The Culture–Power Syndrome within a
Transcivilizational Ecumene
Armando Salvatore
ORIENTAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY, NAPLES/HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY, BERLIN
interesting since it is not based on a preventive cultural devaluation of the significance of Islamic civilization. Its inherent culturalism is mitigated and made more interesting for civilizational analysts by a view of cultural transformations that brings to light the deep entanglement of culture with the production of ever more sophisticated forms of power. As a result, the difference between the Western and Islamic civilizations comes down to a divergence in the type of syndrome through which culture is translated into power and legitimizes it. The focus is on the differential capacity of culture to refine the forms of social power and justify a civilizational hegemony (Brague, [1992] 2002).
In his attempt to penetrate the originality of the Roman road of Western Europe, Brague pays attention to the methods that its carriers employed for dealing with civilizational sources, instead of predefining a set of cultural values or institutional frameworks to be considered part of a basically univocal ‘heritage’ (like, e.g. ‘autonomy’, ‘responsibility’, or even ‘democracy’). In Brague’s view, the cultural logic of the construction of Latin Christendom in the post-Roman world depended on the adoption of a consciously eccentric positioning towards its purported sources, i.e. Greek philosophy and Hebrew prophecy: an approach inherited from the quite
sui generis character of Roman civilization. The meaning of eccentricity, according to Brague, consists in the fact that key cultural sources were eagerly reappropriated by Latin Christendom via an original method of cultural elaboration, notwithstanding the fact that such sources were perceived, from the viewpoint of Western Europe, as remote and to some extent alien. The object of Brague’s analysis is the dynamic of reconstruction of a political ‘centre’ from the margins of a civilizational area: in this case, the distance is measured not only from ‘Athens’, but also from ‘Jerusalem’, one major centre of the Irano- Semitic region. As a result, it is not the world of Islam that is divergent from the norm that is incarnate in the civilizational standards carried by Western Europe, but it is Europe that diverges from the much more linear Islamic path, which reflects a more harmonious and less troubled – albeit original – combination of the Hebrew heritage with the Greek legacy, eagerly absorbed by Muslim philosophers and other scholars.Accordingly, the ‘Latin’ (in the medieval sense of ‘post-Roman’) nucleus of Europe has been formed not through a cumulative build-up of a civilizational legacy, but via a process that both reflected and sublimated a geo-cultural distance from its axial sources. In this sense, it is less the ‘secondary’ character of Roman and post-Roman (finally ‘European’) civilization that matters in Brague’s argument, than the cultural machine set in motion by a sense of alienation from the primary sources. After all, according to Brague, Greece was also secondary enough with regard to the ancient civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily Egypt, yet it carved out a new home for its emergent values and set clear boundaries vis-à-vis the world outside. The ‘Roman road’ deploys instead an expansive potential that cuts through ever new boundaries, while it also entrenches the new gains within a strong, albeit ‘developmental’ type of identity.
Nor was this a dynamic of pure conquest. Post-Roman, Latin Rome, the Rome
of the popes, developed a new type of expansiveness: both cultural and political,
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European Journal of Social Theory 13(1)