Abstract
This chapter attempts to articulate what the political logics of an uncolonial—as distinct from a pre- or postcolonial—imagination would look like. The trajectory for this attempt takes various forms by which an uncolonial imagination could be sketched, which will be identified here with three broad themes: resemblance, choice, and the hidden. What “binds” these points of imaginary triangulation is the relational context that they create, which I would here identify as being thalassic rather than spatial. Unlike the notion of space as a receptacle, the thalassic prompts us to consider a hermeneutic approach that implies both a confluence of horizons and also a groundless state of affairs. Here definitions remain contingent to the relational patterns that emerge from the political “logics” by which resemblance, choice, and the hidden construct peculiar subjective economies. This chapter will draw from a reading of two Mediterranean authors, Leonardo Sciascia and Nikos Kazantzakis. Sciascia frequently identifies the notion of an order of resemblance (l’ordine delle somiglianze) within the making of the Sicilian culture. Kazantzakis’s work (particularly that inspired by the figure of Christ) often runs on the binary track of heresy and the apocryphal, which recall airesis (choice) and apochryphos (hidden). Taking the basic elements of these forms of argument, it is here proposed that because of—and notwithstanding—its immersion in a history of colonial strife, the Mediterranean (thalassic) imagination has also entertained and cultivated a sense of the quotidian which maintained an essentially uncolonial essence by way of the same aporias that define it as being critically Mediterranean.
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Notes
- 1.
In an interview with Andrew Horton, Theo Angelopoulos mentions a very interesting discussion he had with Andrei Tarkovsky on how the Russians and Greeks each claim special ownership of nostalgia in their aesthetic imaginary (Angelopoulos 1997).
- 2.
For a discussion of my concept of exiting and the polis, see Baldacchino (2012).
- 3.
Sciascia’s word for this measure, scandaglio, is an instrument used by sailors to measure the sea’s depth.
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Parts of this chapter are from a paper originally read at the “Thalassic Imaginaries” Conference held at the University of Malta, January 2015. It is dedicated to Nikos Chircop.
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Baldacchino, J. (2018). Resemblance, Choice, and the Hidden: Mediterranean Aesthetics and the Political “Logics” of an Uncolonial Subjective Economy. In: elhariry, y., Talbayev, E. (eds) Critically Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7_9
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