall or a barrier in the nomadic, open and fluid thought of Gilles Deleuze. The approach is twofold: on one hand, it is literary, calling upon affects and concepts but above all percepts, those conceptual characters that Deleuze inaugurates in an ‘entre-deux’ (or in-between) of philosophy and literature – philosophiture, he would say, or literasophy ¹; on the other hand, it is political, evoking the horizontality and verticality, the equality and difference, of a people to come. In both cases, Rancière sees the possibility of a Deleuzean wall, which would be something similar to a border. We know how Deleuze abhorred borders unless it was to open up gaps in them as well as lines of passage, lines of flight. To return to the idea that Jacques Rancière explains in his text entitled Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littéraire [Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula], there exists a wall in Deleuze’s thought, a barrier-limit to his own thought. It is the end or the cutting of the flow, according to Rancière: “the strength of any strong thought is also its ability to arrange its aporia itself, the point where it can no longer pass”. However, Deleuze detests the point; he always prefers the line. Therefore, this wall-final point could not be a strong aporia within a strong thought without also being a line of flight, a passage, opening or resting place before picking up speed again. A wall of slowness to accelerate better. What this article proposes is to start from the characters that Where life clogs us, intelligence opens a way, because if it is true that there is no remedy for an unshared love, the truth is that we escape the verification of a suffering, let alone be his by drawing the consequences it entails. Intelligence doesn't know these closed situations of dead end life Deleuze, Gilles: Littérasophie et Philosofiture, interview with Hélène Cixous; in Dialogues, 13 November 1973, p. 30. The title comes from the text transcribed from a radio programme of Roger Pillaudin on France Culture. The creation of concepts, through voluntary excess, so dear to Gilles Deleuze especially in his works with Félix Guattari, is clearly evident in the title of this programme in which philosophy and literature dance around, changing position, in the different zones of the written word in order to compose and re-compose themselves, expressively different, but with a force that is the same, that of the differentiation of the majority pattern of these two disciplines. It is in the ‘entredeux’, the in-between, that the movement (of thought) accelerates and intensifies to create the concept. ¹ Opening (Marcel Proust) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 54 Deleuze extracts from novels by the authors and of the literature he appreciates, as is the case of Charlus (Proust) or Bartleby (Melville), in order to reach the haecceities (Duns Scot/Simondon), these a-subjective singularities that are not identities but are perfectly individuated to ensure them a territory and a voice, the possibility of the univocity of a people becoming, a people to come, fleshed out by haecceities in individuation. So, could we conceive such a Deleuzean wall as being a murmur of Rancière’s instead, which might be knocked down and transformed into a wall of free stones, in an intifada that knocks down the univocity of the wall to counter it with the equivocity of the stones? But will it still be possible to find one single voice, that European voice, for all the modes that, in the difference, repeat it? It would be necessary to revisit Spinoza and the procedure of modes to find this European immanence for a people to come. Let us rather think about cutting the flow at the end of this line of flight as if a line with an end did not immediately become a segment, a line segment that can be remounted, enchained and provide material for the reconstruction of continuity and new lines of flight. Ultimately, the wall that Jacques Rancière builds at the limits of Deleuze’s thought could be constituted, or not, as the element where the shock of heterogeneous elements produces light. Does that anent (re) construction? To return to the idea that Jacques Rancière develops in his text Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littéraire (1998) in which, based on an excerpt where Gilles Deleuze discusses what a world “in process” or “an archipelago” would be like, which is one of fraternal individuals – “a wall of loose, uncemented stones where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to the others” (Deleuze apud Rancière, 1998, p. 199 ² ) – he defends that a Deleuzean wall will therefore exist that is a barrier-limit to his own thought: “And this is exactly what Deleuze does here when, in one single gesture, he clears the way of Deleuzism and sends it into the wall” (idem, p.203). The end or the cutting of the flow of all Deleuze’s thought, according to Rancière, clashes with this aporia: “the strength of any strong thought is also its ability to arrange its aporia itself, the point where it can no longer pass” (ibidem). However, Deleuze detests the point, he does not like to point, either in the numerical sense or in the sense of the French expression faire le point or “to take stock of a situation”. He always prefers to trace a line, a line of flight, by dint of the vital movement of all the lines of life. This geometric aversion is sufficient to refute the forced reading that Jacques Rancière makes of the extract regarding the Melvillean brotherhood in Bartleby, ou la Formule, this wall-final-point-of-Deleuzean-thought; it could not be a strong aporia within a strong thought without being, simultaneously, a line of flight, a line of exit or a line of passage, a passage and opening, a resting place before once again taking up, at great speed, the movement of thinking. If we are attentive to this wall of loose stones – without succumbing immediately to the dictum of the mental image that shows us piles of granite stones in the Attempt at concluding a text to be concluded: about the formula Translator’s note: All the references in this article refer to the French editions in the bibliography. ² EUROPE: UNIVOCITY OR EQUIVOCITY? A READING BETWEEN GILLES DELEUZE AND JACQUES RANCIÈRE Luís Lima 55 open fields of southern Europe where mammals (goats, sheep, dogs and men), reptiles (lizards and snakes), birds and plants (brambles, blackberry bushes and moss) open up cracks and climb over with the greatest ease and naturalness of their animal and vegetable and mineral vitality – slowly so as to accelerate more quickly. ) – he defends that a Deleuzean wall will therefore exist that is a barrier-limit to his own thought: “And this is exactly what Deleuze does here when, in one single gesture, he clears the way of Deleuzism and sends it into the wall” (idem, p. 203). The end or the cutting of the flow of all Deleuze’s thought, according to Rancière, clashes with this aporia: “the strength of any strong thought is also its ability to arrange its aporia itself, the point where it can no longer pass” (ibidem). This is what we propose here: to start from the characters that Deleuze extracts from the tales, novellas and novels of North American authors, and to forget Antonin Artaud (body without organs), Henri Michaux (multiplicities and properties), Franz Kafka (minorities) and a biased appreciation of Proust by the simple reading that Rancière applies to the commentaries that run through all Deleuzean thought, would be to once again cement Deleuze’s free thinking that, above all else, is made up of the creation of concepts – those loose stones that produce thought in their movement in an autonomous and heteronomous league (the “crowned anarchy” of which Deleuze speaks at the end of Différence et Répétition, 1968). Let us remember that through both French writers and American ones, Deleuze passes from romanesque characters to conceptual characters and, from there, to singular forces, pure relata, which are the haecceities ³. This occurs in the case not only of the Baron de Charlus, who in the curvature of his voice and the elevation of his nose embodies the features of a whole blood-related people, a genetic brotherhood that circulates through the arteries of his literary and literal body, but also in the pure affirmation of Bartleby’s non-affirmation, which is the expressive voice of the immanence of a singular, but not subjective or, rather, a-subjective, voice: that is to say, individuation by haecceity. In order to reach the haecceities, to reach individuation through the text, what Deleuze does is not build a wall but rather the composition of an ontographic plane ⁴, where the lines of text are lines of life and where the writing plane is a vital plane of composition between the autonomy and the heteronomy of the characters who emit signals (more than signs); we can talk of an ontonomy. A being of the names that are, like in Proust, like in Nietzsche, a wind. Rancière further disagrees (using the argument of Alain Badiou that reduces Deleuzean univocity not to an expressive modal multiplicity like Spinoza’s but to an original unicity that is contrary in every way to Deleuze’s theories of differential multiplicity) that this wall is a wall of non-passage, a total wall where “we do not go on, from the multitudinous incantation of Being, toward any political justice. Literature opens no passage to a Deleuzean politics” (Rancière, 1998, p. 202). After the Rancierian terms, the argument: “There is no Dionysian politics”. And “as loose as its stones might be,” this wall “is that in front of which the joyful expansion of the philosophers children of Dionysus is halted” (ibidem). Why would children stop in front of such a wall of loose stones instead of climbing over it as all children do, as goats, sheep, brambles and lizards do? The reason, concludes Rancière, is that the philosopher did not want disciples; Deleuze, like Dionysus, like Nietzsche, did not want disciples. To say, as Jacques Rancière does, that Dionysus did not appreciate philosophers but only asses is to forget that Cf. 1730 – Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible in Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1980). Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux. Paris, Minuit. ³ Cf. Lima, Luís (2013). Ontografias da Imanência (de Deleuze a Proust e volta), respigar, compor, expressar. PhD thesis in Aesthetics. Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. DOI: https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/10188/1/ luislima .pdf. Accessed on 15/07/19. ⁴ Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 56 Zarathustra, in the cave at the top of the mountain with his animals, knew the answer the ass would always give him, his “Ye-a”, the affirmative consent characteristic of the German people. Zarathustra was seeking other actors, other flights, coming out from his cave at the top of the mountain where he established himself on a plane of free thinking: a plateau. What is the top of a wall but a micro-plane, a mountain plateau? But, naturally, without asceticism. Let us then look more closely at the wall of loose stones of Bartleby, of Melville, of Deleuze, and at the context from which the passage cited by Rancière was taken: What force does the term “wall” have if it is made of loose, uncemented stones? Is it not just one more Deleuzean oxymoron, one more topological object like the Möbius strip or Klein’s Bottle, more than surface and less than volume, or an object with n dimensions in the Riemannian space which is the topological space by nature of the vitalism of Deleuzean ontology? We read “process”, “loose stones”, “uncemented”, “relation”, “floating relations”, “islands and straits”, “immobile points”, “sinuous lines”, “archipelago”; Jacques Rancière wants to read “wall”, despite the warning Deleuze gives later on in the same paragraph: “But to reach this point, it was also necessary for the knowing subject, the sole proprietor, to give way to a community of explorers, the brothers of the archipelago, who replace knowledge with belief – or rather with ‘confidence’, not belief in another world, but confidence in this one, and in man as much as in God […] Pragmatism is this double principle of archipelago and hope” (idem, p. 111). However, the archipelago is everything except the community. And this is what Rancière fears. The crowned anarchy of Deleuzean politics is incompatible with the emancipating programme of the community to come. Even though the master might be ignorant, he knows that he must emancipate. Nor is it a pedagogy, and this is why Deleuze is the friend of children, of the children-philosophers or indeed of philosophy’s childhood, its happiness and sense of humour, as in Nietzsche. And this is why we can look at the “wall of loose stones” of the Melvillean brotherhood, of an anarchism of becoming, in the light of another formula, not that of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” but rather of the Deleuzean formula for the univocity of being. There is an aesthetic line inaugurated by Gilles Deleuze. But it is a line that is traced much earlier than is usually mentioned. It is not then with Francis Bacon (1984) or with the two volumes on cinema (1983 and 1985), or even with Critique et Clinique [Critically and Clinically] (1993) that the philosopher dedicates to literature. It is, for us, in the movement of his philosophical plane, in the movement that draws abstract lines that become lines of thought that become concrete, material and aesthetic, and that seek to affirm an ontology of univocity through movements of expressivity, difference, individuation. Everything was pointing in this direction ever since his commentary on expressivity in Spinoza (1968). After this date there is a dance that involves the works Différence et It is first of all an affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines – for Truth always has “jagged edges.” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 110) 63 PhD in Philosophy – Aesthetics, at FCSH/ New University of Lisbon, under the guidance of José Gil (UNL) and Antoine Compagnon (Paris 4 Sorbonne), as a Fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He was also a Fellow of the Portuguese FCT in the Master in Communication, Contemporary Culture and New Technologies from the same university. He collaborated as a journalist in several publications and is currently a professor at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and at the Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, where he teaches Image Theories, Creative Writing and Communication and Digital Storytelling. He also works as a freelance translator in the field of contemporary aesthetics and poetry and is a researcher at the IC.Nova and CEAA EUROPE: UNIVOCITY OR EQUIVOCITY? A READING BETWEEN GILLES DELEUZE AND JACQUES RANCIÈRE Luís Lima Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 64 Cosmopolitanism, Populism, and Democracy Andreas Michel The topic of my paper is the attack on cosmopolitanism ever since the Great Recession. Since 2008, populist reactions to the ill effects of globalisation have sprung up in many Western countries. Their target is the post-WW II political consensus—at least as far as Europe is concerned—of an ‘ever closer union,’ a policy based on 20th century history and a new cosmopolitan sensibility. This sensibility is now under attack—Brexit being only the most visible sign—and calls for a new nationalism have returned to both sides of the Atlantic. For a West-German citizen born after the war, such a focus on the nation was out of the question for all the well-known reasons. In this paper I engage with the critics of cosmopolitanism, exploring both populist and liberal objections to it. As a result, I arrive at a more nuanced position that takes stock of the negative effects of globalization. I suggest that the road forward—at least for the foreseeable future—might well be a division of labour between the European nation states and a cosmopolitan sensibility. Cosmopolitanism, European Union, globalisation, nationalism, populism. KEYWORDS Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana, USA ABSTRACT COSMOPOLITANISM, POPULISM, AND DEMOCRACY Andreas Michel 65 I would like to start with a quote from After Europe, Ivan Krastev’s 2017 meditation on the future of the European Union. Krastev’s book is not a swan song to the European Union. Rather, he tries to find an explanation for the rising disenchantment with this institution as felt in many of its member states. In the process, he submits the following bifurcated observation on cosmopolitanism, which I will use to set the stage for my reflections on the challenge that today’s populist movements pose to my own cosmopolitan beliefs. The bifurcation alludes to the different ways Western and Central Europeans conceive of transnational, or cosmopolitan, ideas. Krastev suggests that: What I find so instructive about this statement is that the move towards internationalism or cosmopolitanism—is either welcomed or rejected on the basis of a nation’s history. Not only do these diametrically opposed reactions to a postnational Europe help explain the gap in the European handling of refugees in Western and Central Europe (Merkel: thumbs up; Orban: thumbs down); they point, in addition, to the cultural and political roots for these divergent policies. Krastev’s remark thus provides a first indication that the populist challenge to cosmopolitanism needs to be taken seriously rather than to be rejected out of hand as undemocratic intervention. In what follows I will pass in review recent challenges to the view that cosmopolitanism represents the arrow of history. I will use the term cosmopolitanism in the way Krastev understands it: namely, as the underlying drive of a European post-World War II vision to build a united Europe, an ‘ever closer union,’ in which, ideally, and eventually, national sovereignty gets dissolved in European sovereignty. In no country, perhaps, was this drive for a European unification stronger than in West Germany. The burden of the Nazi crimes committed in the name and with the support of the German people, prohibited, after 1945, a patriotic focus on the nation. In the West Germany I grew up in, not all, to be sure, but a large majority of politicians and citizens rejected expressions of nationalist sentiment in any shape or form. In its stead, they espoused a European cosmopolitanism or, at the very least, multilateralism. Led by the vision of a united Europe that would see no more wars, cosmopolitan-minded Germans, even after the fall of the Wall, were Europeans long before they received European passports. Looking back from today’s vantage, the decision in favor of cosmopolitanism as a bulwark against nationalism was a very successful undertaking. What we are learning the hard way today, however, is that, along with nationalism, cosmopolitans rejected the