It is not enough to travel; one must first have dreamed of it, have desired it. It is not enough to accomplish the journey; one must also assume its consequences, for oneself and for the other. The journey is both material and spiritual; it leads us to the most distant and to the nearest, outside ourselves and within ourselves, and confronts us with the crucial ethical question of the relation to the stranger — who is the other and who is ourselves.
When the theme of this issue was proposed — “Jewish travellers” — and when it was specified that this time it would not be a matter of speaking of deportation or of forced exile, I thought back to three authors in whose books the reflection on the journey and on the other unfolds: Emmanuel Levinas, Victor Segalen, Edmond Jabès. Two of them are Jewish authors and laid claim to that belonging, sometimes against the reluctance of the guardians of identitarian orthodoxy. The third, whose generous reflection — addressed to all men beyond their particularities, confronting the material and the spiritual — joins theirs admirably.
Victor Segalen.
Équipée (Gallimard, L’imaginaire, 1983) (Journey to the Land of the Real) was published in 1929, ten years after his death.
Making one’s way between the Imaginary and the Real.
This little book, a “travel journal ‘in the land of the real’,” speaks to us of his desire for travel (to China, in the early twentieth century) and of his confrontation with its realization, for a disinterested pleasure, free of any project of spiritual or material possession. “A flagrant opposition between two worlds: the one we think and the one we collide with, what we dream and what we do, between what we desire and what we obtain… The only question here is to seek in what mysterious caverns of the depths of the human these diverse worlds can unite and reinforce one another to plenitude.” (pp. 12–13), with the risk that one of the two might, alas, end by prevailing, or that the traveller might “renounce the double game (between these two poles)… without which living man is no longer body or no longer spirit.” (p. 13)
The desire for the journey is the desire for that wayfaring between imaginary and real whose effect and value will be verified on the return. “I set out and bestir myself only in the hope of an enriched return.” (p. 18)
The journey is made, then — painful and risky, which is what gives it its price, a price the traveller must pay in order to make the space and the country his own, not to possess it but to inhabit it with his presence and to be inhabited by its own, in an immaterial enjoyment: “It is thus that the visual possession of foreign distances feeds on substantial joy. It is the view of the promised land, but conquered by oneself, and which no god can spirit away: a human moment.” (p. 33)
But between the Imaginary and the Real, reality slips in, far indeed from the Ideal. “The accomplishment did not give the strong intoxication imagined, but the verdict: that’s it. It’s done. So it was only that; and one is left dazed by the limited thing, very quickly sated, satisfied!” (p. 54)
His foreign Other, the secret stake of the journey.
Yet what then discloses itself is the secret stake of the journey: the fleeting encounter with one’s double, that self become the intimate stranger. “I myself and the other met here, at the most remote point of the journey…, after that stage, the one I had fixed in advance as the frontier, the geographic goal, the gain to which I had resolved to confine myself. (p. 118) Yet, before he vanished, I had had the immeasurable time… to gather his whole presence, and above all to recognize him: the Other was myself, from sixteen to twenty… So this is what I had come to find here.” (p. 120)
This encounter marks the limit and the term of the journey. Impossible to go further, impossible too to remain for long upon this summit of experience and of being. Impossible, too, to repeat the journey, whatever its destinations and its roads. There can be no professional traveller. “I cannot flatter myself that I shall see the Other come and appear to me at every crossroads. The first encounter was astonishing enough. Others would be unbearable, destroying the mysterious adolescent of the first, turning that rare phantom into a habit, a need, a life companion! My face has changed direction in seeing the other face again. I am set toward the return.” (p. 122) One must return, without the joy. “Everything that follows of the journey now appears to me already unrolled in advance. To retrace steps already taken, to chew over a digested food… is the very image of the disconcerted defection… The return is struck with ignorance and sterility.” (pp. 123–125)
The ordeal of the return.
