Untitled

Europe and Its Others
something as a work of art are partial, but their overall rhetoric is unmistakably
European.
This rhetoric, as we well know, was repeatedly applied to the area of
the human as well. From Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Dostoyevsky, by way of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to Bataille, Foucault, and Deleuze, European
thought has acknowledged as a manifestation of the human much of what
was previously considered evil, cruel, and inhuman. Just as in the case of art,
these authors and many others have accepted as human not only that which
reveals itself as human but also that which reveals itself as inhuman—and
precisely because it reveals itself as inhuman. The point for them was not to
incorporate, integrate, or assimilate the alien into their own world but, conversely,
to enter into the alien and become alien to their own tradition. That
these authors, like countless others in the European tradition, cannot easily
be integrated into the discourse on human rights and democracy, need not,
in my opinion, be demonstrated here. Nevertheless, these authors, perhaps
like no others, belong for just that reason to the European tradition, because
they manifest an inner solidarity with the other, with the alien, even with the
threatening and cruel, that lies much deeper and takes us much farther than
a simple concept of tolerance. The work of all these authors is an attempt to
diagnose within European culture itself the forces, impulses, and forms of
desire that are otherwise territorialized in foreign lands. Hence these authors
have shown that the truly unique feature of European cultures consists in
permanently making oneself alien, in negating, abandoning, and denying
oneself—and doing so in a way more radical than that of any culture we know
has ever been able to do. Indeed, the history of Europe is nothing other
than the history of cultural ruptures, a repeated rejection of one’s own
traditions.
This certainly does not mean that the discourse on human rights and
democracy is inherently deficient or that it should not be entered into. It
merely means that this discourse should not serve the goal of differentiating
European culture from other cultures, as, unfortunately, happens more and
more frequently today. The others, the aliens are correspondingly identified
primarily as those who necessarily lack respect for human rights and the
capability for democracy and tolerance if only because these values are considered
specifically European by definition. Thus these aliens, as soon as they
arrive in Europe, are sent down the infinite path to so-called integration,