GOODBYE TO COMMUNITY: EXILE AND SEPARATION

Author(s): REMO BODEI and Sylvia Hakopian

Source: Diacritics, Vol. 39, No. 4, CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN THOUGHT (2) (winter 2009),
pp. 178-184
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 GOODBYE TO COMMUNITY
EXILE AND SEPARATION

REMO BODEI

The Italian Difference

I am going to speak of a peculiar way in treating the idea of the common vis-a-vis what
has been called Italian philosophical difference.
Looking back over the long Italian philosophical tradition, its core consists in a civil
vocation. In fact, from its Renaissance humanist origins to the present, Italian philoso
phy's largest audience is made up not of specialists, intellectuals, or academics, but of a
much wider public, of the entire national community. For philosophers and literati, the in
ner circle consists of their compatriots, fallen heirs of a great past and citizens of an ideal
nation, initially defined only by language, but politically divided into a multiplicity of
fragile regional states and spiritually influenced by a strong Catholic church. The second
circle, with an accent on "universalistic" traits, includes everyone else.
The objects of philosophical investigation are questions that involve the majority of
humanity and assume that human beings are not only rational animals, but animals with
desires and plans, whose thoughts, actions, and expectations should be anchored to real
ity. In Machiavellian terms, these should be secured to "la verita effettuale della cosa,"
instead of "l'immaginazione di essa." Quoting Machiavelli: "I have thought it proper
to represent things as they are in real truth, rather than as they are imagined" [65], The
classical heritage of Italian philosophy thus is made of concreteness (from the Latin cum
crescere, to grow together and let the different elements interact with each other), a term
that conveys the sense of complexity of human affairs in fields of knowledge and practice
in which the way of thinking is not linear; that is, in which, using Bernard Williams's
categories, we need "thick" and not "thin" concepts and arguments [140-55].
The most representative philosophers in Italy thus did not enclose themselves within
narrow fields or dedicate themselves to questions involving particular logical, metaphysi
cal or theological subtleties, as was the case in other nations such as England, Germany,
Spain, and later the United States. In these other countries the weight of scholastic or aca
demic philosophy was felt for a longer time, since the caesura of the Renaissance was not
as strong there as it was elsewhere. I am speaking of scholasticism in the positive sense
of the word, that is, as a form of culture in which the division of philosophical knowledge
is articulated according to thematic, rather than historical criteria (logic, metaphysics,
ontology, and ethics). In this model prevails the argumentative rigor that Italian philoso
phers have often abandoned and which represents the root and the most appreciable as
pect of the analytic tradition, by which I mean the capacity of reasoning with coherence
and clarity (which is therefore in its origins not only Anglo-Saxon). In Italy, humanistic
and Renaissance culture, often unintentionally, degenerated into an explanation of ideas
by means of external historical or psychological events or became a source of rhetoric.

diacritics Volume 39.4 (2009) 178-184 © 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press

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 Italian philosophy is a philosophy of impure reason, which takes into account the
conditions, imperfections, and possibilities of the world, as opposed to pure reason, which
is concerned with knowledge of the absolute, the immutable, and the rigidly normative.
Italian philosophy is at its best when attempting to solve problems in which the universal
and the particular, the logical and the empirical, collide. Such problems arise from the
intersection of associated life and various social networks; from individual conscience,
which combines the awareness of the limits imposed by reality with projections of desire;
the opacity of historical experience with its transcription into images and concepts; and
the impotence of morality in the face of the harshness of the world. Thus there have been
many (successful) attempts to preserve zones of rationality in territories that appeared to
have none and to make sense of forms of knowledge and practices that seemed dominated
by the imponderability of arbitrariness, taste, and chance. This pertains to political phi
losophy, the theory and philosophy of history, to aesthetics and to the history of philoso
phy (all fields in which subjectivity and individuality are decisive). It must be stressed
that there was no "weakening" of the demands for intelligibility of the real, but rather an
effort to reclaim areas that had been too quickly abandoned (and had become unpopular)
by a form of reasoning identified with the victorious models of physical-mathematical
sciences.

Curiously, despite Italy's fundamental contribution to the world of scientific study—