But at the end of the return lies the cruel experience of the reunion with the friend (a degraded caricature of the Other) and of the ravaging image he sends back to us of ourselves. “The all-too-faithful friend… cried out to me: ‘Look, you haven’t changed’…, and added, reassuringly: ‘I haven’t changed either!’ That is just what I feared… He is lying. I answer: ‘Yes, you are always the same.’ He accepts me then, and takes me off, satisfied.” (pp. 126–127) Before these lines I could not help thinking back to what Robert Antelme wrote on his return from the camps: “All my friends overwhelm me, with a kindly satisfaction, with my resemblance to myself… I have had the extraordinary adventure of being able to prefer myself other… I am still left, at times, with too keen a feeling of the horror, but no doubt soon all that will be smoothed over, neutralized. Then perhaps I shall accept the resemblance to myself, because I shall know that it does not exist; I shall accept the portrait: there will no longer be a portrait.” (in D. Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire (Around an Effort of Memory), Maurice Nadeau, 1987, p. 17)
It remains to draw up the balance of the journey. “In these encounters between the Imaginary and the Real, I was less resonant to one of them than attentive to their opposition… I had to pronounce between the hammer and the bell. I confess, now, to having above all gathered the sound.” (p. 131)
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas devoted one of his Talmudic readings to the “explorers” (Terre promise ou terre permise? (Promised Land or Permitted Land?), in Quatre lectures talmudiques (Four Talmudic Readings), Minuit, 1968, pp. 111–148). His reflection bears on the good and the bad reasons the Jews have for desiring to take possession of the land of Israel.
Chapter 13 of Numbers tells how Moses, after a year’s march in the desert, sent men to explore the land the Lord had promised to Israel. They returned and declared that it would not be possible to live in the land of Canaan. The land is fertile, to be sure, but it wears out its inhabitants and kills them; moreover it is guarded by men far stronger than the Israelites. Ten of the twelve explorers die soon after, of a strange illness. What is one to make of this?
The origin of the journey, its causes and its reasons.
Levinas, following the Talmudists, first questions the desire of the explorers: must one then question so much and observe so much caution when one arrives at the end of the journey, when one is so close to touching the goal at last? Their fault is to have hesitated at the final moment, when it was too late to draw back. (p. 118) The hesitation ought to have taken place at the beginning, before departure. Once the journey is launched, it is useless to want to stop it — which does not mean one should advance blindly and unconsciously, like a brute force that nothing halts.
What was the origin of this story? The departure from Egypt corresponded to God’s order, the exploration of the country to a human decision (p. 119) — risk of a regrettable confusion. Likewise it is desirable not to confuse the register of desire with that of need. Even though they may be intimately intertwined, it matters to be aware of what makes us move and act. We may decide to leave in order to flee a danger, to save our life and that of our family, to flee misery and seek wealth and its security elsewhere. We may also do so because another country attracts us or because we no longer recognize ourselves in the one in which we live. We may feel this departure as a shameful flight, a defeat, a necessity we do not approve but that we are obliged to undergo and carry out — and there are so many other reasons that it would be too long and tedious to enumerate. To say nothing of the desire for elsewhere, of fleeing oneself (in the hope of finding ourselves different elsewhere, more beautiful, more new — but it is not so easy to flee oneself), or of fleeing the suffering that comes from the permanent confrontation with what we have loved and that is no more, and whose lack and loss we never cease to feel (whether it be a loved one or the culture in which we grew up and that formed us).
Desire abandoned in favour of covetousness.
Pursuing his reflection, Levinas examines the proximity, in the biblical text, of the expressions “let them explore” and “will be ashamed,” and develops his reflection on the desire of the explorers and the conclusions of their exploration, indicating that they ought to be ashamed of them (p. 120). Is their fault only that of having wanted to delay the moment of accomplishing the project that was at the origin of the journey? But is this project not blameworthy in its secret objectives, whether these existed from the start or imposed themselves along the way? Levinas specifies that the pure desire of the promised land gave way to the desire to appropriate a land: a debasement of desire into covetousness, a utilitarian, realist project. To desire to be on this land no longer in order to be transformed by it but in order to make use of it, not to give oneself to this place but to exploit it. None of these objectives is in itself blameworthy; the only thing that is, is the confusion between ideal land and real land, spiritual project and material project. He indicates, apologizing for the anachronism, that in such an attitude there was a risk of reifying the land.
