"Exile" refers to being outside, to a separation or distance from a place to which one feels a sense of belonging: city, country, territory, community. It comes from Latin. exilium and it is usually associated with exile and, therefore, can be linked to ostracism (from the Greek ostrakismos), with the condemnation that entails exile for political reasons related to dishonor, to unvirtuous behavior. The precedent of exilium es exsilire ("jump out") which refers to the Greek phugéwhich means "flight," "escape" (also from a battle), and finally "exile." The term is almost identical in other related languages, see exile (English), exile (French), exile (Italian) or Exile (German).

We can then think of exile as circumstantial—ostracism usually had a time limit and was motivated by some specific behavior—and negative, since it prevents a person or group of people from being in the place to which they belong. This feeling of belonging, beyond its legal recognition, is crucial for our political culture. The very term "politics" is related to life in the city, to integration into a community called polis which is based not only—or not so much—on territory, but also on linguistic, cultural, moral, and ethical aspects. The well-known passage of the Politics Aristotle's statement that the nature of human beings is precisely to belong to a city, understood as a political community, is eloquent enough:

From all this it is evident that the city is one of the natural things, and that man is by nature a social animal [politikón zôion], and that the unsocial being by nature and not by chance is either an inferior being or a superior being to man.

Like the one whom Homer reviles: without tribe, without law, without home, Because he who is such by nature is also a lover of war, like an isolated piece in the game of checkers.

The reason why man is a social being, more than any bee and any gregarious animal, is obvious: nature, as we say, does nothing in vain, and man is the only animal that has speech.

For the voice is a sign of pain and pleasure, and that is why other animals also possess it, because their nature extends to experiencing pain and pleasure and indicating it to one another. But speech is for expressing what is beneficial and harmful, as well as what is just and unjust. And this is what is unique to humankind compared to other animals: to possess, alone, the sense of good and evil, of justice and injustice, and of other values; and the communal sharing of these things constitutes the home and the city.

By nature, then, the city is prior to the house and to each one of us, because the whole is necessarily prior to the part. (Aristotle, Polity, 1253a 3-13)

If we accept Aristotle's view, few things seem more serious than being excluded from participation in one's political community. Exile or banishment, however, can occur voluntarily for economic or military reasons, because the land or homeland one leaves has been occupied or offers no guarantees of survival: the exile or migrant departs, but a part of them continues to feel connected to their place of origin, which manifests itself as melancholy, nostalgia, or saudade.

Exile, or the condition of being exiled, can also refer to an entire community, perhaps organized around some other kind of political bond, but fundamentally held together by the possibility of returning to their homeland. Perhaps one of the clearest examples in our culture is that of the Jewish community, whose situation, curiously, is often described with a term of Greek origin, "diaspora." The turbulent political and economic reality of the globalized world has migration as one of its most prominent characteristics, so today the term could be applied to the millions of people who are forced to leave their place of birth or residence and who constitute a veritable world on the move. Countries like Australia or the United States could be said to have their origins in populations exiled from other parts of the world. Indeed, one of the canonical novels of contemporary American literature—The grapes of wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck - revolves around the journey to California of a farming family from Oklahoma who are forced to leave their land due to the ecological crisis of the 1930s known as Dust Bowl, when successive dust storms, drought, overexploitation of the land and the progressive mechanization of agricultural practices pushed the poverty to thousands of families.

At dusk something strange happened: the twenty families became one, the children ended up being everyone's children. pérdida The loss of home was transformed into a single loss, and the golden dream of the West was just one dream. And it could be that a child's illness filled the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people, with despair; that a birth in a tent kept a hundred people stunned and silent throughout the night, only to be filled in the morning with the joy of the new birth. A family that the night before had felt lost and terrified would rummage through their belongings to find a gift for the newborn. fall In the afternoon, seated around the campfires, the twenty of them became one. They formed a unit of the camps, of the sunsets and the nights. A guitar would appear wrapped in a blanket… and the songs, which belonged to everyone, would fill the nights. The men sang the lyrics and the women hummed the melodies.

Every night a whole world was created, with all its elements: friendships were made and enmities sworn; a whole world with braggarts and cowards, with quiet men, humble men, kind men. Every night the relationships that make up a world were established; and every morning the world was dismantled like a circus. (Steinbeck, 2002, 280-281)

If we understand the exile As a form of distance, this can also be considered within the supposed homeland, but not, as in the case we just cited, imposed more or less by economic reasons or those related to survival. Rather, there can be forms of exile that resemble a voluntary disconnection, a distancing that is sometimes more mental and experiential than physical. Certain philosophical movements, such as the Cynics or the Epicureans, can be interpreted as forms of voluntary exile by certain communities that are critical of their social group of belonging and from which they decide to separate themselves. This finds its more contemporary counterpart in various currents—often significantly labeled "countercultural"—that are organized around the rejection of prevailing social conventions, develop their own codes, and construct their identity based on this exercise of self-exclusion, as may be the case with the beatniks or the hippie movement and, on another level, sects or urban tribes. Movements as disparate as the more or less organized bohemian scene, artistic avant-gardes, street gangs, certain mystical currents or certain behaviors related to drug use can also be analyzed from the perspective of exile.

