WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.080 And I have the pleasure of chairing this session of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. 2 00:00:04.500 --> 00:00:07.560 It's also my pleasure to welcome all of you to this session, 3 00:00:07.660 --> 00:00:11.620 especially to welcome Professor Nigel Rapport, who is our speaker for today. 4 00:00:13.500 --> 00:00:16.660 In thinking about introducing Nigel, I thought, well, 5 00:00:16.760 --> 00:00:22.280 why do I want to repeat the plain facts that are in the brochure? 6 00:00:22.340 --> 00:00:24.980 So I'll let those plain facts speak for themselves, 7 00:00:24.980 --> 00:00:30.620 as Nigel, as a distinguished scholar and anthropologist. 8 00:00:30.820 --> 00:00:35.760 But for me, they do nothing to introduce what I call Nigel the individual. 9 00:00:37.500 --> 00:00:40.160 I've chosen these words, Nigel the individual, 10 00:00:40.280 --> 00:00:45.280 because for me they encapsulate, to paraphrase Miles Franklin, his brilliant career. 11 00:00:47.280 --> 00:00:50.680 I share with Nigel the discipline of social anthropology, 12 00:00:51.180 --> 00:00:54.780 a discipline that was founded on the ideas of culture, 13 00:00:54.980 --> 00:00:55.740 culture, and society. 14 00:00:56.580 --> 00:00:59.760 These ideas were deemed to be collective realities 15 00:00:59.760 --> 00:01:03.520 that shaped, guided, constrained, 16 00:01:03.940 --> 00:01:07.880 and even determined our actions and our ideas as human beings. 17 00:01:08.360 --> 00:01:11.160 The concepts of culture and the concepts of society 18 00:01:11.160 --> 00:01:15.720 became the explanations that anthropologists used 19 00:01:15.720 --> 00:01:18.480 for the ideas and actions of individuals. 20 00:01:20.160 --> 00:01:23.060 More than any other contemporary anthropologist, 21 00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:24.960 Nigel has refuted the idea of culture and society 22 00:01:24.980 --> 00:01:27.660 and has refused to submit to the tyranny of these ideas, 23 00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:33.240 a tyranny that he would say denies the foundational creativity of the individual. 24 00:01:34.080 --> 00:01:36.400 In the foreword to his latest book, 25 00:01:36.620 --> 00:01:39.740 I Am Dynamite, an Alternative Anthropology of Power, 26 00:01:40.500 --> 00:01:42.860 Michael Jackson writes in the foreword 27 00:01:42.860 --> 00:01:45.200 that Nigel's work can be described as 28 00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:49.160 a fascination with the presence and power of the individual, 29 00:01:49.420 --> 00:01:53.240 a profound interest in the phenomena of uniqueness 30 00:01:53.240 --> 00:01:54.960 in a plural world, 31 00:01:56.180 --> 00:01:59.800 For Nigel, it is not the idea of the individual 32 00:01:59.800 --> 00:02:01.140 that informs his work, 33 00:02:01.280 --> 00:02:03.760 but rather the individual of ideas, 34 00:02:04.700 --> 00:02:06.240 the individual of unique consciousness, 35 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:08.920 of unique action, energy, and will. 36 00:02:09.880 --> 00:02:12.500 His is the individual whose vitality, 37 00:02:13.140 --> 00:02:15.620 creative improvisations, and actions in everyday life 38 00:02:15.620 --> 00:02:19.120 impart reality to society, to history, 39 00:02:19.300 --> 00:02:20.520 and to the nation state. 40 00:02:21.260 --> 00:02:23.180 And in the act of imparting this reality, 41 00:02:23.400 --> 00:02:24.960 the individual transgresses. 42 00:02:24.980 --> 00:02:25.460 He transcends them. 43 00:02:26.380 --> 00:02:28.960 For me, these are the themes that frame Nigel's own 44 00:02:28.960 --> 00:02:31.340 transcendent individuality as an anthropologist, 45 00:02:31.520 --> 00:02:34.280 and that I suspect he will weave into today's talk, 46 00:02:34.340 --> 00:02:34.900 which is entitled 47 00:02:35.380 --> 00:02:38.180 People of the Air and the City of Global Guest. 