le "monde" méditerranéen

This year my birthday happily coincided with the end of Ramadan and the coming of the Fitr. Otherwise, it’s Hiroshima as usual, one more time, like a burden. I will miss Ramadan, which, like Christmas, has something secular into it. That it shifts two weeks backwards every year makes it even better, as it desperately associates itself with the four seasons. In Beirut, a lousy city in every respect, streets are quiet by 7:00 in the evening, which is one of Ramadan’s blessings for a city filled with noise, extra noise, more noise for nothing, noise like garbage. I’ve developed so much hatred to this place that I’m beginning to think that my liking it in the last few years must be related to teaching: I hate teaching more than I hate Beirut, therefore I tolerate this damned city. On the positive side, I need castration to work, hence the toleration. The real pleasure is at the beach, with a nearly empty swimming pool all for myself in Ramadan. What would happen to me when in few years Ramadan shifts back to winter? But the real blessing is this deep blue Mediterranean, and all those young women tanning themselves endlessly, who seem “possessed” for life by men who are notoriously absent, as if they’re having their moment of “fun” elsewhere. (Freud would say there’s no “sexual liberation,” because it’s all in that damned oedipal unconscious; hence we repeat ourselves indefinitely; we score well or poorly; at best there’s pleasure, if we can find it, but no jouissance.) It’s those couple of hours every afternoon at the beach that I’ll miss once in Chicago—moments of relaxation and serenity which have no equivalent elsewhere—certainly not on “Lake Eerie”—or its cozy apartment. I can forget myself and my failures: something uncanny in the heat of a Mediterranean sun that would urge such forgetting. I am by temperament not much of a social animal, hence the solitude of loneliness is all what it takes to get hold of that elusive “self.” At least it gives me the energy to write few hours a day, with that feeling of accumulation and achievement, in spite of all failures. Writing about the eastern Mediterranean, this world where I grew up, is a frustrating experience, as there is so little that “comes together” through the symbolisms of language. As I read Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, with his elaborate genealogies that connect socio-historical layers of discourses and practices, I realize that all my life I’ve been struggling precisely with that desire of continuity, of things and phenomena connecting together through their most obscure layers. I then decided to drop every “about” I could think of: not to write about an about is a great blessing; not to write with a thesis in mind and proofs for that damned thesis; hence all writing and teaching became more confusing, for the better. Difficult not to think of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean “world” and its three archeological cultural layers: the Greco-Roman and Latin Christianity, the Islamicate, and the Greek-Orthodox, in relation to their temporalities. There is a layer, says Braudel, that never moves, completely immobile, like those mountains on the Mediterranean; on the top of it sits the layer of institutions, which are slow moving; still on the top is what we are instinctively attracted to: the events on the surface which give us that wonderful illusion that so much is happening, so much is going on, to the point that change is all over the place. Yet, we remain the same, no matter what. Had you known me at twenty, you would have realized that “I” was back then exactly as “I” am now, at fifty-seven, but with less gray hair. Time and age only bring forth that element of consciousness that was not present before: I know now why I made such a decision at twenty. Only time brings that satisfaction: I haven’t changed because that’s how I always wanted to be in the first place; but I only understand it now. Freud used to compare the unconscious to archeological layers, deep down into our consciousness, which we know nothing about (that is, “it” cannot be formulated in the symbolisms of language; hence the “violence” “it” inevitably holds from within our libidinal impulses) until a contingent event accidentally hits on one of those layers. The event which looks like an innocuous accident would be perceived through the lens of analysis and therapy as situated within a broader traumatic structure, which could be discovered by connecting what seems at face value disconnected events. For Freud Rome was the quintessential metaphor of the unconscious, sitting as it has been for thousands of years on archeological layers, some of which are visible all at once at its center—the Forum. The Mediterranean is just like that—unconscious archeological layers which are open to be associated with one another into infinite temporalities. Like any unconscious, it is neither egalitarian, nor democratic, nor ready to be reeducated. That’s my fate and destiny. That’s why I find myself useless as a teacher—and lover. Needless to say, I’ve got no urge for icy Chicago!