On a stasis of memory

or disrupting the postliminium

[Publication: Vassilios Paipais (ed.), Theology and World Politics. Metaphysics, Genealogies,
Political Theologies (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 211-233 (chapter 9)]

Ilias Papagiannopoulos

Introduction

In departing from theories that would simply oppose, within a binary structure, the
First and the Third world, the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’, the postcolonial
perspective, as it has been elaborated in recent years, ‘forces a recognition of the more
complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed
political spheres’ (Bhabha 2004, 248). From such a hybrid location of cultural value,
it would be possible to acknowledge that ‘encounters and negotiations of differential
meanings and values within “colonial” textuality […] have anticipated, avant la lettre,
many of the problematics of signification and judgement that have become current in
contemporary theory - aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive
closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge of “totalizing”
concepts […]’ (ibid.). A colonial contramodernity would be at work in the eighteenth
and nineteenth century matrices of Western modernity, which would question the
linear narrative of a historicism that links late capitalism and the fragmentary,
pastiche symptoms of postmodernity. Cultural contingency and textual indeterminacy
generated in the attempt to produce an ‘enlightened’ colonial or postcolonial subject
would be excluded from those narratives and their understanding of modernity. A
certain kind of ‘dialectical thought’ would be necessary instead, capable of indicating
an otherness constituting ‘the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications’
(ibid. 249-250).
Modern Greece is a specific case of ‘crypto-colonialism’, as Michael Herzfeld
has suggested (Herzfeld 2002). It would, moreover, be linked to a peculiar
colonization of the occidental past itself, of its own origin and cultural history in other
words. This twofold nature, being a buffer zone between colonized lands and those as
yet untamed, as Herzfeld points out, on the one hand, but also, simultaneously,
representing at a symbolic level the innermost kernel of Western identity, on the
other, such a structural duality that corrupts the clear-cut distinction between the
central and the liminal, is here decisive. Its dramatic ambiguity is particularly
apparent in the case of the relation of the German world of the nineteenth century to
the concrete historic reality of Modern Greece, when the immaterial visions of an
ideal Greek antiquity capable of functioning as a projection of an own origin gave
suddenly way to an accessible, concrete materiality. The German travels to Greece
during that period testify often to a highly diffusing experience, since it would be
perceived as oscillating between an escape into the ideal and the return of that ideal in
an alienating, uncanny experience of sameness. Meeting Bhabha’s remarks, it is then
possible to trace within the corpus of that travel literature aspects of an emergence of
cultural otherness at work. Aspects, which become apparent at the very fissures of the
texts, and which are often overlooked by the prevailing histories of ideas, but offer,
nevertheless, alternative archival logics and, thus, alternative genealogies of the
present. And it is precisely a messianic thought, one that undermines in the most
radical way a linear and continuous vision of historical time, which helps elaborating
such genealogical endeavors and a different thought on memory as well as its deeply
political character. An example of a text from that travel literature which permits such
a reading and of its resonance with texts, seemingly distanced, from contemporary
discourse on the character and the perspectives of modern politics, such a network of
privileged connections so familiar to messianic thought, gives rise to the following
thoughts.

A remote scene

In February of 1842 a man called Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer, a passionate historian

from South Tirol engaged in the academic scene of Germany, was entering horseback
the Greek territory. He was in Thessaly, at a place of labyrinthine hills, where, as he
mentions in his travelling notes, the roman dominance over Greece begun at 197 B.C.,
with the victory of Titus Quinctius Flamininus over Philipp V of Macedon
(Fallmerayer 2013, 334). By naming the place, Fallmerayer helps his reader, more
familiar with ancient rather than with modern Greece, to connect with geography and
the ambience of the landscape. But at the same time, antiquity returns in this narration
exactly in order to demonstrate the radical gap that separates it from the present; in
order to be made clear that its repetition can only have the form of a farcical scene.
Nevertheless this reversal is crucial. Because it raises the disquieting question whether
perhaps it is only through a ridiculous and yet bitter return that a glorious past and its
memory disclose, under the guise of the ancients, the true face of history. Whether, in
other words, there is no first time apart from its uncanny, spectral return as a second
one.
Fallmerayer and his guide lost their orientation between those hills. The
scenery was ‘empty of men’; only a solitary crane standing on the water watched
them go by. And as Fallmerayer takes out his compass, his horse makes a ‘false step’
und falls, with him on top, at a swampy spot, into mud. But the horse seemed in a
curious way to incarnate the very thoughts of its rider, since, just five pages earlier,
Fallmerayer, writing about the ‘Hellenomaniacs’ (Hellenomanen) of his country, was
referring to the ‘Bulgarian mud’ (Bulgarenschlamm), i.e., in his view, to the Slavic
element that intruded and obscured, befogged, Hellenism. As if that swamp and that
mud were mirroring the contaminated human element of Greece, in which not only
the Greek past was irreversibly immersed, but also the German present insofar as it
sought in Greece its own historical and spiritual origin, as well as its role within
contemporary Europe. Yet that is not all, since this power of disorientation and
deterritorialization seemed to be marking not only a territory, a ‘remote zone’ as
Fallmerayer wrote (ibid. 331), but also and foremost a paradoxical historical
subjectivity, internal and external at the same time in relation to ‘Europe’, passive and
active, coming from an immemorial past, but, perhaps, from some kind of future as
well. Being at a border, being the border itself, the swamp seemed to be the place, or
the non-place, of an ambivalent event between mourning and an exposure to an
incalculable disclosure.