48 00:02:38.280 --> 00:02:39.960 I'm looking forward to it very much, 49 00:02:39.980 --> 00:02:40.940 and welcome to Nigel. 50 00:02:43.700 --> 00:02:50.640 Thank you very much for coming 51 00:02:50.640 --> 00:02:54.460 and spending your lunch hour here with me. 52 00:02:57.540 --> 00:03:01.500 My title, People of the Air and the City of Global Guests, 53 00:03:02.180 --> 00:03:04.560 People of the Air derives from a slur 54 00:03:04.560 --> 00:03:06.140 favored by the Nazis. 55 00:03:07.180 --> 00:03:07.700 Luftmension. 56 00:03:08.240 --> 00:03:10.220 People of the air, people of smoke, 57 00:03:11.040 --> 00:03:12.900 are those people who have no roots, 58 00:03:13.660 --> 00:03:15.280 will not or cannot take root. 59 00:03:15.920 --> 00:03:18.420 They remain, as George Steiner phrased it, 60 00:03:18.460 --> 00:03:20.200 guests among others. 61 00:03:21.240 --> 00:03:23.480 The ideal types of Luftmension, 62 00:03:23.620 --> 00:03:24.560 of people of the air, 63 00:03:24.560 --> 00:03:26.880 There were, of course, Jews and gypsies. 64 00:03:27.420 --> 00:03:30.980 In this, the Nazis could be said to follow the philosopher Hegel, 65 00:03:31.640 --> 00:03:34.740 who saw in such people an awesome pathology. 66 00:03:35.540 --> 00:03:39.740 In leaving the Garden of Eden, the pastures of Abraham, the land of Israel, 67 00:03:40.000 --> 00:03:42.120 the Jews had, according to Hegel, 68 00:03:42.220 --> 00:03:46.300 entered into exile from their natural human place in the world, 69 00:03:46.460 --> 00:03:51.320 their embodying of an unconscious organic and singular totality with a place. 70 00:03:51.320 --> 00:03:55.840 Here was an alienation from self and from humanity, 71 00:03:55.980 --> 00:03:59.040 from love, trust, family, and community. 72 00:03:59.500 --> 00:04:03.940 In choosing to house themselves, not in land, but in their Sefer Torah, 73 00:04:04.220 --> 00:04:05.200 their book of law, 74 00:04:05.540 --> 00:04:11.000 they had perpetrated their suicidal renunciation from the family of nations. 75 00:04:12.300 --> 00:04:17.040 The talk I'm going to give today is a kind of paean to Luftmenschlichkeit. 76 00:04:17.880 --> 00:04:21.160 I want to argue for an appreciation and an education 77 00:04:21.160 --> 00:04:23.480 of global guesthood, 78 00:04:24.180 --> 00:04:27.720 and for the city as a site where an embodiment of global guesthood 79 00:04:27.720 --> 00:04:32.140 might not take root, but be secured and enshrined. 80 00:04:33.360 --> 00:04:40.660 In four parts, my talk revolves around the key terms of guest, city, story, and irony, 81 00:04:41.500 --> 00:04:49.360 as these appear in the writings of luminaries such as George Steiner, Robert Park, Paul Ricoeur, and Richard Rorty. 82 00:04:49.780 --> 00:04:51.140 I want to do just that. 83 00:04:51.160 --> 00:04:53.420 I want to bring justice to a particular conception of human identity, 84 00:04:53.700 --> 00:04:58.820 as that which is born in and of movement, and manifested in multiplicity. 85 00:04:59.140 --> 00:05:05.600 And I look to movement and multiplicity as ideal ways to measure just procedures of state, 86 00:05:06.300 --> 00:05:10.660 to formulate ideas of justice and just relations between human beings. 87 00:05:11.380 --> 00:05:14.900 Justice, I want to say, is about ensuring the free movement 88 00:05:15.480 --> 00:05:17.780 that is fundamental to human being and becoming, 89 00:05:18.060 --> 00:05:20.680 and to its potential for multiplicity. 90 00:05:22.100 --> 00:05:25.920 Part one, George Steiner and the Jewish guest. 91 00:05:27.560 --> 00:05:32.160 For George Steiner, the shock waves of the Dreyfus affair still reverberate. 92 00:05:33.840 --> 00:05:39.320 In 1894, Albert Dreyfus, an officer in the French army and an assimilated Jew, 93 00:05:39.520 --> 00:05:41.940 was accused of treason against the French state. 94 00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:45.680 And even when the ridiculousness of the charges had been revealed, 95 00:05:45.900 --> 00:05:50.160 it was felt better by many in the French establishment, and also the anti-establishment, 96 00:05:50.880 --> 00:05:51.140 that the French government was not willing to accept the charges. 