Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile

Exile, and the dramatic changes that come with it, has become a defining feature of the postmodern "lifestyle." In the following essay, Farhang Erfani explores the concept, thoughtfully juxtaposing it to Heidegger's discussion of Being. The result is a deep and thoughtful discussion of what it means to "Be There" while "Being-from-elsewhere".

Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile [printable version]

Farhang Erfani

For a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether. Ether here means the free air of the high heavens, the open realm of the spirit.

Martin Heidegger, Discourse On Thinking

Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

<1> I find myself in an unsettling position, as I do not know where to begin to talk about a philosophically neglected topic: exile. I cannot hide behind the famous names of the tradition; I cannot speak through them about exile in order to make my inquiry sound more legitimate since most of them did not address the topic. Isn't it interesting though that my inability to know where to start and the lack of legitimacy that I feel are in themselves two typical symptoms of the exiled? In all fairness, "exile" has become a buzzword and is fashionable in academic circles. As Eva Hoffman recently put it, "today, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands-uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse" [1 ]. To be clear, exile here means displacement. Politically banished, forced emigrants, involuntary nomads, refugees others who have lost their place are regrouped here, for practical purposes, under the one category of "exile." Place does not only refer to a land, but to what gives people an identity, which if "it is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create" [2 ]. In other words, place must be broadly understood as that which gives a shared identity. The exiled and the dis-placed are those who have lost that common ground.

<2> Since displacement is rarely analyzed -- and we can attribute this lack to a poor understanding of "place" in philosophy in general -- this essay will focus on Martin Heidegger's early philosophy. It is Heidegger's analysis of "place," or "world" as he calls it that are of interest, not Heidegger's own thoughts on exile. Along with the so-called postmoderns whom he inspired, Heidegger fiddled with "exile" as a heroic human endeavor. Even though through his brief and disastrous political experience and in his later writings he valued land, language, and being at home, he often praised a romantic sense of distance, or of being in exile and not at home [3 ]. Though he understood nothing of actual exile, his philosophical insights can nevertheless be helpful in understanding this strange phenomenon. I fully agree with Charles Taylor that we owe much to Heidegger for opening the way to seeing human beings, not as disengaged and rational observers, but "as engaged, as embedded in a culture, a form of life, a 'world' of involvements" [4 ]. By focusing on Heidegger's existential-analytic of human life as deeply grounded in the world, we can by extrapolation shed some light on what it means to be displaced.

<3> It is intriguing that there is no systematic treatment of exile within the philosophical community, especially during Heidegger's own time. Many of Heidegger's contemporaries, most members of the Frankfurt School for instance, experienced unsettling displacement. Theodor Adorno, who spent many years in the United States, illustrates this paradox well. Adorno's own work was tortured by his personal experience, but his elitist take on life and his avant garde philosophy made exile an un-aesthetic topic. Even though I will try to show later on in this essay that social class affects the degree of trauma, the following passage testifies to the difficulty that even Adorno experienced. In his case, beyond financial difficulties, Adorno suffered from the change in his social status. This is the story he tells us about a personal encounter with a fellow German emigrant in New York:

Late at night in the subway a young girl sat down opposite me, the only other passenger...Her clothing revealed her to be an emigrant...What made her attractive was her poor and helpless appearance coupled with her stubborn insistence on her own grace...I had to smile; and I smiled at her. She pulled herself together and her tired face became covered with the sort of rejection she thought was lady-like. In Vienna, where she might have come from, or yet again in Berlin, she would have smiled back...in New York she forbid herself to do so, made herself unfriendly and pulled her skirt down over her slender knees. Do you not know, said the gesture, that we are in America? Do you not know that we must start a new life? You are yourself an emigrant. But if you were really someone, you would not have to have yourself trundled home by the subway, but would have at least purchased an automobile...We must realize that the price we have to pay for life is that we no longer live...I looked up and she immediately brushed her skirt down again: meanwhile, she had no doubt, crossed her legs again. That is Hitler's triumph, I thought. He has not only taken away our country, our language, and our money, but also confiscated that last little smile. The world he has created will soon be as evil as he is...however, we had arrived at my stop and I swiftly got out. At the kiosk up on street level, I bought a "Times" from the sleepy newspaper vendor and searched through it for news of victory ...there was no victory to be found in it. Sad and with the much too heavy paper under my arm, I walked down Broadway [5 ].

