In Praise of Exile

Abstract

My contribution is in three parts. First, I will sketch a phenomenology of uprooting and exile. Uprooting is a devastating event because you have to separate yourself overnight from something that, for as long as you can remember, has been an important part of your identity. Yet, philosophically there is something “redeeming” about it: when your “old world” has vanished, you are suddenly given the chance to experience another. Indeed, what you eventually get is not just a “new world”, but the insight that the world is something you can dismantle and piece together again. In the second part, I will look at the process of re-making of the self that accompanies exile through the lens of a specific experience: the change of language. When she starts writing in the new language, the world is born anew to the writer. Yet the most spectacular rebirth is her own. In the final part, I will explore the link between exile and marginality: the exiled artist, writer or philosopher is in privileged position to subvert the mainstream, challenge the canon, and thus produce novelty.