Notes to pages 14–17 163

in the process, making a fool of himself, his origins, and an entire way of
life.—Trans.
3. Here Cassano is referring to the Italian translation (Il rovescio e il dritto,
Milan: Bompiani, 1988), 37–41, of Albert Camus’s first book, L’envers et l’en-
droit, published in 1937. Translated into English either as Betwixt and Between
or The Wrong and the Right Side, it is Camus’s first attempt to theorize a coher-
ent philosophy of life. An English translation is available in The Wrong and the
Right Side, collected in Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy
Kennedy (New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1969), 50–61. The text cited by Cas-
sano, however, is from ‘‘Helen’s Exile,’’ in Lyrical and Critical Essays,
148.—Trans.

2. of land and sea

The epigraph that begins this chapter is a citation from one of Dylan
Thomas’s youth poems titled ‘‘No Thought Can Trouble My Unwholesome
Pose,’’ now collected in The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, ed. Ralph Maud (New
York: New Directions, 1967), 69.
1. Arnold Toynbee, Hellenism: The History of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1959), 19–21.
2. C. Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, trans.
James Hastings Nichols (New York: Pantheon, 1943). 211–14.
3. Cassano’s original citation is from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Geofilosofia. Il progetto nomade e la geografia dei saperi (Sesto San Giovanni:
Mimesis Editrice, collana Millepiani, 1993), 12. As a collection of texts by
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this book exists only in Italian. The English
quotation is from the chapter ‘‘Geophilosophy,’’ in What Is Philosophy? trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 87.—Trans.
4. Helmut Berve, Storia greca (Bari: Laterza, 1959), 7. The original, titled
Griechische Geschichte, is available in three volumes (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder, 1963).—Trans.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans H. B.
Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 195–96.
6. Spyros Asdrachas, ‘‘Una città liquida: l’Arcipelago greco,’’ in La salvagu-
ardia delle città storiche in Europa e nell’area mediterranea: atti del convegno intern-
azionale di studi (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1983), 139–45.
7. Carl Schmitt, Terra e mare, a cura di A. Bolaffi (Milan: Giuffrè, 1986).
The Italian translates Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Leip-
zig: Reclam, 1942). In English it has appeared as Land and Sea, trans. Simona
Draghici (1954; Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1997). Unfortunately,
there seem to be some passages in the English translation that do not corre-
spond to passages in the Italian translation, so we occasionally translated pas-
sages cited by Cassano from the Italian version.—Trans.
164 Notes to pages 19–22

8. Plato, The Laws, IV, trans. Trevor Saunders (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1970), 158–62. In this passage, Plato discusses the transformation of foot sol-
diers into sailors as a negative one, since he believed that foot soldiers face
battle directly, while sailors and seamanship teach human beings deceit and
cowardice by allowing them to dodge and tack direct fights with the
enemies.—Trans.
9. Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? (New Haven, Conn: College and
University Press, 1956), 31.
10. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 81.
11. Ibid., 153.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans.
Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), 32.
13. Ibid., 33.
14. Massimo Cacciari, Geo-filosofia dell’Europa (Milan: Adelphi, 1994). No
English translation is available, with the exception of a chapter titled ‘‘Geophi-
losophy of Europe,’’ included in The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Polit-
ical Reason, ed. Alessandro Carrera (New York: Fordham University Press,
2009) 197–205.
15. Plutarch, ‘‘The Obsolescence of Oracles,’’ in vol. 5 of Plutarch’s Mor-
alia. Loeb Classical Library Edition (London: Heinemann, 1939), 351.
16. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1963); and Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek
Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
17. Santo Mazzarino, Il pensiero storico classico, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1966),
245–99.
18. Here and in the following few paragraphs, Cassano discusses Thucyd-
ides’ famous Melian Dialogue (or Melian Debate) found in chapter 17 of his
History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Books, 1954).—Trans.
19. In Sophocles’ Antigone, Creon upholds the law of Thebes, which
declared that traitors could not be given proper burial, against Antigone’s plea
to allow her to bury her brother Polyneices, who had fought against their
brother Eteocles to become ruler of Thebes. Creon’s opposition results in the
death of every member of his family, including his wife, Eurydice, and son,
Haemon.—Trans.
20. Protagoras and Gorgias were two of the most famous Sophist philoso-
phers of the mid-to-late fifth century b.c. Protagoras was famous for his ‘‘Anti-
logies,’’ which stated that every argument to establish a truth had a
correspondent and contrary argument. The Sicilian Gorgias equally believed
in antinomies to negate the possibility of reaching certain and definitive
truths.—Trans.
21. Antonio Capizzi, I sofisti ad Atene: L’uscita retorica dal dilemma tragico
(Bari: Levante, 1990), 65.
Notes to pages 23–25 165

