

Europa Prima Pars, Terrae in Forma Virginis, 1548

Claudia Landolfi

In modern times, European identity is accepted as the natural supremacy of civilization over barbarism and sauvagerie. The historical extension and application of a model, considered superior, justified the imposition of practices, institutions and customs in places that were autonomous and different, reinforcing the dream of a space in which to exercise an imperialist domination: a typical European hegemony.

In this frame, the colonial experience has been a relevant factor for the construction of Europe’s image as a superior community. Imposition and violence, but also intangible (cultural, symbolic) factors related to subjectivity have been part of this process. Frantz Fanon analyzed the relations between ‘white’ and ‘black’ people, in order to understand the superiority and inferiority complexes between colonizers and colonized: “Inferiorization is the native correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us have the courage to say: it is the racist who creates the inferiorized.” Frantz and the postcolonials strongly criticized European hegemony, showing the racist nature implicit in the model of institutional and cultural superiority, and that the exclusive European identity clashes with the ‘civilization’ constraint.

Today, Europe’s relationship with former colonies remains difficult: flows of migrants make ineffective the European claim of ‘close identity’; that it is not sufficient for the peaceful coexistence of diversity. There is a need to return to Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to understand current identity conflicts.

Europe’s Identity

Long ago, when the Universality of a ‘Western Empire’ was both the premise and the purpose of political strategy the West’s identity was born. Since then, the historical processes behind the political representation of ‘unity’ have met discontinuity and opposition of differences. Although geographic unification of Europe has its roots way back in history, with ancient Greek and Roman colonialism, no one in the Roman Empire was aware of European identity. Later, when Charlemagne was known as ‘Emperor and Father’ of Europe, the term ‘Europe’ was used simply as a geographical label. If the following terms had much use – ‘Empire’, ‘dynasty’, and ‘Christendom’- Europe emerged with the development of economic exchanges in modern times, even with other continents, as the expression of a sense of superiority. In fact, the western logic of ‘non-contradiction’, on which philosophical – cultural and institutional – tradition is based, has often accepted the difference as the ‘enemy of the totality’, of the identity as a consistent whole composed of a multiplicity which final sense is the adhesion to the dominant model.

The modern feeling of European superiority has been fostered by trade, Christianity and colonization. Erasmus (1469-1536) wrote about the unity of Christendom, not of Europe, but with the success of Luther’s and Calvin’s Reformation, the coexistence between the different religions naturally made it difficult to identify Europe with Christianity. In the 18th Century, Rousseau[1] imagined an organization of European people under international law; therefore, the unity was sought in the legal principle of social organization. In the 18th Century the superiority of Europe became expressed more clearly: it was now based on the ideas of the Enlightenment that was referred to as ‘civilization’. Only in 1766 was the term ‘European civilization’ used for the first time. During the French Revolution, the idea of Europe and the sense of belonging to a European community have been among the strongest opponents of the revolution against its supporters, who were still too full of their Jacobin and national ambitions.

“Europe was imagined as a Christian commonwealth, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, followed by a view of the essence of Europe as a culture, in the early modern period and especially in the Enlightenment. After the Napoleonic interlude, the European idea was then adopted by various different groups in the Nineteenth Century: whether a family of monarchs; an international liberal bourgeoisie; a brotherhood of democrats; or a Europe-wide proletariat. This was also the age of Romantic nationalism, which was intensely European but at the same time detracted from any implementation of a structure of European unity: an early manifestation of the dichotomy between unity and diversity in Europe, enriched by the role of literary figures and philologists, and by many regional versions of an idea of Europe.”[2]

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, ‘Europe’ became a natural historical category, but there were two different versions of Europe; the Romantics saw it as a Christian entity, the Conservative Realists as a balance of power. After 1848, Germany and Italy emerged as nation states, so nationalism was on the rise, and the sense of belonging to a single European community diminished. ‘Europe’ was only a geographical term while, at the same time, it was ‘implicit Europa’ (‘une Europe sous-entendu’). Industrial Revolutions took place in Europe, giving the continent a head start on the world stage (strong Euro-centrism). There was also a sense that Europe was superior to other parts of the world, in fact ‘Progress’ became a synonym for Europe. This view was supported by colonialism: around the 1890s Europe started exporting its religion, its technology and its so-called superior Victorian middle-class values to educate their colonial underlings and help them reach Western greatness. French, British, but also the Dutch with their ‘Ethical Politics’ (ethische politiek)[3] in Indonesia invested large sums of money in their colonies. The fact that English or French is spoken by most people in Africa is a leftover of what the French called ‘mission civilisatrice’.

