Beirut was founded in 5000 B.C. She has repeatedly experienced devastation. But each time the phoenix is reborn from her ashes. The dead, on the other hand, will not return. And here, those who are not dead are deadened in some way. Home is sick.
Yet there are treasures that remain immune. These treasures safeguard our relationship to the essential. This time, homes exploded. But not the particular way of inhabiting them which makes us what we are. As a famous German philosopher reminds us, the dwelling shapes human behavior, in that it determines a singular way of being in relation to oneself, to others, to things, to gods, and to the world.
This dwelling makes possible cohabitation, and is its undoing. Through the political sharing of the house is born the possibility of a peaceful neighborhood with other houses; our tendency to hospitality towards the stranger; and the hospitality owed to us by hosts when we become the stranger.
However, the fundamental trait of the present world, wherever you are, is that it has become uninhabitable: the desert grows! Thus spoke Zarathustra. The world is becoming filthy, otherworldly in this tragic sense of destroying the possibility of a home; it is a world that demands a Promethean vigilance to keep the hearth fire lit — without it exploding on us.
But even now, it is ultimately language that defines our way of being (dwelling) in the world. The languages that we speak with each other are our home. Hannah Arendt, having emigrated to the US, considers that her true homeland is the German language.
What do we have of our own? What is properly ours, that cannot be snatched away without altering our essence, without alienating us? Who are we, as inhabitants, past and present, of Ashrafieh, Gemmayze and Mar Mkhail? Not only did we live in lodgings there, but our way of being was, through-and-through, determined by his particular feature of our behavior as speaking beings; the essential nature of our friendly relationship with the world: our ability to dwell in a plurality of languages.
Since I’m referring to neighborhoods of Beirut that were among those shattered by the explosion — Ashrafieh, Gemmayze, Mar Mkhail — I apologize to the reader for the partiality of one who speaks here in a particular idiom (the Queen’s english) while talking about the multiple languages spoken by these particular Beiruters.
I’m not attempting a socio-linguistic map of the city. But perhaps I am searching for a therapeutic-pharmacological avenue. A philosopher who left us the day after the latest explosion in Beirut, Bernard Stiegler, placed the french words penser and panser together — ‘to think’ and ‘to care for’ — to heal wounds. It comes down to curing evil. We have a nostalgic relationship to the world itself and to the languages of the world. In Greek, algos is pain; we speak of nostalgia — in French the word carries the sense of home-sickness.
In the pain of this nostalgia resides our ache to care for the world; and to dwell in any world is to enact our care for the plurality of its languages. To have a nostalgic relationship to language is to take pleasure in one‘s words and phrases: one enjoys uttering. In our neighborhoods, is not uncommon for us to laugh out loud at language and its signifiers; at figures of speech which remind our memory of the incongruity of certain sounds, of certain expressions, the way languages play poetically into each other. The distinction between foreign and proper no longer matters here.
As the inhabitants that we are, who manage neither to inhabit nor to have a homeland, our relationship to language is itself a microcosm in the political cosmos — it is a nostalgic relationship. A friend defined nostalgia as the fact of remaining on the threshold of home and never being able to enter it. We remain at the threshold because we inhabit several languages.
Each of us has a foot in one country, the heart in another, the head in a third… We are always already emigrants on the spot, expatriates in the homeland (1). We are not defined by an absence of identity but a fragmented, contrasting, plural identity.
One might think that the predominance of French in these districts of Beirut is a sign of a cultural mimicry, a complex of the colonized, incapable of inhabiting a world proper to himself.
But the characteristic of our inhabitation is precisely to have given up on any monopoly of the proper, and learned — through our own proprietary language games — to release the tension created by such property.
No authority can assign us a single identity. In which of our many natural languages would that dictate it? We embrace pluralism. For Nietzsche the Greeks were the ‘Europeans’ of their time: they had nothing of their own and appropriated everything from the stranger. Thus Beiruters are the true Europeans of today.
(1) But it’s a certain unique linguistic constellation that is taking shape.
The language that speaks depends on the speaker we are dealing with. Each language is associated with a face and a voice.
– French spoken by women to children.
– English spoken with the house staff.
– Lebanese Arabic spoken by men or spoken by adults among themselves.
– Classical Arabic spoken by politicians and journalists on TV.
– As a result the emerging of the Franglibanais which combines all these languages.