European proxies. Our European laughter. And what do we know of Europe! We’ve never even been to Europe! Never participated in the French exchange. Never holidayed in the Mediterranean. Never sailed down the Danube. Never hiked in the Alps. In the snowfields of Switzerland. Never caught a cable car up to the peaks in Saas Fe.
We have to retrieve a new Europe. Our own Europe. We have to repeat Europe, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Re-take it. Farcically. Let it live again, in our own way.
A way of reappropriating the European past. A way of reliving the past in the present. A past that we never lived! That wasn’t ours to reappropriate!
A farcical repetition. Not the return of old Europe as old Europe. Not a retrieval of the possibilities of old Europe. Not a restoration of the possibilities of old Europe, not making it possible again. Not the rearticulation of a past we could never attain. Not re-experiencing the European past in a different way, in a way that responded to what is needed in our time, in our present.
A farcical repeating, that meant only the impossibility of retrieval. That showed only the irrelevance of the old times. Of the European past.
Work in Progress 