Law, territoriality, history

The logic that informs Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth is primarily a spatial one.
Let us remember that for Schmitt the primal act (Ur-Akt) of law is a placing or a
localization (Ortung; Schmitt 1997, 15). Such a placing is equal to a territorial
ordering (Ordnung), an appropriation of land assigning a measurable ground to a
community protected by walls. Community as a whole is, thus, emphatically defined,
both internally and externally at a single stroke, through a supreme ownership
(Schmitt 2006, 45) of that ground - a common ‘radical title’, which would precede the
very difference between imperium and dominium. In other words, localization as
territorial ordering is the archetype (Ur-Typus) of a constitutive legal procedure that
initiates the emergence of a collectivity as such, permitting it to ‘put down roots in the
kingdom of History’s purposefulness’ (das Wurzelschlagen im Sinnreich der
Geschichte; Schmitt 1997, 19). Roots are hidden, yet they permit appearance,
historical existence, actual presence (in a kingdom) - hence visibility too: ‘nomos is
the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes
spatially visible’ (Schmitt 2006, 70). At stake would, then, be a form of visibility as
visibility of a measured and closed territory, a becoming spatial as a becoming visible,
which is not only the quintessence of law/nomos, but the beginning of history as well:
‘In the beginning was the fence’ (ibid. 74).
Territoriality and its visual logic marked for Schmitt the main achievement of
the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the European public law which lasted from the 16 th to
the end of the 19th century and incorporated modernity’s political wisdom. It was
guided by the distinction between two territorial political logics, two logics of the
political as territorial. There was, on the one hand, a European domain where
sovereign states recognized each other as personae publicae, bearing witness to each
other’s structurally similar organizational forms. The very kernel of those forms,
based on the friend/enemy distinction, led them to engage in legitimate wars
according to a jus ad bellum, which were to be formally contained and thus, in a
sense, limited according to a jus in bello. Wars, as well as their restraints, became
internal moments of a mirroring function that was essential here. Precisely the
principle of justus hostis indicated a structural reciprocity and a symmetry between
the belligerent forces, which were for Schmitt not only practically crucial to Europe’s
internal balance, they also provided, at a deeper layer, its fidelity to the ontonomy of
territorial ordering. Symptomatically, the European ground was thus turned into a
‘theater of war’, a theatrum belli: an ‘enclosed space’ wherein ‘politically authorized
and militarily organized states could test their strength against one another under the
watchful eyes of all European sovereigns’ (ibid. 142). Vision again - but also the
condition of the stage, roles, artificiality and mediation in other words. Which perhaps
undermines, at the level of spatiality already, the previous reference to an immediacy
of visibility. As constitutive, nomos might be a violent power unmediated by any
previous rules, an act of legitimacy preceding any legality; yet that does not already
imply an unconditional character in general.
That same inter-European balance permitted, and actually promoted, a
different kind of political and military attitude ‘beyond the line’, beyond a Eurocentric
threshold. By the time, already, of previous global lines, the cultural and political
asymmetry between the European and the non-European had removed from their
relation any kind of normativity. As far as the competing claims of the European
powers to occupation over such ‘free zones’ were concerned, the space beyond
Europe was considered an ‘empty space’ beyond legal bonds, resembling the
condition of the civil war as a naked struggle in a state of nature. Schmitt refers here
explicitly to Hobbes, locating the emergence of the New World as an influence on
Leviathan next to the European civil wars (ibid. 96). In that sense, the conflict zones
beyond the line, ‘a tremendous exoneration of the internal European problematic’
(ibid. 94), are not exactly ‘beyond’, or not only beyond. Because what is at stake here,
is a variation of the state of exception, wherein the beyond, the exterior, is precisely
what is to be internalized by being transformed into an instrument rather than keep
hovering as a sudden event.

Modes of otherness

Schmitt’s main theoretical gesture consists in rejecting and transcending, in politics

and law, the all too clean separation between inside and outside, national and
international, and it is this that makes him appreciate a legal mechanism that
neutralizes both the European other as an alter ego (wherein enmity is secondary to
the formal similarity between the adversaries) and the non-European other, who
remains a passive surface without any possibility of returning or even escaping and
negating the European gaze upon itself. In both cases, interiority and exteriority
merge once more at an indistinguishable threshold.
This becomes particularly evident when one envisages the conception of
discovery, originally embedded in earlier versions of the global lines that nevertheless
remain effective within public law. As such, the discoverer ‘knows his prey better
than the prey knows himself, and is able to subjugate him by means of superior
education and knowledge’ (ibid. 132). Evidence of this regard is cartography, and it
would be ‘a ludicrous anachronism’ to suggest that Indians could have made
cartographic accounts of Europe just as the Europeans made of America.
‘Kartographische Aufnahmen’, Schmitt writes (Schmitt 1997, 103), which would also
be cartographic shots analogous to photographic ones. The European sees - and
transforms the terra incognita to cartographic archives; but, or for that reason
precisely, he can be neither seen nor archived by the subject of a terra incognita.
What makes him visible, is only a reciprocal gaze that verifies his own, an actuality
without passivity - or, rather, a passivity constantly transformed into an actuality.
A different category of political and historical otherness, which is of interest to
us here, also traverses Schmitt’s text: ‘older, non-Christian people’ as Arabs, Turks or
Jews, considered either as hostes perpetui, like the latter ones for example, or not
(Schmitt 2006, 131). Let me, finally, add at this point that the Balkans and Eastern
Europe presented for Schmitt, under the point of view of continuity or not between
Rome and Byzantium, a specific theoretical problem (ibid. 58), exactly because that
territory is not easy to classify within Schmitt’s mapping of sameness and otherness.
In all previous cases, however, it is the same double structure that constructs, for
Schmitt, variations of anarchy and it is its dissolution in the 20 th century that he calls
nihilism: turning in a sense everyone potentially into either a passive surface, or an
outlaw, and thus creating the conditions of an unlimited and global civil war, an -as it
were- orderless absolute order. Within such an order everything should reflect an
ipseity without resistance and everything, at the same time, threatens that ipseity. But
perhaps this is not the only way to understand the breakdown of the modern orders,
nor is it the only variation and perspective of nihilism.