nation state in general. Not in reality, of course, but potentially. For, as is quite plain to see, not only do the European nation states still exist but they also wield political power commensurate with their economic strength. In other words, nation states continue to exist alongside the cosmopolitan project of the European Union. Yet, in theory, the goal of a truly cosmopolitan vision is to step by step merge these nation states into one sovereign European state—whose citizens would eventually agree with Emmanuel Macron’s exclamation “Brussels is us”—made during his the German drive for cosmopolitanism was […] a way to escape the xenophobic legacy of Nazism, while it could be argued that Central Europe’s anti-cosmopolitanism is partially rooted in an aversion to a communist imposed internationalism […] (In Western Europe, 1968 symbolizes the endorsement of cosmopolitan values, while in the East it stands for the rebirth of national sentiments). (Krastev, 2017, p. 57) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 66 Initiative for Europe speech at the Sorbonne in September 2017. Today’s populist movements, however, most ardently the supporters of Brexit, are opposed precisely to this endgame of cosmopolitanism. As a German, born in 1955, it was “natural” to be a defender of cosmopolitanism and of European integration. But given the recent populist attacks on cosmopolitan elites as well as the claim of a democratic deficit in the governance of the EU, I feel the need to reexamine my own premises. In a first step, I will pass in review the political objections that recent populist movements have leveled against Europe’s cosmopolitan aspirations. In a second step, I will interrogate the theoretical arguments leveled against cosmopolitan democracy even by some defenders of cosmopolitanism. I will then suggest that a reconceptualized cosmopolitanism is nevertheless indispensable for European integration and a peaceful world. Populism itself is not an ideology, if by ideology we mean to designate a particular set of beliefs as they are for example enshrined in religious doctrines or party platforms. Populists, rather, in the words of Ernesto Laclau, ‘construct a political frontier dividing society into two camps and calling for the mobilization of the “underdog” against “those in power”’ (quoted in Mouffe, 2018, pp. 10-11). Populists therefore display an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality, with ‘us’ being the people, while ‘them’ refers to a perceived elite. This formalist conception of populism does not exclude that, at any particular point in history, a populist revolt has a precise political content, purpose, or agenda when it erupts. All we need to do is look to Brexit for confirmation. But because the populist moment has no core set of beliefs, is not attached to any party platform, the revolt of the underdogs or ‘left-behinds’ (Goodhart, 2017) is more easily co-opted, even high-jacked, by demagogues who fill the populist outrage with antiliberal and anti-democratic content. In the recent literature on populism, if we zoom out far enough, we can discern two schools of thought when it comes to the legitimacy of populism as a democratic tool. For some, populism is seen as a political means to protest an elite’s neglect of their vital interests: Goodhart (2017), Judis (2016), Koppetsch (2019), Manow (2018), and Mouffe (2019) are in this camp. For others, however, populism poses a direct danger to liberal democracy because of its anti-pluralist stance: see Galston (2018), Krastev (2017), Mudde (2017), and Müller (2016). For the first group, populism emerges as a legitimate political reaction to real existing inequalities that are not on the radar of ruling elites. Populism here represents the pressure from below without which important changes to the political landscape will never happen. It is therefore seen as a democratic counter weight. If handled without giving in to authoritarian, nationalist, or nativist seduction, such a form of democratic populism could even be helpful in stabilizing the political system. The field of those who see populism as a legitimate activity includes defenders of national populism (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2019) as well as leftist populism (Mouffe, 2018). Both camps see populist interventions as the honest expression of a disadvantaged section of the population voicing legitimate complaints against an elite, while staying within the bounds of liberal democracy. I. The Populist Challenge COSMOPOLITANISM, POPULISM, AND DEMOCRACY Andreas Michel 67 The second school of thought considers populism an undemocratic, and therefore illegitimate, tool of political change—in spite of the fact that its representatives also recognize the validity of the populist complaints against the elites. However, they consider the populists’ political demands as but a smokescreen. For them, populist rhetoric is anti-pluralist in orientation and the real danger comes to light once populists are in power (as in Central European countries today), for then they start to erode liberal institutions. This is because populists assume their voice is the authentic voice of the people, which makes all other political positions not just different but inauthentic. Their authenticity, they argue, gives them the right to curtail or abolish fundamental institutions of liberal democracy, such as the state of law (Rechtsstaat), the division of powers, and the freedom of the press. In the words of Ivan Krastev: Thus, while both schools of thought agree that the populist revolt stems from opposition to elites, it is the second for whom the true nature of populism surfaces in the anti-democratic slippage that occurs when legitimate complaints of a loss in political solidarity take the form of antiliberal, authoritarian politics. For the danger is that, for the loss of solidarity to be regained, populists often make use of ethnic or religious nationalism. Thus, while populism of the first kind looks to establish political solidarity in democratic fashion, the second—potentially—conceives solidarity on the pre-political level of the nation as ethnic or religious community where, at least potentially, non-national others may be persecuted. John B. Judis (2016) refers to the first kind of populism as dyadic (people/elite) and to the second as a triadic (people/elite/other to blame]. This debate about the true nature of populism is in full swing and both sides have serious arguments on their side. What is interesting for my purposes is that, in both cases, whether as animus against the reigning elite or as threat to the institutions of pluralist democracy, cosmopolitanism finds itself in populism’s line of fire. This is so because cosmopolitans are seen as lacking, even as challenging the kind of solidarity populists want to reclaim. What characterizes populists in power are their constant attempts to dismantle the system of checks and balances and to bring independent institutions like courts, central banks, media outlets, and civil society organizations under their control. Populists and radical parties aren’t just parties; they are constitutional movements. They promise voters what liberal democracy cannot: a sense of victory where majorities — not just political majorities, but ethnic and religious ones, too — can do what they please. The rise of these parties is symptomatic of the explosion of threatened majorities as a force in European politics. They blame the loss of control over their lives, real or imagined, on a conspiracy between cosmopolitan-minded elites and tribal-minded immigrants. They blame liberal ideas and institutions for weakening the national will and erodinga national unity. They tend to see compromise as corruption and zealousness as conviction. (Krastev, 2017, pp. 75-6) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 68 In order to see if this assessment of cosmopolitanism is justified, we need to dig deeper. Since the mid-1990s, a great number of books and essay collections on cosmopolitanism have appeared, among them Archibugi (2003), Brock and Brighouse (2005), Brown and Held (2010), Breckenridge (2002), Cheah and Robbins (1998), Robbins and Lemon Horta (2017), and Vertovec and Cohen (2002). These different collections interrogate cosmopolitanism from all points of view: systematic, historical, philosophical, ethical, political, sociological, and Eurocentric. One of the reasons for this busy publishing activity is the challenge to which the idea of cosmopolitanism has been put in the wake of what Dani Rodrik (2019) has called hyper-globalization—an economic trend which itself is the result of drastically changed political circumstances since the early 1990s. After the fall of communism, the economic and political alternatives to Western-style liberalism and capitalism seemed exhausted. Some even suggested that History, understood as the sequence of economic and political formations, had come to an end. Buoyed by this sentiment, laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberalism underwrote the liberalization of world markets including the free flow of people, products, and capital across international borders. As it turns out, hyper-globalization while it contributed to economic growth during the last 25 years, has also brought about immense inequalities. The reason for the failure of hyper-globalization, as Rodrik sees it, is two-fold: a first failure consists in the fact that since trade will produce comparative advantages for some and disadvantages for others, the international community should have taken care of the losers of the liberalization of markets. That did not happen. Rather, a broad section of the middle classes in the US and Europe were left behind; blaming the elites for their fate, they have lost all trust in the system. A second failure of hyper-globalization is to be seen in the fact that multi-national companies and international organization were allowed to dictate rules and regulations across international borders that clashed with deeply held values about regulatory diversity or national autonomy. For Rodrik, the trouble started when hyper-globalization, rather than serving the broad economic interests of the world community, came to be seen as an end in itself. The flow of people across borders—this is where cosmopolitanism comes in. For the globalization of trade included the rise of a new class of professionals and technocrats without national roots, whose values, interests, connections, and identification are not with their immediate environment, but rather with “rootless” people like themselves, be they in faraway places or in the neighborhood. David Goodhart (2017) who researched this phenomenon in the case of Brexit, labeled this new class the Anywheres. What unites them is that their values and identifications are not rooted in the nation. On the contrary, they pride themselves on having a broader view because they are no longer attached to a national community. They are the new cosmopolitans, the winners of globalization, who are affluent, able to move to a different place when times get hard. The Somewheres on the other hand, are the locals, those who cannot and do not want to leave their local attachments. Many of them have been losers of globalization who feel that their livelihood, their traditions, their country, and their nation is in danger of being transformed by policies and ideologies designed by a far-off European II. Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, and the Problem of Solidarity COSMOPOLITANISM, POPULISM, AND DEMOCRACY Andreas Michel 69 Union for the benefit of the rootless Anywheres. In Goodhart’s view this is the reason why the Somewheres voted to leave the European Union. Thus, the effects of globalization are here identified as the culprit that fueled the populist explosion leading to a nationalist backlash in England as well as in other liberal democracies.´ This is the first point I concede to the populist challenge. I find it hard not to agree with this critique of an economic cosmopolitanism that as a result of hyper-globalization has led to economic hardship for those who cannot compete with the new cosmopolitan realities. I am convinced that globalization contributed to this state of affairs, and the lack of national and EU attention to the fate of certain segments of British society has led to a loss of a sense of solidarity that gets expressed in populist anger. Yet the critique of cosmopolitanism does not only come from the populists. A similar critique of cosmopolitan democracy comes from the discipline of political sociology that, on a more theoretical level, shares some of populism’s principal complaints. I am thinking in particular of the work of Craig Calhoun. As it turns out, the crux here, as in populism is the notion of solidarity. “Nationalism is not a moral mistake” (Calhoun, 2007, p. 1). This first sentence of Craig Calhoun’s collection of essays published in 2007 under the title Nations Matter really hit me when I first read it. It hit me because—as a proponent of cosmopolitanism—this is precisely how I thought about nationalism—as a moral mistake. Since this is the first sentence of the book, I assume I was not the only one to think so. The sentence is worth repeating along with the paragraph that follows: III. Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Nation State Nationalism is not a moral mistake. Certainly it is too often implicated in atrocities, and in more banal but still unjust prejudices and discriminatory practices. It too often makes people think arbitrary boundaries are natural and contemporary global divisions ancient and inevitable. But it is also a form of social solidarity and one of the background conditions on which modern democracy has been based. It has helped secure domestic inclusion and redistributive policies even while it has inhibited cosmopolitan attention to the needs of non-nationals. Nationalism helps locate an experience of belonging in a world of global flows and fears. Sometimes it underwrites struggle against the fantastically unequal and exploitative terms on which global integration is being achieved. We should approach nationalism with critical attention to its limits, illusions, and potential for abuse, but we should not dismiss it. Even where we are deeply critical of the nationalism we see, we should recognize the continued importance of national solidarities. Even if we wish for a more cosmopolitan world order, we should be realistic enough not to act on mere wishes. (Calhoun, 2017, p. 1) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 70 After much soul searching, and in spite of my personal convictions, I tend to agree with Calhoun that abstract cosmopolitanism, as in the case of my “natural” support for the EU, has a hard time providing a sense of belonging as long as national populations in its member states do not feel that their interests are represented. As long as that is the case, they will—rightly—fall back on the national solidarities they are used to and feel supported by. I am also in agreement with Calhoun’s point that national solidarities are providing the background conditions for liberal democracy to function. His main point is that, historically speaking, democracy does best when it is linked to a nation state that provides the framework for the growth of social solidarity as well as a sense of belonging. Through shared tradition, religion, and culture, the nation guarantees and fosters meaningful identifications. Here laws are created and enacted, policies are made, and the balance between the free market and the welfare state is worked out. As John B. Judis remarks in The Nationalist Revival: ‘Democracy needs a “We.”’ People make sacrifices (e.g., pay taxes, go to war) only if they identify with the community that demands them. That is to say, people act this way only if they feel they have a voice in the community; hence the link between democracy and nationalism. These are two additional points I concede to the critics of cosmopolitan democracy and actually existing cosmopolitanism. Yet, despite my general agreement with Calhoun’s remarks, I feel uneasy when it comes to his broad support for nationalism. For me to agree more wholeheartedly with him, nationalism has to be qualified as liberal and distinguished from illiberal nationalism. I therefore much prefer to speak of allegiance to the nation state rather than of nationalism. For not all nationalisms are the same, and it makes a huge difference whether or not the nation state is defended on the basis of liberal ideals or on a brand of ethnic, nativist, or otherwise exclusionary forms of nationalism. To me, it makes all the difference on what the sense of belonging is based. It is for this reason that I am following Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, rather than Calhoun, when it comes to a sense of national belonging. In 2019, in a series of shorter pieces on the nature of American nationalism in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and a small book entitled This America: The Case for the Nation, Lepore (2019 a,b,c,) puts forward an interpretation of American nationalism that entertains a close relationship to a liberal sense of belonging. In these texts, she reminds her readers that the first nationalists in the US called themselves federalists, that is to say, their nationalism found expression in the political confederation of states that led to the writing of a constitution. US national sentiment therefore co-originates with the founding of the state. Because the political union, the state, is at the basis of American nationalism, Lepore calls the United States a state-nation rather than a nation-state. What this means in the context of my argument here is that the sense of belonging to this new nation was based on a liberal creed rather than a pre-political national sentiment. (John B. Judis [2018], by the way, holds the opposite view, namely, that American nationalism stems from the ethno-religious community of Anglo-American Protestantism.) In order to counter the resurgence of illiberal versions of American nationalism today, Lepore exhorts her fellow historians to retell the history of American nationalism as the contest between liberal and illiberal forces and to side with the liberal national sentiment as it was articulated by Frederick Douglass and W.E. B. Du Bois, among others. COSMOPOLITANISM, POPULISM, AND DEMOCRACY Andreas Michel 71 What Lepore describes as American nationalism here, post-WWII German thinkers labeled constitutional patriotism—an allegiance to a liberal creed with cosmopolitan dimensions. The hope was that the European Union could be founded on such a creed as well, turning into what Lepore calls a “state-nation,” and that the idea of constitutional patriotism could function as a blueprint for European cosmopolitan democracy. But as we know the proposed European constitution was not ratified by all member states and was subsequently transformed into the Lisbon Treaty—dealing a crushing blow to the hopes for a cosmopolitan democracy. Furthermore, today’s populisms, as shown above, allege an essential disconnect between cosmopolitanism and democracy. Some of this development is to blame on the confusion that because of its underlying universalism (love of humanity rather than nation) cosmopolitans see their ideals as superior to national sentiments and can therefore introduce their ideas by fiat. But as Calhoun rightly states with respect to actually existing cosmopolitanism: ‘cosmopolitanism is not universalism; it is easiest for those who belong to a social class able to identify itself with the universal’ (Calhoun 2012, pp. 106-07). The mistake of real existing cosmopolitanism was to assume that it represents a superior loyalty rather than a different one. Real existing cosmopolitanism merely targets a larger, transnational, audience as opposed to a local, regional, or traditional one, and the solidarities it offers are largely based on interactional and rational, rather than cultural, ethnic, or religious grounds. My personal preferences lie with this ‘larger loyalty’ (Rorty, 1998) offered by cosmopolitanism. I feel closer to people who have moved beyond their local communities and inherited cultures, who embrace a broader outlook. But I have learned that cosmopolitan democracy is a particular political stance, not a superior one, and like any other political position, in order to become implemented, it needs to find a majority. And it is here that, for example, EU cosmopolitanism runs into trouble with its democratic deficit. Unless and until the EU convinces the populations of its member states of the benefits of an evercloser union, cosmopolitan democracy will not be attractive. Because of the democratic deficit, the question has resurfaced as to whether or not the long-term cosmopolitan goal of the overcoming of nation states is the best way to go. Calhoun and most of the critics assessing the rise of populism maintain that for theoretical and practical reasons it would be a mistake to try to overcome the nation state and national attachments at this point in history. Having passed the arguments against cosmopolitan democracy in review, I conclude by agreeing with Calhoun when he says: ‘Cosmopolitanism – like NGOs and civil society—makes much more sense as a complement to states, and sometimes a corrective to state politics, than as an alternative to them’ (Calhoun 2012, p. 117). I am therefore, at least for now, left with cosmopolitanism as corrective. What precise form this is to take, remains to be explored at another time. Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 72 *Archibugi, D. (2003). Debating Cosmopolitics. London and New York: Verso. *Breckenridge, C. et al. (2002). Cosmopolitanism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. *Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (2005). The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. *Brown, G.W. and Held, D. (2010). The Cosmopolitan Reader. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. *Calhoun, C. (2003). The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism. South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (4), 869-97. *Calhoun, C. (2007). Nations Matter. Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. New York: Routledge. *Calhoun, C. (2012). Cosmopolitan Liberalism and Its Limits. In R. Robertson & A. S. Krossa (Eds.), European Cosmopolitanism in Question (pp. 115-125). London: Palgrave Macmillan. *Cheah, Ph. and Robbins, B. (1998). Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. *Eatwell, R. and Goodwin, M. (2018). 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A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story. Foreign Affairs, 98 (2), 10-19. *Lepore, J. (2019b). Don’t Let Nationalists Speak for the Nation. New York Times, 26 May 2019. *Lepore, J. (2019c). This America. New York: Liveright Publishing (W.W. Norton). *Macron, E. (2017): Initiative for Europe (26 September 2017). https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/ en/french-foreign-policy/europeanunion/events/ article/president-macron-s-initiative-for-europe-asovereign-uniteddemocratic-europe *Manow, Ph. (2018). Die politische Ökonomie des Populismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp. *Mouffe, C. (2018). For a Left Populism. London and New York: Verso. *Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C.R. (2017). Populism. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. *Müller, J.-W. (2016). What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. *Robbins, B. and Lemos Horta, P. (2017). Cosmopolitanisms. New York: New York University Press. *Rodrik, D. (2019). Globalization’s Wrong Turn and How It Hurt America. Foreign Affairs, 98 (4), 26-33. *Rorty, R. (1998). Justice As A larger Loyalty. In Cheah, Ph. and Robbins, B., Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (pp. 45-58). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. *Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (2002). Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Theory, Context, Practice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. R R EEE N C E S F EUROPE WITHOUT ORGANS? OPICINUS DE CANISTRIS AND THE NEW ANOMOS OF THE EARTH Łukasz Moll & Michał Pospiszyl 79 Opicinus and deterritorialization of Christian Europe According to Silvian Piron, the images created by Opicinus should be seen above all as symptoms of the crisis in which Christian Europe finds itself at the beginning of the 14th century (Piron 2015). We know that on the 31st of March 1334, Opicinus de Canistris fell ill. As a result, the clergyman was partially paralysed (he could not use his right hand) and lost his memory and ability to speak for a while. We know as well that the illness was a borderline experience for Opicinus. A year later, he began to see things he had not seen before. Strictly after his conversion, Opicinus started to depict his divine visions. For a long time, most scholars believed that these un usual images were symptoms, not symptoms of the crisis of Europe, but only of the mental illness of Opicinus (Salomon 1962; Salomon 1936; Kris 1952). As Piron, partly also Whittington (2014) and Camille (1994), have shown, Opicinus’ anthropomorphic maps show much more than the effects of mental illness of the particular, individual body. We can see on them the disease of the political body which tried to constitute itself as a permanent and hierarchical organism. Figure 1 We should think about his notion of political body in contrast to theory of collective body which dominated at that time. It is well known that corporeal metaphors gained popularity in the late Middle Ages, as found in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, and De Regno of Thomas of Aquinas. As shown by Ernst Kantorowicz (2016) and Henri de Lubac (1944) or Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani (2000), corporeal metaphors are essential for constructing the concept of the Church as a mystical political body. Also in cartography – during transition between the Middle Ages and modernity – continents, Figure 1. Vaticanus latinus 6435, fol. 61r. The map of Europe, Africa and Sea by Opicinus de Canistris Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 80 In contrast to theory of collective body and its later depictions by cartographers, Opicinus’ maps rejected biologist and hierarchical metaphors which supported social and territorial hierarchy in the European order (prince as the head, knights as hands, peasants as feet etc.) and maintained clear boundaries of the political organism. On the other hand, the bodies from Opicinus’ vision are not metaphors to organize the world. The state, the Church or Europe do not resemble a body but simply are a body. Since it was a body, it was subject to the same changes and metamorphoses as individual bodies. That is why, when Opicinus depicted the body of Europe, he presented it as a model of his own body, Figure 2. Vaticanus latinus 6435, fol. 78r. The map of Europe and Africa by Opicinus de Canistris Figure 2 states and res publica christiana were often depicted as personifications of kings, queens or saints. In the case of Europe we can mention her cartographic standard of representing Europe as Europa Regina (Queen Europe) – the most famous examples included Johannes Putsch’s map from 1537, Sebastian Münster’s version from his Cosmographia (1588) or the one by Heinrich Bünting from 1589. But if Europa Regina was supposed to emphasize the regained unity of Christendom (in the form of Habsburg Empire), its harmonious and organic geographical and political structure and also its privileged, almost heavenly location, then body played an entirely different role in the cartographic visions of Opicinus. EUROPE WITHOUT ORGANS? OPICINUS DE CANISTRIS AND THE NEW ANOMOS OF THE EARTH Łukasz Moll & Michał Pospiszyl 81 In Opicinus view, the political body is a body without organs, without borders, abstract norms, stable hierarchies (Deleuze, Guattari 1987: 149-166). This notion of collective body is legible if, instead of limiting ourselves to a single selected map, we follow all thirty. From this broader perspective, we can see that in subsequent representations of gender identity, gender is a subject of permanent changes (one time, Africa is represented by Opicinus as a woman; another time, Europe is a woman; the next time it is entirely impossible to determine the gender). A similar game concerns division between the earthly and the heavenly. In turn, on fol. 61 r from Vaticanus Latinus (Vat. Lat. 6435, fol. 61r)(fig.1), this crossing of identities seems to be the subject of one image, in which we can see mirror reflections of spiritual and carnal Europe on one side, and spiritual and carnal Africa on the other. Or when Opicinus portrayed himself as a penis of demonic Europe which is copulating with the probably heretical sea (Vat. Lat. 6435, fol. 78r)(fig.2). The deterritorialization of Europe which manifests itself in countless Opicinus’ works had to be reorganized and synthetized anew under new unity by counterrevolutionary images, of which Europa Regina is the most obvious example. with all of his lacking facilities and sickness, giving all imperfections specific political meaning. As Michael Camille noted: For Opicinus the arrangement of pubic hair on his body signifies the arrangement of vineyards over the whole European continent. His farts and constipations warn of troubles in 'the belly of Europe' and a rheumatic pain in his arm which prevents him from touching his shoulder means the failure of a planned German attack against France. He does not recognise where he ends and the universe outside begins (Camille 1994: 88). Figure 3 Figure 3. The map of Europe, Queen Regina in Sebastian Münster Cosmographia Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 82 Opicinus’ cartographic innovation was possible due to connection between two different traditions of map-making which he managed to establish. Two types of maps prevailed in the 13th century – both entirely different, and both serving completely different purposes. The first type of map was the so-called Mappamundi – symbolic maps which were never intended to guide travellers. Their goal was to present a religious image of the world, which is why the Earthly Paradise was placed in the East, and Jerusalem was placed in the centre; in turn, the representation of continents, seas, rivers or tracts, had nothing to do with reality. The second type is the portolan maps. The oldest maps preserved to our times' came from the end of the 13th century. We do not know precisely where and when first such maps were created, and it is not clear either what methods were used to draw them. What we know is that they were shockingly accurate (very precisely reproducing the coastlines surrounding the Mediterranean Sea) and that, contrary to symbolic maps, they had strictly practical application. We also know that a portolan map was never a finished composition: once it had been drawn, it was subject to constant changes and corrections by the sailors who used it. So, it was the work of many authors, the work of a general intellect collecting data from thousands of individual journeys, and the product of the collective work of a multitude of sailors. Although these maps were created thanks to multiple individual observations, their effect was to produce knowledge that is, in a sense, absolute or divine because it is unachievable through individual cognition. Simultaneously, the image of the world that emerges from the portolan maps is entirely different from the one known from symbolic maps. There is no Rome or Jerusalem in the centre of the map, only an empty spot in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. While the Mappamundi had (for religious reasons) always been oriented to the Orient, the sea maps had no permanent points of reference. This was because the shapes of coastlines were constantly changing under the influence of new knowledge but also because the maps had neither a bottom nor a top, as the sailors who used them rotated them in all directions, depending on the needs and comfort of the observer. The difference between a Mappamundi and a portolan map would be analogous to the difference between cartographical and geological thinking studied by Deleuze. While the effect of portolan maps was a process of continuous becoming of the truth, the effect of Mappamundi was to show an unchanging, geological and "deep" meaning of reality. As Deleuze noted: The same difference was articulated by Deleuze and Guattari in pair of concepts map/tracing. As was explained by Jakub Zdebik (2012: 41): Maps are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the preceding one: from one map to the next, it is not a matter of searching for an origin, but of evaluating displacements. Every map is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures, which necessarily go from bottom to top. There is not only a reversal of directions, but also a difference in nature: the unconscious no longer deals with persons and objects but with trajectories and becomings. (Deleuze 1997: 63) Whereas tracing repeats, mapping shows new possibilities. The tracing generates the same through analogous repetition but a map is not something that necessarily represents what is EUROPE WITHOUT ORGANS? OPICINUS DE CANISTRIS AND THE NEW ANOMOS OF THE EARTH Łukasz Moll & Michał Pospiszyl 83 there; it rather marks the process of discovery. What is not there originally – as in the case of cinema – grows, overflows, must be mapped anew. How are the maps created by Opicinus placed against this background? On the one hand, Opicinus drew his images using portolan maps as the basis (Pal. Lat. 1993, fol. 5r; Whittington 2014: 25-59). On the other hand, unlike normal maps of this type, Opicinus maps were filled with religious and astrological symbols, full of political and autobiographical allusions. What is more, Africa, Europe, and on several maps also the sea, were presented as human or demonic figures. If these maps were not to be used for travel, but to create a story about the world, why did Opicinus not use the well-known formula provided for such purposes, that is to say Mappamundi? Symbolic maps presented a very static vision of the world. Firstly, because they were always oriented towards the East, but also because they were supposed to reflect a strictly theological concept according to which carnal life has no meaning and is only a background for the history of salvation. However, Opicinus, like many other philosophers of the 13th century, treats creation quite differently. The carnal world is an active reality, full of meanings that should be subject to constant interpretation. Opicinus believed that the truth about the world is not static. Cognition sort of resembles the travels of Mediterranean sailors, each of whom increases their collective knowledge of the world by adding further corrections to the maps (Whittington 2014). Procedural, dynamic and collective map-making which Opicinus privileged, borrowing it from naval techniques, enabled him to discover and depict forces of anomos. What could be the benefits of studying Opicinus de Canistris today, in the times of crisis of European borders? Our answer is prepared by the scholars engaged in developing autonomy of migration perspective. As Federico Luisetti, John Pickles and Wilson Kaiser (2015: 4) argue in the introduction to their co-authored book The Anomie of the Earth, a rising range of authors search in current migration flows and social movements the new forces of anomos, of contesting recent form of organic and closed European identity. Today’s European Union had been criticized by migrant activists as fortess Europe which limited external migration after new phase of enlargement of the union to the South and the East. This anomos had been conceptualized by proponents of autonomy of migration as collective and productive subjectivity which seeks for line of flights from oppressive border regime and whose resistance and creativity forces sovereign power to invent new techniques of control and to establish new locations and new types of borders (Papadopoulos, Stephenson, Tsianos 2008). Migrants – just like sailors in the epoch of Opicinus – are involved in constructing non-representational but functional maps which open new forms of collective living that Vassilis Tsianos, Dimitris Parsanoglou and Nicos Trimikliniotis (2014) called “mobile commons”: their shared and militant knowledge is able to help to find escape routes and to imagine more fair world. From organic festung Europe to Europe without organs? Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 84 Figure 4Figure 5 Figure 4. Hackitectura's map Cartografía Crítica del Estrecho (Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar) creates an alternative understanding of the Spanish-Moroccan border region Figure 5. Hackitectura's map Cartografía Crítica del Estrecho (Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar) creates an alternative understanding of the Spanish-Moroccan border region EUROPE WITHOUT ORGANS? OPICINUS DE CANISTRIS AND THE NEW ANOMOS OF THE EARTH Łukasz Moll & Michał Pospiszyl 85 And just as in the times of Opicinus, their embodied and mobile knowledge provokes new methods of extraction and codification of data which serves preparing the post-sovereign image of the world. Unmanned drones, satellite photos, heat sensors and other apparatus are brought into work in order to spot, measure and represent migrant’s forces of immanence. They try to trace new maps constructed by migrants and to make mimetic representations of deterritorialized movements in the service of biopower from them. Europe without organs is continuously, time and time again, grooved as more sophisticated organism which cannot suppress and block anomos anymore, but needs to govern and steer flows of people. It is like European body without organs which in Opicinus still served as an alternative to collective body of corpus mysticum, has now become a reality in which biopower tries to remain operational. This on-going struggle between map-making from the bottom up and tracing movements, between becoming-imperceptible and being captured by apparatus is going to decide which antithetic scenario would come out victorious: new nomos or new anomos of the Earth. Work on publication was financed from National Science's Centre funds (project number 2018/29/N/HS1/00853) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 86 *Aldea, E. (2014). Nomads and Migrants: Deleuze, Braidotti and the European Union in 2014. https://www. opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/nomadsand-migrants-deleuze-braidotti-and-european-unionin-2014/. *Balibar, É. (2011). Politics and the Other Scene. London and New York: Verso. *Cacciari, M. (2015). Europe or Philosophy. Phenomenology and Mind, n. 8, pp. 139-140. *Camille, M. (1994). The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies. In S. Kay, M. Rubin (Eds.), Framing Medieval Bodies (pp. 62-99). 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"A Psychotic Artist of the Middle Ages." Appendix to Chapter 3 in his Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International Universities Press. *Lubac, H. (1944). Corpus mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen âge, étude historique. Paris: Aubier. *Maldonado-Torres, N. (2013). On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept. In W.D. Mignolo, A. Escobar (Eds.), Globalization and the Decolonial Option (pp. 94-124). London and New York: Routledge. *Mezzadra, S. & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham and London: Duke University Press. *New Keywords Collective (2016). Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”. In N. De Genova, M. Tazzioli (Eds.), Near futures online, no. 1. http://nearfuturesonline.org/europecrisis-newkeywords-of-crisis-in-and-of-europe/. *Opicino de Canistris. Vaticanus latinus 6435. Vatican City: Vatican Library. *Opicino de Canistris. Palatinus latinus 1993. Vatican City: Vatican Library. *Paravicini-Bagliani, A. (2000). The Pope's Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *Piron, S. (2015). Dialectique du monstre: enquête sur Opicino de Canistris. Paris: Zone Sensibles. *Salomon, R. (1936). Opicinus de Canistris: Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines avignonesischen Klerikers des 14. Jahrhunderts. London: The Warburg Institute, 1936. *Salomon, R. (1962). Aftermath to Opicinus de Canistris. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25 nos. 1-2, 137-146. *Schmitt, C. (1997). Land and Sea. Washington DC: Plutarch Press. *Schmitt, C. (2004). The Theory of the Partisan. A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. *Schmitt, C. (2006). The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europeaeum. New York: Telos Press Publishing. *Whitfield, P. (1997). The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks. *Whittington, K. (2014). Body-Worlds. Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. R EF EREN CE S 87 His dissertation in philosophy at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland) was devoted to nomadic European identity and borders from the perspective of poststructuralism. Currently, he works as an adjunct at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław. He is also a principal investigator in “The Idea of Europe in the context of migration crisis” project, which he realizes at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He participated as fellow in the seminar with Étienne Balibar at the New School of Social Research in New York. He is an editor for “Theoretical Practice”, the peer-reviewed journal on critical theory. Main interests: the idea of Europe, theories of the common, political philosophy. An adjunct at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and visiting fellow at The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, In 2020 he is co-curator of the cycle of seminars "Plebs, commons and alternatives to capitalism" organize at Biennale Warsaw. His dissertation was devoted to medieval concepts of the collective body. He is an author of a monograph on Walter Benjamin’s minor materialism and philosophy of history and co-author (with Katarzyna Czeczot) an anthology on romantic anti-capitalism. He is an editor for “Theoretical Practice”, the peer-reviewed journal in critical theory. Main interests: history of biopolitics, political theology, visual culture, philosophy of the masses. EUROPE WITHOUT ORGANS? OPICINUS DE CANISTRIS AND THE NEW ANOMOS OF THE EARTH Łukasz Moll Michał Pospiszyl Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 88 European Dream “Keep bangin’ on the wall” Carla Cruz This paper discusses ideas around European identity, the ideal of free movement, and the building of ‘Fortress Europe’ through artistic work I was developing between 2005 and 2006, and endorses feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti’s idea of “becoming minoritarian” as an antidote to building an European identity based on old and new xenophobic and racist ideas, supported through my experience of leading the feminist exhibition project All My Independent Wo/men between 2005 and 2013, as a similar project of operating from the margin as a place of potentiality. Europe, art, immigration, nomadic subjectivity, becoming minoritarian. KEYWORDS Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto - I2ADS Faculty of Fine Arts from University of Porto - I2ADS, OPorto, Portugal ABSTRACT EUROPEAN DREAM “KEEP BANGIN’ ON THE WALL” Carla Cruz 95 logic, but it was the centre of AMIW’s counterpublic, and from there it allowed us to imagine new and uncommodified possibilities of being and making, not just within the art sphere but in relation to the world itself.⁸ Recognising the potential of the margins – Braidotti’s notion of becoming minoritarian as an always changing and changeable position – allowed me to understand AMIW’s situatedness as a source for critical artistic practice which challenges reducing constructions of what is commonly seen or experienced to be a wo/man and what ‘good’ art is. The experience of coming to understand AMIW as a location, as defined by Braidotti, a “collectively shared and constructed jointly occupied spatio-temporal territory”, leads me to believe that Braidotti’s vision of the becoming minoritarian of Europe is an effective/affective way to difuse the growing European xenophobic tendencies. Figure 5 Figure 5. Conjugar no plural, poster, Carla Cruz, 2012, (reproduction, courtesy of the artist) A counterpublic is, in essence, no difference from a public, in the sense that both are constructed through the same means, such as self-organisation and reflexive circulation of discourse. However, the counterpublic is capable of transforming political landscapes and creating space for voices that are marginalised and not heard (Warner, 2002). ⁸ Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 96 *Asian Dub Foundation, (2003). Fortress Europe. Enemy of the Enemy. FFRR Records. *Berardi, F. (2010). Exhaustion and Senile Utopia of the Coming European Insurrection. E-flux Journal #21 December, pp. 1–8. *Braidotti, R. (2004). Gender and Power in a post-nationalist European Union. Nora, N.3, Volume 12, November, pp. 130–143. *Cruz, C. (2012). Conjugar no Plural. [Poster]. *Cruz, C. (2006a). European Dream [Installation] (Norlinda and José Lima Collection). *Cruz, C. (2006b). Welcome. [Performance]. *Cruz, C. (2006c). Welcome. Unpublished Exhibition text (Fear+Desire, Platform, Vaasa, 8 – 21 December 2006). *Cruz, C. and Ferreira de Sousa, A. (2006). Europe – where are you?. [Photograph] (collection of the artists). *Cruz, C. (2005). EUROPA. [Sculpture] (collection of the artist). *Europa.eu. History 1990-1999. [Available online] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/ history/1990-1999_en [Accessed 18 July 1999]. *European Commission. (2005). Technical Mission to Morocco. Visit to Ceuta and Melilla on Illegal Immigration. Mission Report (October 7–11). [Available online]. http://www.migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/rapportceuta-melilla-2.pdf [Accessed 18 July 1999]. *Ferreira de Sousa, A. (2006) Jusqu’ici tout va bien. Unpublished Exhibition text (Jusqu’ici tout va bien, Plumba Gallery, Porto, 15 July – 16 September 2006). *hooks, b. (1984). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. Boston: South End Press. *Mendes, P. (2019). A preta do prédio da Bonifácio. Jornal Público (15 July 2019). [Available online] https://www.publico.pt/2019/07/15/sociedade/ opiniao/preta-predio-bonifacio-1879775 [Accessed 18 July 1999]. *Michael, W. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. Public Culture 14 (1), pp. 49–90. *Mouffe, C. (1993). The Return of the Political. London, New York: Verso. *Rich, A. (2003). Notes Towards a Politics of Location. in Lewis, R. and Mills, S. (eds.) (2003). Feminist Postcolonial Theory. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 19–42. R E F E R E N C E S 97 Is an artist, researcher and teacher, living in Porto. Cruz has a PhD in artistic practice by Goldsmiths University of London, with the support of FCT. In 2016 she was an Associate Researcher AHRC Cultural Engagement fund, focusing on the Northeast London community hub, The Mill. Since 2011, she develops in collaboration with António Contador the internationally exhibited project Finding Money. Since 2007, she develops with Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa the critical project Associação de Amigos da Praça do Anjo (AAPA). Carla was a co-founder of the Feminist Collective of Artistic Intervention ZOiNA (1999-2004), Associação Caldeira 213 (1999-2002); and All My Independent Wo/men (2005-2013) EUROPEAN DREAM “KEEP BANGIN’ ON THE WALL” Carla Cruz Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 98 Then And Now: Cultural Europe in Agony on Zambrano’s Thought Paulo Alexandre e Castro In 1945, Maria Zambrano came out with the book The Agony of Europe (although it had initially appeared as an article in 1940) delivering some major ideas about what she considers to be an agonizing Europe, that is, the crisis in which Europe is steeped. Those writings are mainly about what is happening in Europe between the years 1940 and 1945, and three elements can characterize that scenario given by the philosopher reflection: 1) the malaise of civilization, 2) the construction of Europe as a history of violence, and 3) the interference of religion at the European cultural crossroads. She proposes, as a way of overcoming this agony, the need for a new man, an inner man. If it is true that her critical thinking remains current and helps us understand the phenomenon of the European crisis, does her solution remain current? This paper will reflect on the agony of Europe nowadays and his social, political and cultural problems with Zambrano's thought in the background. Europe. Maria Zambrano. Religion. Philosophy. Violence. KEYWORDS Instituto de Estudos Filosóficos Institute of Philosophical Studies, Coimbra, Portugal ABSTRACT THEN AND NOW: CULTURAL EUROPE IN AGONY ON ZAMBRANO’S THOUGHT Paulo Alexandre e Castro 99 Thinking Europe is an urgent task today as it was at the time of Kant. The main concerns we find today, except for a few minor differences, seems to be the same: from Hegel to Denis de Rougemont, from Edmund Husserl to Victor Hugo, from Saint-Simon to Proudhon, arriving at Ortega y Gasset and his disciple Maria Zambrano, culminating in a George Steiner or in a Peter Sloterdijk, the agony (of a (de)construction) of Europe seems evident. In this sense and because many of the reasons for this cultural crisis (which are in line with the social, economic and political ones) are already thought of in these authors, it makes sense to recover the thought of Maria Zambrano for this purpose. One might initially think that María Zambrano's works are just poetic philosophy but in fact, they sink into the heart of political philosophy. In Zambrano's philosophy, man is at the heart of reality (which means that he is always making the world happen), and therefore he also emerges in his political circumstances. Man is in a world of relationships, in a world where his participation unfolds and is marked by historical and political events. Zambrano is aware of the place of politics in the active life of man, and it will not be by chance that his first book, dated from 1930, is Horizontes del Liberalismo (Horizon of Liberalism), where the beginnings of the philosophical-political thought begin to be drawn, according to the concepts of life, man and reason (Zambrano, 1996, p. 207). It begins in this book defending a third way or 'revolution', which can be translated into a sort of readjustment of the liberal economy - with a critique of capitalist liberalism and bourgeois individualism - so that greater social justice can be possible. This criticism of liberalism will also serve as a motto in the Agony of Europe, precisely to reveal a decharacterized Europe). Note that Zambrano warns, however, to safeguard what liberalism has the best, ie, freedom in culture, freedom of thought, freedom to investigate and educate. This commitment of the philosopher with her historical time - of which we find the record in the author's biographical works (Martínez and Muñoz, 1997, p. 14), is thus well self-evident in her demand for a serious reflection on the crisis of the West, which as we all know, begins by establishing the basic principles of a democracy: freedom and solidarity. Therefore, it is not surprising that reflection on Europe arises as a natural consequence in the attention of our Philosopher.¹ Zambrano is aware of the cultural and political movements of Europe and the world at large: the consequences of World War I were still happening and political ideologies were already boiling in a second phase. The book The Agony of Europe appears in 1945 (although it first appeared as an article in 1940, and Zambrano classifies it a few years later as a set of essays of unpretentious fragments) that the philosopher wrote moved by the impulsiveness of feeling (Zambrano, 2012, p. 21). This impulsivity and/ or emotional courage lies in the summer of 1940 with the unfolding of the new war and in concrete, with the Nazi invasion of Paris (where Zambrano has some her family living). With this emotion, Zambrano starts a political dialogue with her time. Our author begins with a commonplace which is the affirmation of the decadence of Europe, not to subsume itself in this premise but to highlight the ethical unconsciousness that has been reached (Zambrano, 2012, p. 23). In this framework of hidden social and political consciousness, resentment, rancour, the cult of success (Zabrano, 2012, pp. 24-25), and some currents of thought, have placed Europe at the point where it J. Moreno Sanz in the “Introductory Study» of (cap. III- “El Tiemplo del Pacto”, 119) Horizontes del Liberalismo, points out that the philosopher's trajectory is reflected in this consonance of political thought with the formation of his general philosophy. ¹ Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 100 finds itself, that is, in its agony. As our author points out, during troubled periods, during periods of crisis, man appears in the open, putting his life in the open because every disaster gives people the possibility of manifesting themselves in all their raw reality - it is the means of a more exact revelation of all who are known (Zambrano, 2012, p. 23). This idea is present throughout her reflections, that we find an echo in a work published five years later, Hacia un saber sobre el alma (Zambrano, 1987, p. 37). This crisis of Europe can be translated into a civilizational malaise, that is to say, in the realization that European thought moves in an enigmatic and mysterious climate, where terror and fear reigns, in an excessive trust in an unknown monster. A monster created by naturalism, which generates a passivity dictated by the facts, which leads to a destruction of the capacity for abstraction, to the distance from truth (Zambrano, 2012, pp. 26-27), to blind trust in the given world; and a social monster, who in the path of naturalism, settled through liberalism (Zambrano, 2012, pp. 28-30), not knowing how to safeguard the human person nor the power of creation; the blindness of both the critics and the defenders of liberalism also contributed to the fragility and paralysis of European thought (Zambrano, 2012, 31), which had born so noble in the Greeks, as Husserl had advocated in Die Krisis der Europaischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie (1954), (Husserl emphasizes the importance of Greek cultural tradition and the role of philosophy in the constitution of spiritual Europe). However, philosophy allowed the evacuation of subjectivity and the lack of lost unity of philosophy have contributed to the crisis of science and to the European crisis. So, the German philosopher defends a return to subjectivism in his early conference entitled “The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy" in Vienna in 1935, echoing in the work of Maria Zambrano (although Greek philosophy occupies a different place in history). European thought would have defined its own roots, which means that philosophy itself (like literature and painting) has become an agonizing place, that is, a place where art betrays itself, where its principles are forgotten and embrace the “black empty”. In such a scenario, the philosopher recognizes that where there is life, there must be hope. This is probably one of the key concepts of the author's thinking, and in 1953 she wrote in Delirium and Destiny that "agonizing is not being able to die because of hope" (Zambrano, 1987, p. 244). This agony thus appears as a sort of revelation of the inner feeling which is hope and which ‘animates’ man, as he would also declare a few years later (Zambrano, 1994, p. 20). The philosopher tells us: But even in the midst of terror, love does not resign itself and continues to ask if this historical reality of life and culture has died, this tradition we call Europe, which has already emigrated from its scarce territory (Zambrano, 2012, pp. 36-37). So, the question then will be: what is irrevocable in what constitutes/ constituted Europe, or, what was Europe? From its complex and very rich reality, what cannot be renounced? (Zambrano, 2012, p. 37). Zambrano claims the impossibility of the death of Europe, because Europe is perhaps the only thing - in History - that cannot die totally, the only thing that can be resurrected (Zambrano, 2012, p. 49). How to resurrect Europe from its (transient) death? The philosopher, not falling into the temptation to embrace nostalgia, responds with the painful lucidity of knowing that it is necessary to recognize what constituted it (what allowed the creation of the European lifestyle in its density, multiplicity and wealth). Zambrano asks about the origin of violence in Europe. In the question is already contained the answer: in the constitution of Europe violence has always been found (as she says, violence was in every aspect of THEN AND NOW: CULTURAL EUROPE IN AGONY ON ZAMBRANO’S THOUGHT Paulo Alexandre e Castro 101 his life, Zambrano, 2012, pp. 54-55), and with this answer also raises another fundamental question for the philosopher that is about the domain of religion: the European God is a unique god with unique characteristics, the God of a “elected people” by himself to save the whole universe.