Repetition and Inscription in Europe’s Dream-Land

Abstract

In Against the Double Blackmail, his recent collection of essays on the contemporary global crisis, Slavoj Žižek argues that what we need is a Wiederholung of Europe. He writes, “through a critical engagement with the entire European tradition, one should repeat the question, ‘What is Europe?,’ or, rather, ‘What does it mean for us to be Europeans?,’ and, in doing so, formulate a new vision.” In this paper, I explore how such a retrieval-through-repetition of “Europe” is already taking place in the set of traits, marks and other traces carved by the footsteps of refugees and asylum seekers in their passage from the south to the north. If, in Žižek’s book, the “European tradition” is synecdochically presented as the twin figures of Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley, this is because, foreclosing in advance all possibility of escape, these writers staged the original Northern fantasy to which today’s refugees assert their rights. It turns out that “Dream-Land” or Ultima Thule was, from the outset, a logic of inscription. From this perspective, the act of seeking refuge would be a form of “thinking through one’s feet,” as Lacan once scandalously put it, with the text being emplotted as “Europe” the unconscious of that thought.