22. Federico Chabod, Storia dell’idea d’Europa (Rome-Bari: Laterza,

1995), 23.
23. Capizzi, Sofisti, 65.
24. Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 10, trans. Jackson
Mathews, ed. Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), 23–36.
25. Chabod, Storia dell’idea d’Europa, 23.
26. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 68. Cyrus tells the Greeks: ‘‘ ‘I have never yet found
occasion to fear the kind of men who set aside a space in the middle of their
town where they can meet and make false promises to one another. If I remain
healthy, their tongues will be occupied with events at home rather than those
in Ionia.’ This was intended by Cyrus as a slur against Greeks in general,
because they have town squares where they buy and sell goods, whereas it is
not a Persian practice to use such places at all and the town square is entirely
unknown among them.’’—Trans.
27. Jacob C. Burckhardt, Storia della civiltà greca, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni,
1955), 96–98; and Santo Mazzarino, Fra Oriente e Occidente. Ricerca di storia
greca arcaica (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947), 206–13. A much abridged
English translation of Burckhardt’s Storia appeared as History of Greek Culture
(New York: Ungar, 1963). However, references to the plurivocality of the
Greek world can be found in chap. 2, ‘‘The Polis and Its Historical Develop-
ment,’’ 18–97; chap. 3, ‘‘Objective Consideration of the Forms of the State,’’
98–103, and chap. 4, ‘‘The Unity of the Greek Nation,’’ 104–23.
28. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B.
Nisbet (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 196.
29. Alberto Savinio, Opere. Scritti dispersi. Tra guerra e dopoguerra (1943–
1952). Introduction by Leonardo Sciascia; ed. Sciascia and De Maria (Milan:
Bompiani, 1989), 1285.
30. Ibid., 1279.
31. Ibid., 1027.
32. Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea, trans. Teresa Lavander
Fagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 4, 230, 231.
33. Valéry, La crisi del pensiero, 44; ‘‘The European,’’ in The Collected Works
of Paul Valéry, trans. Jackson Mathews, ed. Denise Folliot (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1962), 312.—Trans.
34. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans.
Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), 20–22.
35. Alberto Savinio, Nuova enciclopedia. (Milan: Adelphi, 1977), 64.
36. Paul Valéry, Sguardi sul mondo attuale (Milan: Adelphi, 1994), 145–46.
This is a collection of essays partially based on the French original entitled
Regards sur le monde actuel (Paris: Stock, 1931. Since the English version,
166 Notes to pages 25–28

Reflections on the World Today, trans. Francis Scarfe (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1948), does not contain several passages cited by Cassano, the transla-
tors are citing their own version.—Trans.
37. Valéry, Sguardi sul mondo attuale, 146; see n. 36.—Trans.
38. Valéry, Sguardi sul mondo attuale, 276; Reflections on the World Today,
trans. Francis Scarfe (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948), 169.—Trans.
39. Valéry, La crisi del pensiero, 65; ‘‘The European,’’ in The Collected Works
of Paul Valéry, 319.
40. Valéry, Sguardi sul mondo attuale, 148; see n. 36.—Trans.
41. Ibid., 149; see n. 36.—Trans.
42. Schmitt, Land and Sea, 1.
43. Schmitt, Terra e mare, 103. This passage is not included in the English
translation.—Trans.
44. Ibid., 109. Again, this passage is not included in the English
translation.—Trans.
45. The V2 is a long-range ballistic missile. It was originally developed by
Germany at the beginning of World War II.—Trans.
46. Stefano Levi Della Torre, Essere fuori luogo. Il dilemma ebraico tra dias-
pora e ritorno (Rome: Donzelli, 1995). No English translation exists of this
book.—Trans.
47. Martin Heidegger was born and later buried in the town of Messkirch,
a rural town between Freiburg and Ulm. Cassano is here referring to the fact
that Heidegger roots much of his philosophy ‘‘inland,’’ away from the antago-
nistic sea.—Trans.
48. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics,’’ in
An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 38.
49. Ibid., 38–39.
50. Ibid., 50.
51. Alberto Savinio, Alcesti di Samuele. Alcesti di Samuele e atti unici (Milan:
Adelphi, 1991), 47–48. In this tragedy, Savinio reinvents the myth of Alcestes,
the queen who descended to Hades, by turning her into a Hebrew woman
who kills herself so as to not stand in the way of her Nazi husband’s career. In
the original myth, Alcestes is saved and brought back to life by Heracles; here,
instead, it is President Roosevelt who tries to rescue her. However, faced with
the choice of returning among the living and staying in Hades, she chooses
the latter.—Trans.
52. Savinio, Opere, 62.
53. Martin Heidegger and Erhart Kästner, Briefwechsel: 1953–1974 (Frank-
furt am Main: Insel, 1986), 51.
54. Martin Heidegger, Saggi e discorsi (Milan: Mursia, 1991). Heidegger
himself collected the essays and presentations found in this volume around
1954. A current edition of the volume in the original is Vorträge und Aufsätze
(Stuttgart: Verlag Klett-Cotte, 2000).—Trans.
Notes to pages 29–35 167

