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c h a p t e r 3 Thinking the Frontier The Restlessness of the Frontier ‘‘A small county is a country that was once great and remembers it,’’ said Georges Simenon in a short and wonderful story titled Frontiers.1 It is on the frontier that one measures the full and terrible restlessness that runs through human history. The word ‘‘frontier’’ derives from the Latin frons, frontis, ‘front/forehead .’ Frontiers are the places where countries and the human beings who inhabit them meet and stay in front of each other.2 This being in front of each other can mean many things: first of all, looking at the other, learning about him, confronting and understanding what we might expect from him. But the existence of the other can be insidious. As in Hegel’s dialectic of ‘‘self-consciousness in self-opposition,’’3 what is up for grabs in this staying in front is recognition. The most restless frontiers are those that are not recognized. It is not by chance that the word front is also used to represent the greatest hostility, as in war-front: It is also at the origin of fronting each other (which is a verb that is used for battles), confront, affront, and frontal, an adjective that in Italy refers almost exclusively to automobile accidents (‘‘frontal,’’ or ‘‘head-on,’’ collisions). Two can be ‘‘fronting’’ each other, like young Americans playing chicken (meaning ‘‘coward’’): Two cars face 41 42 Homo currens each other going at top speed; the winner is the one who does not swerve and move out of the other car’s path. One front excludes another. Frontiers have been and are primarily this: places of division and opposition , places where men confront each other, each keeping an eye on the other. Fronting one another means looking, watching, not turning one’s back. We can only turn our backs on those we trust and whom we do not need to control. The uncertainty of the frontier does not pertain only to borderlands, but it reaches the capital. The doors to the temple of Janus (derived from ianua, door, the frontier between inside and outside the house) were opened in times of war, when one needed to control all the borders: Only a bi-frontal god can look in all directions without running the risk of being assaulted from behind. The true god of borders though was Terminus, the only god who refused to cede his place to Jupiter when a temple was built in the latter’s honor. The statue of Terminus was the only one that remained in the temple of Jupiter: no majesty without the safety of borders. Janus, for his part, oversaw the beginning and end of all things. On the frontier, on the limit, each of us ends and is defined, acquires one’s shape, accepts to be limited by something else that is obviously also limited by us. The end de-limits and the con-fines de-fine. This reciprocity of the ending , this ending into something is inevitable and incurable. The suspicion that the limit is unfair or that it is reputed as such by the other is inseparable from this reciprocal de-limiting, from our ending where the other begins. Its highest and most organized form is the paranoia found in every border, as it is seen on the faces of frontier guards, in their fear armed with machine guns. From every blockhouse one espies a desert of the Tatars,4 and anguish becomes a daily thing. It is as if hypochondria were the only way we might become healthy. When we continuously inspect the borders (even our own, our internal ones) we are like Kafka’s moles: We no longer can distinguish external noises from those produced by our brain and nerves. For this reason many ghosts wander on the borders, and enemy maneuvers blend in the fog with the maneuvers of the mind and of fear. Recently geopolitics has come back into fashion, a subject that pertains to the interests that countries have in foreign policy, their territorial rivalries , and the contrast between existing borders and those some countries wish to have. It pretends to oversee the perennial and terrible restlessness that men have about the limes,5 and it offers itself as a rational remedy to their incurable diffidence. But, maybe, all it does is augment it. There are disciplines that are as inevitable as nightmares. [18.222.108.18] Project MUSE...

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