Then the First World War changed the face of Europe: after it had ended, seven new European nations emerged (Finland, the three Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) while two world empires were dissolved (Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman). The feeling of crisis was everywhere but according to the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset[4], Europe was one large family despite all the differences. Europe gained more and more colonies and flourished through the imposition of its supremacy.

Production of the Others

The epistemological affirmation of a human ‘idealtype’, corresponding – albeit not officially – to the white and male western European ‘model’, has meant a symbolic imposition of a ‘hierarchy of humans’, causing a dramatic social exclusion phenomenon. Add to this mix a dangerous component of social-Darwinism according to which held the possibility of ‘scientifically’ defining the rest of the ‘inferior’ world, legitimizing the obligation to educate the ‘Others’ (‘White man’s burden’).

Europe’s official policy has been to export its ‘universal’ values (democracy, human rights, rule of law, etc.) to all other parts of the world. Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his preface to Fanon,

“Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved. The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open … thenon! … therhood!’ It was the golden age. It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that bark don’t bite.’”[5]

Sartre’s support to Fanon points to the undercover European logic of superiority and the Hegelian philosophical scheme: “colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and for that matter they do not read much of him, but they do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences are caught up in their own contradictions.”[6] Hegel, in his Logic[7], shows how such ‘‘honest but narrow thinking,’’ reaching for the purely empirical (the non-identical), ends up in a kind of stalemate by entangling itself in contradictions, i.e. loses itself in the hard-and-fast nonidentity of its thoughts, and so, instead of reaching itself, is caught and held in its counterpart. This ‘‘mere understanding’’ is to be overcome by the ‘‘perseverance of thought’’ seeking ‘‘in itself the solution of its own contradictions’’. The notion of ‘constitutive outside’ means that a thing is what it is only through what it is not. This ‘‘what is’’ allows the thing to be an identity with itself even as it contradicts it. This view follows from the idea of ‘identity in contradiction’ from Hegel.

Thus, the modern colonial state was an identity in contradiction: of the modern and the non-modern. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection and narcissism[8] can help us to understand the Western process of exclusion based on a self-referential identity (Euro-centrism) that involves not only society but also individuality divided in itself. As such as Fanon has conceived the psychology, the behavior and the ‘pathologies of affect’ of the colonized as the basic political level of conflict.[9] The ego is the ego of dominating society, its image of brightness, rationality, beauty and its ability to assimilate the other in order to confirm itself: differences are only a moment, a step of the adventure of western subject while, in case of resistance, it represents something baseless, that has no legitimacy and must be eliminated to restore the identity of the West that has a civilizing role in the world.

Julia Kristeva reminds us that, after Plato (Timeus, 48-53), khôra is the receptacle of the refused.

For the benefit of the ego or its detriment, drives, whether life drives or death drives, serve to correlate that “not yet” ego with an “object” in order to establish both of them. Such a process, while dichotomous (inside/outside, ego/not ego) and repetitive, has nevertheless something centripetal about it: it aims to settle the ego as center of a solar system of objects. If, by dint of coming back towards the center, the drive’s motion should eventually become centrifugal, hence fasten on the Other and come into being as sign so as to produce meaning—that is, literally speaking, exorbitant. But from that moment on, while I recognize my image as sign and change in order to signify, another economy is instituted. The sign represses the khôra and its eternal return. Desire alone will henceforth be witness to that “primal” pulsation. But desire expatriates the ego toward another subject and accepts the exactness of the ego only as narcissistic. Narcissism then appears as a regression to a position set back from the other, a return to a self-contemplative, conservative, self-sufficient haven. Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis. Too much strictness on the part of the Other, confused with the One and the Law. The lapse of the Other, which shows through the breakdown of objects of desire. In both instances, the abject appears in order to uphold “I” within the Other. The abject is the violence of mourning for an “object” that has always already been lost.” Ego, other, narcissism, refuse, and mourning: all terms that tell the western impossibility to relate its culture to differences.[10]