(Zambrano, 2012, p. 56). This placement of a people glorified by the Creator God would make the European people a people with a thirst for divinity - unlike the Oriental who would be incapable of such violence (Zambrano, 2012, p. 66), but also the people who would make Christianity triumph (Zambrano, 2012, pp. 56-57). This relation of transmutation of the creative God to the creative man (Zambrano, 2012, p. 59) involved the European in his excessive reliance on judging himself in the image and likeness, and for this, St. Augustine is called to debate, to give us the dimension of the agreement between religion and philosophy, in order to situate ourselves in the framework of understanding the immense decadent difficulty that Europe has reached (see Romero, 2003, p. 134); but, according to Zambrano, the conflict that Europe has arrived at its violence is religious and philosophy cannot solve it on its own. Before a new philosophy emerges, in this European tradition, the conversion of man must take place, there must be an acceptance of reality in a revealing way (Zambrano, 2012, p. 72). Only with the appearance of a ‘new man’, the philosopher tells us, can Europe resurrect. Or rather, only with hope and mercy (the "confession" that St. Augustine introduces is decisive for the realization of the interiority of man), we will see the way out of the agony of Europe, and that is why the European man is the protagonist of History, is the man who can in his duplicity, embrace the rebirth of Europe and open the way to the transparency of the heart, that is, to restore lost dignity (Zambrano, 2012, p. 90). Zambrano announces to us the new man as the inner man (almost in an Nietzsche way), the man who has regained his interiority, who embraces life in its novelty: The European man was born with these words. The truth is within: it realizes, for the first time, its interiority and therefore it can rest in it; so it is independent, it is free. Recover his interiority (Zambrano, 2012, p. 92). This man of "unfathomable interiority" opens hope to the resurrection, to the purity of heart, to the end of the conflict between himself and the world he manages; the Christian person is the incarnation of these values: The concept that marks Zambrano's philosophy begins to be drawn here, and perhaps as Ana Mendonça points out, the author puts (in the future) the thought into a poetic reason as a possible figure and a framework for a new rational discourse (see, Mendonça, 2004). Given Zambrano's reflections and plunging into the reality of today's Europe, how to reconcile the humanitarian sense of help and union with the growing fascist ideological movement? How to be supportive in an Europe that is caught up in the rise of extreme right-wing parties? Could the new Zambrano man be a solution to this continued crisis in Europe? As Zambrano realized, the ghosts of the past - violence and terror - that built Europe are the same ones that today threaten the solidarity The Christian person, on the other hand, has no limit, neither for his strength, nor for his life nor for his death. There is something in man that transposes and transcends everything: to be a man is to possess this inabarcable interiority. That is why a person, a Christian, is like an infinite perspective that is never exhausted in any of his acts, not even in all of them together: it is what is always beyond - it is deep, deep (Zambrano, 2012, p. 93) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 102 and humanitarian sense that should characterize a real European Union. Maybe art and culture can be a solution, as Nietzsche said only art can save us from ourselves. To deal with different cultures it is not a sign of fragility but instead a sign of recognition of humanity; to accept differences is to built a richer world, even if this world is constantly changing, in agony. *Bundgard, Ana (2000), Más allá de la filosofía, sobre el pensamiento filosófico-místico de María Zambrano. Madrid: Ed. Trotta. *Corona, Lourdes (2002), La Razón Poética en María Zambrano. Guanajuato: Universidad de Guanajuato. *Martínez, Rogelio Blanco, e, Muñoz, Juan F. Ortega, (1997), María Zambrano (1904-1991), Biblioteca filosófica. Madrid: Ediciones del Orto. *Mendonça, Ana Maria Bijóias (2004), «Vergílio Ferreira e María Zambrano ou uma estética do “exílio”», in Philosophica, 23, 69-85. *Paisana, João (1997), Husserl e a Ideia de Europa. Porto: Edições Contraponto. *Revilla, Carmen (1998), Claves de la Razón Poética: María Zambrano – Un pensamento en el orden del tiempo. Madrid: Ed. Trotta. *Romero, María Xosé Agra, (2003), «Sobre La Agonia de Europa de María Zambrano», in Diacrítica – Filosofia e Cultura, nº 17/2, 123-139. *Saura, María del Carmen Piñas (2004), En el Espejo de LLama: Una aproximación al pensamento de María Zambrano. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. *Zambrano, María, (1994), Os Sonhos e o Tempo. Tradução de Cristina Rodriguez e Artur Guerra. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água Editores. *Zambrano, María (1996) – Horizontes del Liberalismo. Estudo introdutório de Jésus Moreno Sanz. Madrid: Ediciones Morata. *Zambrano, María (2012) – A Agonia da Europa. Introdução de Jesús Moreno Sanz e tradução de Ana Marques. Lisboa: Nova Vega. *Zambrano, María (1987), Hacia un saber sobre el alma, Madrid: Alianza Editorial. *Zambrano, María (1989), Delirio y Destino: los veinte años de una española. Madrid: Mondadori. R E F E R E N C E S THEN AND NOW: CULTURAL EUROPE IN AGONY ON ZAMBRANO’S THOUGHT Paulo Alexandre e Castro 103 Is a research member of IEF-Coimbra University. PhD in Philosophy of Mind (UMinho), Master in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (FLUL), Bachelor in Philosophy (FLUL). Author and co-author of several books (literature and essay) and director of Uncanny – Philosophy and Cultural Studies Journal. Find more info about the author at: pauloalexandreecastro.webs.com Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 104 Disfiguring Figures The political potentiality of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s choreographic work Alexandra Balona Departing from the German philologist Erich Auerbach’s foundational study on the genealogy of figura—a concept that belonging to the three different fields of theology, rhetoric and visual arts has laid the foundations of the theories and practices of Western European representation — and following the reformulations by Freud, Gilles Deleuze, and Lyotard of this influential notion of figura as indeterminacy between form and process, the visible and the invisible, sensible and intelligible, the corporeal and the spiritual, this paper wishes to address how the choreographed figures of ambivalence, hybridity and metamorphosis in Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ works, namely, in her solo work ‘Guintche’, set the stage for a contemporary criticality of some of the structuring postulates of European modernity. Marlene Monteiro Freitas, contemporary dance, figure, figural, decolonial KEYWORDS European Graduate School & Lisbon Consortium FCH-UCP, Switzerland and Portugal ABSTRACT DISFIGURING FIGURES THE POLITICAL POTENTIALITY OF MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS’S CHOREOGRAPHIC WORK Alexandra Balona 111 economy”, a title, precisely, of another Lyotard’s essay (1974)’ (Dumora: 2017, idem). Gilles Deleuze in his work Logique de la sensation (1981), in order to analyse the painting of Francis Bacon, adopts the concept of figural, which he opposes to the figurative and to representation. Remaining a pregnant zone of indiscernibility, for Deleuze, the figure allows a sense beyond logical and rational signification, one that follows the forces of unconscious drives (Deleuze: 2017, 61). If Lyotard analysed Cézanne’s and Klee’s painting to ‘faire voir que voir est une danse’, ‘dance will probably be the privileged art form where to analyse the visions of excess [Bataille] that reside where the eye sees itself seeing’ (Bouvier: 2017). Guintche (2010), the first renown solo work by Marlene Monteiro Freitas, departs from the experience of a jazz concert by Archie Shepp, followed by the need to draw this experience, and then to endow the drawn figures with life. This methodological gesture opens some questions for reflection. Firstly, how to draw the contours of an experience? Secondly, how liveable, changeable and animated can the contours of those figures become? Thirdly, how to translate and transform (in the sense of metamorphosis) a drawing into a dance? According to Marlene, a drawing can be alive, allowing for transformation by the single action of erasing the mouth, or redrawing the eyes differently. Thus, a face can easily acquire a different appearance, intensity or force, and this potentiality for metamorphosis was transposed from the drawing to the dance figure. What do drawings want, then? Or, as would W. J. T. Mitchel asks in his homonymous book, What do pictures want? Departing from the wish to animate a drawing, or the belief on the liveable power and intensity of this register, Marlene crosses the thin modern divide of animism. ‘The idea that pictures want something’, refers Michael Taussig, ‘evokes the belief that pictures are spirits’, and the ‘colonial response’ as we know it, ‘was to be suspicious of such a claim’ (Taussig, 2009: 263), regarded as an animist superstition held by others, but not by the Western moderns. In his book that proposes pictures to be alive, W. J. T. Mitchell advances the concept of the ‘metapicture’, as ‘a figure that helps to explain the often-observed uncanniness of images, their ghostliness or spectrality, their tendency to look back at the beholder, or seemingly (…) to "want something" from the beholder.’ (Mitchell: 2006). ‘To properly understand images’ Mitchell continues, one would need to recur to ‘vitalism and animism’, not in the sense of a regression to a primitive thought, but ‘(as Levi-Strauss so often insisted) a taking account of the persistence of the "savage mind" at the dialectical heart of whatever we mean by the modern.’ (Mitchell: idem). For moderns, animism was the confluence and mixture of all the differences they had established, namely, the dissolution between subject and object, resulting in images of strangeness and fantasy, Guintche – or the incoherence of all matter The animism of a drawing Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 112 which questioned the control that the Cartesian subject had over the representation of reality, causing anxiety and, ultimately, the loss and destruction of that same Cartesian subject and his superiority over nature and all other reified (colonised) subjects. Anselm Franke has traced a brilliant diagnosis of animism as a ‘ghost that haunts modernity’, together with all the other negatives, such as the imaginary, the unconscious, and all otherness that existed on the other side of the Great Modern Divides. The task, the curator underlines, will be to bring these negatives back into history as the only way to ‘account for the relational constitution of the present’ (Franke, 2012). In her choreographies, Marlene traverses back and forth all those modern divides, not only by conveying unconscious and dream-work processes as choreographic tools, but by evoking a wide range of those negative beyond modern Western positivity. Coming back to Guintche, it can take several forms: from the concert, to a drawing, then a dance that is also a circus show, a metamorphic wax figure. However, notes Marlene, between all these there is no resemblance, only the same intensity, the same nature (Freitas, 2013). As a word in Cape Verdean creole, Guintche has several meanings: a bird that builds his nest with whatever he finds in his surroundings, a prostitute, a woman or a man that has several partners, or it can also generally refer to someone who lives his/her life making neither logical nor coherent choices. Guintche, the dance, is in fact the embodiment of incoherent oppositions and immeasurable excesses. Propelled by an exultant force, Marlene embodies the potentiality of simultaneous contradictions, the fury and strangeness that challenge not only the duration of her movement, but also a rational comprehension of the Guintche figure. Her body is divided in two: the lower limbs rooted in the ground follow the repetitive mechanics of her hip movement, with a movement and rhythm reminiscent of Cape Verdean dances. The upper limbs and face express a kaleidoscopic array of modes and states, as a drawing that is permanently redrawn, recalling bird like gestures, animalist and clownish postures, bringing into relation fear and parody, irony and indifference, excitement and sadness, cannibalism and eroticism. Marlene’s face expression gains prominence in her eyes, the proper locus of the subject’s identification, and the mouth, one of the most symbolic body openings. Thus, these polymorphic distortions aim at disorganizing the stability of this figure, a figure that traverses and transfigures some of the modern divides, such as, of human versus puppet, human versus non-human animal, rationality versus animism. Circus music with drums set the tone, and the piece unfolds in two parts: in more than half, Marlene dwells in this indomitable split movement; in the second part, with a slower pace, Marlene starts To embark upon this task is thus to understand these [negatives] are never given “universals” of the modern, but its very relational products. They are the sites that modern history is silent about, to the extent that the very narrative of the “the modern” is built upon this silence as its fundament. The narrative-imaginary vacuum of the present is the direct outcome of this silence. This silence tells us that it is actually not animism, but modernity that is the ghost – halfway between presence and absence, life and death. And the future grand narratives of modernity may well speak of this ghost from the perspective of its other, from its “animist” side. (Franke, idem). DISFIGURING FIGURES THE POLITICAL POTENTIALITY OF MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS’S CHOREOGRAPHIC WORK Alexandra Balona 113 wandering through space, in what could be related to circus entertainment scenes. With clumsiness, mechanical puppet movements or virtuosic gymnastics, Marlene embodies transitional and contrasting figures that combine delusion and hopefulness, comic and sadness, indifference and fragility, always unfinished, incoherent, initiating a path that ends up going nowhere. “This wax figure”, Marlene adds, “melts, solidifies, hides, changes form (...) and the sequence of transformations produces distinct images: circus, cannibalism, ectoplasm, rituals, gymnastic, puppets” (Freitas, 2013). However, Guintche always keep its matter, which lies in its imponderability and counter-intuitive structure. An atlas of eclectic references informed Guintche, namely, Goya’s drawings, The Character Heads by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt by the face disfigurement, the film Les maîtres fous by Jean Rouch by the intensity of the trance performance, among others. The documentary The Statues also die (1953), by Chris Marker and Alain Renais, that traces not only the uprooting of African art by the colonial power, but also its annihilation from liveable symbols within a culture of objects deprived of life in Western context of museology and consumption, is a general reference to Marlene’s work. Along the colonial power, refers the film narrator, the figure of the black slave progressively acquired other roles: “the black-puppet” for entertainment, and in modern Western context, “the black-sportsman” or the “black-boxeur”. In the bareness of Guintche’s blue scenario one notices a boxing bag hanging from the ceiling. A possible remark, not directly to Cape Verde’s heritage as a former Portuguese colony, but probably, or from the eye of the beholder, as a symbol of strength and struggle. A boxing bag and a figure of permanent incoherence which, haunting the Western theatrical apparatus, return the gaze to the (European) spectator. Figure 1. Guintche. © Laurent Paillier (cortesia da artista) Figure 1 Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 114 Figure 2. Paraíso – colecção privada. © Hervé Véronèse. (cortesia da artista) Figure 3. de marfim e carne – as estátuas também sofrem. © Hervé Véronèse. (cortesia da artista) Figure 2Figure 3 DISFIGURING FIGURES THE POLITICAL POTENTIALITY OF MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS’S CHOREOGRAPHIC WORK Alexandra Balona 115 Figure 4. Jaguar. © Hervé Véronèse. (cortesia da artista) Figure 5. Bacantes – Prelúdio para uma purga. © Filipe Ferreira. (cortesia da artista) Figure 4Figure 5 Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 116 *AAVV (2016-17). Figure. Le travail de figure: que donne à voir une danse. La Manufacture. In http://www.manufacture.ch/download/docs/ ugcwr4g5.pdf/Figure%20-%20Le%20projet.pdf. (consulted 25/08/19). *Auerbach, Erich (1959). “Figura”, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays. New York: Meridian books, p. 11. *Branco, João Guedes (2016), CRIOULIZAÇÃO CÉNICA. Em Busca de uma Identidade para o Teatro Cabo-verdiano. Tese de Doutoramento em Comunicação, Cultura e Artes. Universidade do Algarve. Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. *Bouvier, Mathieu (2017) (Ed.), Pour un atlas des figures in http://www.pourunatlasdesfigures.net/atlas. (consulted 20/98/19). *Coderch, Anna Maria, Stoichita, Victor (1999), Goya. The Last Carnival. London: Reaktion Books, 15. *Deleuze, Gilles (2017). Francis Bacon. Lógica da Sensação. Lisboa: Orfeu Negro. *Didi-Huberman, Georges (2017). Diante do Tempo. História da Arte e Anacronismo das Imagens. Lisboa: Orfeu Negro. *Dumora, Florence (2017). Force des figures. Le travail de la figurabilité entre texte et image. La Part de L’Oeil. Revue de pensée des arts plastiques, numéro 31, 13-19. *Franke, Anselm (2012). Introduction - “Animism”. e-flux journal #36. *Freitas, Marlene Monteiro (2013). in https:// cargocollective.com/pork-marlenefreitas/marlenemonteiro-freitas-1 (consulted 14/08/19). *Freitas, Marlene Monteiro, (2017). Entrevista com Alexandra Balona. (não publicado). *Glissant, Edouard (1997), Poetics of Relation. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. *Lyotard, Jean-François (2011), Discours, Figure. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. *Mitchel, W. J. T. (2006), What do pictures want? Interview by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, From the online magazine Image & Narrative, Center for Visual Studies, in https://www.visual-studies.com/ interviews/mitchell.html (consulted 28/08/19). *Ovid (2009), Metamorphosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 357. *Sarrazac, J-P. (1999). L’ Avenir du drame. Saulxsures: Circé/Poche. *Sermon, Julie (2004). L’Effetfigure : états troublés du personnage contemporain. Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène. Paris: Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, p.8. *Taussig, Michael (2009). What Do Drawings Want?. Culture, Theory and Critique 50(2-3), 263-274. *Vergès, Françoise (2007), “Indian-Oceanic Creolization: Processes and Practices of Creolization on Reunion Island”. Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Charles Stewart. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, pp. 133-152. R E F E R E N C E S 117 is a researcher, writer and independent curator based in Porto. Curator at Rampa, she is PhD student at the European Graduate School & Lisbon Consortium, with a research on the Political Potentiality of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ Choreographic Work, supervised by Samuel Weber and Isabel Capeloa Gil. With Sofia Lemos, she co-founded PROSPECTIONS for Art, Education and Knowledge Production, cocurated Metabolic Rifts, and co-edited Metabolic Rifts Reader (2019). She curated Migratory Images – Thinking Lab on Performative Arts in Porto City Theater, is a member of SINAIS DE CENA scientific and editorial board, and publishes regularly on performing arts DISFIGURING FIGURES THE POLITICAL POTENTIALITY OF MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS’S CHOREOGRAPHIC WORK Alexandra Balona Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 118 To Draw Borders and The Aesthetic Mind: Reviewing Europe With Almada Negreiros Maria de Fátima Lambert Almada Negreiros, Polychrome artist, European (aesthetic) Utopia, Antegraphy KEYWORDS Instituto Politécnico do Porto – Escola Superior de Educação School of Education – Oporto Polytechnics, Oporto, Portugal At the beginning of the 20th century, Almada Negreiros considered that Portugal had urgently to step into Europe and the only way to achieve it was through cultural performing, affirming the straightness of modern thought. Almada acted in several paths of creation what might diagnose his profile as a “polychrome artist”, following Edward T. Hall in The hidden dimension (1966, 173). Let’s underline the principle of a South European polychrome person that shaped the unique (but multiple) direction of Almada’s achievement in his multidisciplinary artistic and thinking roles. Nowadays, a century after reviewing his writings concerning Europe (from his modernist period), how can we understand his obsession? Let's analyse what involves the title “Portugal in the Map of Europa” published at SW – Sudoeste, the magazine he kept for three numbers during 1935. And, on the other hand, considering his multiple achievements as an artist and performer thinker, how did the idea of Europe – its utopia survived all those decades until the Portuguese 1970’s? And let’s add Almada’s compulsive quest for the universal language before writing – the antegraphy developed as an inner and essential thinking. How do it connect with the urge for modernity? Can it be reasoned in a two highways pursuit: the European assumption of Portuguese nationality versus that Universal visual writing which existed since the early age of humanity? Are those anthropological, philosophical and aesthetic/artistic proposals by Almada deeply linked or/and setting forth gaps, even paradoxes’ aims? And, mainly, when regarding his African ancestors, that apparently he never emphasized too much, should it be considered the link of his demand for antegraphy the universal visual language present in all continents? Maybe that concept of polychrome artist is a key for shaping Almada’s solo utopian identity with a www anthropological geography. Was he a true paradigm of a polychrome artist? ABSTRACT TO DRAW BORDERS AND THE AESTHETIC MIND: REVIEWING EUROPE WITH ALMADA NEGREIROS Maria de Fátima Lambert 119 How can we figure today the borders of European Culture compared with the authors that performed avant-garde in the beginning of the twentieth century? By that time the nucleus of cultural emancipation in Europe was located in Wien, Berlin (and Munich) and mainly in Paris for the Portuguese elite. The center of the European Map was there, a kind of imaginary point, a new geographical cosmogony. In 1940 Almada Negreiros conceived a mural with a Mappamundi, painted in the walls of the building of the Newspaper Diário de Notícias (Daily News) Lisbon. The painting represents the continents reviewing the morphology and character of the ancient maps. He drew trees, persons, animals, shaped the coasts and the oceans alongside with the Zodiac’s characters. It’s a modern-ancient cosmogony reviewing the symbols and the visual signs that explore the definition of archaic knowledge, myths and poetry outspread towards the eternity of mankind. That’s the imaginary-real way of presenting time and space, where borders and frontiers occupy a different epistemological category. Where was, in 1940, the center of a world falling apart and how did Almada deal with it? He was obsessed with the mythical terms since an early period of his career. How did he emphasize the reality of places and countries subsumed into the seduction of a great European Metropolis? At the beginning of the 20th century Almada Negreiros lived in Lisbon and rehearsed himself at an imaginary Paris, built upon the guidelines told by those which were living there. Nevertheless, when he travelled to Paris in 1919, he was very much disappointed. However he enjoyed a remarkable stay in Madrid, from 1926 to 1932. It was his real merge into life as he cherished for his last longing life. Figure 1 1. Europe < human being + collectivity > humanity Figure 1. Panel “Mapa-Mundi [Great Planisphere]” at the building of the Daily Newspaper Diário de Notícias – Lisbon, 1940 By that time in Europe arose Romanticism which was a kind of liberation for everyone, those whom had life to be lived with it legitimacy, the hour of enchained Prometheus. (Almada, 1990, p. 45) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 120 By then the Lisbon Portuguese Modernity was already established and the 1st Modernism failed apart. Nonetheless, modernist aesthetic would last along Almada’s creation and life, though taking different rhumbs. As early as 1915, Almada proclaimed that Portugal was, not only the most backward country in Europe, but from the entire world. However, he believed that Portugal ‘will open its eyes one day - if its blindness is not incurable and then it will shout with me, at my side, the need that Portugal has to be something of a clean thing!’ (Almada, 1993 b, p.23) His point of view about Portugal borders included the colonial territories. It’s curious to recall that Almada descended from an Angola’ Woman Slave and his mother was a Creole from S. Tomé. But his African Heritage was never assumed in a country living under a fascist regime.¹ So he was much more focused in Europe, trying to cope both with Iberia and afterwards with the search for the primitive forms of Humanity. In 1915 Orpheu², a privileged organ of cosmopolitan Europeanism set in Lisbon, presented itself as the magazine that would correct the Portuguese case with the chronological time of Europe, by means of the action of culture and arts.³ Fernando Pessoa wanted a cosmopolitan art in time and space" adapted to the time (Pessoa, 1966, P.113)... in which all countries, more materially than ever, and for the first time intellectually, all exist within each one, in which Asia, America, Africa and Oceania are Europe, and there are all in Europe. (Pessoa, 1966, P.113) After the episode of Orpheu, Almada engaged himself with Portugal Futurist, a single number published magazine, where he presented his Ultimatum spread to the Portuguese Generations of the 20th Century and the Ultimatum by Álvaro de Campos ⁴. Both authors were stressed by the need of update into Europe, although under specific patterns. Suddenly with the 1st World War, the borders changed and became mental maps of desire for his individual identity and also a search for an updated collective one for Portugal. In the twenties and the thirties, Almada's ideas proliferated in several texts, culminating in his own editorial project, whose title clearly located the Portuguese geography - as territory - in Europe: Cadernos de SW/ SW’s Notebooks (Almada, 1982a). Almada's three notebooks confirmed his genius and intellectual consistency. The artist developed essays that corroborated his ideological-mythical convictions about Nationality, in contrast with the notions of Homeland, Europe and World / Humanity.⁵ From his verve emerged fictional and mythological figures and the circularity of his esoteric thinking arose, converging towards Prometheus, the hero reactivated as the symbol for Europe. On the other hand, his "Theory of Opposites" bore the key to his aesthetic paradoxes, and the significance of his doctrine concerning the condition of Humanity, Art, and the individual human person, became quite explicit. The opposites were: Portugal versus Europe, sometimes underlining the Iberian relationship. Thought, as I remarked at a Conference held at the National Museum Soares dos Reis, in Porto, in April 2018, we can find several clues and even some clear underlining of the proud in his Race. ¹ I am referring to the Magazine, project by Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Luís de Montalvor, Armando CortesRodrigues, among others. They published only two numbers in 1915 and a third one was ready but they were not able to finance it. Almada was present since the first number, publishing a group of 15 short stories untitled Frisos. ² After the episode of the magazines Centauro and Exílio, in February1915, Fernando Pessoa intended to publish a review called Europa, which gave place to Orpheu. ³ Álvaro de Campos is one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymous. ⁴ Almada's project, as it had been announced in previous texts, was that of the collectivity of Portugal, recognizing the necessity of its assumption. ⁵ TO DRAW BORDERS AND THE AESTHETIC MIND: REVIEWING EUROPE WITH ALMADA NEGREIROS Maria de Fátima Lambert 127 way: ‘To know and to manufacture are needs that can be characterized in themselves, without necessarily relating them to the will to power. There is in man a real will of intellectuality.’ (Bachelard, 1992, p. 26) According to the philosopher, Prometheus’ complex was the Oedipus complex of the intellectual path. So, it was legitimate that Prometheus is sometimes associated with the Myth of Creation, and not only in Greek Mythology, for he decided on the irrevocability of the qualities and conditions for the human. ‘Prometheus realized a utopia. He attained an unprecedented achievement, when he realized human power surprised by the universal at the hands of the gods of Olympus and, after the surprise, it is impossible for him to agree.’ (Almada, 1982b, p. 130) It was the main interpretation of Prometheus for Almada: his act of civilization, the effectiveness of utopia, the individual force that constitutes culture: ‘Now this dream of Prometheus is European, and, today is Europe's dream at least in the West.’ (Almada, 1990, p.94) Prometheus' dream did not fade away when the tragedy overcame him, nor did he fade away with the impregnable punishment. He knew how to mock ¹¹ the situation, for in the final instance both men and God were part of the same chain: they were bound to violence, to illusions of victory, to inevitable defeat. When Prometheus perceived the wars among the gods, he recognized the provocations of the men: he could endure his fate, for there were no cases of exception in the Cosmos. His daydreaming is eternal, since it persists in the Universe by knowledge as by number. A secret that contained in itself the tragic and fatalism of the human: ‘Not a tragedy that unfolds fatally forever without solution, but the eternal tragedy of Man to conquer the World, the tragic action of this heroic conquest.’ (Almada, 1990, p.94) Considering the intimate and primordial terms of the Human-sacred, Almada underline the antithetical terms symbolized in Prometheus and Io. It’s a sort of Coniunctio Oppositorium as he wrote in "Heraclitus weeps and Democritus laughs" (Almada, 1950). He established the distinction between what ‘would be the half-blood of divine and human" and Prometheus ", which would separate the divine from the human, and only with this would open the way, against the divinity if it were necessary…’ (Almada, 1950, p.100). According to the legend, the confrontation between the two - Prometheus and Io – would remain possible as long as each respected their destiny, excluded from each other. They symbolize the Divine-human bi-presence, the marriage between Heaven and Earth, unified in Number.¹² ‘Prometheus confers the universal unity, through this finding which he gave to men: the Number. This is a quotation taken from Prometheus Chained of Aeschylus quoted by Almada: I gave [men] the beautiful find of arithmetic.’ (Almada, 1982, p. 179) The Number is the supreme knowledge. Longing to redeem Portuguese from atavism, he cried out for the force of Myth and its polychromic understanding. He was able to produce knowledge in art and established a peculiar thought, being able to use several expressions, strategies and achievements viso-verbico-performatic. Capable of a greater conceptual agility, he circumvented conventions, stereotypes, counteracting the tragic in his present, exercising elusive and assertive simultaneously, crossing chronology and space. Through his capacity and impulse he conceived the inclusive binomial, without dissolution of the terms: LIFEART. Almada was demanded in Art (and in Life) as a worthy individual case. Using exemplary ideas In the literary twentieth century, consider the version of André Gide, Promethée Mal Enchaîné, an exercise in sarcasm, whose end culminates in a feast in which Prometheus delights in savoring the flesh of those who, in time almost without end, devoured his liver. ¹¹ Also see Almada Negreiros, "Heraclitus weeps, Democritus laughs". ¹² Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 128 and acting’s, maybe Almada wanted to reach the level of that perfect individuality he recognized in Goethe: ‘the first individual among all individuals in Europe.’(Almada, 1993b, p.82) He synthesized "his" literary and philosophic references gathering Platonic aesthetics and Neoplatonic revisions in which he incorporated the aesthetics of number (Pythagoreanism); concealed the aesthetics of light (aesthetic theophany) and the aesthetics of symbology (structured mythification). Almada verified that each one of those sides had an inclusive circumstance, capable of autonomy due to the overcoming of symbols, in time to accede to the simple and universal visual sign, which was a guarantee and constant presence in humanity. The obsession of Almada thought obliged him to wonder largely in circular convictions, almost paradoxes or at least extreme riddles. His ultimate goal concerned the harmonic dialogue between human individuality and collective authority. During his lifetime a fatal disruption was present: an apathetic and mute obedience between the individual and the collective. His mission consisted in alerting each one and the collectivity in order to admit the crisis. The crisis was caused by the failure of collectivity. People no longer were able to encourage or valuing the collective condition for individuality and alienated human personality. The resolution would only be possible for the individual who rushes to fight because ‘he does not resign himself to die in life, nor to live in blank.’ (Almada, 1993b, p.100) One cannot be dissolved by the passiveness of others in the collectivity. To each one is destined the effort and the wisdom undertaken, aware of its capacities. The gifted individual is surpassed by the reinvigorated understanding, by the conscious force of its social dimension in the collective. Here is the answer to proceeding one by one: ‘The individual of the community fully informed about the individual of nature, is up to you to prepare your new place and arm yourself with your best sense.’ (Almada, 1993b, p.73) Almada's demand fixed the matrix of humanity in the sacred terrain bordered without borders, but keeping up with the reason of the location, the geography of his country in the Map of Europe. He followed the argumentative clues of conciliation that the Myths strangely imply. Almada felt he should point out Prometheus as a European synthesis. In Homer's personality and in the effectiveness of Greek civilization, he recovered the collective [inspiring] source for Europe: ‘Civilization is a collective phenomenon. Culture is an individual phenomenon.’ (Almada, 1990, p. 77) Homer, founder of civilization according to Almada, was the Poet that respected positive values both in Tradition and in ‘the individual initiative of the present ones of the same civilization’ (Almada, 1990, p. 77). That union of times/ spaces was the condition for strengthen the future civilization. And secondly, because ‘The whole act of civilization is closely linked to an advance of the order of culture and its continuation.’ (Almada, 1982, p. 129) His pursuit for a utopian Europe overwhelmed the real frontiers and countries. As an artist from the SW, and remembering his African roots, Almada spent his lifetime searching for Humanity. He was able to reduce his points of view into the essential one, which was the ultimate belief in those simple geometrical shapes that exist since the beginning of Mankind. Almada’s final abstract-geometrical black and white paintings (1957) can be understood as the fusion of all his research and still are one of his greatest landmarks of heritage for the future generations. Which achieved the late conquest in the large seminal mural for the main building of the Gulbenkian Foundation – Beginning (Começar) his last work. TO DRAW BORDERS AND THE AESTHETIC MIND: REVIEWING EUROPE WITH ALMADA NEGREIROS Maria de Fátima Lambert 129 Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 130 *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1990) Ensaios. OC. Vol. V. Lisboa: INCM. *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1950) "Heraclito chora, Demócrito ri". Cidade Nova 5, 2 Novembro. *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1965) Orpheu 1915-1965. Lisboa: Ática. Almada Negreiros, J. de (1984) Poesia. OC. Vol. I. Lisboa: INCM. *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1993 a) Teatro. OC. Vol. VII. Lisboa:INCM. *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1993 b) Textos de Intervenção. OC.Vol.VI. Lisboa: INCM. *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1982a) Sudoeste, Cadernos de Almada Negreiros. Ed. Facsimilada. Lisboa: Contexto Ed. *Almada Negreiros, J. de (1982b) Ver. Lisboa: Arcádia. *Bachelard, G. (1992) Psychanalyse du Feu. Paris: Gallimard. *Gide, A. (1925) Prométhée mal enchaîné. Paris: Gallimard. *Goethe, J. W. (1950) Prometeu - Fragmentos de Juventude. