Document Type
Essay
Abstract
[First paragrap]
I find myself in an unsettling position, as I do not know where to begin to talk about a philosophically neglected topic: exile. I cannot hide behind the famous names of the tradition; I cannot speak through them about exile in order to make my inquiry sound more legitimate since most of them did not address the topic. Isn't it interesting though that my inability to know where to start and the lack of legitimacy that I feel are in themselves two typical symptoms of the exiled? In all fairness, "exile" has become a buzzword and is fashionable in academic circles. As Eva Hoffman recently put it, "today, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands-uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse" [1]. To be clear, exile here means displacement. Politically banished, forced emigrants, involuntary nomads, refugees others who have lost their place are regrouped here, for practical purposes, under the one category of "exile." Place does not only refer to a land, but to what gives people an identity, which if "it is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create" [2]. In other words, place must be broadly understood as that which gives a shared identity. The exiled and the dis-placed are those who have lost that common ground.
Repository Citation
Erfani, Farhang. "Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss3/3
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