The purpose of conceiving the unity of Europe is an issue for the problematic coexistence of differences in other continents that, through trade, conflict, and complex historical processes, have come into contact with European countries, contact whose traces are fatally evident. Indeed, as Fanon argues, America is inevitably involved in the schemes and categories of European experience. “Two centuries ago, a European colony decided to compete with the metropolis. It has succeeded so well in order that the United States of America became a country in which the defects monstrous, nausea and cruelty of Europe have reached frightening proportions.”[11] European culture is regarded as a contagious and destructive virus whose main feature is its dominating relationship with the colonies. One of the most relevant steps in the European identity is of course represented by the ‘discovery’ of America that deeply changed the perception of the world and of the self. As a direct consequence of its unfortunate origins, which led to slavery and colonization, Western civilization, has found a way to correct itself:

“The representatives of Western civilization do not believe so naively its superiority and the movement of assimilation is shutting down from Europe, even if countries – old and new of the Third World continue to want to live like Europeans. At least at the ideological level, we try to combine what we seem to have the two terms of better: we want equality without identity, but also turn the difference without it degenerating into superiority / inferiority, we hope to enjoy the benefits of the equalitarian model and those of the hierarchical model, we aim to recover a sense of social experience without losing the individual… the difference in equality: it is easier said than done. “[12] In 1984, Tzvetan Todorov saw the premise of anti-Western anger that pervades all colonized peoples, and considered the possibility that a disaster it could lead to retaliation, which would only “play the most condemnable Europeans have made”.[13]

“It is possible to establish an ethical criterion by which to judge the shape of influences: the essentials, I would say, is whether they are proposed or imposed … There are aspects of a civilization that can be considered superior or inferior, but this does not mean that they can be imposed on others. “[14] The imposition is reinforced by the refusal of differences meant as abnormal or outrageous. But we can reverse this approach recalling that, according to Levi-Strauss (Race and History), the Barbarian is one who believes in barbarism. “I want to talk about the discovery that the ego does of the self. (…) We can see others in ourselves, we realize that each of us is not a homogeneous substance, radically alien to everything that does not coincide with the ego: the ego is another. But the others are egos: they are subject as I am, that only my point of view – to which all persons are there, while I’m here- really distinguishes and separates.”[15] The colonialist ideology, as defined by Todorov, has reappeared in the form of desire for assimilation of the Other, i.e. the rest of the world, in the name of universal values- human rights, democracy, freedom, justice – the West, since the United States, seems inclined to propose rather than impose, by force of arms.

Kristeva states that in Europe the first experience of ‘the existence of the Other’ happens with the birth of the category of ‘black slave’ in the United States. (This perspective is very surprising because ancient Greek knew the category of ‘slave’ and the modern Europe was used to have exchanges with African and Eastern world). The crisis of identity starts from an external point of view: the alterity comes from a land over the ocean, where the ‘negritude’ becomes a political, ethical, semiotic (linguistic and symbolic) problem.

Negritude and Postcolonialism

According to Fanon’s friend and mentor, Aimé Césaire:

Négritude, is a necessary revolt against the European feeling of superiority. Négritude is the result of an active and attitude of the mind on the offense. It is a summersault, a summersault of dignity. It is a refusal, and I mean a refusal of oppression. It is a struggle, that is to say, a struggle against inequality. It is also a revolt. But a revolt against what? (…) Négritude has been a form of revolt, mainly against the global cultural system as it had been constituted during the last several centuries, a system characterized by a certain number of prejudices, of assumptions which generate a very strict hierarchy. In other words, Négritude has been a revolt against what I shall call European reductionism. I am referring to the system of thought, or rather the instinctive tendency of an eminent and prestigious civilization, to abuse its very prestige to isolate itself, as Léopold Sédar Senghor would say, by reducing the concept of universality to its own dimensions; in other words, through its own categories.(…) And in the process, after a long period of frustration, we, ourselves, were able to seize our own past and, through poetry, through our imagination, through novels, through works of art, perceive the intermittent flashes of our own possible future. An earthquake of concepts, a cultural seismic phenomenon, all the metaphors of isolation are possible here. But the essential is that with Négritude, there was a beginning of the rehabilitation of our values by our own selves, of the deepening of our past by ourselves, of a re-rooting of ourselves in a history, a geography, a culture, all interpreted not as an backward-looking accent on the past, but as a reactivation of the past in order to overtake it. Literature? – you ask. Intellectual speculation? Definitely. But neither the literature or intellectual speculation are innocent or inoffensive.[16]