Another fault of the explorers: their attempt to rewrite history, the logical consequence of their position. Indeed, to justify the change of goal (the covetousness of a material good in place of the desire for a spiritual place), they must annul not only parts of the project but also its overall logic and coherence. They cannot simply justify their present attitude by relying on the present situation alone; they must rewrite the whole history, its origin, its development, its chains of events and of causality. Then they make of it a human history, and a merely human one (p. 122).
But it is not possible to change with impunity the objectives of the journey, whether this transformation (here from the spiritual to the material) was conscious and deliberate or unconscious and hidden within the logic of the minute choices that men make but have such trouble perceiving, recognizing, assuming. This change produces retroactive effects that end by contaminating and transforming the whole history. The journey is not a succession of parts independent of one another but a living whole that has its logic, its coherence, its deep unity, and that is altered when one of its elements is.
The explorers bear names that refer to remarkable qualities and virtues: they committed great faults, for which they were punished by death, but they were not at the outset wicked men, unbelievers, exploiters. Thus error and fault can touch anyone, even the best-born, the most conscious of their responsibilities. No one can lay claim to an original purity flowing from his birth, his family or collective history, his intentions, and thereby escape all risk of deviation in the accomplishment of his project. The risks of the journey are not only material (to lose one’s baggage, even one’s life) but also spiritual (to lose one’s innocence and one’s worth). True virtue is not to protect oneself from every temptation, from every risk of error and fault, but to be able and to know how to free oneself from them. To want to draw a hermetic line of separation between the just and the wicked is a dangerous illusion, for this line, often barely visible, runs through each one of us. (p. 127)
Levinas gives to understand that this reflection (delivered in 1965) is of present relevance and can contribute to the critique of a Zionism that would consist only in the reification of the land and in its exploitation (p. 121).
To dare the risk of fault, but to overcome it.
How to explain that two of the explorers escaped the fault into which their companions fell? (p. 127) Through fidelity: the one to all that had been transmitted to him by his forefathers, long before the journey, and the other to the teaching he received from his masters. The journey extracts us from our habits, makes us lose our bearings, lays us bare (but this disarray is one of its principal virtues and what we expect of it). In this great fragility we are open to every error, and threatened not so much by the hostile strangers or the natural dangers we encounter as by ourselves, by what reveals itself in us once we are no longer framed by the stable collective, by the tradition embodied in those close to us, by the repetition of the everyday and of habit, by the permanence of our identity.
Contradiction of the journey: to step out of one’s routine, to make oneself anew, to explore new paths, to forget all that makes us who we are, as well as the origin of the desire for travel — but not to erase them, nor to think that we have made a clean slate of our past by the simple fact of having left our house. To accept authentically the unheard-of of the journey without for all that becoming an empty sack, a passive receptacle offered up to every novelty, one must keep enough coherence and consistency. The dissatisfaction and the desire for the elsewhere and the other that were often at the origin of the departure permit, no doubt, more availability and openness to the new than do bitterness, disgust or fear. But a rigid, blind and excessive fidelity to one’s history, one’s identity, one’s tradition renders any journey sterile. It bears witness to the refusal of all change and to the imperialist will to subject the other, the stranger, to our habits, our ways of thinking and of speaking, rather than to be transformed by the encounter with him.
The encounter with the other and with his land.
But the land discovered is not virgin; it is inhabited, and the traveller will have to confront its inhabitants. (p. 130) The fear they inspire may cast doubt on the validity of the project of departure, on its reasons, its goals, as the difficulties of the road may have done before. The journey is a putting at stake of our desire, but also an ordeal of truth concerning our relation to it (will it hold, to the very end?) and concerning the goal of the journey. Doubt is part of the ordeal, and the certainty as to its rightness, its reason, its legitimacy, its goal — no more than the enclosure within our old identity — is compatible with availability to the encounter and to change, to the surprise and the disarray constitutive of the journey.
