english text 181 The Mediterraneans: opposite views Javier de Lucas An interplay of views that reveals our way of seeing I consider that a visit to this exhibition at the IVAM is primarily an exploration of different ways of seeing. There is no need to echo Anderson’s insistence on the process of the social construction of reality that we perform with our way of seeing, which the great Machado summed up in the well-known lines “El ojo que ves no es/ ojo porque tú lo veas;/ es ojo porque te ve” (The eye you see is not/ an eye because you see it;/ it is an eye because it sees you). Films and photography, even more than painting, have that brutal capacity of reconstruction. I know that art does not have to set itself any kind of normative intention. I am using normative in the Kantian sense of practical reason, the reason that has to do with the meaning, evaluation and justification of our decisions and our conduct, and that aspires to guide our decisions in the moral, judicial and political order. Therefore I say again that in art that normative intention is not a necessity, and still less a priority. And even less necessary is the perversion that Nietzsche denounced as moralistic acid. It is our way of seeing, that of the visitor to this exhibition, that will be able and perhaps will want to extract a judgement that sometimes will go further than what the artist proposes and sometimes will go less far. A judgement that, in my view, will allow us to reveal the brutality and cruelty of our (re)creation of the Mediterranean, of our Mediterraneans. Because, for a start, we cannot ignore the fact that the Mediterranean is the largest border or boundary in the world, in the sense of the largest demographic fault: there is a gigantic inverse proportion between GNP and demographic growth on either side of our sea. That cannot fail to produce an effect of exodus from those countries (where the population of persons under 21 years of age is an overwhelming proportion, added to the fact of the scanty or very meagre expectations of improvement in quality of life) towards the countries in the north, which have grown old, but which have a GNP and human development index up to five times greater than those of the countries on the southern shore. What we could not have suspected is that our maritime boundary would also become the most perilous one in the world.1 That is the Mediterranean, the Mediterraneans, that we have created with interests and laws. Those that serve what we call “Mediterranean policies”, such as the policies of migration and asylum. Interests, laws and conflicts that barely manage to conceal the reasons why the Mediterranean is becoming – or, worse, by which we have made the Mediterranean become – a place of fright, of indifference to the fate of the Other: the fate that we have assigned to him by constructing him with our way of seeing, which assigns to him exploitation, inequality, humiliation and death. I say death. Death that is not only physical, that of the almost four thousand corpses that in 2015 enlarged the mass grave that is what the sea to which our ancestors referred with the possessive, our sea, has become. No: I am speaking of inequality, exploitation, humiliation and expulsion, which are civilian death, the death of what is most human, the deaths of people transformed into anonymous numbers, statistical fodder. Yet the Mediterranean is also, or at least it was, the myth in which the myths from which we still draw nourishment grew. The myth in which myths became reason, logos. In what follows I shall try to offer the reader, or the visitor, some clues concerning this deviation. Mediterranean: myth, reason, market, empire Since the eminent philologist Wilhelm Nestle published his monumental work Vom Mythos zum Logos,2 in which, in a critical dialogue with the physicists, the Eleatics and sophists and Plato, but also with Nietzsche, he explains the birth of philosophy in Greece as an effort of emancipation of reason from mythological thinking, the work of those first philosophers, we cannot separate that trilogy – myth, reason, philosophy – from another key concept, that of the Mediterranean. Indeed, the Mediterranean appears as the natural space, the “amniotic broth” of civilisation or, at least, of the cultural tradition that has been appropriated in terms of the identity of Western civilisation, our civilisation, and it has gone so far as to define itself as “the” civilisation. It is a “sea between lands” that involves a constitutive dialectical relationship between three lands (Europe, Africa, Orient) which historically was resolved in the same relationship between two civilisations, Orient and Occident, two world views that really implied each other while at the same time conflicting with each other: They nourished each other, as did the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, that of the Holy Door, although they finally resolved their ageold conflict – political, commercial, religious and cultural – with the hegemony of the latter, which eventually imposed its own version of the Orient, the Orientalism so expertly described by Edward Said.3 It was the Roman tradition that took this region where culture originated to its culmination, joining to it the dimensions of a commercial area, one of exchange, and therefore of wealth, the key to the prosperity of the Empire and even of the very notion of empire. The Romans were, admittedly, not the first to accumulate those two dimensions, economic and political, which the Mediterranean potentially contained. The names of Carthage, Alexandria, Athens, Sicily, Crete, Tyre and Byblos, i.e., above all, of the Phoenician-Punic civilisation or of the empire of Alexander III of Macedon, , the disciple of Aristotle and son of King Philip, are antecedents that help to explain the myth of the Mediterranean as the central sea and even as the centre of the world, as long as we do not forget the tendency that makes any empire, as such, define itself as the “empire of the centre”.4 The curious thing is the evolution of this central defining role of the myth of the Mediterranean for the identity
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