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PARTISAN REVIEW
like a neighbor. The stranger has always been perceived as different, but
often also as a challenge, even as a downright threat which undermines
everything that sedentary tradition has structured as a communal, unifying
convention, as a national emblem. The very premise of the stranger's
existence presupposes a comparison and a reevaluation, also a potential
competition.
We find ourselves in a world in which the concepts of "citizen" and
"citizenship" migrate far beyond the borders given at birth, in an in–
stantly global reality created through intense world air traffic, via satellite
invading everyone's home television screen. And today's world of rapid
migrations and instantaneous communications is also a world on the
threshold of a revolution it is still, rightly, afraid to acknowledge. I refer
to the genetic revolution, which could overthrow the "human project"
itself. The amazing discoveries in the field of genetics, coul soon provide
a new meaning to our human destiny. Who knows? Maybe they even
will discover an "exile gene ." Genetics might well turn out to be a
problematic challenge to the myth of equality among people. Stupen–
dous means of genetic manipulation might force mankind to reconsider
on a dramatic scale its morality and its laws, with unforeseen conse–
quences for the future of the human race. And if we add to this our
conquest of outer space, we must ask ourselves again, in this context,
what does the notion called homeland mean, the challenge called for–
eigner, the reality called exile?
And how do we perceive from the vantage point of our unstable,
transitory, and pathetic domicile called a human life the tension between
the particular and the general? The modern world faces its solitude and
its responsibilities without the artifice of a protective dependency or a
fictive utopian coherence. Fundamentalist and separatist movements of all
kinds, the return of a tribal mentality in so many human communities,
are expressions of the need to reestablish a well-ordered cohesion which
would protect the enclave against the assault of the unknown, of diver–
sity, heterogeneity, and alienation. A dismembered Soviet Union and a
united Europe are only two obvious examples of the kind of contradic–
tions that convulse our present and certainly will convulse our future,
too. There is, on the one hand, the need to do away with restrictive
barriers and achieve a democratic, multinational, economically efficient
system. On the other hand, there is the desire to replace the totalitarian
state, center of tyrannical power, with a conglomerate of states, each
with its own center of power and uncertain democracy.
The recent debates about the canon in American universities are
highly significant; they point to the persistence in our post-industrial
modern world of a tension, harbored in all of us, between the centrifu–
gal and those still-centripetal, nostalgic tendencies. When discussing the
