Re-imagining Europe: local imaginaries, affect and the ever-thorny question of a continental identity [Bilingual edition: Spanish – English]

Abstract

Imagining Europe is a much harder task than it might initially seem, particularly, one might say, at the current historical conjuncture. This article aims to make a small contribution to what seems to be an increasingly perplexing and multi-faceted—if by no means new—debate concerning what it might mean to be—or feel, rather—European at the current moment: one that can be characterised as a moment of “crisis” in which internal clefts fissuring their way across the collective continental fabric have led to a retrenchment of surprisingly resurgent internal (read: national) frontiers and placed strain on what political philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, advocated as the possibilities of the “postnational constellation.” Taking as its case study a set of cultural expressions that engage with European identity in local imaginaries by way of exhibiting spectral figures (present absences that denote a range of social constructions of invisibility) in public space, this article seeks to elucidate the importance of the experiential and affective dimension to being — “being” (re)calibrated in this case as “feeling,” or “becoming”—European. Its aim is twofold: first, to consider how theoretical notions informing the affect and spectral “turns” in the humanities and social sciences interconnect to provide a fruitful approach to better understanding the way in which individuals imagine Europe from a subjective and local position; second, how the experiential and affective interactions that are produced through the act of seeing or reading the works of art in question encourage different ways of cultivating empathic ties for a new sense of community, thus contributing to a shift in paradigm where collective identity is concerned. The main artists cited are as follows: sculptors, Bruno Catalano, David Cerny and Lorenzo Quinn; the Empathy Museum performance collective; author, Antonio Muñoz Molina.