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Part of
Controversies in the Contemporary World
Edited by Adriano Fabris and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 15] 2019
► pp. 217–239

Chapter 12
The ruins of the political

Thoughts about the concept of “border”

According to Carl Schmitt, the main premise of Western political thought is the idea of the “border” between “friend” and “enemy”: one’s “ownness” is always founded in its difference from the “otherness”. However, after the end of the Cold War, the Western world abandoned these categories, choosing for itself an “open identity” and the new myth of a completed universalism. As a result, the idea of “border” fell into ruin. Nevertheless, during the last Crisis the former conceptuality came back into fashion. Many political forces and opinion makers identify Globalization itself, and the universalistic vocation of our culture, as the reasons for the material and spiritual decay of the Western world: refusing to distinguish the others from us, finally we became unable to recognise ourselves. Therefore, the critics of the “open identity” propose a return to the “old borders” of the Western identity and a strong defence of its roots: The Holy Bible and the Judeo-Christian culture. The aim of this paper is to examine the problems of these controversies between the universalistic vocation and the new identity claim of the Western world, answering these questions: (1) What are the implications of ruined human artefacts and concepts? (2) How did it happen that the conceptuality of “border” fell into ruin? (3) Why is that ruined conceptuality now important again? (4) How can the Bible and the Judaic-Christian culture be useful to solve the controversy about Western identity?

Keywords: ruins, border, Berlin Wall, Tower of Babel, otherness, Christianity, Judaism, enemy, identity, community
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“Stranger things”
  • 3.The ruined border
  • 4.Wall and tower
  • 5.“Deliver me, o Lord, from mine enemies!”
  • 6.The twins’ story
  • Notes
  • Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe
  • References
Published online: 7 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.15.13bia
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