<4> What Adorno does not mention here is that the return home, for those who get to go back home, is not the end of exile. The tragedy of exile is that there can be no homecoming, not even for Adorno:

During his American exile, Adorno remained entirely a foreigner. His rigid and stable European distance allowed him all the more clearly to recognize the dark side of America's apparent progress. But upon his return to Europe he began to see the old continent with American eyes and from alienating distance of his exile he noticed all the more strongly the barbarity of its remaining peculiarities [6 ].

Regardless of the (possibility of) return, it is important to notice that for Adorno, even though exile allowed him and others in his condition to physically "live," there is "no life" left after exile; that is the "price" that the exiled must pay. Exile is nothing to envy and this is why its romanticized version is very far removed from the true trauma that too many people experience. According to the High Commissioner for Refugees (H.C.R.), there are at least thirty million refugees scattered around the world. But the actual number is far greater, as the fine print of the H.C.R. explains that this is the number of people that are "of interest" to the H.C.R., which is an administrative term to designate those who have been actively chased out of their own county by their own government. Algerians, for instance, who must flee their homeland to escape religious persecutions, do not count. Afghans who must flee their country because of warlords or American bombings do not count. Kurds who have no country to begin with do not count. Others who had to leave their country to avoid starvation do not count. There is no shred of doubt that there are hundreds of millions who are displaced, exiled, forced to leave. Where Adorno is absolutely right is that for these people there if no life left, even though the very reason they left their homes is to save their lives. And this is because life runs deeper in us; it goes to our roots. To reach heaven, Heidegger is correct to point out, we must spring from our roots and grounds. In a philosophical paradigm that would assert an absolute freedom for human beings, be it psychological or metaphysical, there is no room for exile. In order to philosophically grasp the meaning of exile, even by extrapolation, we must begin with a philosophy that recognizes that to live depends greatly upon where you live. To live is to live-there and to be-there; consequently not-being-there is disastrous. In this paper, I shall first analyze Heidegger's depiction of life as being-there, as Dasein.

There There Is

<5> There are many angles from which we can approach a Heideggerian analysis of exile. For one, as said before, Heidegger uses the metaphor of exile from time to time and it could be interesting to explore that. From another angle, he deplores political and technological forgetfulness of our roots, and from yet another, he believes that "from an existential-ontological point of view, the 'not-at-home' must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon" (BT 234) [7 ]. But all these outlooks are, according to Heidegger, part of human facticity -- no human fits-in since there is no "in" ontologically speaking, and all have a sense of exile in that sense. What I have in mind here is not exile as a human condition but as an unfortunate phenomenon that only some experience. And this is precisely why we must ignore this aspect of Heidegger's analysis and just focus on the "there," to understand the importance of coming from elsewhere.

<6> Throughout the tradition, there have been many different approaches and answers to the fundamental question of what it means to be human, and understanding each one of these answers could theoretically provide us with some insight into what it means to be a human being in exile. In most cases, however, the definition of a self was, quite understandably, metaphysical and not political and cultural, making the issue of exile irrelevant. According to most philosophies, human beings are essentially "monadic": they are both windowless and immaterial, concerned with metaphysical issues such as epistemic forms or theological gods. Standing against this tradition, Heidegger puts human beings in time and space. Heidegger's analysis and his concept of being-in-the-world has been widely explicated and interpreted, therefore I will here focus on a few aspects, within Heidegger's work in Being and Time, that are relevant to the temporality as well as the spatiality of human life; human beings occupy a privileged position in Heidegger's early thought [8 ]. According to Heidegger, the very reason why other accounts of what it means to be a human being are wrong-headed is that they have neglected the question of Being itself without which the question of human being is quite simply pointless. The question of Being, far from being too abstract or theoretical an issue, will prove to be important for understanding exile. Being, according to Heidegger, is "that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood" (BT 25-26). Or to put it in common parlance, Being is the background that makes things meaningful; it is what allows meaning to be. What is important to underline here is that Being is the "basis" of any understanding, and that understanding is "already" in place, and I will come back to this later. There is no understanding of things (beings) without a greater understanding of the condition of possibility of beings, which is Being.

<7> What does that entail in our understanding of human life? Heidegger thinks that a human being is neither a thing, nor a mind. In fact, being human (Dasein) means that we are different from other things. It is true that all entities, things or human beings, are understood or become understandable under the light of Being, but to be human means that one has a special relationship with Being: the "understanding of Being itself is a definite characteristic of Dasein's Being" (BT 32). That is to say that to be a human is not simply to be an entity before Being; rather, Dasein is the only being for which the question of meaning and the source of meaning matters. But is this account so different than, say, Descartes', who says that human beings are thinking things, or Plato, for whom humans have the burden of participating in the forms? By saying that the question of meaning is an inescapable question, is Heidegger departing from the tradition, or is he simply rephrasing its basic tenets? Heidegger's contribution to philosophy, and to the present inquiry, is in fact his undermining of all philosophical analyses by focusing on the pre-philosophical self.