Postliminium

Schmitt seems to neglect the aspect of time in favor of space. Nevertheless, at least
three moments point at a different direction. Citing, at the beginning of Nomos of the
Earth, the essential elements of the public law, he also mentions -next, for example, to
occupatio, aedificatio or munitio, all of them referring to space- postliminium.
Following Latin sources, Grotius writes that postliminium designates ‘the right
accruing to anyone in consequence of his return home from captivity […] Upon this
principle nations have, in general, gone so far, as to allow the right of postliminium to
take place, where any person, or indeed any thing, coming within the privileges of
postliminium, have arrived within the territory of a friendly or allied power’ (Grotius
1901, 351). Whereas the Latin word limen indicates the boundary or entrance of the
house and limes the public boundary, eliminium was a word for exile or banishment.
Both Cicero in Topica 8, 36 and the Theodosian Code of laws (5, 7) indicated that any
Roman captured by an enemy is considered legally dead. Postliminium defines, then,
the right of him who, managing to escape and returning home, may reclaim his
property. It is then a fiction about the restoration of a former condition, about a certain
apokatastasis, as if the homecoming person had never been abroad and no rupture had
ever taken place. But we should add: it is about a return from the dead. As if the
caesura itself (death, rupture, exteriority) was, within such a legal and political
mechanics, its frozen temporality, its similarly frozen unity, expelled as such.
The concept of occupatio bellica, the occupation of enemy territory, points at
a similar direction and it is of no surprise that Schmitt links it directly with jus
postliminium. Technically, it is about a temporary occupation and administration by a
belligerent state on the territory of an enemy state, during an armed conflict and
before a general armistice agreement is concluded. Schmitt insists on the fact that
occupatio bellica, though an ‘effective extension of power’, does not bring along any
change of sovereignty, regime or constitution. On the contrary, its importance lies in
the very fact that it guarantees ‘identity and continuity’ of the occupied state,
belonging thus ‘neither to state- nor to inter-state law’, in a ‘striking parallel’ to the
state of exception (Schmitt 1997, 205-209). In that sense, the state of exception, close
to the logic of postliminium itself, operates as a mechanism to avoid discontinuity - in
other words: a way of establishing a constant mnemonic return from the historic dead.
But continuity is primarily grounded in a theological manner and its crucial
figure is no other than the katechon. ‘The history of the Middle Ages is the history of
a struggle for, not against Rome, Schmitt writes. Emperor and Pope, imperium and
sacerdotium, the two united parts of respublica Christiana, would demonstrate the
continuation of Roman antiquity: ‘The continuity that bound medieval international
law to the Roman Empire was found not in norms and general ideas, but in the
concrete orientation to Rome. This Christian empire was not eternal. It always had its
own end and that of the present eon in view. Nevertheless, it was capable of being a
historical power. The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the
restrainer: katechon. “Empire” in this sense meant the historical power to restrain the
appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon; it was a power that
withholds (qui tenet), as the Apostle Paul said in his Second Letter to the
Thessalonians’ (Schmitt 2006, 59-60). And Schmitt goes on: ‘I do not believe that any
historical concept other than katechon would have been possible for the original
Christian faith. The belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world provides
the only bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human events
and a tremendous historical monolith like that of the Christian empire of the
Germanic kings.’ Such a ‘potent historical power’ and a ‘concrete historical
authenticity’ would have recovered and rescued the ancient unity of Ortung and
Ordnung, bridging the gap of the Hellenistic and oriental destruction of the classical.
It is in the same spirit that Schmitt himself reminds, in a textual performance of
postliminium, the original meaning of nomos as a ‘fence-word’, retrieving it from a
‘later application of the term [which] belongs rather to the linguistic usage of a
declining era that no longer knew how to connect with its origin and beginning’ (ibid.
69, 75).
The katechon inscribes the a-temporal spatial logic of nomos into a double
temporal structure. Appropriation of land is always already an appropriation of its
past and of its future; it takes place not in a pure state of nature, but in an intermediate
state of exception, where the collectivity exists as tanquam dissoluta, in the domain of
an exile both from visible space and measurable, continuous time, a domain within
which a gesture of return becomes possible and, as such, politically constitutive.
Sovereignty and memory demonstrate here their deeper bond. And yet, such a
sovereign mnemonic return seems, at once, to take place only and already within an
‘eschatological paralysis’ of which it is nevertheless a ‘restrain’ - a negation and a
reversal, to be more precise. Such a paralysis might then be a different name for the
present time in its nakedness. An affirmation of such a naked present, perhaps an
affirmative ‘messianic nihilism’, to use an Agambenian expression about Kafka and
Walter Benjamin (Agamben 1998, 53), would amount to a different thought on the
state of exception, one which Benjamin called, in the eighth of his Theses on the
Philosophy of History, a ‘real state of emergency’ (Benjamin 1968, 257). Which
means that such a ‘real’ exception would not be opened up at a different point,
exterior to the domain defined by postliminium; it would only be a rupture from
within it, at its core.

