Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization by Massimo Cacciari

Author:Massimo Cacciari [Cacciari, Massimo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Political Science, Civics & Citizenship, History & Theory, Globalization
ISBN: 9780823267163
Google: hlM2yQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 26267237
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE MYTH OF THE GROWING CITY

The mythos—together with the rituals and the cults that accompany it—brings to presence that origin which is the foundation of the present state: it makes origin present and reveals at the same time that the present time is still contained in its origin. The myth is therefore always the result of a “work,” a narration that discerns, interprets, and imagines. There is no myth that is not mythology, and there is no mythology that by means of intervening on its own material does not become an act of mythmaking (mythopoiesis).1 More generally, no memory exists that is not imagination and the perpetual re-creation of the past.

Mythology, this work of interpretation-transformation-metamorphosis, establishes any associated order, any pact (foedus) endowed with real virtue. A political order that ignores its own origin appears to be without a foundation. At best, only a simple, contingent cohabitation (synoikia) can stand without a proper mythos, but this is not true of a political reality, nor a polis, and certainly not a civitas. Could or can the modern national state exist without its own myth? Can that paradoxical rootless community that we are today still narrate its own origin? Can it reimagine its own mythos? Of our states only history remains, but the writing of history (historein) will never be able to represent that character that is not ephemeral and not transitory and that supports and shapes (in-forms) the becoming of the city. In fact, historein ultimately aims to destroy precisely the validity of that foundation that the mythos “imagined.” History, by its nature, demythologizes.

Neither polis nor civitas can be imagined in their substance, disembodied of their founding mythos. This, in fact, is what the mythos says: who founds the city? Which demon or character guarantees its power? In other words, only the origin (arché) is myth’s true champion. Still, how are we to understand the arché? How can it be portrayed? The well-known passage from Book 5 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics speaks of the different ways of predicating the arché. It is the beginning but also the first and immanent cause, and it is also the most essential and original part of a being. Furthermore, it is also what guides and rules a process, and it is the principle of a knowledge as well as the premise of the demonstration of that knowledge. It certainly isn’t easy in reconciling these definitions. To be sure, arché appears as what explains a process (and therefore what remains stable as the foundation of the history of a city). Nonetheless, this potentiality in no way coincides, necessarily, with the origin of the same process. What guides and rules, what holds supreme command is not as a matter of course manifested as the first in chronological order. Therefore, the tenet (principium) that must be recognized as the most important part (potissima pars) of everything does not necessarily sum up in itself the character of the first (primum) and highest (summum).2

What power or force, then, guarantees the life

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