Today’s Enlightenment

Abstract

This paper aims to present Derrida’s reflections on Europe, which criticizes Europe’s actuality while recognizing its promise to-come. Europe in modernity has been conceptualized as sovereign heading, the only one capable of governing the world. Derrida hopes for a Europe other than a super-state, closed within its borders, and an economic alliance. He works on today’s Enlightenment, that is, on a new shape of Europe as a shoreline fit to welcome the other, following in the footsteps of Kant, who redefined the right of hospitality and drafted a cosmopolitan order, but going beyond his sketch. In the global age Europe must exemplarily assume The law of hospitality as its key principle, constantly seeking to translate it into political and legal acts.

Keywords:

• Europe
• borders
• hospitality
• cosmopolitanism

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Derrida says that doing justice to Europe, which means revealing its fractures, is a capital challenge today, as it was for Valéry, whose “quasi-political” reflections at the end of the First World War were tormented by the question, which was written in capital letters: “What are you going to do TODAY?” (Other Heading 11–12). TODAY, in which Derrida addresses the subject of rights for asylum seekers and immigrants as well as the question of “refuge cities,” is marked byAnti-immigrant sentiment, the Pasqua–Debré laws, the horrors of violent law enforcement that brought the sans-papier movement to a close.

2 See Resta, Passione.

3 As Derrida reminds, Valéry defines Europe as “a small head at the end of the Asian continent” (Other Heading 21) and Nietzsche as an advanced “little peninsula” of Asia, which would represent the progress of man (Beyond Good and Evil 48). In the Kaizo articles, Husserl argues that European culture is axiologically supreme as it allows European humanity to reach the highest stage, that of a humanity capable of shaping itself and the world around it (Husserl).

4 Sovereignty is a theological principle of power, which is linked to the logic of the archè and it “does not suffer division.” Sovereign derives from superanus and it qualifies the omnipotence of the One God and then of the absolute monarch by divine right. This archaic principle dates back to Hesiod’s Theogony, which inaugurates the patriarchal ideology of a superior ethnic identity (Derrida, Rogues 75), but it also haunts the modern forms of popular sovereignty.

5 Ipseity

includes within itself, as the etymology would also confirm, the androcentric positioning of power [potis] in the master or head of the household, the sovereign mastery of the lord or seigneur [despotes], of the father [pater] or husband [posis], the power of the same, of ipse as the selfsame self. (Derrida, Rogues 142)

6 Contemporary Europe must rediscover that it is an archipelago, a set of distinct islands (cultures), which remain separate, while continually navigating toward each other (Cacciari). Cf. Resta, Geofilosofia; Cassano; Cassano and Zolo.

7 As Hegel affirms, the peculiar outlet of Europe “enables life to step beyond itself” (196).

8 As Nietzsche says, Europeans are a “mixed race” and as such they have the duty to work against “the separation of nations” and for “the amalgamation of nations” (Human, All Too Human 174–75).

9 As Kant highlights, “the sublime, never fully attainable idea of an ethical community is greatly scaled down under human hands” (“Religion” 111).

10 I consider this issue further in Surace.

11 The responsibility for the other is a “categorical imperative” (Derrida and Ferraris 82), it is what Kant calls respect for the dignity of man as an end in itself.

12 See Resta, Evento and Di Martino.

13 See Rothfield.

14 The exposure to the visitation of the arrivant exceeds not only the duty, but also the power, so it cannot be made into the horizon of a task, as Kantian task to realize perpetual peace, “but what may, perhaps, become a task, […] for a new psychoanalytic Enlightenment, is a revolution that, like all revolutions, will come to terms with the impossible” (Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches” 276–77).

15 For Derrida justice is not distributive justice, based on the geometric proportion: “law is the element of calculation, […] but justice is incalculable” (“Force of Law” 16), even if it requires law to calculate.

16 Kant asserts: “the positive idea of a world republic cannot be realised. If all is not to be lost, this can at best find a negative substitute in the shape of an enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war” (“Perpetual Peace” 105).

17 See Mallet.