Spectral entities

The name of Fallmerayer (1790-1861) is to be found in every Greek textbook on

Modern Greek history. The national consciousness seemed from the very beginning to
find in Fallmerayer the negative surface it needed in order to reflect itself. And indeed
the first major historical narratives that link modern Greece to the ancient one and
provide thus a national ideology according to the ideas of European classicism,
emerged gradually as a response to Fallmerayer (cf. Paparrigopoulos 2004 [1843]).
Yet, throughout the 20th century there is only a single attempt in the Greek literature
that offers a critical interpretation of his oeuvre (Skopetea 1999). A scholarly
treatment of an internal foreigner of such an importance, of someone who rather
resembles the reversed image of a national writer, was stuck, as peculiar as this might
be, at an early vilified image accountable to the urgent needs of a young state, deeply
insecure about its place in modernity. At the same time, the interest of German
speaking scholars in his work, while remaining generally vivid despite the fact his
work, apart from few exceptions, has not been systematically edited or re-published,
is nevertheless confined mostly within a range of specific historiographic concerns
and their respective debates (important contributions include here Seidler 1947,
Thurnher [ed.] 1993, Leeb 1996, Hastaba/De Rachewiltz [ed.] 2009; Märtl/Schreiner
[ed.] 2013).
Fallmerayer’s central thesis is often put in a nutshell through his infamous
declaration that ‘there isn’t a single drop of pure and genuine Greek blood flowing in
the veins of the Greek people today’ (Fallmerayer 1830, IV). And yet this has been
misleading, since it exhausted all attention to a single question about continuity, be it
biological or cultural, between ancient and modern Greece. It is true that Fallmerayer
himself focused on a suspect historical reconstruction that served his polemical
intentions. Nevertheless, texts often say much more than they intend to. Sometimes
they even engage in struggles against themselves and one has to listen carefully to
their dramatic, polyphonic structure that runs through their epic, monophonic surface.
In the first page, for example, of his aforementioned, seminal History of the peninsula
of Morea during the Middle Ages - First Part, Fallmerayer writes that Modern Greece
is an ‘empty ghost’, an ‘entity that does not exist in the nature of things’. A certain
storm, he continues, one of those that ‘our kind’ has seldom yet seen, made of Greece
a double layer consisting of decay and remains of two new and different human
breeds, Slavs and Albanians, which cover the tombs of the ancient Greeks. At the
same time, he equally declares elsewhere that the reinstitution of Modern Greece was
the most important event of the 19th century (Fallmerayer 1835, 3). Why so, if Modern
Greece is nothing but a fraud? Is it, perhaps, precisely because it is a fraud? Who
would, in that case, be the victim of such an illusion and why would this particular
illusion be so important - who would be in that case the target of Fallmerayer’s
polemics? Could it also be that exactly this storm and this ghost did, or still do if seen
in a specific genealogical perspective, as such say something crucial about ‘our kind’
and our own suspended historical time?

Fallmerayer’s position

Fallmerayer’s historical argument was shaped against the belayed yet powerful
Bavarian Philhellenism. One has to keep in mind the importance of Greece for
German self-consciousness throughout the 18th and the 19th century, and the
adventures of its representations, adventures of which we have today fine and rich
accounts (Marchand 1996; Güthenke 2008). Fallmerayer’s position in that discussion
was supposed to be violent, bold at a certain level and yet full of cultural stereotypes.
Let me briefly summarize his general thesis in his aforementioned History (1830),
without being here concerned with whether he was right, and to what extent, in his
arguments. The ancient Greeks, Fallmerayer writes by insisting on a biological level,
and not only the ancient Greek world or culture per se, gradually disappeared in the
course of three main invasions: firstly by the Romans in the 2nd century B.C., secondly
by the Goths in the 4th and, finally, by the Slavs in the 6th century. He, thus, tells a
story of a ground that became literary empty, a proper terra nullius, as he himself
points out time and again, for example in a direct historical analogy that he proposes
with the Spaniards and West India or South America in the 16 th century (Fallmerayer
1830, 172). And of course, Turks and Albanians are also present in the Greek history,
merging gradually with the Greek population, especially the latter ones, whose
language Fallmerayer will be hearing spoken again and again in his travel to Athens
twelve years later. His analysis in this book is concluded with the return of the
Greeks, which had in the meantime escaped to Asia Minor. They would have now
become Byzantine Christians and returned in that cultural form. As such, they
culturally absorbed anew the Slavs in a Greek version of Christianity, which of course
had nothing, for Fallmerayer, to do with the ancient world. Continuity was broken,
eastern Christianity was a seal on that rupture, and what Europe welcomed in the 19th
century as a true inheritor of ancient Greece was in fact only a hybrid marked by a
crucial deterritorialization that could never heal, a hybrid under a false name.
Germany’s and, thus, Europe’s projection of its own origin and, hence, its own
foundational image onto a historical heterotopia was destined to fail sooner or later.
We are still within the first part of the History of the Peninsula of Morea
during the Middle Ages. One important feature of this narrative is the polarity
between Rome and Athens that Fallmerayer constructs. They represent two opposite
historical logics, Athens as metonymy for spirituality, but also weakness, Rome as the
center of historicity and political power, regardless of a cruelty that seems for him to
go along, sadly yet inevitably, with those features. In that sense, Athens’ destiny
would have been to disappear, whereas Rome’s, on the contrary, to grow. So, if for
Fallmerayer, like for Schmitt later, Rome would serve the role of a true
origin/foundation of the German and, more generally, the European world, the
question about the importance of Athens would have now, in the 19 th century, become
one about the enigmatic importance of a spectral entity.
A second important feature was the fact that the Slavs are thematized to have
invaded Germany as well. But, contrary to the Greek case, they were this time
successfully absorbed by the Germans in every level. Still, what concerned
Fallmerayer are the Slavic toponyms in the German geography - which, if one recalls
for example Machiavelli’s thoughts on the uncanny effect of toponyms estranged by a
parasitic and nomadic kind of intruder in Discourses 2, 8, an intruder whose ideal
leader would bear the name of Moses, still keeps something of its disquieting echo.