97 00:05:51.160 --> 00:05:53.500 That he be sacrificed for the greater good of France. 98 00:05:54.260 --> 00:05:57.120 Better the individual Jew be scapegoated, 99 00:05:57.200 --> 00:06:00.420 than the good name of the Christian nation-state be compromised. 100 00:06:01.780 --> 00:06:07.100 For George Steiner, the Dreyfus affair passed judgment on communitarianism. 101 00:06:08.540 --> 00:06:13.980 There is no nation, he wrote, no polis, no church, no ethnic community, 102 00:06:14.100 --> 00:06:15.660 that is not worth leaving. 103 00:06:16.940 --> 00:06:20.740 There's no interest, no caste, profession, or social class, 104 00:06:20.740 --> 00:06:22.560 not worth resigning from. 105 00:06:23.240 --> 00:06:27.120 The reason being that every nation will end up behaving unacceptably, 106 00:06:27.220 --> 00:06:31.820 will sacrifice a Dreyfus, while every church will excommunicate a Spinoza. 107 00:06:33.180 --> 00:06:35.100 Patriotism will override justice. 108 00:06:35.980 --> 00:06:39.200 It must do so, because communitarianism, 109 00:06:39.200 --> 00:06:44.220 that is, the ideology of discrete national, ethnic, or religious communities, 110 00:06:44.580 --> 00:06:50.620 tied by blood, homogeneous, sharing a common birthright of culture, tradition, or land, 111 00:06:50.620 --> 00:06:53.480 this notion entails the sleep of reason. 112 00:06:54.520 --> 00:06:59.200 An overriding loyalty to community entails an abstention from free thought, 113 00:06:59.400 --> 00:07:02.040 and also from a disinterested pursuit of justice. 114 00:07:02.780 --> 00:07:06.000 The nation-state, for instance, is founded on myth, 115 00:07:06.140 --> 00:07:11.280 and perpetrated by lies, mendacity, and mystique, and by guns. 116 00:07:11.920 --> 00:07:15.140 Over the past two centuries, the virulent madness of nationalism 117 00:07:15.140 --> 00:07:18.780 has edged humanity ever closer towards self-destruction. 118 00:07:19.340 --> 00:07:20.600 A thinking person, 119 00:07:20.620 --> 00:07:23.440 George Steiner concludes, cannot be a good patriot. 120 00:07:25.480 --> 00:07:27.580 It's Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher, 121 00:07:27.780 --> 00:07:31.860 who provides Steiner with a name for the habit, or the habitus, 122 00:07:31.940 --> 00:07:34.400 that he would set against communitarianism. 123 00:07:34.740 --> 00:07:36.400 And he calls it humanism. 124 00:07:37.900 --> 00:07:42.420 Humanism, says Rousseau, is a theft committed on la patrie. 125 00:07:43.780 --> 00:07:47.620 Humanism replaces relativities and local contingencies 126 00:07:47.620 --> 00:07:49.200 with universalities, 127 00:07:49.200 --> 00:07:51.220 and an aspiring to global truths. 128 00:07:52.560 --> 00:07:54.460 Anthropology, the name of my discipline, 129 00:07:54.760 --> 00:07:56.340 the writing of the human, 130 00:07:57.200 --> 00:07:58.760 derived from Immanuel Kant, 131 00:07:59.020 --> 00:08:02.340 and was part of his vision of what he called a cosmopolis 132 00:08:02.340 --> 00:08:05.180 that might combine warring localisms, 133 00:08:06.200 --> 00:08:08.740 contesting theisms, and opposed ethnicities 134 00:08:08.740 --> 00:08:11.480 in a polity that represented the earth entire, 135 00:08:11.760 --> 00:08:14.880 and that looked out from that globe to the cosmos beyond. 136 00:08:15.700 --> 00:08:17.260 The enlightened notions, 137 00:08:17.260 --> 00:08:20.300 the enlightenment notions of Rousseau and Kant, 138 00:08:20.460 --> 00:08:23.580 fed into those great liberal experiments of modernity, 139 00:08:23.640 --> 00:08:25.460 the French and American revolutions, 140 00:08:25.780 --> 00:08:28.040 British liberalism and utilitarianism, 141 00:08:28.060 --> 00:08:31.340 and socialism, a separation of church and state. 