The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language

Начало книги

The increased nationalism and religious fundamentalism all around the world, the dangerous conflicts between minorities in Eastern Europe, and a growing xenophobia emphasize one of the main contradictions of our time: between centrifugal, cosmopolitan modernity and the centripetal need (or at least nostalgia) for belonging. We are reminded again and again of the ancient yet constant predicament of the foreigner, the stranger.

It seems that although he is taught to love his neighbor, man fails to love his neighbor as he loves himself, and fails also to love a stranger like a neighbor. The stranger has always been perceived as different, but often also as a challenge, even a downright threat which undermines the unifying traditional and conventional structures of society. The very premise of the stranger’s existence presupposes re-evaluation and potential competition.

We find ourselves in a world in which the concepts of citizen and citizenship migrate far beyond any borders designated at birth — an instant global reality created through intense world air traffic and which, via satellite, invades everyone’s home TV screen. And today’s world of rapid migration and instantaneous communication is also a world on the threshold of a revolution which it still is, rightly, afraid to acknowledge. I refer to the genetic revolution which could create a new meaning for our human destiny. Stupendous means of genetic manipulation may force mankind to reconsider on a dramatic scale its morality and its laws, with unforeseeable consequences for the future of the human race. And if we add to this our conquest of outer space, we must ask ourselves again, what do they mean in this context: the event called homeland, the challenge called foreigner, the reality called exile?

Читать дальше →