55. George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Florence: Sansoni, 1980), 142.

56. Ibid.,143.
57. Remo Bodei, in Theodor W. Adorno, Il gergo dell’autenticità. Sull’ideo-
logia tedesca, introduction by Remo Bodei (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1980),
xxxiv. The citation is taken from the introduction, and thus occurs originally
in Italian and is not present in the German, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur Deut-
schen Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964), or English ver-
sion, The Jargon of Authenticity (New York: Routledge, 2003).—Trans.
58. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2001), 289, 163.
59. Ibid., 283, 161.
60. Ibid., 240, 147.
61. Ibid., 124, 119.
62. Ibid., 343, 199.
63. Ibid., 310, 176.
64. Ibid., 337, 190–91.
65. Ibid., 382, 246.
66. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,
trans. Adrian Del Caro, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 186.
67. Ibid., 194.
68. Roberto Calasso, ‘‘Monologo fatale,’’ in Ecce homo. Come si diventa ciò
che si è, by Friedrich Nietzsche (Milan: Adelphi, 1981), 165.
69. Savinio, Nuova enciclopedia, 250–52.
70. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Why Poets?’’ in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian
Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
200–241.
71. Henrik Ibsen, The Lady from the Sea (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1960).
72. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1983).
73. Burckhardt, History of Greek Culture, 104.
74. Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1943), 211.
75. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1989).
76. Heidegger, ‘‘The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics,’’ 38.
77. Carlo Diano, Forma ed evento. Principi di un’interpretazione del mondo
Greco, preface by Remo Bodei (Venice: Marsilio, 1993).
78. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘‘The Trace of the Other,’’ in Deconstruction in
Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 348.
79. In Canto XXVI of the Inferno, Dante meets Ulysses in the circle of the
deceivers. But he retells a myth of Ulysses that is neither in the Iliad nor the
168 Notes to pages 35–42

Odyssey. Indeed, what Ulysses recounts, when prompted by Virgil, is how he

died. An important component of the story is his crossing the columns of
Hercules that lead out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean, in open
defiance of God’s will. For this arrogance, God condemns him and his crew
to death. In a famous tercet (‘‘Consider your birth:/you were not made to live
like brutes/
but to follow virtue and knowledge’’), Ulysses summarizes the argument he
used to convince his men to explore and pursue their leader’s desire to expand
his knowledge of the world.—Trans.
80. Schmitt, Terra e mare, 43; Land and Sea, 13. The second cited passage,
however, is not present in the English version, so we have translated the pas-
sage ourselves.—Trans.
81. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment,
by Edmund Jephcott was published in 2002 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press).
82. Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus (New York: Viking, 1954), 25.
83. Gabriel Audisio, ‘‘Vues sur Ulysse, ou l’ambivalence des Méditerra-
néens,’’ in Cahiers du Sud, special number titled Le genie d’oc et l’Homme méditer-
ranéen (February 1943), 281.
84. Ibid., 273.
85. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the
Western World, 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press 1994), 8.
86. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim
Parks (New York: Knopf, 1993), 351.
87. Ibid., 366.
88. Piero Boitani, L’ombra di Ulisse. Figure di un mito (Bologna: Il Mulino),
1992.
89. Raffaele La Capria, L’occhio di Napoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 9.
90. Alberto Savinio, Capitano Ulisse (Milan: Adelphi, 1989).
3. thinking the frontier
1. Georges Simenon, ‘‘Frontiere,’’ Limes, no. 2 (1994): 289–96.
2. Cassano engages in an intricate game with the Latin word frons, ‘‘fore-
head,’’ and the many derivatives that occur in the Italian language. If the
reader understands the English ‘‘front’’ to mean ‘‘forehead,’’ as well as to hold
similar meanings in compound nouns and verbs, it is possible to follow the
wordplay in English as well.—Trans.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, most recently by A. V.
Miller (with foreword by J. N. Findlay [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977]). The
citation refers to a small chapter by this subheading. See the link at http://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phba.htm.—Trans.
4. Cassano is here referring to Il deserto dei tartari, a famous book by Dino
Buzzati that narrates the unending wait of a garrison on the borderlands for