142 00:08:32.340 --> 00:08:36.200 However, George Steiner wants to situate this humanist habit, 143 00:08:36.260 --> 00:08:39.940 or habitus, the loyalty to truth and to living authentically 144 00:08:39.940 --> 00:08:42.060 in an earlier history than the enlightenment. 145 00:08:43.260 --> 00:08:44.640 He calls it Jewish. 146 00:08:45.640 --> 00:08:48.740 Obviously, there's a certain irony in this appellation, 147 00:08:48.800 --> 00:08:51.860 giving the above diatribe against tribalist notions. 148 00:08:52.620 --> 00:08:55.760 But Steiner wants to draw attention to certain practices 149 00:08:55.760 --> 00:08:59.980 of being and doing that he feels have a long historical provenance. 150 00:09:00.540 --> 00:09:03.800 And as with the Nazis, Hegel and others before them 151 00:09:03.800 --> 00:09:06.400 have long been stereotyped as Jewish. 152 00:09:06.780 --> 00:09:10.300 So, says Steiner, let us invert the slur 153 00:09:10.300 --> 00:09:12.960 of Luftmenschlicher Jiddischkeit. 154 00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:18.680 Homeland for the Jews was a text, Steiner begins. 155 00:09:19.060 --> 00:09:22.560 Even before the diaspora and the exile from the land of Israel, 156 00:09:22.740 --> 00:09:25.680 in essential ways Jewish identity was intrinsically connected 157 00:09:25.680 --> 00:09:27.720 with knowing and observing the book of law, 158 00:09:27.960 --> 00:09:30.060 reading and being answerable to it. 159 00:09:30.380 --> 00:09:34.400 The book, as Heinrich Heine put it, was the land of his fathers. 160 00:09:35.520 --> 00:09:38.600 This affected a certain continuity in Jewish life, 161 00:09:38.780 --> 00:09:41.340 from Israel to diaspora and back, 162 00:09:41.500 --> 00:09:43.620 and throughout the pogromatic history 163 00:09:43.620 --> 00:09:45.220 of the latter diaspora. 164 00:09:45.520 --> 00:09:49.040 One remained at home, in transit across different lands, 165 00:09:49.300 --> 00:09:52.340 one's sentimental attachment only to a messianic land, 166 00:09:52.580 --> 00:09:55.520 because one enjoyed a homecoming, 167 00:09:55.580 --> 00:09:58.160 cognitive and emotional and physical, 168 00:09:58.400 --> 00:10:00.640 each time one returned to the text. 169 00:10:01.200 --> 00:10:05.020 Each rereading of the sacred text was a return home. 170 00:10:07.020 --> 00:10:09.160 The text was also a living text, 171 00:10:09.280 --> 00:10:11.200 what Steiner calls a real presence. 172 00:10:11.560 --> 00:10:13.180 It contained a living truth, 173 00:10:13.620 --> 00:10:15.920 such that each new generation and each new reading, 174 00:10:16.040 --> 00:10:17.400 each new individual commentary, 175 00:10:17.640 --> 00:10:21.120 could be expected to deliver up a new interpretation. 176 00:10:23.280 --> 00:10:27.240 Now, in underwriting an identity not on the basis of territory, 177 00:10:27.540 --> 00:10:30.620 or the fixity of any earthbound relationship, 178 00:10:31.220 --> 00:10:33.660 exclusion, knowledge or practice, 179 00:10:33.920 --> 00:10:37.460 but on the basis of an addiction to reading and to insight, 180 00:10:37.700 --> 00:10:42.160 and to a truth which a nomad could carry within him or her, 181 00:10:42.280 --> 00:10:43.520 alone with God, 182 00:10:43.620 --> 00:10:44.140 with truth, 183 00:10:44.340 --> 00:10:47.480 when embodies and idealizes homeliness, belonging, 184 00:10:47.780 --> 00:10:50.980 in a particular and a particularly humane way. 185 00:10:52.000 --> 00:10:54.940 Steiner wants to depict this, 186 00:10:54.980 --> 00:10:56.060 wants us to understand this, 187 00:10:56.200 --> 00:10:58.580 as the habit or the habitus of a guest. 188 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:02.500 The humaneness of the diasporic Jew, 189 00:11:02.680 --> 00:11:05.380 derived from the fact that he or she was too weak 190 00:11:05.380 --> 00:11:07.620 to make others as wretched as themselves. 191 00:11:08.860 --> 00:11:10.760 In the Jew's resilience, however, 192 00:11:10.840 --> 00:11:13.600 is a pointer towards the dignity of guests. 