Colonialism means gaining possession and direct control of territories belonging to other people or social groups. While ancient types of colonialism were pre-capitalist, colonial expansion as a driving force in modern capitalism first developed commercial and industrial activities then worked to restructure economies and internal socio-political structures. So the formal dismantling of colonialism is not enough, because it acted on a deeper level beyond the mere extraction of goods or the request for contributions. The postcolonial critique is a critique of culture. Euro-centrism is not only the past but this is a trend of the present. The post of postcolonial cannot not be taken literally, does not denote an after, a fracture with colonialism or the impossibility of overcoming it as neo-colonial dynamics that characterized the historical processes of formal decolonization, thus symbolizing the persistence of colonial status in the contemporary global world.[17]

The postcolonial is conceived as a set of discursive practices of resistance to colonialism, colonialist ideology and its contemporary forms of domination and subjugation. From this point of view, the postcolonial perspective means the literary output of countries in contact with Europe that have developed critical positions: literature as an expression of a given nationality. Colonialism acts on intangible factors, cultural, symbolic, relating to subjectivity, it is not just a ‘structure’, such as Fanon states. Edward Said, author of Orientalism[18], argues that the current global system is almost entirely the result of imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries, therefore the relationship between empire and colonies is omnipresent. There is still a Western principle that there is an ethical and political authority as we complete against the rest of the world but does not hold a sense of guilt or liability of the former colonies and continues to seek a role in the reconstruction of identities in other countries of the world. According to Fanon, who had both a psychoanalytic and an intellectual philosophical training involved in the struggle for independence, the tendency of Marxism to consider the racist ideology of colonialism as a superstructure, as a result of economic exploitation, did not explain the logic that, in the colonial context, the line of demarcation between rich and poor coincided with that between white and black.

This division, then, is structured on the races and not on the classes as we can deduce from the Marxist theory, thus racism and not class is at the base of the control of the groups. Racism is not the superstructure. What separates the world belonging to a group or not and also the master-slave dialectic cannot be explained only by the work relationship but also with reference to a link with the divine status which provides for the difference. The cultural processes of identity formation are central to individual and collective, and on them act ideologies, images and cultural stereotypes and the cultural baggage cannot be considered a reflection of the economic structure. The configuration of cultural colonialism was analyzed by Fanon at the psychic level : in fact, diseases of the colonized subjects are the result of a cultural relationship of domination in which the black wants to become like white to feel included. The entrance to the white culture in the subjectivity created neurosis, alienation and schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is the overlap of irreconcilable cultural models and the denial of the personal stories. Fanon reflects the distinctive characteristics of being black and refers to negritude in order to rediscover the authentic roots for ransom and political culture. Said[19], however, argues that nationalism promoted by Fanon is a nationalism that is critically aware of the risks of deception in Nativization. Said says that for Fanon, the mythification of the past precolonial more than the release would have led to a new type of oppression. It should be noted that Said’s approach to these issues affected the climate in which many poststructuralist notions of the social process as a key, power, ideology, subjectivity, resistance, discourse, representation is considered as one of the miles tones of postcolonial studies because it flows into the critique of cultural identity, which Fanon called Manichean delirium, i.e. rigid division between self and other as opposing essences and distant. Even Spivak[20] speaks of ‘Othering’, that is how the West has created its Other in order to demonstrate its superiority over the rest of the world.

Suleri[21] speaks of the ‘Otherness machine’. This happens even in the globalized world in which it is clear that the nation state is not finished. “The problem of colonization, therefore, comprises not only the intersection of historical and objective conditions but also man’s attitude toward those conditions.”[22]

Racism as Colonial Perversion

Sartre stated that “it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew”[23], and so did Fanon: “Inferiorization is the native correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority. Let us the courage to say: it is the racist who creates the inferiorized.”[24] “Europe has a racist structure”[25] “Colonial racism is not different from other racisms.”[26]

Fanon considers European calls to universalism as follows: “When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders”[27]. The true measure of continuing humanity, Fanon insists, is to end all of the distortions of human life and perversions of human psychology that arise out of colonialism and its consequent uprooting. Remembering Deleuze (The Cold and the Cruel) and Pasolini (120 days of Sodoma), in Europe is recognizable a deep root of social relations rooted in sadism and masochism, with institutional effects (micro-fascism) this mechanism is applied to the relation with ‘black people’: in a micro-politic perspective, the injustice, the inequality in the distribution of the resources has an underlying scheme that operates in the field of subjective desire. This could explain the morbidity by which Africans were examined by European scientists: the ‘Other’ is an object of perverse desire, sized in his body, analyzed, theorized, limited, humiliated and gendered.

