Rémi Brague's Eccentric Culture, Part 2

What of European identity in the present? Brague argues that

[t]here are no Europeans. Europe is a culture. Now, culture is a work on oneself, a formation of oneself by oneself, an effort to assimilate what goes beyond the individual. In consequence, it can not be inherited. . . . One can not be born European, but one can work to become one. (148-49)

I do not understand how Brague can insist that there are no Europeans and then say that you can work to become a European. But I take the point that to the extent there is European identity, it functions differently than ethnicity or national citizenship, which can be transmitted by birth. As Tim Barr reminded me, the nation is etymologically derived from natus because it designates the country of one’s birth. Likewise the Latin gens, which was the primary term for ethnic groups prior to the nation state, derives from genetic genealogy. 

Yet in Brague’s account, Europe is neither an ethnic nor a national entity, participation in which could be inherited. Nor is it a geographic region. 

The danger for the inhabitants of the space that is called “European” (the pretended “Europeans”) is to consider that their Europeanness is a possession and no longer something to conquer, a guaranteed income and not an adventure, a particularity and not a universal vocation. From this point of view, the interest in the past is an activity that needs to be examined carefully. Indeed, there exists a retroactive imperialism, by which a country claims what happened on its current territory as belonging to it[,] as if cultural goods existed in a sort of strong box, separated from the process by which one appropriates them. (149-50)

To be European, then, is to refuse Eurocentrism. 

For this reason Brague concludes this essay with the observation that “non-Europeans”—immigrants to Europe, counter-European modernities, etc.—may be better positioned than European citizens to become European. “Non-Europeans” are 

Conscious of the distance which separates them from Europe (real or imagined), of that painfully felt distance whose courageous admission has been the mainspring of European dynamism. As a result, it could be that Rome is no longer in Rome, and that the “non-Europeans” are fundamentally better able to take on the Roman attitude that has been Europe’s good fortune, and to become more European than those who believe themselves to be already European. (151)

I wonder whether at this point it continues to be useful to speak about Europe at all. But to return to the summer’s seminars, where Europe seemed stubbornly to shape nearly every conversation, I find it helpful to think of European eccentricity, rather than a stable “European” content, as the source of many modern phenomena, whether violent or peaceful, whether continuous or rupturing.

Ryan McDermott is the Director of the Genealogies of Modernity Project, associate professor of medieval literature and culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and founder and faculty director of Beatrice Institute.