Philosophical disputes occur in a space that has already been constituted by distilling the substance of "factical life" into a set of categorical "ghosts." The "hermeneutics of facticity" has a formidable, even paradoxical task, to make philosophy take into account the sphere of life before it is touched by philosophical conceptuality, a region of nonphilosophy or prephilosophy [9 ].

<8> Any philosophy rests on a prephilosophical factical life that philosophy does not choose. Philosophy is an after fact -- our facticity, where and how we are, is relevant for it constitutes us and is the condition of possibility of any action, or interpretation as Heidegger puts it. The everyday life, traditionally considered frivolous in philosophy, "is not nothing," Heidegger emphasizes (BT 69). "Averageness" is the "undifferentiated character" of our life, which lies underneath our actions. For Heidegger, Dasein's dealings with the world are primarily practical, which Heidegger's famous example of hammering shows [10 ]. We always find ourselves involved in an activity, such as hammering, without realizing everything that we presuppose in order to hammer properly. In a workshop, which here can be seen as a metaphor for the world, everything is in place and we live with insouciance. In fact, Heidegger tells us that "for the most part everyday Dasein understands itself in terms of that which it is customarily concerned. [Ultimately] 'One is' what one does" (BT 283, emphasis added). To be is therefore to do, and to do requires familiarity with one's environment. The proximity of Dasein to its accustomed world is such that Dasein does not know itself outside of its given world. Though it is rare for Heidegger to reflect on childhood, there is always the implicit assumption that to be -- which we can never emphasize enough, is "to do" -- relies on the world in which one grows and shares with others. "This common world, which is there primarily and into which every maturing Dasein first grows, as the public world governs every interpretation of the world of Dasein" [11 ]. The metaphor of "governing" underlines the commanding force of the common world and its constitutive power. In a nutshell, and to answer our above question, Heidegger departs from the philosophical tradition by emphasizing the constitutive and un-reflected conditions of human life. Sigmund Freud, too, had taught us that we are "governed" by unconscious forces, but Heidegger's approach is more interesting here since it is not a personal unconscious but rather a common world that dictates human life.

<9> We must however push Heidegger further by both politicizing and perhaps even relativizing this everydayness grounded in traditions of the world. What Heidegger taught us is that we are grounded in everyday practices and that everydayness is a universal structure of human life, but the content of this universal must necessarily vary from one place to another. Everydayness and traditions run so deep in us that we are not free to choose them but instead they condition our freedom. This radical belongingness has its own political implications that we must draw. Eighteenth century philosophy with its deficient and exaggerated emphasis on freedom assumed that our freedom is universal and one, regardless of the place and the world in which we live. To be fair, it is true that social contract theorists, such as Rousseau and Locke among others, also emphasized belongingness to a society and called for a sense of obligation to one's society. According to them citizens must live and obey the governing rules of their society, but only contractually. This so-called contract, however, could be broken at any time. This means that belongingness itself is only contractual, instead of factual. If the contract is broken, then, according to Locke, one is absolutely free (if not obligated) to pick up and leave [12 ]. But for Heidegger, we cannot speak of a contract, not even hypothetically. We are "thrown" into the world, without a choice or a notice. We have no contract with Being. In fact, for Heidegger, to be a human being, that is Dasein, one gets no choice in being thrown or in where one is being thrown; maybe gods could choose their landing, but not us. Heidegger goes even further by saying that Dasein "is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is its 'there'" (BT 174). That is to say, to be human fully depends on the place in which one is. Let us then turn to the question of the "there."

<10> The Heideggerian analysis offers a depiction of us as beings-in-the-world. So how are we exactly in? Heidegger wants us to think of Dasein as being-in-the-world, but not in the same way an entity, or thing, is in the "cupboard." For Dasein to be "in" means "a spatial 'in-one-another-ness' of things present-at-hand, any more than the word 'in' primordially signifies a spatial relationship of this kind. 'In' is derived from 'innan' -'to reside', 'habitare', 'to dwell'" (BT 79-80). So we could say that to be-in-the-world involves an active relationship to the world by dwelling in it and not just standing there. And it is to the nature of this relationship that we must now turn.