The famous case of the ‘black venus’ is explicative of the fact that social relations are ‘sexuated’ in the big frame of alterity that is the double of One’s desire. But it is explicative also of the ‘sizing approach’: the body of the Other is captured and transformed in the map of the institutional (technical, scientific…bio-political) control. If European modernity (and its second modernity) forgot the constitutive relational dimension of subjectivity, the space of the Ego is considered as something to be preserved on every level (symbolic, geographic, physic, politic) generating a hierarchy of the human. But in contemporary,, the ‘sized’ ‘Other’ has lost his measurability overcoming the limits: immigration from ex-colonies, cultural revolutions, and protests involved the project of an European identity in an irremediable way.

The mass migration to European cities, due to the destruction of the local political equilibrium in colonized countries, the World Wars, the Yugoslav wars of independence, the ‘never-ending war’ promoted by USA, the new flows of refugees and immigrants via the Mediterranean determine an ‘exceptional condition’ which seems to be the destiny of current times. The exacerbation of the antagonism between identitarian religions caused tragic events recently in France. This is a dramatic phenomenon in which racism and xenophobia still has a role that we cannot ignore by removing them from history, as the holocausts of democracy. The postcolonial critique has opened very urgent and unavoidable issues and dilemmas for a serious reflection on the global coexistence of differences, and we should return to the thoughts of Fanon and Said to better understand current identity conflicts.

Notes:

[1]. Genevieve Blanchet, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Contribution to International Relations Theory”, Glendon Journal of International Studies, n.2 (2002).

[2]. Michael Wintle, The history of the Idea of Europe: where are we now? Perspectives on Europe, (New York: European Studies Forum editions, 2013), n. 43.

[3]. Rem Poddar, Rajeev Shridhar Patke, Lars Jensen, Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires, (Edinburgh: University Press, 2008).

[4]. José Ortega y Gasset, De Europa meditatio quaedam [1949], in Obras Completas, Revista de Occidente, (Madrid: Alianza Ed., 1983).

[5]. Jean Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Grove press, NY, 1961

[6]. Ibidem

[7]. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, (Cambridge: University Press 2010).

[8]. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

[9]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 152.

[10]. Julia Kristeva, “Approaching abjection”, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, (London: Routledge, 2000), 550.

[11]. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press; Reprint edition March 12, 2005), 237.

[12]. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, (Oklahoma: University Press, 1984), 249.

[13]. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, 298.

[14]. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, 218.

[15]. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, 5.

[16]. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

[17]. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[18]. Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 1977).

[19]. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

[20]. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” In Francis Barker, et al., Europe and its Others, Vol. 1, (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 128-151.

[21]. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[22]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 65.

[23]. Jean Paul Sartre, AntiSemite and Jew, (New York: Schocken Books, 1944).

[24]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 73.

[25]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 72.

[26]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 69.

[27]. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 312.

References:

Genevieve Blanchet, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Contribution to International Relations Theory”, Glendon Journal of International Studies, n.2 (2002).

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press; Reprint edition March 12, 2005), 237.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, (Cambridge: University Press 2010).

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, An Essay on Abjection, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

Julia Kristeva, “Approaching abjection”, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, (London: Routledge, 2000), 550.

José Ortega y Gasset, De Europa meditatio quaedam [1949], in Obras Completas, Revista de Occidente, (Madrid: Alianza Ed., 1983).

Rem Poddar, Rajeev Shridhar Patke, Lars Jensen, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires, (Edinburgh: University Press, 2008).

Edward Said, Orientalism, (London: Penguin, 1977).

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

Jean-Paul Sartre, AntiSemite and Jew, (New York: Schocken Books, 1944).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” In Francis Barker, et al., Europe and its Others, Vol. 1, (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 128-151.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Sara Suleri, Meatless Days, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, (Oklahoma: University Press, 1984), 249.

Michael Wintle, The history of the Idea of Europe: where are we now? Perspectives on Europe, (New York: European Studies Forum editions, 2013), n. 43.

About the Author:

Claudia Landolfi is a philosopher and author of books and essays on modern and contemporary Western philosophy. She focuses on the subjectivation processes in neoliberal apparatuses which rearticulate the relation between nature and culture, desire and power. She is elaborating a theory on the ‘governamentalization’ of the emotions in digital media, focusing on the concept of what she calls ‘psychic enclosure’. Her aim is to propose an Ethics of affects on Empiricist basis, stressing the concepts of imagination, indetermination and invention, criticizing the anthropological paradigm which she calls ‘the legal subject’.