What does it mean to be European today? But this question is too broad. Who can answer this question? Not Europeans of course, because they do not know what they are.
Varela, Bolaño, Derrida, Zizek to name a few of those who can say something. Of course I count myself here, rather be stupid than humble, fail miserably than have a normal life.
The problem is the one of the future. The very possibility of an existence. To paraphrase Zizek, the future will be Europe or it won't be. The chilean answer to this question of the possibility is, as usual, given by Parra: "kein Problem, in just one million years the earth will have forgotten us". For us whose land destroys itself every 50 years, ecological catastrophe is not a problem at all. From nowhere to nowhere, life goes on. For those who do not have anything else to lose, everything they have cannot make it for what is already lost.
What is this loss about? The language. The home. The place to go back if one day everything fails. Trapezists without a network, dazzling in the edge of 2000 years of foreign history, trying to grasp a thinking which from always has been alien, and the worst, that we know is useless. Because we have seen how our cities fall apart, and our neighbors rape his stepdaughter, and we do not care. In the edge to take europe in our hands, trying to find our place where is not, where it cannot be.
The only way to say what europe is, is to say what shall not be. What is not possible to be. What we dream it to be, but our guts tell with certainty that it will not. It is not the languages, it is not Wim Wenders' movies and his attempt to elevate human soul, it is not Heiddeger's neighbor and all the Fascist support of this kind and lovely neighbor. It is not the art, not Malevich's white on white.
It is the devastated fields from the south of Chile from where poets emerge and talk to Rene Char. And here we have the first silogism, by Juan Luis Martinez:
"a. The death is a blue path.
b. All the paths are the death.
c. Then, all the paths are blue. "
It makes sense.
It makes a lot of sense.
Not like the violence of Badiou's siècle, one hundred years that yes, indeed are there, and define what it is today, but that at the same time, for us, are completely irrelevant.
Because we are rats.
A sounded definition of Europe can come just from the third world. From the world that fought the third world war, and lost the words. I mean History when I say Europe. I mean Truth and Reason. I mean Freedom. I mean Responsibility, and I stress Responsibility. And that is a choice. A choice that is only there for those who knowing what they know, that the catastrophe is inevitable, that the fight is already lost, decide to fight.
Because we are rats who sell their souls, the little pieces of roots that they still have, for a university position, a flat in barcelona where to write, the small chance to find one of the few, and have a conversation, continue the conversation.
We are rats, and we are blue. Yet we dream every night.
Photo by Vincent Lock
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