from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo, Alessandro Volta to Antonio Pacinotti, Guglielmo
Marconi to Enrico Fermi—in the past and even until a few decades ago, there has never
been a practice of autochthonous reflection on the philosophy of science or on logic (if
we exclude Galileo and the isolated figures of Giuseppe Peano, Giovanni Vailati, and
Federigo Enriques, and later, in the field of history of science, Ludovico Geymonat and
Paolo Rossi). And despite the importance of the church and widespread religious prac
tice (or perhaps because of it), there has never been a philosophy of inferiority, of the
dramatic dialogue with the self (as existed in France from Pascal to Maine de Biran).
This absence was not so much the result of the oft-noted tendency toward theatricality of
Roman Catholic ritual or the psychological blocks provoked by the fear of the Counter
Reformation's "tribunals of conscience." It was caused instead by the largely hierarchi
cal institutionalization of the relationship between the faithful and the divine within the
juridical culture of the Church of Rome, which, formalized over centuries, meticulously
and skillfully regulates the behavior of its faithful.
The civil vocation (or the pedagogic approach to the national community) of Italian
philosophy rarely manifests itself in the form of frontal opposition to ecclesiastic power
or political establishment. The great exceptions to this rule were Giordano Bruno and Gi
ulio Cesare Vanini, burned at the stake in the seventeenth century, and Antonio Gramsci,
who died in prison in the twentieth century. Only rarely has Italy known philosophers
comparable to those who attacked religion in France: Blaise Pascal, who wrote against
the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters, Denis Diderot in the Encyclopedic, or Voltaire in
his pamphlets. More often than not, the civic mission of Italian philosophers is seen as a
noble paternalism; as benevolent education for both the privileged and the masses.
Long before being labeled as such, historicism was present and deeply rooted in the
mainstream of Italian tradition, both as a tendency toward a "passive revolution," and as
a tendency to look at the concrete specificity of historical situations. This kind of histori
cism examined, with sober realism, not the vicissitudes of the individual conscience, but
the matter that community is made of.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, greater attention was given to the exi
gencies and rights of the individual when unleashed from obligations to the collectivity
and when relieved of the heavy burden of history for which he or she would otherwise
be fully responsible. Generally speaking, there has been a shift of philosophy's center of
gravity from the political pedagogy that was very popular during the Cold War, toward a

Goodbye to Community / Remo Bodei 179

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 new way of considering social dynamics and family ties. At the same time, in an apparent
paradox, there has also been a shift from the collective intellectual, who was aware of his
membership in a class or party, to the individual intellectual. The fall of the Berlin Wall,
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the victory of neoliberalism and the "savage
market economy," with their emphasis on individualism, threatened to discredit the ideas
of equality and solidarity.
The reconceptualization of the common by contemporary Italian philosophers might
also be considered to some extent as an answer to this kind of ideology: as an attempt
to find new forms of living together, interweaving themes such as gender, the body, and
biotechnologies in communities that do not coincide with the national state.

Goodbye to Community: Exile and Separation

Since we are living in a period in which national communities face great migrations, I
am now going to deal with the problem of what is common by looking at its reverse: the
uprooting of community, in the form of exile, deportation, emigration, or self-exclusion,
with the consequent insertion—difficult or impossible—into the world in which one is
constrained or induced to seek refuge.
I will be speaking about all those circumstances in which one is driven to abandon
or repudiate—physically, emotionally, or mentally—one's own country to become, as the
Spanish say, desterrados.
A country may either be spatial/geographic or it may be temporal/historical. In the
latter case, we find ourselves facing a further division: on the one hand, exile concerns
each of us, since, at any moment, we all become inexorably expelled from the times we
have lived to this point, that is from our past. We are, in fact, all emigrants of time, exiled
from our past, as we are continually in transit, crossing the ever-vanishing bridge of the
present, from the irrecoverable lived past toward a future yet unknown. On the other
hand, exile is internal and concerns those who, in times of persecution, oppression, or
profound social crises, withdraw into their own world, without physically abandoning
their country.
In addition, there are other kinds of exile from the community: that which was prac
ticed by many ancient philosophers (and I will only mention a few) and that which was
practiced by Christian clergy and hermits. According to Aristotle, for example, the phi
losopher can be compared to the stranger. He is detached from the political community,
but his life is better than that of the citizen who has wholly been integrated into the com
munity. Even if the stateless is similar to an isolated piece in a game of chess" [Aristotle
37], the philosopher transcends the narrow confines of the community in which he seeks
to live, and he addresses, not impartially, all those who are fully endowed with reason.
In this sense, his political character extends beyond the narrow confines of the polis.1 In
Plutarch's De exilio, part of his Moralia, the state of the exiled even constitutes a posi
tive one; however, the political dimension is utterly missing. He, in fact, finds himself a
long way from the tribulations, struggles, and dangers of politics; he is not deprived of
freedom of speech and has a predilection toward the contemplative life.
Considering first the uprooting of community in geographic terms as a result of po
litical and economic developments, we see to our dismay how this phenomenon contin
ues to grow. The world was and is literally still filled with exiles, refugees, runaways, and

' See Aristotle, Politics 1321 a 15-16. See also 1253 a 4-8 and Agamben, "Politica dell'esilio."