To Be, Being There

<11> To better appreciate the importance of human interaction with the place or the world, we must understand what Heidegger means by "interpretation" as a fundamental characteristic of human life. The example of the hammer demonstrates the relevance of the background of practices and of the pre-reflective life. But hammering itself is also unreflective, unless one encounters difficulties in the process; there is very little "taking-up" in hammering. But in interpreting, Dasein must more actively take up the given possibilities, and interpretation is more political for two different reasons. First, it requires more than an implicit knowledge of a workshop; it requires a primary understanding of communal life, or what Heidegger calls the "they." Second, interpretation also requires a greater historical understanding.

<12> Being the social beings that we are, as soon as we are thrown into the world, we are amid other people, other Daseins; this is what Heidegger refers to as the "they," which is a translation of the German "das Man." The translation is misleading as it could incite us to think that there is a us/them split between Dasein and the "they." This is why Hubert Dreyfus translated it as "the one" and Richard Polt proposes that we should think of it as the "anyone" thereby emphasizing the "neutrality" of the term [13 ]. Indeed, Heidegger tells us that Dasein should be understood "in the undifferentiated character which it has proximally and for the most part" (BT 69); the "they" precisely represents this proximity to average everydayness. But a point of clarification is needed here for it is often difficult to separate das Man as the constitutive element of everydayness and das Man as a hideout for the inauthentic self. The goal of Being and Time was to lay out the existential analytic of Dasein and show how Dasein can reach into its possibilities. Understanding Dasein's temporal and spatial facticity and the taking-up of the inherited possibilities is what Heidegger called authenticity. Inauthenticity, on the other hand, is a flight from Dasein's true conditions and is a denial of what it really means to be Dasein. The inauthentic Dasein is the one who would make ontologically unsound decisions, denying or ignoring finitude and mortality. Heidegger's work ought to awaken us to what we can and cannot do; this is why Heidegger only described the basic structure of Dasein and chose not to write a manifesto or a set of commandments for Dasein. He in fact made an important distinction between an existential analysis, which is ontological, and an existentiell one, which is about each Dasein's personal choices. Authenticity, as one may expect, is a difficult state that one must struggle to achieve, and one is always prey in falling back into inauthenticity [14 ]. This tendency to negate authenticity, to escape from the difficulty, is also proper to our condition. "Falling [back into inauthenticity] is a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself" (BT 220). No doubt, there is a "tranquilizing" side to inauthenticity, an easiness which is very appealing. Thus one cannot discuss Being and Time without dealing with the problem of authenticity and inauthenticity as these two options are in struggle throughout the book. But beneath this more attractive plot, there are other subplots. What I am interested in is the foundation on which Dasein stands, the very ground which allows it to be either authentic or inauthentic. The question of exile, of displacement, is a pre-authentic/inauthentic distinction, for one needs a place, a world, a "there" to take up (in authenticity) or to ignore (in inauthenticity). And das Man, the structural and factual presence of other humans, is needed for a place to be and it is this aspect of the "they" that is of interest here. Heidegger himself sometimes confuses the two topics and speaks negatively of the "they" or everydayness as if they were the basis of inauthenticity. But this is not the function of the "they": "The 'they' prescribes one's state-of-mind, and determines what and how one 'sees'" (BT 213). There is a difference between this "condition of possibility" and inauthenticity [15 ].

<13> The "they," to put it in a nutshell, is what Dasein needs in order to function. The very definition of Dasein is that he or she is thrown and this thrownness among others serves as the basis, as the foundation, that Dasein needs in order to function in the world. "Even resolutions depend on the "they" and its world" (BT 346). If in the morning I contemplate what I should wear, I look into my closet and think about the different possibilities that are before me. I will probably choose to wear jeans and a not-ironed shirt, quite proper to the academic life. Other academicians, as I know by living among them, do dress similarly. There are, no doubt, variations but the "they" sets the standard. For instance, academicians dress more casually than, let's say, executives in a downtown corporation. But both the corporate executive and the college professor will wear pants to work, and will not, for example, wear two ties. The "they" has determined what it means to dress for us (in this society). Even when we encounter imaginative students who thrive on provocation and would decide to wear two ties instead of one, or to come to class without a shirt, they would also do so based on re-action against the "they." As Heidegger puts it:

