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PARTISAN REVIEW
balmed like mummies in their tombs, destroying both their singularity
and their complexity.
It
is a vacuum that swallows rituals, folklore, and
legends as if Hollywood or Disney were the culmination of all the histo–
ries on this planet. Several years ago, Ted Turner, the head of CNN,
decided to eliminate the word "foreign" completely, substituting
"international" instead. He had one economic and strategic goal: to pre–
vent CNN from appearing too American and make it appear a reflection
the world would see in its own mirror. But this choice is also sympto–
matic: like Chaplin's dictator, playing with the globe like a child with his
ball, each spectator is invited to consider the world a single village in
which all residents are as familiar to him as the neighbors in his apartment
building. And yet, this denial of differences between peoples and conti–
nents is universalism's pitfall, a fear of totality, whereas cosmopolitanism is
a thirst for plurality.
When Juan Goytisolo writes, "A culture is most alive when its open–
ness towards and hunger for otherness is greatest," he is probably equating
all civilizations because they are fundamentally all the same to him. Con–
trary to our belief that we are crossing boundaries and bringing hostile
countries together in vast syntheses, we are actually just falling into an
abyss as long as the-re is no pain of apprenticeship, no sense of estrange–
ment. Proximity eliminates the other by creating the illusion that we have
access to it. "Speed destroys color. When the gyroscope spins rapidly,
everything turns gray," wrote Paul Morand in 1937.
Is not tourism universalism's saddest image, even if inevitable: the
spectacle of those glutinous mobs milling around the Louvre, Versailles,
the Acropolis, the pyramids, the Prado, all alike in their differences, a
polyglot series of crowds, sharing the same polished boredom with works
of art? We can certainly always dream of unifying humanity from the
bottom up, confiscating possessions, erasing myths and fables , if that is the
price of peace. In the name of harmony and security, we can wish to
eradicate the aristocracy (and the danger) of great civilizations, pushing all
men into the common mold of disenchantment, empoverishing but tam–
ing man, rendering him uniform at all latitudes of the globe. Yet this
reduction to the lowest common denominator is not even certain. Tradi–
tions and beliefs that have been crushed or denied can resurface even
more impetuously when they have been lost and reconstructed artificially
as incoherent monsters and hybrids. (Several countries of Eastern Europe,
forced into amnesia and atheism by a half-century of Communism, are a
tragic example of this.) Furthermore, we know that Fascism, like Integra–
tionism, in no way represents a mad love of traditions and sacred texts
endangered by modernity, but represents instead their ideological falsifi–
cation and, in a certain sense, their destruction . Hegel had already