Fragments from a travel

Fifteen years after the first volume of his History, Fallmerayer published Fragments
from the Orient, notes from his second travel to the Black Sea, Asia Minor and then to
Greece, along with political and historical reflections that accompanied it. It is this
text that interests me here the most. The nature of Fallmerayer’s worries becomes now
clearer. Nevertheless, it is not so much at the level of the narrative itself that
Fallmerayer wants to construct, where the interest lies for the reading proposed here.
It is primarily at its interstices.
Two moments at an early stage of the text capture our attention: Fallmerayer
has arrived at Trebizond, today’s Trabzon in Turkey and first station of his travel.
When describing the difference between this travel and the ones within Europe,
Fallmerayer remarks that it entails an interim period (Zwischenperiode) at an
unknown ground, where one feels suddenly estranged (Fallmerayer 2013, 42-43). A
state of ‘severe disquiet’ had overwhelmed him, mixed with a particular enthusiasm,
as he intended to spend several lonely months in the ‘most remote corners’ of the
area, engaged in an inquiry that, as he put it, ‘didn’t correspond to the great interests
of the world’: seeking to shed light on the political history of the Trapezuntine
Empire, an ‘unknown byzantine empire enveloped now in shadow’. (ibid. 57, 81).
Where others pass by, he would linger, he writes, adding as an example for this, next
to his visits to the ruins of the Byzantine castle of Trebizond (a castle fragment,
Schloßfragment, ibid. 66), that he would delay in order to dedicate his attention to the
dull and recurrent breaking of the waves - an image from the Black Sea, in which
something of his deeper vision of history seems to be reflected (ibid. 86). He was
constantly roaming with a telescope in his hand, another instrument destined to
capture a kind of cartographic shots. He, a European interested in the history of this
foreign place and its people more than they were themselves (ibid. 131), as he notes,
prefiguring once more the Schmittian analysis. And yet, he had from the very
beginning the presentiment that disappointment would be the result of this long trip,
that he was to find nothing but an ‘estranged city’ (entfremdete Stadt) buried long ago
in forgetfulness (ibid. 43-44). Indeed, no archives where in the end to be found, ‘no
inscription, no sign betrayed the past’ (ibid. 56, 119, 128). The extinction of memory
beyond any possibility of retrieval is a constant theme running through these pages, as
is the case throughout his entire work. But the catastrophes that concern him, both as
an object and as an impediment of his inquiry, as a seal, in other words, on his own
work, are such that humans had caused to humans. Of special concern to him are
deportations and displacements. It was precisely such catastrophes that had already
been shaping the core of his narrative in the History of 1830 and it was them again
that he would now trace anew, like a constant pattern in history, in that remote region
of the Ottoman Empire, as the last episodes of a sinking world. Hence, a twofold
alienation traverses and structures internally these pages: his own from himself and
his environment, in a traveling condition whose inherent destabilization seemed to be
excessively prolonged, and a historical one, culminating in the vision of an estranged
city, a culture and a collectivity irretrievably lost. As if those dimensions where
mirroring each other. To be more precise: as if this unusual travel, firstly, which
produced in him the uncanny (unheimlich) association that he was banished at the end
of the world (ibid. 111), the written fragments, secondly, in which the travel took a
literary form (Fallmerayer was called a fragmentist at his time) and the fragments of
history, or of history’s effacement as history itself, thirdly, formed an internal unity.
As if, to put it differently, his travel and the writing about it were performing history
itself, or were delivered to history’s inherent arrhythmia.
Precisely this multiple mirroring takes a crucial further turn when we notice
that Fallmerayer compares the atmosphere of the mountains, in which he is immersed,
with his Tirolean homeland, thus pointing to a paradoxical return to the origin through
a radical alterity (ibid. 80, 88). In its very forgetfulness of history, in its ahistorical
totality, nature would be here a place of a deep relief, the opposite from the historical
presence and its inherent struggles. Moreover: like a ‘magical mirror’, it would
resemble a lost paradise, escaping the inherent destructive forces of culture (ibid. 135,
156), as Fallmerayer writes in Rousseauian tones. This polarity would take many
different names and find many political and cultural correspondences in Fallmerayer’s
work in general. The one that emerges here and to which we will turn our own
attention next, is Constantinople and Rome, eastern and western Christianity. It is
interesting that the experience of an encounter, nostalgic, sometimes even mystical,
with a deeper occidental origin, which Fallmerayer had in this oriental corner, is a
motif often found in many texts by German speaking travelers in Greece during the
19th and the 20th century, under the influence of romanticism (Meid 2012, Mylona
2014). It is equally interesting that Fallmerayer accords the tense relation between
historicity and the ahistorical a crucial role within Christianity itself and, hence, the
Western world in general. And yet none of these capture the most radical move that
underlies his work in general and this text particularly.