180 diacritics / winter 2009

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deportees. Every civil or international war; every coup d'etat; every change in regime
or in the relations between forces; every situation of misery or famine; every climactic
cataclysm—all create a considerable number of these people in the richest and most suc
cessful areas of the planet. Many of them hold on to their identification documents, while
others intentionally lack them. Abandoning the minimum amount of guaranteed protec
tion against their previous affiliations, these sans papiers, indocumentados, or illegal
aliens become stateless in order to render themselves invisible or untraceable.

Let us try to imagine all the acts of a community's uprooting and the publicly decreed
distancing from community: beginning with the rituals of some early societies, up to and
including ostracism, banishment, deportation to remote islands or unpleasant areas, and
the expulsion of the masses. Not only are individuals, but also relatively large groups —
such as whole populations—expelled from their indigenous communities. In Ancient
Greece, exile even involved the dead, since the bones of ancestors and family members
of the exiled were often buried and cast out of the confines of the state.
With regard to a group of exiles, a few episodes will suffice: that of the moving en
counter between the young Giuseppe Mazzini and the defeated revolutionary departing
from the port of Genoa after the failed uprisings of the Carbonari in 1821. Those of my
own generation recall teachers at school emphasizing the profound impression made on
Mazzini by the tall and bearded young man who begged him on behalf of those in exile. It
is also worth noting the deportation of the French Communards to Guyana or New Cale
donia after 1872, or that of the Volga Germans or the Tatars forced out of their regions
under Stalin. Or more recently, the expulsion of Italians from Istria after World War II,
given their identification with the fascists and reprisals in Yugoslavia.2 All together these
people—and there are tens of millions—lose their home and native land.
An enormous accumulation of pain and nostalgia is hidden behind each moment
of exile and emigration, behind the countless departures from the places and the people
who love each other. At any rate, each of our lives continually experiments with separa
tion: from a mother's body, from parents, from friends, from one's own city. Individual
and social existence fluctuates between separation and reunion, between rifts and links,
between farewells to the past and discoveries of the new. We are incessantly shedding
the past, our very selves and others; the home in which we were born and our first com
munities. We are isolated, flattened, or embittered by the pain of detachment (something
one often forgets when thinking about migrants, intent as we are on our own unease and
not that of others). Moreover, we are forced to become used to this state of affairs and
then to find a reason for it, especially when separation involves an irreparable loss. Thus
we survive separation while devising numerous strategies that allow us to rise above the
feeling of tragic loss.
The intention of those who, from a position of power, exile individuals and peoples,
is that of cutting roots to make them wither and die. Exile at such a point is shown as more
"humane" than killing or genocide. And, in fact, redemption is possible. Whoever has
lived in exile or in a state of emigration has been subjected to the supreme test: to remake
oneself; to learn, in a foreign and often hostile environment, the rules for a world that is
not his or hers. The exile has to become a sort of amphibian, a being capable of living
simultaneously in two worlds, inside and outside of his own first habitat.
For those who are strong and lucky enough, exile can be an excellent school. He or
she who has spent a lot of time far from "home" gains a broader perspective on problems.
Looking in from the outside one necessarily becomes less provincial. Exiles who were
able to return home after years of emigration, turning out the previous regimes and rising
to positions of power, are generally better off than the generations to follow who will take

2 See Guido Crainz, II dolore e l'esilio.

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their place. This next generation comprises people who have never seen themselves from
the outside, who have always been preoccupied with local problems, who do not know
how unsettling defeat can be for former certainties, who have not received this strict
schooling in humanity and character.
In glorifying this feature of exile, expansionist European civilization of the recent
past has come to promote voluntary exile for its children, to preach the necessity of send
ing its children to the colonies to seek out their fortunes or to carry "the burden of the
white man." Mutato coelo, mens eadem [the stars change, but the mind remains the same]
is the motto of the University of Sydney: the British colonies that founded the university
wanted to preserve that very mentality, the same spirit that they felt at home even if it
were now in a different country. They wanted to transfer and perpetually reproduce their
memories in different places, as if they had never left their country of origin.
Yet we might say that modern culture was initially marked by humanity's experience
of cosmic exile from the center of the universe and that, as a consequence, human beings
have tried in various ways to absorb the shock of sudden marginalization. Thus men and
women have reacted, on the one hand, with a further rootedness of human relationships
in this land (accentuating the pathos for the state, for the nation, for history), and uncover
ing, on the other hand, the positive aspects of decentralization and permanent exile. As a
result, the "successful" exile shares the essence of modernity in privileging restlessness
and in not finding—as they say—solid ground under his or her feet.