As thrown, Dasein has indeed been delivered over to itself and to its potentiality-for-Being, but as being-in-the-world. As thrown, it has been submitted to a 'world', and exists factically with Others. Proximally and for the most part the Self is lost in the "they." It understands itself in terms of those possibilities of existence which 'circulate' in the 'average' public way of interpreting Dasein today. These possibilities have mostly been made unrecognizable by ambiguity; yet they are well know to us. (BT 435)

<14> Following the above citation, Heidegger tells us that not only is Dasein completely involved in the "they," but that whatever Dasein chooses to do depends on what has been "handed down" to it. Our understanding of the world, understanding tout court, is based on this given communal potentiality. Indeed, understanding is more than an epistemological question. Had Heidegger's philosophy limited Dasein to its thrownness, it would have been unable to account for any sense of agency that we have. To put it quite simply, after being thrown into the world, we can become throwers, that is to say, we can project based on the primary thrownness [16 ]. Dasein is an active agent who always projects itself into the future by working on possibilities.

<15> Projection is not an accidental feature of life, but according to Heidegger "Dasein is thrown into the kind of Being which [is called] projecting...Dasein always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities" (BT 185). Understanding, simply put, is the passive realization of the possibilities: understanding is standing under, situating one's position (a play on word that works in German as well: "vorstehen" can be literally translated as "fore-standing"). And the exploration or the development of understanding, i.e., of possibilities, is what Heidegger calls "interpretation" (BT 188). This developed understanding, or interpretation, has a triadic structure that reflects the temporality of Dasein. To interpret, we must rely on a solid knowledge of our background (fore-having), on a developed ability to solve problems (fore-sight) and based on the first two to be able to have an idea of the outcome of the project (fore-conception) [17 ]. Only with this three-fold structure, what Heidegger calls the "fore-structure" can one interpret, i.e., make possibilities work.

In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a 'signification' over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within the world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation. (BT 191, my emphasis)

<16> What does this circular relationship between Dasein and the world entail? By proving, as Heidegger does, that human beings depend on the commonality of a world, are we not simply stating the obvious, especially for the exiled, i.e., the displaced must now learn the ways of the new home? Isn't phenomenology simply making tabula rasa sound more complicated? According to Heideggerian phenomenology, Dasein comes to a world from which it learns how to live and work -- a point to which neither Locke nor Hume would object. But I believe that Heidegger adds something to the debate that modern thinkers and even other phenomenologists do not: the depth of the background, or what he calls "historicality" [18 ]. Although this occupies a brief section of Being and Time, it significantly politicizes Heidegger's philosophy. Consider, for instance, Alfred Schutz who was perhaps the most famous social and political phenomenologists of his own time. Schutz wrote a short essay entitled "The Stranger" depicting the life of the immigrant [19 ]. His starting point sounds quite like Heidegger:

Any member born or reared within the group accepts the ready-made standardized scheme of the cultural pattern handed down to him by ancestors, teachers, and authorities as an unquestioned and unquestionable guide...It is a knowledge of trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world and for handling things and men in order to obtain the best results in every situation [20 ].

But the proximity stops here. Contrary to Heidegger, Schutz believes that "the cultural pattern of the approached group is to the stranger not a shelter but a field of adventure...[and] a topic of investigation" [21 ]. The outsider, with Schutz, has even a more privileged position than the insider -- the outsider can observe and amuse himself and perhaps, like Locke, understand the inside better from the outside. After having figured out the intricacies of his new home, the stranger has gone through "what is commonly called the process of social adjustment...[and] then the stranger is no stranger any more, and his specific problems have been solved" [22 ]. The absurdity of the conclusions of Heidegger's own philosophical relative, a fellow phenomenologist, reveals the importance of Heidegger and his analysis of the "world." Schutz's stranger, in my view, was never displaced to begin with, for he attaches no importance to "place." That amused observer swiftly moves from a society to another, enjoying the variety of social and perhaps culinary recipes. Heidegger's account of Dasein runs deeper than this: "In self-understanding there is understood the being-in-the-world with which specific possibilities of being-with others and of dealing with intra-worldly beings are traced out" [23 ]. What are these specific possibilities? Can one buy into them? Could one subscribe to them? Could one "adjust" to them?

<17> These possibilities are historical possibilities and they give an actual meaning to Dasein. The specific possibilities are not recipes that can be collected -- they are given as a heritage that was "handed-down" to Dasein (BT 435). The identity of Dasein is closely related to its "there" because the "there" was handed down to Dasein and it is with other Daseins that it must take up those possibilities: concretely, Heidegger refers to the "destiny" that Dasein shares with Others. Each generation passes a set of practices to the next one that must collectively accept it and then further it. This does not need to be seen in grandiose terms; it simply means that those who have the same identity, i.e., share the same "there," can be fully free:

Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities...Dasein's fateful destiny in and with its "generation" goes to make up the full authentic historicizing of Dasein (BT 436).