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra. *Hall, E. T. (1966) The hidden dimension. New York: Garden City/Double Day. *Hall, E. T. (1959) The Silent Language. New York: Garden City/Double Day. *Pascoal, A. M. (2011) “As Figuras Greco-Romanas de Almada Negreiros na Cidade Universitária de Lisboa”. Boletim de Estudos Clássicos — 55. Coimbra: Associação Portuguesa de Estudos Clássicos, Instituto de Estudos Clássicos. *Pessoa, F. (1982) Obras em Prosa. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Aguilar. *Pessoa, F. (1966) Páginas Íntimas e de AutoInterpretação. Lisboa: Ática. *Trousson, R. (s/d) Prometeu na Literatura. Porto: Rés Ed. R E F E R E N C E S TO DRAW BORDERS AND THE AESTHETIC MIND: REVIEWING EUROPE WITH ALMADA NEGREIROS Maria de Fátima Lambert 131 Is based in Porto, where is a Full Professor at the School of Education – Oporto Polytechnics since 2000. She is Master in Philosophy (1986) and Doctor in Philosophy [Aesthetic] 1998, Faculty of Philosophy – Catholic Portuguese University. She is a senior investigator for several research projects at InED (Reserch Center for Education Innovation and Research) and has been its director during two years. She is the director of several Courses, Departments and Projects and Invited Professor in Brazil and European Universities. She acts as an Art Critic and independent Curator. She danced at Pirmin Trecu Dance Company Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 132 Gerhard Richter: Between the sayable and the intelligible Cristina Susigan Faculdade Santa Marcelina e Pesquisadora do CEAA Santa Marcelina College and Researcher of CEAA, São Paulo, Brazil It is a fact that the history of art has sought new theoretical foundations and new methodologies, driven by the desire to become more "global". In Peter Sloterdijk's thinking, art is more potent and therefore would reject any categorization (2014, 479), going beyond the sayable and the intelligible; Gilles Deleuze (2001: 88) says: "Art thinks only of philosophy, but thinks of objects and percepts". In the heated debate provoked by this desire for a more critical Art History, a question can be raised: Who holds the power in the field today and where do the theories that govern the interpretations emanate, for the restructuring of a more democratic and inclusive Art History? This communication aims to question the artistic representation produced after World War II and the multiple connections that help to sediment what we can call "the end of art", in the sense of Hans Belting - like the artist's liberation -, at the same time that debates the end of utopias of the vanguards. In a fragmented world, where according to Theodor Adorno it was impossible to produce poetry after Auschwitz, let us analyze the works of Gerhard Richter (1932-), whose works can be understood as mirrors to reflect a world in which reality and image are equally present in contemporary life, in search, according to the artist "of the truth of the image. ABSTRACT Art History, Gerhard Richter, sayable and intelligible. KEYWORDS GERHARD RICHTER: BETWEEN THE SAYABLE AND THE INTELLIGIBLE Cristina Susigan 133 When we come across a work of art our first impulse is to rationalize, theorize, because western cultural thought gives more importance to the text; interpret the image through the word rather than the aesthetic fruition and the approximation of images. If we return to Upper Paleolithic, we will already find in what we call "rock art"- or more recently the indigenous objects, which only acquires importance when there is a context-, images, which by themselves speak of themselves, at the same time that reminds us of the reflection of that we will never know the true intent of these images and why they were made. According to Marie-José Mondzain: The idea that the human being is an artist and art producer, in turn, is strongly linked to the historical thought developed in the Renaissance by Vasari, where the desire to immortalize those who produced and produce the third space arises (the third Space as a proposal of a sensitive logos trying to separate the distemation between man and animal, and as well reflects Emanuele Coccia (2015: 85):’ (...) the sensible exists within matter / in the object, not in our soul / in the subject, but it is the place where nature and culture, life and history exile themselves.’ These parameters will be based on the new theories of the image, with the intent of a knowledge of the world, to move away from the concept of art to approximate the concept of image, more comprehensive, permeate our thought. When we look at the images of René Magritte (1898-1967), for example the Key of Dreams (Figure 1), which makes a game between saying things and seeing – fighting between the speakable and visible image and the meaning of the written word-, they defy us and shuffles our gaze, who sees the object and can be redirected to the words, mistaking the understanding. This conflict between words and image-a medium widely used nowadays-, will redeem Plato's dichotomy between word and truth and reminds us of what Marilena Chauí, by summarising the socratic thought, signaling that the sensitive world is a shadow, a copy deformed or imperfect of the intelligible world of ideas or essences. The reduction of the visible to the speakable, of the sensible to the intelligible was, in the twentieth century, first fought in philosophy by the definition of work of art by Martin Heidegger, who sought to regain the idea of truth, and then "(...) The negative hand is the first self-portrait, non-specular, mirrorless self-portrait of the man who is a subject who knows only of himself and the world the trace left there by his hands. The self-image is a proof of separation, the establishment of a regime of separation and untied subjectivity.” (Mondzain, 2015, p. 42) Figure 1 Figure 1. Key of Dreams, 1930. Oil on canvas: 81 x 60 cm. Private Collection, Paris. http://www.magritte.be/ Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 134 by artists such as Magritte and Joseph Kosuth (1945-). According to Heidegger: The Magritte paintings can be interpreted by the idea of the unmasking of Heidegger's truth, and this truth would be the imbroglio of knowledge and the unsurpassed span between the visible and the decidable, meaningful and meaningful, that other knowledge. They sought to fill in an analytical and analytical-historical way. Kosuth (2006: 225), in turn, emphasizes the ability of the art to self-define: ‘(...) At this moment of mankind, after philosophy and religion, art can eventually be that activity that solves what other times may have called ' the spiritual needs of the human being.’ Art has a potential that goes beyond the speakable and intelligible, though, over two millennia and a “(...) As soon as the shock to the unsettling abyss is dampened in the field of the habitual and the expert, the art business around works has already begun. The very careful transmission of the works, the scientific efforts for their recovery, never again touch the very being-work, but only a memory of it. But you can also offer the work a place from which to make history. The most authentic reality of the work only comes to light where the work is safeguarded in the truth that happens through itself.” (Heidegger, 2007, p. 57) Figure 2 Figure 2. One and Three Chairs, 1965. Installalion. Chair 32 3/8 x 14 7/8 x 20 7/8" (82 x 37.8 x 53 cm), photographic panel 36 x 24 1/8" (91.5 x 61.1 cm), text panel 24 x 30" (61 x 76.2 cm). MoMA Museum. https://www.moma.org/ collection/works/81435 GERHARD RICHTER: BETWEEN THE SAYABLE AND THE INTELLIGIBLE Cristina Susigan 135 half, it has been trying to discuss it in relation to the truth: either as danger, or as therapeutical, or as truth that must be safeguarded by philosophy. According to Peter Sloterdijk: In philosophy persisted the idea of associating art to the intelligible, although the association of art to philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari, who first declared all sciences as being creative to later recognize art as being able to think, had as main goal to end once and for all with the hierarchization between the sensible and the intelligible. Before that, the potential of art was first defended by the historical vanguard and then by contemporary art. Today the aesthetic experience is no longer seen as being didactical (Plato), therapeutic (Aristotle) or intranquilizing (Heidegger), but as being able to provide a presence of spirit capable of disintegrating the self, to make us feel part of a whole deindividualized (Sloterdijk). If the history of western art, rooted in eurocentrism, places us on the pedestal of being historical beings, that is, those who have possessed and still have an effect on the fate of others. In parallel, an a-historical thought could be associated with both people who dispensed from these activities and writing as to those who were affected by historical thinking and so absorbed or assimilated it, but never actually practiced it or exclusively. In this context, we can include trans-historic thinking, it bridges the temporality of space-time, being a continuum of history and images, in our case. When Adorno refers that after Auschwitz is impossible to write poetry, we can transmute this concept into painting. In the context of the "catastrophe", when the world collapses, the act of painting becomes a body to body with the painting; We see the figuration of the catastrophe, as if nature were to be deconstructed - the first painter to think of this concept was William Turner (1775-1851), with his paintings dissolved, where the figuration little by little is no longer visible to be only a perception. And it will be in this field that post-war artists will have to rebuild their subjectivity. Gerhard Richter (1932-) is one of the greatest living artists. Multifaceted, he experienced throughout his career a contrasting changes in techniques and concepts, redirecting historical crises, revisiting consecrated artists, exploring new procedures. Its dialogue between figuration and abstraction is diachronic and constant, goes beyond following a single pathway, we see a mixture. Within the context of "catastrophe" we can analyze the formation of the Atlas of Richter. After the second war, the division of Germany, the collectiveness of images will be a form of memory preservation – the loss of the family and social context of the artist and the self-destruction inflicted the identity of the German national state. But beyond this personal factor, as a professional, Richter had to debate whether the medium of painting would continue to be conceived, confronted with the culture of mass and photography. In this double look, Richter will make a transition: from the photograph and create the painting, which will have the support of the Atlas as a starting point. To establish the dialogue with the continuum of history, we chose the painting Reader, 1994, (Figure 3) for our analysis. “(…) From the art the path is short to what in the philosophical language is called decentralized consciousness, that is, that form of consciousness in which the self leaves the strategic center of being-in-the-world in favor of a participation of a belonging without reference." (Sloterdijk, 2014, p. 479) Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 136 “In other words, the restriction present at the end of art history offers the desired opportunity to treat art history with some distance and under the motto: "The king is dead, long live the king!". But the small number of art historians, however, provides sufficient assurance that the subject they have made a profession will never end, and this is similar in other humanities. Still, I see enough reason to give importance to the problem if we take seriously the original idea that is present in the concept of an 'art history': the idea, namely, of restoring an effective history and bringing its meaning to light. In the concept is present both the meaning of an image and the understanding of a frame presented by the written history of art. Art has adjusted to the framing of art history as much as it fits it. Today we could, therefore, instead of the end, speak of a loss of framing, which results in the dissolution of the image, since it is no longer delimited by its framing. The discourse of the "end" does not mean that "it is all over," but it calls for a change in discourse, as the object has changed and no longer fits into the old frames.” (Belting, 2016, p. 13) Figure 3 Figure 3. Reader, 1994. Oil on canvas: 72 x 102 cm. Catalogue Raisonné: 804. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). https:// www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/ paintings/photo-paintings/women-27/reader-8054 This disassociated image of Richter's large abstractions, make a dialogue with the history of art, bringing a new meaning and that we could approach the thought of Hans Belting: TWO EXTREMES AT THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERIES: BALTIC AND IBERIAN POST-INDUSTRIAL CULTURES Inês Moreira 143 penetration in the bodies of humans, animals, vegetation, the objects and its deadly atmospheric presence first in local settlers, then in the bodies and minds of thousands of liquidators collaborating in sealing, cleaning and stabilizing the after effects, and now in the debris, the dereliction and the remnants of the abandoned buildings. All these events occurred while the nuclear powerplant kept operating. The visible and invisible enemies, nature and technology, human and non-human continuities, recalling of past events and progressive destruction as problem-solving are embedded in the many layers of the last 33 years. In 2019, the actual conditions on the ground are a complex material and semiotic reality, where dissimilar agents operate their actions and produce new narratives. As an “exclusion zone” Chernobyl is an extreme militarized post-industrial site, where life runs in new unforeseen tensions between recalling the accident and radiation as it remains an exclusion zone while the effects of the accident shall not be ignored, and remembering its consequences, as the trauma of its impact and consequences affects collective memory – Ukrainian and former Soviet. In a time when Ukraine undergoes a process of decommunization of its politics and national identity through the destruction of Soviet and Communist symbols such as mosaics, sculptures and other symbolic references, the exclusion zone of Chernobyl mirrors even more complex images, as it constitutes an horror set where mosaics, sculptures, inscriptions and other random objects can be mistaken for nostalgic paraphernalia. The exclusion zone of Chernobyl is wrapped inside/outside a few shielding layers which create contradictory readings and understandings, pointing the complexity at stake: it is an untouchable radioactive time-capsule which must be kept still and, as a consequence, became a new wild infested forest, a visible and invisible nature-culture. Prypiat was a “nuclear” city built to support Chernobyl power station, its names, trade logos and symbols, the sculptures and forms point to the atom, to Prometheus and to a bright nuclear future. Materially constituted of buildings, objects and elements static as in the moment of the 1986 evacuation, even though derelict, it celebrates the iconography and toponomy of a heroic nuclear soviet past. Nonetheless, the radiation keeps the nuclear city unliveable. Unlike the sites of war and collective trauma, where the perpetrators were identifiable “other”, in Chernobyl the enemy was invisible – radiation – and those responsible were not “other”, they were a malfunction and/or part of the same state. The narrative of the accident is transmitted through careful taken care memorials, and a small military museum, celebrating the heroes, the fire workers, militaries, miners and liquidators who gave their time and lives. These memorials have a small scale and presence when compared with the vast extension of the wild woods which took over the territory and host wild fauna, all living with radiation. If in Chernobyl the enemy was the power plant, the paradox is that is still operating and generating nuclear energy. One of the monuments celebrating the communist heroic extinction of the fires and radiation created by the nuclear explosion is in front the still functioning power station. If human Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 144 Figure 2. Old seafront of Tallinn. Former military and industrial area by the Baltic Sea. Today it is a landscape promenade connecting cultural institutions occupying several recuperated buildings, in Estonia. Photo by the author, November 2016 presence was reduced to a minimum, first with the evacuation, now working by short shifts, the techno-cultural invisible enemy has double manifest presence. The monument, in front of the same operating plant, celebrates the heroes of the past nuclear explosion, unavoidably evoking with eloquence the danger of future threats. The exclusion zone is a fenced, restricted and militarized area, where access is permitted, and highly controlled, to registered visitors. It is not a park, a public space, nor a museum, a memorial or a historical site, at best, it is all together, plus its new openness to the touristic entrance, following the military rules. The writing of memory is articulated around monuments devoted to heroes, with a memorial referring the names of civilian villages and towns evacuated since the accident. By now, collective civilian memory and subjective testimonies were left outside the zone, as the voices of its former residents published by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich⁴. Individual testimonies and partial subjective stories are published in the book by Byelorussian author Svetlana Alexievich, “Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster”, 1997. ⁴ Extreme site 2: Old Seafront of Tallinn Figure 2 TWO EXTREMES AT THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERIES: BALTIC AND IBERIAN POST-INDUSTRIAL CULTURES Inês Moreira 145 The visit to the Estonia and the Baltic region took place in December 2016 and was made possible with the support of Air Baltic and of The Baltic Pavillion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 - the fieldwork observations regarding the site refer to that period. ⁶ Post-industriality is a systemic reality, and not a mere memory of the past. In Estonia, most power networks, mining operations and urban settlements that were instruments of the soviet industrialization of the Baltic States remain functional today ⁵. Wandering through its physical territory from the period of great industrialization, between identities and remnants of soviet technology, is both an anachronic and individual experience ⁶. The reconfiguration or dismantling of those vast spaces calls for a new relationship between society and its environment – the Soviet Union was not a protector of its natural territories. Electricity networks, fossil fuel pipelines, nuclear plants, geological sections, minerals, relevant structures, insulation materials and landscape operations are part of this context and of the new architectural commitments faced by Estonia, whom affirms itself as the most digital European country, the one that invests the most in information technologies and its post-industrial condition. The post-industrial imaginary of the last decades is marked by facts and fiction. Stalker, the apocalyptic science fiction film shot in the late 1970’s by director Andrei Tarkovsky, is a paradigm of the influence of science fiction on global collective imaginary. The film foresees the chaos of a strongly built, polluted and industrialized territory. The contaminated environment, invasive nature and toxic atmosphere offer context to the metaphoric dimension of the dialogue that occurs within architectures and infrastructures with strong signs of degradation. The actual industrial contamination of the locations of the film, some of which in Tallinn, near the Baltic seafront, proved fatal for a significant part of the actual filmmaker’s team. In a harsh connection between reality and fiction, much of the team would die, intoxicated by the radiation and chemical composts present on the sets. In the film, Stalker says: “The Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish”. Tallinn´s old seafront is scored with large trees and fragments of prefabricated concrete slabs, a bucolic path between city, industry and ruins. Soviet prefabrication allowed for the mass construction of facades, slabs and coverings for housing, industry, kolkhoz and public buildings. It also drove the construction of access ramps to the water used by people and boats, which today, corroded by the saltpetre and temperature variation, appear as a second nature, profoundly artificialized, where torpedoes, ships and other military pieces from the Maritime Museum are displayed. Further away, new ferries and cruises make the connection with Scandinavia. In the future, these will be substituted by the underwater train tunnel that is being planned. In the film, Tarkovsky’s character, Stalker, tells us: “The Zone is a very complicated system of traps, and they're all deadly. I don't know what's going on here in the absence of people, but the moment someone shows up, everything comes into motion. Old traps disappear, and new ones emerge. Safe spots become impassable. Now your path is easy, now it's hopelessly involved. That's the Zone. It may even seem capricious. (…) But everything that's going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!” ⁷. The site resonates with the film, and back: the apocalyptic film was shot here, and the present abandonment recalls the apocalyptic fiction. A version of the fieldwork visit to the seafront of Tallinn fieldwork visit was previously published in: Moreira, Ines (2019). Estonia 2016-2018. Porto: Circo de Ideias. ⁵ Film: Stalker, 1979, directed by Andrei Tarkovski. ⁷ Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 146 Between the Maritime Museum and the Linnahall, the abandoned soviet sports center, emerges a site of traumatic collective memory, the area of Patarei Prision. Robust walls stretch out towards the Sea, folding over a fortified bartizan and enveloped in fences of barbed wire. The vermillion of the imperial brick and the rust of the gates contrast with the grey of the sky, the sea and the concrete slabs that artificialize the seafront. The air is dry, the humidity freezes and falls while it snows. In silence, under the snow, rests the gutted enclosure, partially covered in artistic drawings and interventions. Patarei Prision building encapsulates the horrors of political history: created in 1840 as a Russian Imperial fortification, it was a Russian and German military garrison, a Russian maximum-security prison, taken over by the Nazi’s in 1940 and a soviet prison for the subsequent decades. Its stories are horrifying, it was overcrowded and had rooms reserved for executions and medical experiments. It was closed one year after Estonia joined the European Union, in 2005. Today it is a place that embodies the memory of the fight for freedom, but, since August 2016 it has been closed to visitors. Its present circumstances are also tense, it is in danger and awaits heritagization. (I was not allowed in.) Celebrating the period of soviet occupation is certainly not the approach of Estonian identity politics, neither is it part of the current sentimental mood, as can be seen in the former prison of Tallinn, the Patarei. It is important to understand that the memory of the soviet past is still fresh, as independence was only achieved in 1991 and many citizens still bitterly remember these times – there is no nostalgia, although it exists some memorabilia of the time left for visitors and hipsters. It is also important to recognise that the cinematographic atmosphere of Andrei Tarkovsky was one of the imaginary guides to this territory, both in the fieldwork trip, and to our imaginary of the Baltic region. Almost 40 years after the shooting of Stalker, it is possible to gauge the transformation of its sets, real buildings in different states and situations, while also looking at an apocalyptic Estonia represented in science fiction from the 1970’s, which is today somewhat maintained both in reality and fiction. Capturing the non-melancholic post-industriality that embraces the present and incorporates its contradictions is a great challenge: reality beats fiction. TWO EXTREMES AT THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERIES: BALTIC AND IBERIAN POST-INDUSTRIAL CULTURES Inês Moreira 147 Figure 3 Extreme site 1: Chernobyl Exclusion Zone The eastern slope of Porto´s riverside extends from the abandoned XIXth century Dona Maria iron bridge, designed by Gustave Eiffel, and a XXIst century tunnel linking Porto to the next city, Gondomar. For most of its 1500m river long length, the slope consists of empty land, wild vegetation and abandoned builds, part of which rural, having a vast extension covered with post-industrial buildings and sites, originally privately owned, with few exceptions. Industrialization was led by bourgeois families, its traces are many, but not of State scale. Neglected and dilapidated until very recently, the upper level of the slope is punctuated by smalls industries in a very populated area where workers housing, the islands (ilhas), are still inhabited and private. These small infra-human structures, where families live in individual one floor houses about 16sqm, with no modern facilities, hide behind the bourgeois façades. The area undergoes real estate investment and transformation, having several buildings converted as new hotels, hostels and other tourist related business. Paradoxically, the privileged lower level of the waterfront, with its wide river access, Gustave Eiffel Avenue, is abandoned except for a few functioning structures: a gaz station, a magnate´s farm mansion, the headquarters of his construction company, two high-end apartment blocks, and, Figure 3. Eastern Slope of Porto Riverside. The riverside is a vast area of the city marked by severe geographical, economic and social contrasts, split and crossed by layers of infrastructure - electricity, water, sewage, train and highway -, aside poor workers houses, several abandoned industrial buildings and empty plots, spotted by high-end housing blocks, mansions and a five-star hotel by the water. Photo: Miguel Oliveira Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 148 to the extreme east side, the Press Museum and a recent five-star hotel in a baroque palace by the marina waterfront. The empty mid-slope, between the waterfront and the upper town, occupies most of the area, it is a complex zone, split and crossed by several layers of infrastructure: the former electric power station, its ruins and abandoned structures, where water canals run along rural alleys, train tracks, tunnels, viaducts and bridges (highway, train), all punctuated by minor workers´ neighbourhoods. The slope has privileged river views, there are rumours of future construction plans bringing new intensive housing to the area, as in another couple of unsuccessful attempts in the 1990’s and in the 2000’s. Today, it remains a “terrain vague” of promised future plans, occupied by poor families, and by temporary nomadic groups ⁸. Further east, at the eastern vertex, and apex, of the eastern slope of Porto riverside, in Freixo, sits a convoluted historical complex which encapsulates stories as convoluted as its baroque architecture. The baroque aristocratic palace by the river, designed in the XVIIIth century by the Italian architect Nicolau Nasoni, was throughout time reconverted in style and function, later augmented with other less noble functions during the XIXth century. After the original construction as a pleasure house and garden of Távora family, the site of the palace hosted a soap factory which, after a fire, was seconded by a distillery, and decades later, the palace became the headquarters of a flourmill company – Harmonia – which built a 45m high industrial iron cast building in the palace´s main terrace, in front of the main façade, resuming the nobility of its origins. Later, Harmonia Company built modern facilities across the road, abandoning the complex, which was dilapidated during XXth century. Freixo Palace and Harmonia Flourmill embody a set of conditions and decisions which reflect Portuguese history, from a transient aristocracy to the unstable succession of bourgeois industrial production, its long period of abandonment and resurgence as a classified heritage site, a National Monument, and posterior privatization. After decades of neglect, the Palace and the Flourmill were abandoned ruins. Its daunting spatiality and peculiar location were used initially as venue for a site-specific contemporary art exhibition in 1993, Walter Benjamin´s Briefcase ⁹, which revealed the modular iron structure of mill, the spatiality of the building and its existing machinery, opening the possibility to become in 1998 the new Museum of Science and Industry of Porto, to preserve and expose the history and memory of the industrialization. The life of the Museum was brief, and in 2006 the newly reconverted building was emptied, the From 28th September to 4 October 2019, I had the opportunity to co-organize and mentor with Aneta Szylak, the advanced course Post-Nostalgic Knowings, organized by the City Hall of Porto, with the invited guests Anton Kats, Elena Lacruz, Jonas Žukauskas, Jorge Ricardo Pinto, Solvita Krese. Post-Nostalgic Knowings is a course on culture and critical thinking which aims to look at different places in Europe which contain collective stories in disappearance, scanning the potency of recent curatorial and artistic research and intervention. The course presents a variety of “post-nostalgic” approaches by authors addressing places in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Spain, to understand how contemporary knowings allow for reading, intervening and may contribute to resignify those places, whether in its relation to past memories and, most specially, as redefining new contemporary narratives. Trying to overcome the strictly preservationist and conservative approaches, the course will focus on a specific location in Porto, the Freixo hillside, characterized by the simultaneity of industrial history and the current pressure of real estate interests on the buildings and the land. Program: http://www.plaka.porto.pt/ficheiros/projectos /190827_PLAKA_PLK_PTENG_programa_1.pdf ⁸ The exhibition “Walter Benjamin´s Briefcase” took place at the premises of the Harmonia in Freixo, between 6 November and 15 December 1993. Curated by Andrew Renton, it included works by artists: Christine Borland, Andrea Fisher, Douglas Gordon, Graham Gussin, Caroline Russell, Janet Wilson / Louise Wilson. Fernandes, João. Walter Benjamin's Briefcase. Porto: Porto City Hall, 1993. ⁹ TWO EXTREMES AT THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERIES: BALTIC AND IBERIAN POST-INDUSTRIAL CULTURES Inês Moreira 149 collections stored, and the building let to the private company Pestana. The Museum was closed so to be converted into rooms of a luxury hotel. In the other side of the terrace, after the careful restoration work ¹⁰ led on the public building by the Portuguese Architects Fernando Távora and son, José Bernardo Távora (2000-03), the recuperated baroque Palace became the social area of the private hotel. When in the late 80´s of the XXth century the Portuguese state bought Freixo palace the intention was to instal public education services in its premises. The ambition was set to recuperate it closely to the original, under an experienced architect who was a direct descendent of the same noble family or original owners. Around 2006, the renewed public Palace and the neighbour Museum of Science and Industry of Porto were emptied and together let to the private company, Pestana Group, to be transformed into the exclusive luxury hotel. The group has added several modern facilities and amenities to the National Monument. Freixo Palace celebrates the ostentatious baroque past through luxury tourism. The collection and documents of the Museum remain stored and packed in a warehouse, suspending the memory of industrialization. The tensions around Freixo reading as National heritage and the several failed stories in/around the industrial building embody the celebration of erudite architecture and the suppression of industrialization, its technical remnants and artifacts. From the palace we see a complex, convoluted, contradictory succession of stories, as the ones that span along the 1500m length of the slope: old empty land and abandoned builds, part of which rural, having a vast extension of land covered with post-industrial buildings and sites, private, or privatized, with few exceptions. Going through these three visited and described sites - Chernobyl, Tallinn and Freixo - reveals the impossibility to compare or establish common grounds. All of which are peculiar in its past and present processes, and radically different, therefore, understanding its conditions, decisions, processes and affects was the strategy embraced, instead of comparison, which would reduce the sites to specific relatable traces, reducing its singularities. On one extreme, the cautious classification and preservation of a relevant historical site, classified as National Monument, and active suppression of its industrial past, creates a strangely polished and time-specific baroque object, while its surrounding context is a post-industrial zone severely abandoned. This approach promoted the definition and celebration of a meaningful historical period and its reconstruction through an object over the intervention on the systemic condition of life in the area. On the other extreme, the environment and territory are the main preoccupations, whether for decontamination, safety or access to infrastructure, the resignification of the objectual buildings and past is a preoccupation lesser related to heritage and more with the actual conditions of life, resulting in architecture, buildings and sites in different states of consolidation and destruction. If in Freixo, Porto, the history and memory of the past is celebrated and its heritagization is desired and promoted, even if effacing the industrial construction and past, in Estonia and in Chernobyl, we During 2000/2001 my academic internship took place at the construction site of the recuperation of Freixo, as an intern to the architects. This period was rich in terms of understanding and contributing to the work of interdisciplinary teams working on the monument. ¹⁰ Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep. 150 perceive the active preoccupation with the present and of the possibility of forgetting. Eventually, film fiction, contemporary art exhibitions, or television fiction, are some of the most stable references and protections to part of the memory of the sites. Paradoxically, through the examples we perceive how both the active and the passive suppression of past buildings and sites – through selective preservation or nonchalantly disaffection – overall results in a progressive erasure of the industrial past and, therefore, a careful rewriting of historical narrative. This paper is funded by FCT – Fundação para Ciência e a Tecnologia within the individual Post-Doctoral Research Grant titled: `Curating and revitalizing buildings – intervening in postindustrial spaces in Europe in the 21st century´ (FCT: SFRH/BPD/109954/2015) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS *Alexievich, Svetlana (1997). Vozes de Chernobyl: História de um Desastre Nuclear. Elsinore (Trad 2016). *Bērziņš, Kārlis, Jurga Daubaraitė, Petras Išora, Ona Lozuraitytė, Niklāvs Paegle, Dagnija Smilga, Johan Tali, Laila Zariņa, Jonas Žukauskas (eds.) (2016). The Baltic Atlas. Berlin: Sternberg Press. *Koov, Katrin (2019). Estonian Industrial Heritage in Change. in Moreira, Inês Estonia 2016-2018. Porto: Circo de Ideias. *Moreira, Inês (2019). Estonia 2016-2018. Porto: Circo de Ideias. *Moreira, Inês, Lacruz, Elena (2017) Projecting Memory. Warsaw: IRF Press. R EF EREN CE S 151 Post-Doctoral researcher at Instituto de História da Arte [NOVA FCSH], developing the Post-Doctoral research: “Curating and revitalizing buildings – intervening in postindustrial spaces in Europe in the 21st century” (funded by FCT). Coordinator of the new research cluster Curating Contemporary Cultures: on architectures, territories and networks. Work group leader at Cost Action network -European Forum for Advanced Practices. Guest Auxiliary Professor at Fine Art of University of Porto (since 2014). Holds a PhD degree in Curatorial Knowledge (Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2014), a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urban Culture (Metropolis, UPC/CCCB, Barcelona, 2003), graduated in Architecture (FAUP, Porto, 2001). + inesmoreira.org TWO EXTREMES AT THE EUROPEAN PERIPHERIES: BALTIC AND IBERIAN POST-INDUSTRIAL CULTURES Inês Moreira E X H I B I T I O N S Machines, Spiders and Buccaneers WALKING AROUND THE SUN. Notes on Europe. The Dogmatic Sleep.