The new task of the exile consists not in reaching a secure port (because there are no more
safe harbors since every individual life is constitutively uncertain, and every civilization
is essentially incomplete), but in navigating toward the infinite. From this point of view,
the history of the West in the modern era is presented as an endless sea in which men learn
to repair their ships while navigating.
Beyond the spatially understood notion of emigration there is a subtler and less ap
parent form of exile. It comprises a kind of internal emigration that is experienced during
moments of crisis, when each person creates his or her own world detached from the
troubling, unsatisfying world outside. In one's own world, weight can be given to those
norms and values that differ from those officially in force. Such an exile might seem easy
and tolerable, and, in fact, often it is so, especially when exile represents an escape from
political and moral responsibilities (and an alibi for those who have chosen to openly
oppose a dictatorial or totalitarian regime). At other times it may also be the most pain
ful and humiliating of territorial exiles, if for no other reason than the discomfort caused
by having to pay formal homage to principles and practices that one does not believe in,
while betraying one's own beliefs. Doing so, one becomes a citizen of a dual state, or of
no state.

For the one who lives in such a situation, there is no longer any place in which
one is allowed to withdraw safely. In National Socialist Germany and in Stalin's Soviet
Union, the links of the familial and human solidarity were broken, subjecting individuals
not only to "the party of the thousand eyes" [partito dai mille occhi] or to the building
manager, but also to the possibility of being denounced by one's closest relations. In the
Soviet Union, the young pioneering Pavlik Morozov, who had denounced his own parents
to the authorities, was considered a hero for an entire generation in the 1930s.
The mere passing of time introduces in every individual a rupture with the past,
creating an emptiness that draws one in and risks making a person renounce the richness
of the present. Everyone notices, almost incredulously, the changes and devastations that

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time has wrought on the body. ("You will say as you look at your altered self in the mir
ror. 'Ah, why did I not have as a boy the attitude that I have today? Or why don't those
unblemished cheeks return to accompany my present feelings?'" [Horace 249].)
Still, once one is thrown into the "billows of time," what sense does it make to im
merse oneself forever in the melancholic feeling of loss, in the fear that everything slips
through our fingers and falls into nothingness? The wiser, but perhaps more difficult point
is to convince ourselves of the fact that, "One who was can never not have been: once
having existed, the mysterious and impenetrable fact of having lived is one's last rite for
eternity" [Jankelevitch 275],
In our navigation of the sea of existence without any set course, the past is presented
as a lost country and memory as a vehicle for travelling back in time, if only mentally.
How can we staunch this hemorrhaging of life? It is dangerous and self-destructive to
devote ourselves to grieving, to not reelaborating the trauma of the loss of those things
that were present in former communities that have now disappeared: family as we knew
it when we were children and adults, classmates at school and university, comrades-in
arms, colleagues at work from whom we have taken our leave. What we have distanced
ourselves from certainly remains guarded in memory and in soul, passions such as nos
talgia, melancholy, and regret, but memory also preserves the sweetness, the tenderness,
and the vestiges of joy.
Yet what do we do when faced with the unrealizable desire to return to that past that
incessantly grows more distant? One strategy is to concentrate on the present, in exercis
ing the wisdom of Goethe against the nostalgia for what was and the empty speculations
about the future: "Only the present is our happiness," he said [Goethe 152].3 Another
strategy, which is possible only within the space in which one may be able to move in all
directions (and not in time, given that its arrow only moves from past to future), is to con
template return. In exile, above all, such nostalgia traces "a kind of geographic pathos"
[Jankelevitch 277] at the center of what is situated as "the hometown, where, in the shade
of the bell tower, smoke rises from the chimney of his family home" [277]. Yet this "inac
cessible nostalgia" is sometimes exposed to the delusion of return, when one discovers
that it is not one's native land that one wanted but something else. The geographic coun
try is shown therefore to be a pretext, a form of rationalization of an unexpressed desire.
The return, also in relation to the past, in fact has everything to do with the impossibility
of return: "What renders nostalgia incurable is the irreversibility of time" [298],

Translated by Sylvia Hakopian

3 See also Pierre Hadot, "Only the Present is Our Happiness."

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 WORKS CITED

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Aristotle. The Politics. Trans. Carnes Lord. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Print.
Crainz, Guido. II dolore e I'esilio: L'Istria e le memorie divise d'Europa. Rome: Do
zelli, 2005. Print.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Part Two. Trans. David Luke. Oxford: Oxford U
1994. Print.
Hadot, Pierre. '"Only the Present is Our Happiness': The Value of the Present Instant
Goethe and in Ancient Philosophy." Philosophy as a Way of Life. By Hadot. Trans
Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 217-37. Print.
Horace. Odes and Epodes. Trans. Niall Rudd. Loeb Classical Lib. 33. Cambridge: H
vard UP, 2004. Print.
Jankelevitch, Vladimir. L'irreversible et la nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Print.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin, 1999. Print.
Plutarch. "On Exile." Moralia. Vol. 7. Trans. Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson.
Loeb Classical Lib. 405. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959. 513-71. Print.
Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 1985. New York: Routledge,
2006. Print.

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