So the displaced, the one who no longer has an "already guided fate" can never be authentic [24 ]. This is what Adorno meant when he said that the price of life for the exiled is to no longer live, at least not authentically, not freely, not with others.

The exIled

<18> I fully agree with Eva Hoffman that contemporary intellectual jargon has appropriated the concept of exile, or at least its seemingly universal characteristics. Indeed, the unavoidable alienation, the impossibility of self-coincidence and groundlessness are nowadays appreciated as genuine qualities, and not as the calamities that the displaced suffer. Heidegger's concept of authenticity that I did not thoroughly develop in the above treatment is a sense of "exile," as Heidegger would like to believe it. He tells us that from "an existential-ontological point of view, the not-at-home must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon" (BT 234). What Heidegger means here is that it is impossible for us to be one with our "home," with our "there." Rejecting the old epistemological dream of self-coincidence, Heidegger thinks that being-in-the-world does not mean that we are one with the world and that there is always a great distance separating us from it. We cannot think that we are the world and whatever we choose to do involves a certain distance. From time to time, we realize the groundlessness of our being and are then prone to ontological anxiety. We understand that we are not what we think we are, that there is emptiness beneath our projection. To put it quite simply, we are anxious because we are not gods. Realizing that we are not rooted in that way, god-like to the world, we must admit that "not-at-home-ness" is a primordial sense of ourselves. But in every other aspect Heidegger's analysis is a philosophy of being-at-home. Dasein is to be-there, and not not-to-be-there. But for the exiled person, the not-at-home is not even that complicated ontologically, epistemologically, socially or politically: there is no home. He has left his or her "there." In a recent conversation during an academic conference, an American philosopher, known for his work in American pragmatism, told me that he thinks of himself as exiled. According to him, there is very little of the American way of life or society that he embraces, and therefore he is permanently in exile. The stories that comprise Camus' Exile and Kingdom are variations of this romanticized appropriation of the theme, where the main characters are tormented by an existential angst of not fitting-in as much as they had hoped for. But Heidegger's Dasein, the American philosopher, and Camus' characters in the stories all are at home, and the distance that they feel vis à vis their homes is not enough to make them exiled.

<19> There is a good reason that exile is such a difficult concept to define. Structurally, it defies definitions. Indeed there "has been rather little said [by philosophers] about exiles. They have been left to the historians and poets, and that is a pity. Perhaps their numbers and variety have discouraged philosophical inquiry. It is not easy to generalize about exiles, nor do they land themselves to abstraction" [25 ]. Judith Shklar is in fact one of the very few political thinkers who sought to understand exile. It is quite unbelievable that the topic has been neglected to this point by systematic thinkers, political theorists or philosophers. It was, after all, one of the most disastrous and unflattering heritages of the twentieth century. Even intellectually speaking only, we owe much to the displaced: Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Shklar herself are just a few of the many who had to leave their countries of birth (the "there" where they were "thrown") and live in exile most, if not for all, of their lives.

<20> Taking Heidegger's Dasein to its depth and by extrapolating the analysis, that being-from-elsewhere is revealed as quite disturbing and unappealing. How poorly the immigrants or the exiled are tuned to the new "there" is relative. Depending on the proximity and the resemblance of the country of origin to the country of arrival, the exiled is more or less lost. If there was ever a need to be exiled, say, from the United States to Canada, there will not be much of a shock, "the move [would be] more or less within the same world," though there will be differences that one would perceive [26 ]. In fact, even across the same countries, some habits, manners and ways of being change. The degree of change is very small in these cases and thus carries no trauma. One common experience among immigrants and the exiled coming from non-industrialized countries is the impossibility of setting priorities. Even when one figures out a few basic rules, such as speaking a few words of the new language or knowing where to go grocery shopping and what to do once in the shop, there are still questions of priority. The "they," or average everydayness, puts everything in perspective for Dasein; but for the one who comes from elsewhere, the perspective is absent.

