from Alejandro A. Vallega. Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds.

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

Preface

Exile is a term I came to know long after my exilic experience began. As I remember, my first encounter with such experience was simple and strange. I was nine years old when, together with my family, I left the world I had known as we fled from fascism and a military regime. One day we closed the door of our home in Chile, took one suitcase each (we had to leave the country under the disguise of traveling abroad for a brief vacation), and traveled by train across the Andes. The journey took a day, and we arrived at our destination at night. It is in that moment of arrival that my first exilic experience appears, and it does so as a twofold event. On the one hand, as I looked out the window I experienced a sense of total loss. My memory of this moment is that I saw nothing. It was as if I had come to a point beyond the world: no words, no visible world, not a familiar sound to receive me. This memory of loss is inseparable in intensity from a certain acceleration and excitement stemming from discovering a place, people, sounds, and words, the second aspect of my exilic experience. These sensations seemed born right there to me, in that instant, since I had never experienced or imagined the world and life that began to appear under the emerging lights of the strange city. Since then this astonishing convergence between loss and the arising of life anew has accompanied my sense of self, world, and thought. It was also this experience that led me to the term exile, and eventually to my critical engagement with it, as I began to have a sense of the difference between exile and what I will call exilic experience and thought. An exile is traditionally one who either by choice or force lives outside his or her country of origin. To be an exile is to be ex patria. This means not only being outside a city or motherland, but it also indicates separation, ones exclusion from the rights and identity given by belonging to motherland, bloodline, family, friends, language, and certain estrangement from the practices and traditions that constitute identity, as well as

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the grounds for making sense of life and the surrounding world. In these terms, the exile is no one and belongs nowhere. What is the place of the exile once she has abandoned her place of origin and, even under the most comfortable circumstances, has come to occupy the place of a guest? What claim under law, civil practices or everyday habits has the exile when she can no longer refer to those structures that have constituted her sense of the world, and can only at best imitate those of the host? By definition, the exile is a stranger, a foreigner, and no matter what he does, will remain foreign: once outside (ex) the place of origin there will be no return. The exile is not at home, and cannot be no matter how much he resembles the host. Indeed, once exiled, he knows that it is impossible to return. Once exiled, he was, is, and will be the foreigner, the stranger. A return only reveals how much he has changed and how much the place of origin has slipped beyond what it was, either by being still the samein which case the one returning appears a strangeror by having changed in which case the one returning still finds him-self foreign. In either case the exile will remain the foreigner, and often a return will underscore both aspects of the slipping of the place of origin in different ways. This last point intensifies the experience of the exile by making his or her life a kind of living death. Once an exile is outside, and severed from origin, country, language, the sense of life and world that sustained existence is lost. Therefore, exile will be a living death for those who seek their identity in those unchanging and ever-present, although distant, origins. The term exile figures a condemnation of all senses of life. I live as no one. I stand nowhere. Even if I take the initiative to make a life of my situation I speak and live by someone elses rules and practices (the longlost origins or the hosts ways). In this sense, as someone once said, exile is like wearing someone elses suit. This is certainly the experience of those characters in Virgils Aenead who, having fled from the destruction of their city, Troy, are found weeping around a small scale version of that city. Indeed, from mans expulsion from paradise on, humanity must live an existence condemned to a veil of tears: a life that seems to find its horizons and hopes marked by the memory of a loss that will shape and judge the present in the name of that unchanging origin and the identity granted by it. This is a melancholic life for which the experience of arising from living configurations and senses of being will have never been enough, because it will have never figured a return to those unchanging origins, roots, places.

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Upon close reflection and experience though, exile as defined by such a tradition does not begin to engage the exilic experience of encountering such life beyond unchanging origins in all its senses of being. The definition of exile as a being outside ones origins, country, and so forth, refers such experience beyond unchanging origins back to unchanging origins. The mien of the exile is the fitting exterior for the interiority of a selfdetermined and self-certain identity that claims to be unchanging, and therefore the measure for interpreting all experiences and senses of being. What condemns exilic experience is not its event as such, but the insistence on defining experience beyond self-identical, unchanging origins in terms of those very self-identical unchanging origins. The definition of exile is one that condemns by excluding and yet retaining sovereign power over what has been excluded. This definition never addresses the exilic experience, since it instead remains in distant judgement of it by defining it in terms of a necessary self-certain and unchanging identity. A return to Virgils Aenead gives an indication of the powerful experience figured by exilic life and thought. Aeneas is forced to leave Troy and must wander throughout the ancient world. However, his exile does not lead him to live as no one or to exist nowhere, always dependent on that lost city and on copying the manners of his hosts. Aeneas experience leads to the foundation of Rome. On the one hand, this story indicates that exilic experience figures the possibility of the arising or originary event of the founding of a whole world. On the other hand, the story also points to the way the exilic experience behind the delimitation of the senses of the world can easily be covered over in the name of what arises and is given determination. Traditionally Aeneas story and Virgils poem find their value in light of what has been founded, in light of Rome. But one has to wonder if this allocation of the story (of the event of configuration that gives rise to such powerful world) into an economy of unchanging origins as that found in the Roman empire was not, at least in part, behind Virgils attempt to burn the work before his death. Virgils poem points beyond such an economy of unchanging origins, as it indicates the double character of the exilic experience that grounds Aeneas foundation of Rome: the loss of unchanging origins (in the impossibility of a return), and the transformative effect of such experiences lead to unsuspected possibilities for the arising of senses of being. Exilic experience is not a life of nihilist negativity in the loss and absence of senses of being, of self, place, and living practices and traditions. This experience

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and this thought enact an event that figures not only loss but, moreover, the transformative passage of senses of being toward yet unsuspected configurations. As such, it is an experience that in its most intense manifestations refers us to the very possibility of the arising of life. Exilic experience occurs as such a dynamic event, and it is in terms of its dynamic elements (loss, transformation, possibility) that it may begin to be engaged. The questions that appear are these: How does one begin to engage exilic experiences? What do such experiences indicate about thought in its configurations and about the arising of senses of being? It is not the personal character of these observations that is important here but what such experiences indicate. These questions open a path for engaging the exilic character of thought as well as for exploring the exilic grounds of the configurations of self, community, and the phenomenon called world. In light of these issues, I think it is not out of place to say here that this work is but a beginning step toward articulating the difficulties and possibilities opened by the engagement of exilic experience. This book was written in many places and in a number of languages, in light of many encounters and experiences, which, in all their layers, frame and uphold the book. This particular space remains open thanks to those who have supported and shared in my work. I want to thank John Sallis, whose friendship and scholarly insight have often sustained the work in these pages; Ed Casey, for his encouragement and generous scholarship; and James Risser for his relentless support. I would also like to mention Rmi Brague and Hans-Helmuth Gander, as well as those who generously shared their insights and comments through many conversations at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy. I am grateful for the support of Helmut Kusdat, Linda Neu, Jerry Sallis, Ilya Cherkasov, and Evgenia Cherkasova. I am also grateful for the editing work of Pam Young, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Arnold Webb, and Jennifer Smith at Penn State Press. The final form of this work owes much to the close reading and comments of Dennis Schmidt. Finally, I dont know that this book would have come to be without Charles Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, and Daniela Vallega-Neu.