But the traveller’s doubt and apprehension may have other causes, not egoistic ones (are the inhabitants hostile, dangerous?) but altruistic. (p. 131) Does he not risk polluting them by his presence, endangering them by what he brings with him (microbes and viruses, social, economic, political, religious, cultural divisions, etc.) for which they were not prepared and against which they have no defence? What is his desire worth in the face of these risks (pp. 134–136); by what right does he come to meet the inhabitants of this country; has he properly weighed the positive and the negative, his interest and theirs; will he be able to assume his choice if its effects on them are negative? This discussion can take place only among travellers equally engaged in the adventure (the journey is not made by proxy: it is not enough to send those who cannot refuse and to remain oneself at home): equal not only in their desire, their courage, their strength, their objectives (the range is wide, from mercantile interest to the most disinterested generosity, from the material to the spiritual) but also in what they accept to lose in this adventure. He who risks nothing but his life, because he is free of every tie, of every responsibility (familial, professional, social, political, etc.), cannot be the equal of him who loses everything at the moment of departure (his social standing, his income, etc.) and who endangers others than himself for whom he is responsible (a family, a body of work, an institution) (p. 139).
The encounter with the other is an ethical encounter of the highest order. The honest traveller does not deceive the inhabitants of the country, does not impose on them his rules, his ways of thinking, his authority, his goods or his commercial system, does not exploit their labour, their natural riches, their bodies or their works. And he does not impose on them his lasting presence. He accepts the right of the country’s inhabitants to refuse his presence and his offers, even when he thinks they represent an economic, social, political, cultural or other progress: he does not make their happiness in spite of them, against them. (p. 143) If he decides to remain in the country, he accepts the possibility of (having to) leave it, of finding exile again should he no longer prove worthy of his desire, of his original project and its purity (a universal and not egoistic vocation, no confusion of the spiritual and the material) (p. 147): such is, or should be, for Levinas, the moral demand made of Israel. He was the traveller; he has become the stranger, with his rights and his duties.
Edmond Jabès.
Victor Segalen, at the term of the journey, discovered himself a stranger — to others and to himself, within himself. A bitter and painful wisdom. Edmond Jabès experienced it in exile and in the desert. Both made of the book the privileged site of the exploration and the transmission of the effects of that experience.
The stranger
In one of his late texts Edmond Jabès turns his reflection upon the stranger (Un étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book), Gallimard, 1989). Is the goal of the journey not to flee myself when I become a stranger to myself, when I no longer recognize the stranger within me, when I feel too comfortably at home in my own country — in order to undergo the experience of being a stranger in the land of others, and then to return among my own and there find myself a stranger, otherwise, and make of that unease my place and my identity?
“The stranger allows you to be yourself, by making, of you, a stranger… What is before you sends you back to your image; what is behind, to your lost face.” (pp. 10–11) Thus the book opens. A play of mirrors between self and self, between self and other. The forgetting of self goes hand in hand with the forgetting of the other. “The true face lies in its non-resemblance to itself: the face of an absence patiently modelled… The question I ask myself, daily, is: What is a stranger? How can one be a stranger to oneself, for oneself and not for others? How can one have a name, a face for others and not for oneself? Who deceives whom? And to what unavowed end?” (pp. 46–47)
The relation to the other cannot be a relation of force, nor of weakness, between two identitarian certainties that would ignore the absence dwelling in each. To set out to meet the other, or to welcome the one who has shed his bearings of place, of family, of language, of culture, scans the continuity of our life and introduces a rupture — painful, necessary, fruitful — between a before now too well known and a future that remains to be written in surprise. The questioning of the other, of my relation to the other, is not an inquiry and a card-indexing for the satisfaction of my interested curiosity or my quest for knowledge. The relation to him is not made in the humiliation and depreciation of what constitutes me, but in the reciprocal exposure, face to face, of our weaknesses, our doubts, our pride and our dignity.