<21> It seems quite obvious that Dasein has so little problem functioning in his or her "there" -- Dasein goes about living in the world, using tools and living among others, quite unaware of itself. This anesthetized life goes on without much interruption. The existential angst that Dasein feels, only once in a while, is incomparable to the angst that the exiled feels almost every moment of day and night. Dasein's inauthenticity is comparable to Jean-Paul Sartre's bad faith, as the flight from our true ontological detachment and alienation. For those who are in bad faith, or are inauthentic, for both Heidegger and Sartre, anxiety is the moment of truth where they realize that whatever they are, or rather seem to be, is ontologically contingent. To be, say, a teacher does not mean that one is a teacher in the essential sense; one has a project of being, or playing, a teacher. And those who want to believe that they are essentially teacher-like feel in the rare moments of anxiety that their identity is constructed on an abyss of meaninglessness. But inauthenticity itself is grounded as a possibility in the "there" or the "world" of Dasein, without which the question is moot.

<22> I remember from the a public television special on exile and immigration that an African described being in exile as walking naked in the streets: everyone stares at you, or at least it feels like that. The vulnerability that people in exile feel is far greater than the anxiety of not having an essential identity; their problem is a lack of identity tout court. Perhaps not everyone stares at a foreigner in the street as if he were naked, and perhaps it is mostly in his or her mind. But the reason the foreigner, the immigrant, the exiled or the refugee feels this uneasiness and feels scrutinized is that even if she wanted to, she could not fully assimilate or disappear in the crowd. The color of skin or the accent that betrays the lack of belonging to the "they," the manner of walking, shaking hands, eating, breathing etc. makes assimilation impossible from the start. Heidegger, rightly in my view, calls the hope for assimilation a "masquerade" (BT 222). This lack of legitimacy is terrorizing as the exiled feels always already excluded and lives in angst. Allow me to illustrate this point with a personal story: as I recently helped my father clean up his files in his little office, we went through boxes and boxes of papers and documents that had accumulated over the past ten years of our time in exile. We both had to laugh, hiding a greater distress and sadness, as we looked through what he had saved from our first few years. In shoe boxes filled with important immigration papers one could find menus or flyers handed out in the streets that my father kept, preciously, as carefully as the immigration documents. He now laughs and tells me what a stupid man he is and that he is glad that I do not go around keeping flyers and Chinese menus in my files. Indeed I know better now; he didn't back then. I know, based on what I have learned from the new "there" to which children more easily accommodate, that no one will stop me at the nearest corner asking me to show my Chinese menu or some yellow flyers. I know that these are useless papers, my father didn't -- his sense of direction and priority was lost.

<23> Heidegger did not take into consideration the sort of horrifying breakdowns that the exiled experience; he even neglected the body as an issue for Dasein -- a reproach that Levinas so skillfully made against him. Dasein, no doubt, has a body but it is never a real issue for him. It is not a concern, like the hammer, unless it is ill or is not functioning properly. For the exiled the body is both the site of his past and the torture of his present [27 ]. The body is first and foremost what distinguishes him from the rest of the new world. Most of the required behaviors in a given society are bodily functions, starting from smiling, shaking hands, all the way to knowing how to eat. All the things that one "always already knows," if one is from "there."

<24> In all fairness, there is a question of degree in this experience. I said earlier on that social status matters in exile. In general, one goes down the social ladder through exile, or at best one remains in the same class. This is the frustration that Adorno felt in the subway. As the quite well off and well-respected intellectual in Germany, the places that he would go to would respect his social position: any girl would return his smile in Frankfurt. In the New York subway, he looks like another ordinary person and cannot use his previous social position. But the wealth matters: a wealthy person in exile could in some ways "buy" him- or herself a piece of the "they" by hiring a maid who will know the way around town and will know how to shop at the local market. A wealthy person would not have to work and thus would not suffer from the anxiety of not knowing how to get a job without speaking the language, or speaking it with a heavy accent. Adorno himself, let's remember, wrote in German while in exile. But most exiled can't afford this. Once you need to get your body going and working like the rest of the people of the country, then you genuinely feel how alien you are. This alienation, far from bring intellectually rewarding or attractive, is costly. The exiled desperately want to master their own body; but their body will not fit in. Be it just the muscles of their faces which won't let them acquire the new accent, their lack of synchrony with the rest of the society...regardless of which angle you choose to look at it, if you are not from the "there," it is impossible to pitch a tent "there."

[I would like to thank John D. Caputo for his patience and guidance. This essay, unfortunately, has its origins in family experience and I must thank my parents for being brave, for battling against impossible odds every day and for being the best intellectual models I know.]