193 00:11:13.620 --> 00:11:16.680 As guests, guests of one another, 194 00:11:16.880 --> 00:11:19.320 guests of our planet, guests of life, 195 00:11:19.480 --> 00:11:22.760 we lodge our identities, our bodies, our relationships, 196 00:11:22.800 --> 00:11:25.640 in time, in moments of being, 197 00:11:25.820 --> 00:11:28.460 and not in space or place or land. 198 00:11:28.740 --> 00:11:32.100 It's time which is truth's native ground. 199 00:11:32.900 --> 00:11:37.120 By conceiving of themselves as mutual guests on a small planet, 200 00:11:37.380 --> 00:11:40.380 human beings can escape the mutual destruction 201 00:11:40.380 --> 00:11:42.620 that derives from singular exclusivist, 202 00:11:43.780 --> 00:11:47.100 communitarian identities which are fixed to territories. 203 00:11:49.120 --> 00:11:50.080 Part two. 204 00:11:51.420 --> 00:11:54.460 Robert Park and the Modern Multiple City. 205 00:11:56.280 --> 00:11:58.800 The medieval European adage has it 206 00:11:58.800 --> 00:12:00.920 that city air inspires freedom. 207 00:12:02.280 --> 00:12:04.360 Robert Park, who was a founder member 208 00:12:04.360 --> 00:12:06.520 of the Chicago School of Sociology, 209 00:12:06.700 --> 00:12:09.660 surveying the expanding city of the 20th century, 210 00:12:09.920 --> 00:12:11.940 gave us this rejoinder. 211 00:12:11.940 --> 00:12:15.200 The city is the natural habitat of civilized man. 212 00:12:16.440 --> 00:12:17.660 Civilized person. 213 00:12:18.800 --> 00:12:22.380 Part of what made the city an ingenious social and moral milieu 214 00:12:22.940 --> 00:12:25.420 for Robert Park, and bearing the future within it, 215 00:12:25.540 --> 00:12:28.520 was its bringing together of very different kinds of people. 216 00:12:29.100 --> 00:12:31.200 However transitory, casual, 217 00:12:31.560 --> 00:12:35.060 instable, and fortuitous may be their meetings, 218 00:12:35.380 --> 00:12:38.360 the contacting and contracting of difference 219 00:12:38.940 --> 00:12:40.460 will be instrumental, he felt, 220 00:12:40.460 --> 00:12:43.960 in causing a general expanding of the norms of civility. 221 00:12:45.360 --> 00:12:48.100 Now, commentators since Robert Park's day 222 00:12:48.100 --> 00:12:50.980 have drawn attention to aspects of wishful thinking 223 00:12:50.980 --> 00:12:53.740 in his depiction of urban futures. 224 00:12:55.460 --> 00:12:57.120 The coming together of different people, 225 00:12:57.220 --> 00:13:00.280 different social and cultural communities in the city 226 00:13:00.280 --> 00:13:03.000 is as likely to give rise to what Robert Paine 227 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:05.000 has called cultural compression 228 00:13:05.000 --> 00:13:07.420 as to civilizing tendencies. 229 00:13:08.200 --> 00:13:09.160 That is, 230 00:13:09.160 --> 00:13:13.040 in dialectical relationship with the diversity of the city, 231 00:13:13.200 --> 00:13:15.440 its housing migrants from around the world, 232 00:13:15.680 --> 00:13:18.140 there emerges a piling up of boundaries, 233 00:13:18.240 --> 00:13:22.980 political, ritual, residential, economic, social and cultural, 234 00:13:23.220 --> 00:13:26.880 which people feel to be vital to their sense of personal and collective identity. 235 00:13:27.900 --> 00:13:31.100 Difference in the city is thus experienced oftentimes 236 00:13:31.100 --> 00:13:35.720 not as a mixing, but as an insistence on purity and inheritance, 237 00:13:36.120 --> 00:13:39.140 distinction, discrimination and exclusivity. 238 00:13:41.140 --> 00:13:45.340 Notwithstanding, there does seem to me to be potential in the city 239 00:13:45.340 --> 00:13:47.860 for taking forward an enlightenment vision 240 00:13:47.860 --> 00:13:51.080 of cosmopolitanism, freedom and civility. 241 00:13:52.480 --> 00:13:54.860 There is, as Iris Young puts it, 242 00:13:54.940 --> 00:13:57.300 an incomprehensibility to the city. 243 00:13:57.460 --> 00:13:59.880 It's a kind of chaosmopolis. 244 00:14:01.120 --> 00:14:04.160 And there's a paradoxical proclivity in the city 245 00:14:04.160 --> 00:14:09.120 to encompass or stage inexhaustible and surprising novelty and difference. 