Europe of love: re‐centring intercultural affairs

Abstract

The present collection of essays is the first collective result of the research project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ that is being conducted at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI), Essen.1 The approach of our research is that of a cultural history of Europe, and the focus is on the historical connection between the idea of Europe and a certain type of personal emotion. The project aims to explore the relationships between political forms of identity and cultural attitudes in the field of emotions in Europe. More specifically, it is engaged in understanding the relationship between the formation of identity in the European context, on the one hand, and the idea of courtly and romantic love, on the other. I have argued elsewhere that European cultural identity must be distinguished from the political version based on the sense of belonging to the European Union. In the course of this introductory essay I always refer to a cultural Europe.2 This introduction is divided into a presentation of the project, the specific itinerary that we propose in this special issue, and some considerations on its thematic.

Cf. Luisa Passerini, ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony’, in A. Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project.

Notes

Cf. Luisa Passerini, ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony’, in A. Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project.

The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project.

Cf. respectively Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 2: Courtly and Romantic, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, and W. Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience?, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995.

Cf. Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A forgotten heritage, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

See for instance the work by Paul Michael Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa. Von der Romantik bis zur Gengenwart, München, Piper, 1992.

Cf. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love‐Lyric, 3 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965–66.

Cf. Francis X. Newman, ed., The Meaning of Courtly Love, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1968.

Cf. Edgar Morin, Penser l'Europe, Paris, Gallimard, 1987; Jacques Derrida, L'autre cap, Paris, Minuit, 1991; Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.

‘The dismal story of European anti‐Semitism is too well known to be rehearsed here. And yet one wonders whether the orientalists who now talk of Muslim minorities with detailed scholarly suspicion have learned anything from that unhappy story of European prejudice against Jews. Can it be that they are now able to displace their previous animus against Jews towards a religious minority that is politically even less powerful‐the Muslims in Europe? This would certainly help to explain why most Europeans accept the double standards applied to Muslims and Jews.’ Cf. Talal Asad, ‘Europe Against Islam: Islam in Europe’, The Muslim World, LXXXVII/2 (1997), pp. 193–4.

Derrida, op. cit.

Among the various contributions given to our project on this topic, I would like to remember two that are relevant to reconceptualise one specific European ‘margin’, i.e. the Balkans: Wladimir Fischer, in his presentation Love Songs in the Diaspora: Balkan Migrants' Uses of Popular Music, Concepts of Love and Constructions of Europe, given at the KWI on 19 November 2003, contextualised the study of Balkan music within the symbolical geography of Europe and the European imagination about love and sexual relationships; and Nicola Mai, with The Politics and Poetics of Love and Masculine Honourability: Strategies of Moral and Economic Survival of Albanian Sex Workers in Italy and Greece, a presentation given within the workshop ‘Love Across European Borders’ organised by the project on 30 May 2003, addressed some aspects of the relationships between Albanian male sex workers, their own customers and the women they control, in the context of re‐articulated traditional narratives of love and belonging, and within the migratory flow consistent with the post‐communist transformation.

Further collective publications by the research group will focus more on the intra‐European aspects of the research; among them particularly the forthcoming collection Nouvelles Liaisons Dangereuses, edited by L. Passerini, L. Ellena & A. Geppert, to be published by Berghahn later this year.

It would be interesting to reconsider Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: le système des castes et ses implications, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, in a post‐Eurocentric light.

On the ambivalence of Spain's relationship to Arab culture, cf. Jo Labanyi, ‘Masculinity and impossible love: Spain’s ambivalent relationship to Arab culture', in Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, J. Rüsen, ed., Jahrbuch 2002/2003, Bielfeld, Transcript, 2004, based on a presentation given within the framework of the project on 24 March 2003. In a different way Margarida Calafate Ribeiro has analysed the role played by colonial history in defining Portugal's semi‐peripheral status in Europe, in her paper ‘Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths of the Lusotropical Contact Zones’ presented at the project's workshop ‘Europe and Love in Colonialism/Postcolonialism’, held at the KWI on 24–25 October 2003.

The tension between the official rhetoric of the Spanish‐Moroccan ‘brotherhood’ and the anxieties raised by intimate relationships between Moroccan men and Spanish women has been thematised by Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste in ‘Endangering and engendering the colonial order. Marriages and intimate relationships between Spaniards and Moroccans in colonial Morocco’, a paper presented at the project's workshop ‘Europe and Love in Colonialism/Postcolonialism’ on 24–25 October 2003; Mateo Dieste deals with a corpus of letters censored during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), when Moroccan troops recruited by Franco were sent to fight in Spain.

