The other side of the Mediterranean

The starting point of this paper is a quote from The Monolinguism of the Other, published in 1996 in which Derrida talks about “the disorder of identity”. This disorder takes shape on the linguistic field as an impossibility to translate, as experience of the rest and the time difference that appear in every speech, in every communicative act aimed at universalization. On the ontological plane, it is an impossibility of the individual of “remaining chez-soi, of founding identity on stable roots. The dissymmetry of the subject, the impossibility of adhering to oneself, is represented by the Mediterranean Sea. It represents the time of dwelling, the time that separates us from death, the time that we take to cross those waters, without actually crossing them. “It is a symbolically endless space” that divides two shores, the North Shore and the South Shore, by occupying the middle between the mother land – Algeria – and the land of its language – French – tough without truly separating them, but with a constant relationship of translation. So, the Mediterranean issue can only be analyzed starting from the problem of the essence of consciousness, that needs to be urgently rethought, starting from its Jewish-Christian root as divided, broken-down subjectivity.