246 00:14:10.020 --> 00:14:12.540 This is how Young elaborates on her point. 247 00:14:12.780 --> 00:14:16.820 A place of many places, the city folds over on itself 248 00:14:17.800 --> 00:14:21.760 in so many layers and relationships that it's incomprehensible. 249 00:14:22.180 --> 00:14:24.340 You can't encompass it. 250 00:14:24.520 --> 00:14:26.140 One cannot take it in. 251 00:14:26.260 --> 00:14:29.240 One never feels as though there's nothing new and interesting to explore, 252 00:14:29.420 --> 00:14:31.620 no new and interesting people to meet. 253 00:14:32.780 --> 00:14:35.060 It is perhaps a matter of education. 254 00:14:35.820 --> 00:14:38.800 But in the social and cultural multiplicity of the city, 255 00:14:38.800 --> 00:14:41.840 there are morals to be drawn concerning the capacities, 256 00:14:42.060 --> 00:14:44.560 the benefits and the rights of all people, 257 00:14:44.680 --> 00:14:47.680 every individual, to be themselves multiple. 258 00:14:48.680 --> 00:14:51.560 An education would be to comprehend 259 00:14:51.560 --> 00:14:53.680 that the multiplicity of the city, 260 00:14:53.860 --> 00:14:57.500 its societies and cultures, traditions, cosmologies and moralities, 261 00:14:57.680 --> 00:15:01.940 occupations and congregations, materials, moods and styles, 262 00:15:02.280 --> 00:15:05.840 this multiplicity is an analogue of the creativity 263 00:15:05.840 --> 00:15:08.600 and the potential to construct difference. 264 00:15:08.800 --> 00:15:11.600 Inherent in each individual human being. 265 00:15:12.960 --> 00:15:17.700 An education might be to see the city as an analogue of the creative self. 266 00:15:18.280 --> 00:15:20.940 Social and cultural multiplicity is, after all, 267 00:15:21.020 --> 00:15:23.080 a consequence of individual creativity. 268 00:15:25.100 --> 00:15:27.600 In seeing the multiplicity around them in the city 269 00:15:27.600 --> 00:15:30.380 as their multiplicity, as our multiplicity, 270 00:15:30.380 --> 00:15:33.340 as a manifestation of a version, a fragment, 271 00:15:33.480 --> 00:15:37.440 of the potential for difference that we individuals contain within ourselves, 272 00:15:37.440 --> 00:15:40.080 as something that we could have thought up, 273 00:15:40.140 --> 00:15:42.280 as something that we could enact in life. 274 00:15:42.920 --> 00:15:46.840 An attitude of ownership, of generosity, of irony, 275 00:15:47.020 --> 00:15:50.160 I believe, can be encouraged among all citizens. 276 00:15:51.320 --> 00:15:54.700 One says, as an inhabitant of the city, 277 00:15:54.880 --> 00:15:57.340 all this difference is a manifestation of me. 278 00:15:57.560 --> 00:16:00.780 All this difference around me is a manifestation of the human. 279 00:16:01.440 --> 00:16:04.560 Some parts of me I might like more than others. 280 00:16:04.820 --> 00:16:07.420 Some parts might seem childish or foreign, 281 00:16:07.440 --> 00:16:08.640 or undignified. 282 00:16:09.440 --> 00:16:12.420 But I should not despise myself or be intolerant. 283 00:16:12.660 --> 00:16:16.860 I should not deny what I might become or have been. 284 00:16:17.140 --> 00:16:20.400 The multiplicity around me in the city, the otherness, 285 00:16:20.600 --> 00:16:24.180 manifests my right to construe myself differently in future. 286 00:16:24.720 --> 00:16:28.760 The multiplicity fractures any notion that I, humanity, 287 00:16:29.080 --> 00:16:32.100 can or should be defined in terms of singularities. 288 00:16:32.500 --> 00:16:35.040 Except, that is, for my singular human capacity 289 00:16:35.040 --> 00:16:36.300 to create myself, 290 00:16:36.300 --> 00:16:37.320 to become, 291 00:16:37.600 --> 00:16:38.880 and to go on doing so. 292 00:16:40.260 --> 00:16:43.080 A way of rephrasing what I've been saying 293 00:16:43.080 --> 00:16:45.640 is to say that I could be said in a city 294 00:16:45.640 --> 00:16:47.160 to be a guest of myself, 295 00:16:47.600 --> 00:16:49.760 a guest of my creative capacities. 