“Of the stranger, ask not his place of birth but his place of future.” (p. 14) The work of memory is turned toward the past as much as toward the future, toward what was as much as toward what is to be invented, toward oneself as much as toward the other.
Place and gap
“If no place is mine, what would be my true place? Being alive, I must surely be, somewhere, present? — said a sage. Perhaps — he was answered — the true place lies in the absence of all place? The place, precisely, of this unacceptable absence.” (p. 18) Edmond Jabès’s reflection here joins that of Emmanuel Levinas and of Victor Segalen. The solution to the unease — which is perhaps only the sign of our human condition, for we are neither perfect nor immortal, and totality is not our lot but rather our relative insufficiency — the solution that flows from placelessness (being the out-of-there?) lies not in the appropriation of a place but in the fruitful assumption, for us and for others, of this difficulty of being like others. Who can believe it possible to fill, with a material reality, the lack-of-being that always pushes us forward? Bread can indeed appease hunger, but not desire.
“Desire for exile when I have fallen asleep within myself, at home. What is a stranger? — The one who makes you believe that you are at home.” (p. 112) A difficult balance, and necessary nonetheless, to be found: never to cease driving one’s roots deeper, farther, but at the same time never to cease extending one’s branches. Otherwise the fruits will always fall back upon the roots, which will feed on them as the serpent bites its own tail in a catastrophic autophagy.
To leave, in quest of another place, another face that might suit me, in which I might recognize myself, that might be mine. “I have lived on wandering… A stranger, only a strange world could be mine.” (p. 33) But at the term of the journey, which may be an inner one, we discover that this world we look upon with astonished eyes, that we try to grasp in a quest and a tireless curiosity, so long as we are alive, and that always escapes us, is our own, wherever we may be. Our desire to know, to understand, to learn, to create, to transmit is the effect and the engine of this relation to the strangeness of the world and of those who inhabit it, like us.
“The distance that separates us from the stranger is the very one that separates us from ourselves.” (p. 69) There is no need to seek the stranger far off; he is within us — but the merit of the stranger-stranger is to make us recognize him, when we accept not only his presence but his proximity, his consistency and his question.
“Where is my place?.. To discover it, it seems to me, a whole lifetime would not suffice. You have reached it. By your divine pallor I divine it. Cut in two, I stand before you. On one side there is me; on the other side, there is me. In the middle there is nothing. — There is your place.” (p. 148)
Permanence and rebirth.
“The stranger is constantly at the beginning of his history… To survive. O sources. Every birth is a radiant resurrection… He knows himself a stranger whom the One, the unique, the distinct fascinate: he who, in his accepted, cultivated difference, prepares himself and prepares us — for the advent of the I.” (p. 51) One does not carry off one’s homeland on the soles of one’s shoes, any more than one leaves behind one’s history with its mournings, its faults and its regrets.
The naïveté of the project of leaving to flee one’s history, one’s past, one’s identity in the illusion of the clean slate, of the new skin and of pure rebirth, once, twice, endlessly — and to make of one’s life an eternal beginning-again. But the fecundity of an availability preserved for the questioning of the intimate strange as much as of the near stranger, who awaken the fault lines and break the too-reassuring, too-rigid continuities that prefigure death when we are carried along, motionless, on our rails.
The stranger and the Jew.
“When one says ‘stranger,’ one thinks ‘Jew.’ — A primary reaction. Unhealthy. One is not born a stranger. One becomes one, in the measure that one asserts oneself. Who would wish to become one? — The Jew first of all, for he is the experience and the wearing-away of a book he will never exhaust.” (p. 25).
“The stranger is, perhaps, the one who consents to pay — modest or exorbitant — the price of his strangeness. The price paid, then, in order to remain so; that is to say, for each of us, in order to be oneself.” (p. 87)
April 2004