On the subject of the intimate relationships between Italian colonialised and Erithrean women see the paper by Giulia Barrera ‘Interracial Homes in Colonial Eritrea (1882–1941)’, presented at the workshop ‘Europe and Love in Colonialism/Postcolonialism’ on 24–25 October 2003.

A central question of this project is the conceptualisation of the relationship between the love of the lovers' couple and the love that keeps the community together. Various intellectual and cultural traditions assume a direct link between the two loves, as the example found in the Christian tradition both in its Catholic and Protestant versions. However, important differences can be found between the two approaches, as the comparison between C.S. Lewis (Church of England) and Christopher Dawson (Catholic) with Denis de Rougemont (Protestant) shows (cf. my Europe in Love, op. cit., pp. 197–8). The theme of directness founds an understanding of the crisis of European civilisation as starting from the ‘heart’ of this civilisation, i.e. from the relationship between man and woman. Such directness is present in those intellectual projects that aim at disrupting European civilisation precisely on the basis of love: Georges Bataille envisaged ‘la communauté des amants’ as a nucleus of subversion and André Breton saw ‘l'amour fou’ as a way of getting out of the ‘age of mud’, through which Europe was going, towards a new ‘age d'or’. Some of the poets among the international fighters in the Spanish Civil War shared a similar idea, while the classic approach of the Third International had of course been specular to this, assuming that a change in the sociopolitical system would bring about a change in private relationships and emotions.

One of the presentations in seminars within the project at the KWI, that by Yvonne Rieker (guest of the project, ‘Constructing Identities of Gender and Nationality in the Course of Italian Migration to Germany since 1955’), 14 May 2003, stressed this point on the basis of the analysis of oral interviews with Italian migrants to Germany (for the background of the research, see Yvonne Rieker, ‘Ein Stück Heimat findet man ja immer’. Die italienische Einwanderung in die Bundesrepublick, Essen, Klartext, 2003). The interviewees seem to have developed a double sense of belonging that is reflected in the duplicity (Italian/German) of their language and induces some of them to plead for a sort of European citizenship.

For an analysis of the wide feminist debate on this issue, see Luisa Passerini, ed., Genere e soggettività. In Memoria e utopia. Il primato dell'intersoggettività, Torino, Bollati‐Boringhieri, 2003.

Cf. Luisa Passerini, ‘The Last Identification: Why Some of Us Would Like to Call Ourselves Europeans and What We Mean by This’, in B. Strath, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other, Brussels, P.I.E.‐Peter Lang, 2000.

Cf. G. Griffin with R. Braidotti, ‘Whiteness and European Situatedness’, in G. Griffin and R. Braidotti, eds, Thinking Differently. A Reader in European Women's Studies, London, Zed, 2003.

Presentation by Alexander C.T. Geppert, Dear Adolf. Locating Love in Nazi Germany, given at the KWI within the framework of the project on 5 February 2004. A report of this presentation can be found in Andreas Rosenfelder, ‘Chronik der Gefühle: Hitlers Liebesbriefe sind immer noch nicht angekommen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 February 2004.

Presentation by Constantin Iordachi, Charisma, Identity, and Politics: The Case of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Interwar Romania, 19 February 2003.

Paper by Svetlana Slapšak, ‘Anica Savic Rebac: Theorizing Love at the Time of War’, given at the workshop ‘Love Across European Borders’ on 30 May 2003. One of the three, Edith Stein, a Husserlian thinker, lost her life in a concentration camp; Olga Freidenberg held her course on ancient myth and folklore in Lenigrad, during the siege; Anica Savic Rebac and her husband, a Muslim, were living and writing under cover, chased by Serbian nationalists‐tchetniks.

Paper by Marci Shore, ‘Love in the Time of Revolution: Intimacy, Betrayal and Marxism’, given at the workshop ‘Love Across European Borders’, on 30 May 2003.

This led to tragic developments in the Stalinist era, such as the treatment as suspect of all that could be considered personal, and to the rejection of any autonomous value of private life; the repression of the erotic side of love and the branding as perverse of any attraction to somebody belonging to a different class. This research is being conducted by Ousmanova within the context of the project, with particular attention to films and to the private correspondence between some Western European intellectuals and Russian women.

A presentation by Ilona Tomova, ‘Love and Hate in the Construction of Roma Identity in Bulgaria’, given at the KWI on 8 October 2003, gave a historical and anthropological contribution to our project on one aspect of Roma history.