Notes

[1] Hoffman, Eva. "The New Nomads." In Letters of Transit, ed. André Aciman (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 44. [^]

[2] Michael Dummett, On Immigration and Refugees (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 7. [^]

[3] Leslie Thiele has done a masterful job dealing with Heidegger's own notion of home and homelessness. Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 27-35 &171-179. These categories were first metaphysical, i.e., not actual states but integral part of human facticity, of any Dasein. Once Heidegger politicized them, they became specific for the Germans, the heirs of the Greek. The experience of exile, in this essay, is that of displaced persons. I do not speak of a general sense of exile for all human beings, nor do I address a specific experience of a given culture. Exile and forced immigration are radical displacements, which not everybody, fortunately, experiences. [^]

[4] Charles Taylor, "Engaged agency and background," in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 318. [^]

[5] Quoted in Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 1999), pp. 51-52, emphasis added. [^]

[6] Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory, p. 53. [^]

[7] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Hereafter "BT." [^]

[8] The jury is still out on Heidegger's own anthropocentrism. On the one hand, he dethrones the Cartesian self, from the earliest work on, and his criticism of humanism is well known. The later work undermines human beings' agency even further, giving way to some interesting comparisons with deep ecologists and environmentalists. On the other hand, it is fair to say that Heidegger's own agenda or philosophical preferences were far from the activist and environmentalist thinkers. For a clear and succinct summary of these issues, see Michael Zimmerman's Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 241-244. [^]

[9] John D. Caputo, "Heidegger" in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1998), p. 223. [^]

[10] This primary sense of being is not just with tools and equipments, it is also with other Daseins. See BT 149-169 and Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p.297. For equipments, see Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 60-82. [^]

[11] Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) p. 246. [^]

[12] Even politically speaking this idea is naive. Obviously Locke never dealt with the Immigration Services, and his notion of freedom is impractical. He had a very different understanding of human life than Heidegger: for Locke and other modern thinkers, we were born with tabula rasas that were to be filled later on. The political implication of this epistemological assumption was that we are never truly attached or determined. With such a frame of mind, Locke could allow himself to write, from his home in England, a constitution for Charleston, SC, quite indifferent to the traditions and ways of life of the colony. For more on the political implication of tabula rasa, see Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 40-43. [^]

[13] Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world, p. xi. Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 62. [^]

[14] This is a point that is not stressed enough. Struggle is an overriding theme in Heidegger throughout his work. For a better account see John Caputo, "Heidegger's Kampf: The Difficulty of Life," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 14 (2)- vol. 15 (1) 1991, pp. 61-85. [^]

[15] Richard Polt makes an interesting point by showing that Heidegger makes a distinction between the "they" and the "they-self." The "they" is an "existentiale," a basic structure of our being-in-the-world; the "they-self" is the refuge for inauthenticity. They-self is conformity and leveling down of differences and change. Even though this disctintion appears in Being and Time, Heidegger does not seem to respect it systematically. See Polt, Heidegger, p. 63. [^]

[16] This idea was more developed in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: On Enowning. (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1999). [^]

[17] For a detailed summary, see Dreyfus, pp. 199-208. [^]

[18] Although this is Macquarrie and Robinson's translation, historicity is a better word that I will substitute to their translation. [^]

[19] "The Stranger," in Collected Papers II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). [^]

[20] Schutz, "The Stranger," p. 95. [^]

[21] Schutz, "The Stranger," p. 104. [^]

[22] Schutz, "The Stranger," p. 105. [^]

[23] Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 279. My emphasis. [^]

[24] See David C. Hoy "History, Historicity and Historiography in Being and Time" in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 329-355. [^]

[25] Judith Shklar, Political Thought & Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 57. [^]

[26] Edward Said, "No Reconciliation Allowed" in Letters of Transit, ed. André Aciman (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 97. Said's work is a great contribution to the study of exile. The essay of this volume is quite autobiographical. In general, Said tends to think of intellectuals as always in some sort of exile and I think that he too over-romaticizes the concept. [^]

[27] The best account regarding the body of the exiled that I have seen is in Abdelmalek Sayad's La Double Absence: Des illusions de l'émigré aux souffrances de l'immigré. (Paris: Seuil, 1999). See especially chapter 9. See also Sayad's L'immigration ou les paradoxes de l'alterité (Brussels: DeBoeck University Press, 1991). Sayad's work is a powerful depiction of the conditions of immigration and exile. According to him, the exiled is a paradox, in the etymological sense of being aside common opinion (para doxa), a point which is clearly similar to a Heideggerian understanding of exile based on the impossibility of assimilating the "they"` from scratch. [^]