From the Romantic period onward, the figure of the individual who doesn't quite fit into society is celebrated and often ends up functioning as a prerequisite for being considered an artist. The Romantic hero, the dandy, the flâneurThe solitary traveler, the adventurer, the cursed poet, the intellectual, or the philosopher end up exercising a form of radical foreignness, behaving as permanent exiles with respect to the society of their time: the outsiderThe individual who dissents or resists being assimilated by the social consensus ends up becoming a paradigm of a creative or interesting person. There is, however, a whole tradition of specific situations of expatriation linked to artistic production, such as that fertile Paris of the 1920s teeming with Anglo-American exiles, so well portrayed by Ernest Hemingway in Paris was a party (and from which Woody Allen draws inspiration for his film) Midnight in ParisOr, as in the case of writers like Joseph Conrad, Gombrowicz, Samuel Beckett, or Nabokov, who built their careers far from their homeland and in a language that wasn't their own. In fact, the American cultural hegemony that emerged after World War II cannot be explained without the exodus of European intellectuals who found refuge and a welcoming home in that country, something that the title of the exhibition perfectly captures in the field of visual arts. How New York stole the idea of ​​Modern Art, by Serge Guilbaut. There would therefore be a kind of pendulum movement between the United States and Europe that shows the existing correspondence between exile and artistic creation.

The United States places strange demands on its fiction writers. Their art isn't enough; we expect them to provide role models, so intensely that we sometimes judge them more by their lives than by their work. We like it when they declare themselves part of a movement or a generation, because it simplifies how we plan to use them. If they present us with a manifesto, we take it as a legally binding contract.

Thus it happens that, at least since Henry James, Europe has been considered by Americans as a great source of inspiration and, whether actually carried out or not, expatriation sometimes becomes a duty. (Gifford, B. and Lee, L., 2006, 13)

We do not believe we are dealing here with a phenomenon that is circumscribed locally and temporally, but rather that a large part of Western literature can be organized around exile as a theme, something that allows us to group the Odisea, The Aenidamedieval poems such as The Wanderer, The Divine Comedy18th-century works such as Young Werther's Sorrows, the rich tradition of travel literature and more contemporary variants such as On the Road by Kerouac, Towards wild routes by Krakauer, the road moviesor a not insignificant part of science fiction. One can also consider the biographical dimension of many writers who opted for some form of voluntary exile—as in the case of Thoreau or Tolstoy—but exile can also be seen as a compositional scheme, almost as a condition of intelligibility underlying existentialist proposals or the so-called "theater of the absurd," but also the work of authors like Hemingway, PersonKafka, Rilke, or Nietzsche. Isn't the self-proclaimed untimely nature of the latter's proposal a declaration of exile, an exercise in dissent or resignation from his country, his culture, his contemporaries, and his present? Isn't this sought-after and chosen distance almost a prerogative of the artist and of those who dedicate themselves to reflection?

Only those who possess more will than intelligence, or more impulsiveness than reason, participate in the real life of the world. “Disjecta membra,” said Carlyle, “is what remains of any poet, or of any man” (Pessoa, 2009, 41)

At this point, we might be in a position to ask ourselves whether exile isn't the inherent and definitive condition of humankind. Certainly, this is something that arises at the very origin of our culture, in compositions such as... Gilgamesh Poem or, even more clearly, in the expulsion from Paradise narrated by GenesisTraditionally, human beings have viewed themselves as an exception, as an element that doesn't quite fit into the same taxonomy as the rest of nature. Although this exceptionalism has been questioned for some time now, seemingly disparate disciplines such as religion, psychoanalysis, and philosophy have built their approaches on this premise. Perhaps one of the most forceful proposals in this regard is that of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose ontological framework can be interpreted from the perspective of exile. Thus, for the author of being and time the crucial aspects of being human (To be there) would be precisely his condition as an exile with respect to being (Being), its character as a daring project (geworfener Entwurfto the world, something reflected in his way of being, radically different from all other beings, since he is the only one who exists. Heidegger emphasizes this difference by forcing the very spelling of the verb "to exist," and speaks of the human being "ex-sisting," relating it to ecstasy, to being outside oneself. We can also relate to exile his positive assessment of Marx's use of the term alienation (usually translated as "alienation", but, for our purposes, it may be more interesting to opt for "estrangement").

Seen in this light, exile would point not only to a passing circumstance motivated by a specific situation, but to a stable disposition, to an ambivalent anthropological constant that can become melancholy, estrangement and renunciation of what is most characteristic of human beings - which would be life in community - but from which some of our greatest achievements in the cultural, artistic and reflective sphere also come.

Bibliography

Aristotle 1988. PoliticsMadrid: Gredos

Becker, H. 2018. Outsiders: Towards a Sociology of DevianceTres Cantos: 21st Century Spain

Corominas, J. 1987. Brief etymological dictionary of the Castilian languageMadrid: Gredos

Gifford, B. and Lee, L. 2006. The Book of Jack: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac Barcelona: Planet

Guillén, C. 2007 (1998). Multiple dwellings. An essay in comparative literatureBarcelona: Tusquets

Heidegger, M. 2012. being and timeMadrid: Trotta

Heidegger, M. 2013. Letter on HumanismMadrid: Alianza

Liddell, H.G. and Scott, R. 1983 (1843). A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Royal Spanish Academy: Spanish dictionary, 23rd ed., [online version 23.3]. https://dle.rae.es [13/10/2020].

Steinbeck, J. 2002. The grapes of wrathMadrid: Cátedra

Index of illustrations:

Fig. 1: Dorothea Lange, Migrant mother1936. Image available from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg

Fig. 2: Dust jacket of the first edition of The grapes of wrath, 1939, by John Steinbeck. Design by Elmer Hader. Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Grapes_of_Wrath_(1939_1st_ed_cover).jpg