The Barbarism of the Migrant
Thomas Nail
University of Denver
Significant portions of the population of the United States believe that immigrants are naturally inferior. The attitude is not new. In fact, the idea of a natural political inferiority was invented in the ancient world, though it has repeated itself again and again throughout history—hence the persistence of the term ‘barbarian.’ Originally used to classify those beyond the pale of ancient Greek and Roman society, ‘barbarian’ has since been redeployed throughout all of history to designate one’s cultural and political enemies as ‘naturally inferior.’ From the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie who called the migrant peasants in Paris ‘savage barbarians’ to the Nazi propaganda that described migrant Jews as ‘uncivilized oriental barbarians,’ the perceived inferiority of migrant groups relative to political centers has proven to be an enduring source of antagonism.
The recent slurs against Mexican migrants to the United States on the presidential campaign stage retreads this familiar ground. Mexican immigrants are perceived by many in the United States (including the government) to have a negative impact on those states. It is for this same reason that the entry of barbarians in the Greek polis, Roman Empire, and even in ancient Sumer was carefully restricted. In the United States, and in the ancient empires, large military-style walls were built and guarded to control the movement of undesirable foreigners into the community. The reasons for the undesirability of their respective foreign populations vary in each society, yet all these powers are associated with massive wall projects.
Significant portions of American and ancient societies also found these populations of foreigners undesirable because they would have a negative impact on the ‘culture’ of the host country—yet barbarians were also required as manual laborers to support that culture. In part, it is the language of the immigrant’s culture that is perceived as inferior or incompatible to the host’s language. This matches Aristotle’s first key characteristic of barbarism: the inability to speak the language of the political center. Anti-immigrant discourse in the United States is filled with rhetoric about Mexican immigrants who cannot or ‘refuse to’ learn English and whose populations are changing the ‘American way of life.’ Both contemporary and ancient societies believed that these immigrations were not benign but constituted a political and military ‘invasion’ that required a military response, thus the walls, deportations, and military operations.
Readings of Dostoevsky in ‘Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy’ by Lev Shestov
Marina Jijina-Ogden
University of the Arts, London
Written in 1899 -1903, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903) is among the earlier works written by Russian philosopher Lev Shestov. For possibly the first time in Russian literature, these two great thinkers of the nineteenth century (Dostoevsky and Nietzsche) were brought into a comparative discussion, subjected to a critical analysis and evaluated on a single philosophical level. It is well known that Shestov’s discovery of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work in the 1890s had a stratospheric influence on his thinking (Finkenthal, 2010, p.30). And as Bernard Martin points out in his introduction to the book, it was from Nietzsche that Shestov drew the inspiration for his own lifelong polemic against the power of universal moral rules and the domination of reason (Martin, 1966, VII). For Shestov, like for Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the focus of philosophy moves from the universal to the individual. In his advance towards a notion of tragic philosophy, he relies on the experiences of these two precursors, adopting the underground man as the spokesman for his critical thought. He develops a philosophical perspective that rests on the absurd, or as he defines it, the ‘ugly reality’ (Shestov, 1969, pp.148-149). (more…)
The Oxford Philosopher Speaks to… Luis de Miranda
Forty-four-year-old philosopher, author, and film director Luis de Miranda is no stranger to the philosophical (nor the literary) community, and I was lucky enough to catch him between the flurries of his many ongoing projects at the University of Edinburgh. The Portuguese-born polymath discusses ‘crealism,’ a movement he began in 2007 and continues to ventilate through his ever-expanding bibliography.
Much of your work revolves around the central concept of ‘Creal.’ What exactly is ‘Creal’ and your understanding of ‘crealism’? You’re now dedicating your PhD to the notion of esprit de corps. Should we assume there’s a connection here? In both French and English, espirit de corps refers to a sense of loyalty and respect between a group of individuals, but you give it greater significance. In your own words, what exactly is it?
My novel Paridaiza, published in 2008, first contained the concept of Créel (‘Creal’ in English) as a liberating keyword, a snag within a totalitarian regime. Creal is obviously a portmanteau compound of created-real. At the same time, I elaborated on the concept in an essay on Deleuze (Is a New Life Possible?). A philosophical concept answers a question and Creal is my answer to the question What is more real than the Real? The Real is a prominent concept in the history of philosophy since Plato. The last few centuries in particular have obsessed over the idea of reality, with its materialistic ubiquity (materialism) or, conversely, its disappearance (the loss of the Real in Baudrillard for example, or the absolute and impossible Real of Lacan). I proposed to puncture the idea that the Real is more than reality as we practice it, produce it, or believe it. If I’m to describe a more authentic realm, as a condition of possibility of the Real, I’ll call it Creal. This not only describes a Protagorean world where humans would be the measure and creators of all things: it’s an ethical cosmology. The Creal is an ethical absolute (that would ideally have to be agreed upon by social contract) proposed in order to avoid any form of totalitarian absolute, because I’m convinced that human societies need at least one ultimate value to function properly. Creation as an absolute is, in my view, the only absolute that constantly self-destroys, which therefore could avoid any form of totalitarianism, on one hand, and indifferent chaos on the other. However, I’m not a pure social constructionist, because I’m reluctant to use building metaphors, which are a bit too technical, and also because I find it difficult to believe in a pure anthropocentrism of creation. There are other forms of crealism around, which insist on an exaggerated human creative power. Mine is the idea that we constantly edit, filter and organize the infinite propositions of the Creal, which is such stuff as the cosmos is made of, the immanent creative flow of possibilities and impossibilities, the mysterious and invisible ‘dark energy’ of the cosmologists, if you will: at most, we co-create. Within this frame, my interest for the universal concept of esprit de corps expresses the view that human co-creation is always a collective process of ordering, naming, and valuing. Loyalty, togetherness, and repetition (of daily rituals or beliefs) create a slow epic that is the spiritual fuel of social change. That’s why, when I started my PhD on esprit de corps at the University of Edinburgh last year, I simultaneously founded the Creation of Reality Research Group (The Crag). Esprit de corps is a subset of creation of reality. It’s a concept that covers a process that can be positive or negative: groups can help individuals become sublime, but they can also smother.
The Oxford Philosopher 