296 00:16:50.540 --> 00:16:54.880 My body, my life, plays host to a multiplicity of ways 297 00:16:54.880 --> 00:16:57.280 in which I choose to define myself 298 00:16:57.280 --> 00:17:00.220 and live out an identity over time and place. 299 00:17:00.900 --> 00:17:05.220 The generosity I then extend to others' choices of how to be 300 00:17:05.220 --> 00:17:08.020 is a generosity that I really extend to myself. 301 00:17:08.460 --> 00:17:12.820 A generosity which my body, my life, extends to my creativity, 302 00:17:13.040 --> 00:17:16.740 to play host in this one body to different me's. 303 00:17:17.560 --> 00:17:20.720 To the different me's that can be construed at different moments. 304 00:17:21.340 --> 00:17:23.720 So the truth of my identity, the true me, 305 00:17:23.900 --> 00:17:27.020 is not this or that manifestation or version. 306 00:17:27.320 --> 00:17:29.940 The truth of my identity is my capacity, 307 00:17:30.120 --> 00:17:34.220 my potential, my right to keep on creating different me's. 308 00:17:38.340 --> 00:17:39.380 Part 3. 309 00:17:40.440 --> 00:17:43.580 Paul Ricoeur and the storied nature of identity. 310 00:17:46.460 --> 00:17:47.640 In his article, 311 00:17:47.840 --> 00:17:50.200 Reflections on a new ethos for Europe, 312 00:17:50.640 --> 00:17:53.760 Paul Ricoeur argues that in the European Union 313 00:17:53.760 --> 00:17:56.640 there's an opportunity to institute a form of polity 314 00:17:56.640 --> 00:17:59.720 which does not replicate the structures of the nation state. 315 00:18:00.520 --> 00:18:02.480 The issue is one of imagination. 316 00:18:03.460 --> 00:18:05.200 Imagining a kind of post-economic, 317 00:18:05.220 --> 00:18:06.300 post-national state, 318 00:18:06.560 --> 00:18:09.140 which is ineluctably polyglot, 319 00:18:09.160 --> 00:18:13.780 and which eschews the symbols of both sovereignty and homogeneity, 320 00:18:13.920 --> 00:18:16.100 as well as the structures underpinning these, 321 00:18:16.200 --> 00:18:19.260 such as diplomacy and army and currency. 322 00:18:20.060 --> 00:18:23.060 The key concept which Paul Ricoeur offers 323 00:18:23.060 --> 00:18:24.680 is narrative identity. 324 00:18:25.320 --> 00:18:28.380 We are all entangled in stories, he explains. 325 00:18:30.700 --> 00:18:34.820 From those told to us, by others, from childhood on, 326 00:18:34.820 --> 00:18:38.900 to those we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. 327 00:18:39.200 --> 00:18:41.540 These are both first order stories, 328 00:18:41.640 --> 00:18:43.580 and second and third order stories. 329 00:18:44.220 --> 00:18:47.380 Stories containing stories, and stories about stories. 330 00:18:47.840 --> 00:18:50.160 This telling and receiving of stories, 331 00:18:50.420 --> 00:18:52.240 forgetting and reviving of stories, 332 00:18:52.620 --> 00:18:54.660 mingling and denying of stories, 333 00:18:54.920 --> 00:18:57.800 produces important narrative identities. 334 00:18:58.840 --> 00:19:01.380 Individuals know themselves, we know ourselves, 335 00:19:01.720 --> 00:19:03.220 and we're known by other people. 336 00:19:03.220 --> 00:19:07.220 In significant respects, by the stories which we know, 337 00:19:07.360 --> 00:19:08.640 and in which we figure. 338 00:19:09.420 --> 00:19:11.600 Social groups may also be represented, 339 00:19:11.800 --> 00:19:13.920 to significant extents, 340 00:19:13.940 --> 00:19:16.700 by the stories shared in their collective traditions. 341 00:19:18.620 --> 00:19:20.320 Furthermore, if it were recognized 342 00:19:20.320 --> 00:19:22.360 that the individual and group, 343 00:19:22.540 --> 00:19:25.020 cultural, ethnic, religious and national identities, 344 00:19:25.380 --> 00:19:28.120 are in important respects matters of recounted story, 345 00:19:28.400 --> 00:19:31.600 not of fixed structures of genetic or historic 346 00:19:31.600 --> 00:19:33.200 or revelational realities, 347 00:19:33.220 --> 00:19:36.740 then we might move to an appreciation of stories 348 00:19:36.740 --> 00:19:38.140 that are not our own. 349 00:19:38.440 --> 00:19:42.340 We could take responsibility in imagination and sympathy 350 00:19:42.340 --> 00:19:45.600 for the stories of others, of strangers and of enemies. 