Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered

On the Metaphysics of Exile

ON THE METAPHYSICS OF EXILE j Stefan Rossbach Since it was terror and disturbance and instability and doubt and division, there were many illusions at work by means of these, and [there were] empty fictions, as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either [there is] a place to which they are fleeing, or without strength they come [from] having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not have wings. From the Gospel of Truth According to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, exile marks a crucial moment in human history. Genesis 3 tells us how Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden with consequences affecting the whole of human existence. And yet the account given in Genesis appears to fall short of providing a metaphysics of exile because it does not consider exile as a constitutive feature of the human condition. Exile is presented as a punishment that was inflicted on Adam and Eve as a consequence of their actions. The text does not state that these actions were an inevitable expression of the human condition and seems to imply, therefore, that exile came to affect human life ON THE METAPHYSICS OF EXILE 77 as a contingent event. However, there are many competing religious and philosophical symbolisms in which the significance of exile is dramatized to the point where exile is not the result of human decisions but rather a condition that defines human existence as such. Some of these symbolisms even allow for an inverse reading of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve’s disobedience is celebrated as humanity’s first revolution against their oppressive creators, as the beginning of an inevitable process of emancipation. The wide range and significance of the symbolisms that correlate exile and human existence lead us to explore the nature of this correlation. Why should exile be constitutive of human existence? This is a profound question and it must be made clear from the start that this essay cannot do much more than scratch at the surface of some of the issues involved. Our starting point is the assumption that the truth of human existence, as it is articulated at a given time and in a given place, is always grounded in experience.1 Thus, the condition of exile can play such a prominent role in human self-understanding only to the extent that it resonates with the concrete experiences of concrete people. Therefore, if we want to understand the metaphysics of exile, we must explore the experiential context in which it arose. Historically we find that narratives of exile gained credibility especially in the wake of imperial expansion and the concomitant displacement of peoples. This essay will look at two examples of narratives of exile stemming from what Eric Dodds called the “age of anxiety” in late antiquity—the years between the emperors Aurelius and Constantine, “when the material decline was steepest and the ferment of new religious feelings most intense.”2 Our first example is Plotinus’s narrative of emanation, epistrophe and ekstasis; our second example is a sheaf of narratives known as gnosticism, which includes the inverse reading of Genesis mentioned earlier. The main purpose of this essay, however, is to suggest that the analysis of late antiquity is instructive in that it helps us understand our contemporary age of exile. In the concluding section, we aim to apply the concepts that emerged from our review of ancient narratives of exile and their experiential context to the present. This application assumes the form of an analogy that is fairly straightforward in its political aspects—empires and globalization— but perhaps somewhat surprising in its religious and philosophical aspects. For we will argue that we can find narratives of exile in poststructuralist and postmodern thought that are analogous to Plotinus’s negative theology and gnosticism. We will briefly discuss Jacques Derrida’s work as an example 78 STEFAN ROSSBACH of contemporary gnosticism, which presents a metaphysics of exile in the disguise of an exile from metaphysics. As an implication of our analysis, we suggest that the most profound aftermath of exile, migration, and diaspora can be found in the manner in which these experiences shape our...