Enemies within

The chapter concluding the first volume of the Fragments from the Orient, dedicated
to theoretical remarks around the metonymic machinery of Constantinople or
Stambul, as he writes referring to today’s Istanbul, is the epicenter of the book. In the
introduction to this chapter already, Constantinople, a ‘big amphibious world’ and the
‘monstrous fortress of the old continent’, is exposed as the focal point of all European
politics and of its future, the very place where Fallmerayer believes the difference
between the historically spectral and the real to be evident (Fallmerayer 2013, 158-
160).
Something uncanny (unheimlich) lies in the fact that every effort to internalize
the byzantine territory into the stream of occidental life remained unfruitful,
Fallmerayer says. This is due to the fact that Constantinople would be, among
Jerusalem and Rome, one of those cities that decide the destinies of the earth.
Foreshadowing Schmitt’s Eurocentrism, Fallmerayer sees in Christianity nothing less
than the ‘biography of the world’ (ibid. 162). But now a different twist follows: all
history would be the effect of a ‘higher necessity’, the internal division of
Christianity’s primal power (Urkraft) between a dynamic ‘process of life’,
corresponding to Rome and western Christianity, on the one hand, and a static
persistence of sameness, corresponding to Constantinople and eastern Christianity, on
the other. Constantinople, the first initially and completely Christian city of the world,
as Fallmerayer does not omit to remind (ibid. 164), would embody, like its
counterpart, Urbs aeterna, an ineffaceable principle of spiritual and political life, a
distinct political theology. As such, it would constantly oppose like a shadow the
occidental light. Its theoretical idea and its hidden, yet perpetual, presence within
history is what Fallmerayer intends to demonstrate here.
Such an inquiry does not have, for Fallmerayer himself, primarily a theoretical
importance; it has an acute political and historical one. For him, it would be the task
of the present historical moment to understand the Byzantine idea of the state, not
only because, as he says, the political character of the Byzantine and the Ottoman
world are actually compatible, but mainly because a deeper threat to the occidental
world and its future shimmers through both of them. If the Ottoman Empire was a
material restoration of its Byzantine predecessor, then only as a provisional phase, a
historical occupatio bellica one might say. The ‘apocalyptic Jerusalem in Bosporus’
would be the place of an underlying struggle between a model of the state based on
the idea of balance and plurality, on the one hand, and another one based on the idea
of unity, on the other (ibid. 164). Imperium and sacerdotium, compassion and furor
teutonicus, freedom and order, private life and public authority, positivistic science
and radical doubt - such would be the polarities that structure the Western primacy of
historical action. Whereas faith and its respective communitarian impulses would
promote a unification premised on a transcendental reality in the East. It is such a link
between ‘ideas’, i.e. deep cultural structures, and historical-political reality that
Fallmerayer intends to exhibit here.
As stereotypical as such schemes might sound today, they are not only to
understand them in their historical context, they are, moreover, still influential in the
public discourse both of the center and of the periphery of Europe, forming both anti-
Western and modernization narratives. But what is more important, here already, is
that by locating a radical opposition and, thus, a certain variation of hostes perpetui
within Christianity itself, Fallmerayer, distancing himself explicitly from a specific
understanding of Hegelian thought, identifies history neither with an unfolding of
plurality, nor with one of unity, but with a unavoidable and insurmountable conflict.
A conflict that contemporary Europe seems, in Fallmerayer’s view, to conveniently
neglect, having surrendered itself to illusions of progress and empty rhetoric. But
there are breaths of wind coming from the Orient, ‘signs of a coming storm’ (ibid.
177), which would be nothing but the return of the internal division of Christianity,
the return of history itself in other words. In view of such a return, Europe and the
German world in particular is called to its deeper, katechontic role. No politics in the
conventional sense is here necessary, but only ‘great decisions’ that correspond to the
‘warm breath of the present’ - and such would be the vision of a material destruction
of Constantinople and the recovery of a politics of power at a threshold resembling
the European line in the Schmittian analysis (ibid. 168, 170, 173).

Impossible restorations
The concrete historical point of reference in Fallmerayer’s analysis is the
disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. It seemed as if the Byzantine world would
remain ‘without testament’ and abandoned for the first time after fifteen centuries
(ibid. 166). This is the moment where Modern Greece enters Fallmerayer’s narrative
anew. Because it is in view of such a disintegration that Europe would all the more
project to Greece the role of a force capable of ordering the chaos in the Balkan
Peninsula. But while true historical subjectivity is accorded to only him who exercises
power and violence, modern Greece is only a weak rubble of Byzantium, whose
visibility in the kingdom of history’s purposefulness, to recall the Schmittian
formulation, is made possible only by ‘political masquerades and scholastic shadows’
in the West, i.e. as the parasitic side-effect of an internal repression. Only an
occidental fantasy would see Greece as being capable of functioning as a barrier to the
Slavic world, of ‘filling the abandoned palaces at the Marmara Sea creatively’ - of
restoring the Orient and guaranteeing peace as a ruling power (ibid. 170-172).
In these lines, an image of Greece as a phantasized and failed ‘restoration
apparatus’, as he calls it, becomes clear. The neo-Hellenes (Neuhellenen) emerge thus
crucially engaged in a scene of a major historical postliminium, precisely at the
moment when Europe faces again a danger inherent to itself and its cultural and
political identity, the moment of a crucial state of exception. But instead of
performing such a return, ‘Greece’, or what it is a metonymy for, seems to be doing
the exact opposite: radicalizing the rupture. When Fallmerayer writes ‘what lives in
Hellas today, is not in Hellas at home’ (ibid. 173), then this has a double meaning.
First, that the people called Hellenes are not descendants of the same old people
bearing that name and thus culturally foreign to modern Europe, as we have already
read in his History of 1830; but also, secondly, that they are not even able to
regenerate the Byzantine element either. The latter cannot be revived from within, but
only through the emergency presented by the Slavic world and especially Russia: ‘the
restoration of Byzantium cannot be Hellenic, it can’t even be Byzantine; it can only
be Slavic-Greek (slavo-gräkische)’ (ibid. 174-175). If Modern Greece would help
restore anything, then that could be only the eastern counterpart of western
Christianity, now under the Slavic power. This would share in Christianity’s internal
division, its peculiar dialectics of enmity, which enables the political and cultural
identification of Europe as such especially at times of crises. And yet, this is not the
last historical function of the Greek ghost.

