Abstract

In this essay I reflect on fear and cultural exhaustion and their effect on our language, as possible causes, among many others, of the rise of nationalist and chauvinist feeling across Europe today. By fear I mean the fear of not understanding and of not being understood by the other, which may affect us in various ways; by exhaustion I refer to our modern work life with its permanent accessibility and the uncontrolled flood of pictures and information we are exposed to by digitization, as well as to the more general cultural exhaustion when it comes to discussing “values” or “ideas,” which more and more people see as empty words. This pervasive sense of fear and exhaustion has a substantial effect on our language, for the use of readymade phrases, as in the German “Phrasendreschen”, tends to see them as identity markers and thus to induce resentment against those who do not belong to the same in-group. But language, once it is reduced to a mere instrument for transmitting information, generates the sense that everything has already been said, and in feeding our cultural exhaustion and boredom, leads us to abandon the notions of utopia, irony and poetry, all of which thrive on the creative inexhaustibility of language. Fear and exhaustion ultimately lead us to abandon any dialogue with others. What we need is a new way of listening, “new ears” with which to listen to what we initially perceive as “unheard” words, for without the ability to listen to “strange” words, the words of the “stranger,” no society can survive for long.