Resemblance, Choice, and the Hidden: Mediterranean Aesthetics and the Political “Logics” of an Uncolonial Subjective Economy

Abstract

This chapter attempts to articulate what the political logics of an uncolonial—as distinct from a pre- or postcolonial—imagination would look like. The trajectory for this attempt takes various forms by which an uncolonial imagination could be sketched, which will be identified here with three broad themes: resemblance, choice, and the hidden. What “binds” these points of imaginary triangulation is the relational context that they create, which I would here identify as being thalassic rather than spatial. Unlike the notion of space as a receptacle, the thalassic prompts us to consider a hermeneutic approach that implies both a confluence of horizons and also a groundless state of affairs. Here definitions remain contingent to the relational patterns that emerge from the political “logics” by which resemblance, choice, and the hidden construct peculiar subjective economies. This chapter will draw from a reading of two Mediterranean authors, Leonardo Sciascia and Nikos Kazantzakis. Sciascia frequently identifies the notion of an order of resemblance (l’ordine delle somiglianze) within the making of the Sicilian culture. Kazantzakis’s work (particularly that inspired by the figure of Christ) often runs on the binary track of heresy and the apocryphal, which recall airesis (choice) and apochryphos (hidden). Taking the basic elements of these forms of argument, it is here proposed that because of—and notwithstanding—its immersion in a history of colonial strife, the Mediterranean (thalassic) imagination has also entertained and cultivated a sense of the quotidian which maintained an essentially uncolonial essence by way of the same aporias that define it as being critically Mediterranean.