The weak power of the fragments

It is crucial to make the distinction between two different types of conflict that
structure Fallmerayer’s text. The first one is modelled along a combination of two
schemes, the internal division of Christianity, on the one hand, and the polarity
between the German and the Slavic world, especially Russia, on the other. If Western
Christianity finds its counterpart in the Eastern one, it is for Fallmerayer even more so
that the German world mirrors itself in its Slavic enemy, in which a reversed image of
the occidental is to be found. It is striking how similar these entities are for him: they
are equally old and they have both the same national endeavors and the same virtues.
Moreover, they would not only be neighbors, but, actually, brothers, hence their
mutual hatred is inscribed in their heritage (ibid. 350). ‘Whom may I recognize as my
enemy?’ asks Schmitt himself in 1947 and he goes on: ‘obviously, only him who can
call me into question. By recognizing him as an enemy, I recognize that he can call
me into question. And who can really call me into question? Only myself. Or my
brother. That’s it. The other is my brother. The other is manifested as my brother and
my brother is manifested as my enemy. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.
This is how the history of the humankind begins’ (Schmitt 2002, 89). Through such a
brutal brotherhood we would return to the beginnings of history and, thus, law, as
Schmitt describes their link in Nomos of the Earth. And precisely at such a beginning,
this enmity does not only call into question, it also calls into being. The inimical
reciprocity established in a state of exception would be a form of inheritance, a form
of memory, an incident of postliminium - in other words: of making a sovereign return
to sameness possible. In that sense, the Slavic otherness is of an equal vital
importance as the end of history to the katechontic subject. If Fallmerayer’s
historiography is to be thought only within of the structure of a ‘remaining time’, as I
suggest it should, then its katechontic understanding, collateral to the Schmittian one,
an understanding that is clear on the explicit register of his work, is unsurprising.
The second conflict is between the German world and Modern Greece. The
most interesting aspect for us here is that it cannot be analyzed in the aforementioned
terms of an enmity, even if there is in Fallmerayer a clear sense that the ‘power of the
Germanic genius’, as he formulates it, is negated in his image of a contemporary
Greece. Even if, moreover, or precisely because, Greece can be of neither use nor
harm to the European interests (Fallmerayer 2013, 171). This would correspond to the
fact that, different than both the German and the Slavic historical subjects, ‘Greece’
would be guided by no ‘vivid principle’ and would not have an ‘own spirit’ or
‘incorporate any independent idea’. It wouldn’t be, thus, but an aggregate and a
fragment, a ‘lost, furthest star of the sarmatic solar system’ (ibid. 352). Or elsewhere,
equally telling: ‘the Greek remains of a people (Volksreste) are only a material, not a
causa finalis of the coming order of the world’ (ibid. 294) - they will not be visible in
the kingdom of history, in other words, to recall once again of the Schmittian idiom.
Here we meet again the narrative of Fallmerayer’s History, repeated once
more in the Fragments. It is about a double contagion. If the ancient Greeks were
initially ‘contaminated’ by the invading Slavs and flew to Asia Minor, the Slavs were,
centuries later, recolonized by the returning refugees, ‘contaminated’ themselves, in
other words, by the ‘Neohellenes’. The result was a dubious birth (ibid. 171), a
mixture and an ugly hybrid (ibid. 283, 290). Such, and similar other expressions are
used by Fallmerayer for a spectral historical entity, an empty ghost that does not exist
in the nature of historical things, but is made out of remains, emigrants and refugees.
Foreigners to their own land in any case, independent of their origin, Slavic, Greek, or
any other, since they would bear an otherness within, one which would not permit
them to coincide with themselves. Such an entity functions, in Fallmerayer’s analysis,
as a short circuit of every foundational gesture and, in that sense, of every
subjectivation of a pure and operative agent. ‘Greece’ becomes in his texts the name
for a rupture of historical dialectics. It becomes an image of a ‘self’ that does not
return home, but remains caught up in an interim state (no more and not yet, in a
Nietzschean sense), like a postliminium that gets out of joint. That is, it becomes a
nihilistic non-place, as if neither memory as a foundation of sameness, nor the
institution of a pure novelty could take place in relation to it. It would then exist in the
mode of an inoperative entity that belongs within Europe by not belonging to it, by
escaping and interrupting the very process of belonging - without, on the other hand,
describing some sort of pure exteriority either. This would be but the logic of an
uncanny double, a contagious parasite or, spatially, a threshold - the logic of a
messianic nihilism.
Apocalypticism and messianicity