351 00:19:46.180 --> 00:19:48.920 We already do this for fictional characters, 352 00:19:49.020 --> 00:19:52.120 with whom we provisionally identify in our reading of novels, 353 00:19:52.380 --> 00:19:53.800 and we do this for ourselves, 354 00:19:53.940 --> 00:19:57.680 when we retell our stories and reconfigure our pasts 355 00:19:57.680 --> 00:19:59.580 for present purposes and contexts. 356 00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:03.160 It might be the inalienable, 357 00:20:03.160 --> 00:20:04.940 character of life experience, 358 00:20:05.180 --> 00:20:08.220 that we cannot directly share the lives of others, 359 00:20:08.360 --> 00:20:10.160 we can't get inside others' bodies, 360 00:20:10.440 --> 00:20:13.440 but we might imagine our way into their lives 361 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:15.600 through an exchange of life stories. 362 00:20:16.420 --> 00:20:19.360 This is a difficult and ethical labor. 363 00:20:19.540 --> 00:20:22.920 It calls for generosity and irony and selflessness, 364 00:20:23.120 --> 00:20:26.000 as well as an imaginative replacing of self 365 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:28.160 in other experiences and lives, 366 00:20:28.340 --> 00:20:30.700 but it can be socially and morally rewarding 367 00:20:30.700 --> 00:20:32.080 and practically vital. 368 00:20:33.920 --> 00:20:36.700 Similarly, we can and must be generous with our own stories, 369 00:20:36.940 --> 00:20:39.960 allow them to be retold by others as well as by ourselves, 370 00:20:40.240 --> 00:20:42.620 and not be rigid in our conception of them. 371 00:20:42.820 --> 00:20:45.240 We must not allow founding historical events 372 00:20:45.240 --> 00:20:46.900 which underlie the stories 373 00:20:46.900 --> 00:20:51.220 to freeze the identities conjured up in the latter stories. 374 00:20:51.660 --> 00:20:54.460 We don't abandon important historical landmarks 375 00:20:54.460 --> 00:20:55.000 in our identities. 376 00:20:55.120 --> 00:20:57.940 We go on commemorating and celebrating them in story, 377 00:20:58.220 --> 00:21:00.600 but we don't construe them as something immutable 378 00:21:01.160 --> 00:21:03.140 or incommunicable or incomprehensible. 379 00:21:03.160 --> 00:21:06.860 We allow their plural reading. 380 00:21:07.700 --> 00:21:09.860 So different narrative recountings 381 00:21:09.860 --> 00:21:11.180 of the same historical events 382 00:21:11.180 --> 00:21:13.580 the French Revolution, the Second World War, 383 00:21:13.760 --> 00:21:15.500 the creation of the State of Israel, 384 00:21:15.680 --> 00:21:18.120 should not be seen as irreverent. 385 00:21:18.140 --> 00:21:21.300 It's not irreverent to reconstruct in story 386 00:21:21.300 --> 00:21:22.540 these historical events. 387 00:21:22.860 --> 00:21:25.020 A competitive diversity of tellings 388 00:21:25.020 --> 00:21:28.260 even honors the richness of the original event. 389 00:21:29.600 --> 00:21:32.060 Now Ricoeur is calling for a sophisticated 390 00:21:32.060 --> 00:21:33.140 as well as a sophisticated narrative. 391 00:21:33.140 --> 00:21:36.080 There's a generous and ironic self-knowledge here, 392 00:21:36.280 --> 00:21:38.080 but the stakes are high. 393 00:21:38.960 --> 00:21:41.780 Exchanging stories and partaking in a respectful 394 00:21:41.780 --> 00:21:44.140 reciprocity of perspectives, 395 00:21:44.760 --> 00:21:47.320 Ricoeur calls narrative hospitality. 396 00:21:48.880 --> 00:21:50.960 By way of narrative hospitality, 397 00:21:51.480 --> 00:21:55.100 one plays host to other stories as well as one's own. 398 00:21:55.240 --> 00:21:57.940 One gives over one's stories as guests 399 00:21:57.940 --> 00:22:00.600 to another person's retelling. 400 00:22:00.600 --> 00:22:03.060 One plays guest in one's own life 401 00:22:03.060 --> 00:22:04.940