While still being at Trebizond, Fallmerayer visited the local archbishop more than
once. He would find him sitting still. And throwing glances at a book, always at the
same page - it would be the Apocalypse (ibid. 55). It is exactly before Fallmerayer
begins to note his remarks on the absence of archives and the vanishing of memory.
But also, a few pages before nature appears as a substitute for such a loss. Later at his
travel, in Thessalonica, he is thinking that, though the city does not exactly
correspond to his ideal of moral virtue, or perhaps exactly because of that, there is a
thought which a traveler cannot avoid. It is a dark presentiment, the fleeting
disposition of an anxiety, which is to be traced even among the natives, ‘as if their
city would stand on a shaky ground and the present order of things is not supposed to
last long’ (ibid. 269). It is, perhaps, due to the fact that Thessalonica lies in the
epicenter of the main viae militaris, that events are here earlier and more sensitive
experienced, Fallmerayer continues. And it is almost not surprising for the reader
when, a few lines later, he refers to Paul and to his Thessalonica letter, as if the
feeling of a political anxiety would have been almost endemic in this city’s past.
Throughout the whole book, Fallmerayer is followed by the feeling of an ‘urgency of
time’ (ibid. 37, 171 and elsewhere). An urgency that oscillates between an apocalyptic
end of time and a messianic time of the end (Agamben 2005, 62). While the first one
either immerses him in an ahistorical ‘fabulous zone’ (ibid. 157), or functions as a
stimulus for a katechontic view on history, the second one, escaping precisely that
pendulum, delivers him unwillingly (ibid. 66) to a very different mode both of
memory and of historical existence. In this second case, it is the forgotten things of
history, those that leave almost no trace, that entail the truth of the present time. The
spectral return of them as precisely elusive would indicate an otherness located
within, but beyond any ability to integrate it in sameness. Erinnerungreste, remnants
from memories, fragmented memories, is how Freud called in his Moses and
Monotheism (Freud, 1939, 120), that different narrative on monotheism, such traces
of an otherness that would lie at the very heart of one’s own historical and political
identity. They would be, by the same token, Überbleibsel der Urzeit, relics that
survive from primeval times (ibid. 121). And, as such, they would even promote a
hypermnemonical stasis, ‘a state within the state’ of the economy of sameness (ibid.
123), useless, inoperative, a proper madness of memory.

A cloudy spot

In his essay on Kafka, Walter Benjamin writes that Kafka’s prose has at its center a
‘cloudy spot’ (wolkige Stelle; Benjamin 2015, 392; Benjamin 1968, 122). As such it
disrupts the logic of a parable, a logic presenting a stable symbolic order (cf.
Hamacher 1999). Kafka’s creatures perform instead a code of gestures that is
constantly changing, breaking the rules of meaning, or, rather, being exposed to such
a break - they act as if from within such a cloudy spot. This is particularly the case
with his animals and the figures of assistants and messengers that run through his
novels and short stories. They both are relics from a primordial pre-world (Vorwelt) or
a swampy world (Sumpfwelt), creatures, thus, of the swamp (Sumpfgeschöpfe) which
corresponds to our present time, even if we forget, or rather, as Benjamin adds, within
our forgetfulness of such a world. Yet, equally, Benjamin also writes, they are not, or
not only, to be viewed as relics, but as antecedents too, as forerunners.
 Let us return to the initial scene. Remember Fallmerayer’s horse falling in a
swampy spot (moorige Stelle) at a threshold, but also the solitary crane, standing at
the edge of it, watching a perplexed historian from central Europe go by, in a
labyrinthine empty place. The German word for crane is Kranich, which, according to
the German Lexica, is derived from the medieval Krächzer, a hoarse screamer
verbatim, and linked to the verb krähen, croak, something in between singing and
screaming, whereas Krähe is the crow. Migratory crane or, perhaps, an unclean crow
(cf. Lev. 11: 13-19), a symbol in various mythical traditions of wisdom or the
sublime, and of constant misfortune as well, but mainly a strange creature that
remains from every mythical and symbolic order, Fallmerayer would also become a
Sumpfgeschöpf of historical time.
In the crane, Fallmerayer, a man descended from the periphery of the German
world, sees a picture of his own transformation, as if in another Kafkian
metamorphosis. Deprived of his own ability to speak and to address himself, he would
become a representative of the mud that he despises, in which something interior,
repelled and threatening, seems to return and emerge through the others, through the
colonial otherness. In the image of the crane, Fallmerayer would be looking at a
strange mirror - or looking, as if in a state of disrupted consciousness, at a different
sort of a double; one that shows him who he is and in what world he really belongs
(belongs exactly by not belonging). As if the territory of the hybrids and the hybrid
signifiers, which he is about to enter covered in mud, is not just one of amnesia, as his
own work argues on a first level, but at the same time, in a double-bind that (as a
certain deconstructive reading may, perhaps, demonstrate) runs through his work as
well as through the historical territory it seeks to reconstruct, that of hypermnesia as
well. An ‘entirely other anamnesis’, as Derrida writes referring to such a
hypermnesia, carried beyond an available past, beyond mere reconstruction and
knowledge (cf. Derrida 1998, 60). In that obscure double-bind, however, undecidable
between relics and antecedents, at the boundary, a different space of an inoperative,
coming community would open as well.

Conclusion

Beneath his Eurocentric narrative, or, to be more precise, at its own cracks,
Fallmerayer became ‘unwillingly’, at his own personal cracks perhaps, ones that he
seemed to traverse in the course of his travel in the Orient and Greece, a chronologist
and a cartographer of variations of lost people: the ancient Greeks, the Slavs in
Greece themselves etc. Lost people, which resided, rather invisibly, within current
historical identities. He thus also became a kind of a historiographical hors-la-loi of
the 19th century, calling into question both national and European myths of origin and
continuity, of unity and identity. By so doing, his inherently ambivalent work
indicates perspectives of alternative genealogical inquiries hidden in the all too
visible, all too familiar surface of founding ideologies. Inquiries, which would permit
us today to formulate variations of a counter-memory lying inconspicuously at the
liminal center of today’s politics. Such would be the structure of a messianic mode of
anamnesis, by which the return to the past is not a recovery of the given, but a
deliverance to a new experience, a revelation of the absolutely unknown in which we
are always already immersed. This way of dealing with history as a history primarily
of signs and not of events, signs imploding unwillingly at the core of the most radical
immanence, permits, if not forces, one to acknowledge his own standing at point zero,
resuming as for the first time the whole history. This re-beginning within the time of
the end, identical with such a time, would be then another name of the present time
itself amidst the symbolic nakedness of our world.
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