Images from Paradise. Eszter Salgó
the messianic sources of its legitimacy and people’s emotional allegiance to the European community. The analysis of the visual tools used by the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the European Parliament will allow readers to gain a better understanding of the supranational elite’s “politics of transcendence”—their endeavors to transport Europeans from the profane overwhelming present to the imaginary realm of pristine harmony with the (implicit) promise of fulfilling citizens’ longing for wholeness and sublime idyll.
By taking seriously the Imaginary, the Playful, and the Fabulous, we will embark on a journey to the domain of the Fantastic in order to explore European federalists’ paradise dream. Readers might find that we can grasp (partially) the underlying meaning of the European Union’s symbol politics and identity-building strategy if we explore them with our imagination. If we endorse Mircea Eliade’s idea, “to have imagination is to enjoy the richness of interior life, an uninterrupted and spontaneous flow of images” (1991: 20), then it makes sense to encourage the activation of creative and imaginative mechanisms in order to better understand the complex nature of the “emotional crisis” of the European Union and to unveil the hidden meaning, the roots, and the sources of official visual narratives.
The magic power and evocative nature of banknote imagery could not but capture Walter Benjamin’s attention:
A descriptive analysis of banknotes is needed. The unlimited satirical force of such a book would be equaled only by its objectivity. For nowhere more naively than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest. The innocent cupids frolicking about numbers, the goddesses holding tablets of the law, the stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units, are a world of their own; ornamenting the facade of hell. (Benjamin 1926/1978: 87)
Following a trend present in many realms of life, visual communication has become the most dominant form of political communication used by the European Union. Since “images are one of the last bastions of magical thinking” (Mitchell 2005: 128), this book aims to explore the European Union’s “politics of magic.”
Works of art are not simply to be looked at; “they are to be ‘read’” (Burke 2001: 35). To speculate on the factors driving the ECB’s wish to infiltrate citizens’ everyday lives with the symbolic figure of Europa (by placing her portrait on the banknote and publicizing the new series with numerous campaign videos), we will rely on Erwin Panofsky’s model. The German art historian proposed three levels of interpretation. The first level, which corresponds to the pre-iconographical interpretation, reveals the “natural meaning” by identifying the objects and the events. The second-level iconographical analysis serves to define the “conventional meaning” by linking, for example, the supper to The Last Supper or the battle to The Battle of Waterloo. The ultimate level allows for an iconological interpretation that seeks to grasp the artwork’s “intrinsic meaning,” “those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion” (Panofsky 1939/1972).
Speculative elements are always included in the iconographical analysis and become more and more evident as the observer moves deeper and deeper in the exploration of images’ unconscious meanings (Burke 2001: 171). Peter Burke contends that the psychoanalytic approach is both necessary and impossible when interpreting the use of images. Freud invented a theory and a method that included images, internal and external; gestures; bodies, the body of the hysterics, the sexual body, but also the body of Moses; and symbols, psychic and cultural. “Psychoanalysis drew from and was fed by images that flowed underneath as in a riverbed, a sort of ‘iconosphere’ in which Freud moved and developed his work” (Chianese & Fontana 2010: 33). In the initial period of his reflections on the “invisible” of the psychic life, Freud began the construction of what became an immense collection of statues, animals, and sphinxes. The sensory assault of the Ancient served as an explicit invitation to the patient to undertake a journey back to the past. The fact that in the sacred space of Freud’s studio the singular and the universal, the individual past and the past of civilization, thousand year-old memories and personal recollections overlapped and blurred stands to testify that the psychic life, in order to be alive, must draw from the visible of perceptions and images (Chianese & Fontana 2010: 102–5). Furthermore, psychoanalytic theory helps us reveal more about the relationship between our desire and the visual world, the pleasure we glean from images or the unconscious fantasies that we tend to project onto them. At the same time, if the interpretation of images is based on a psychoanalytic perspective, the method lacks evidence required by the traditional scholarly criteria: it is inevitably speculative. In order to pass to the third level of interpretation and capture the spirit that prevails among the supranational policy-makers and gain some understanding of the fantasies underlying the ECB’s decision to incorporate a portrait of Europa in the iconography of the euro banknotes, at the end, one may be inclined to endorse Burke’s view: “The best thing to do is probably to go ahead and speculate, but to try to remember that this is all that we are doing” (2001: 171). One might also take Freud’s advice:
We must call the Witch to our help after all! … Without metapsychological speculation and theorizing—I had almost said “phantasying”—we shall not get another step forward. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, what our Witch reveals is neither very clear nor very detailed. (Freud 1937: 225)
My reflections were initially inspired by the (speculative?) idea that the European Union (just like other political communities) could be viewed as a “fantastic community” that is held together by an affective bond that is formed by its members’ shared conscious and unconscious desires and fears, by what haunts them and what they yearn for (Salgó 2014). I will take the theoretical (speculative?) framework that I proposed in my previous book and argue that the driving force behind the European integration process is fantasy—illusions in a Winnicottian sense, phantasies in a Lacanian sense, phantoms as described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and dreams as interpreted by Sándor Ferenczi. From Winnicott’s perspective, “we can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings” (1971: 3). For the French psychoanalyst Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan (1901–81), unconscious phantasies relate to the imago of the mother, the shadow of the bad internal objects. Phantasies are different variants of the same theme. The “fundamental phantasy” places the divided subject in relation to the cause of its desire, the objet petit a. The Hungarian-born French psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok used the concept of the phantom in a transgenerational sense: it is a formation of the unconscious, an entity that carries unspeakable and undisclosed secrets from one generation to the next. In their theory, the phantom operates through language; it “works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography” (1994: 173). And finally, according to Sándor Ferenczi, there lives in all of us “an undying longing for the return of the paradisiacal conditions of childhood” (1910: 315), an unconscious yearning for harmony and completeness that existed before the trauma. Dreams’ traumatolytic function, he contends, overrides dreams’ wish-fulfilling function (1931).
In all forms of human culture (art, science, religion, myth, etc.) we find a “unity in the manifold” (Cassirer 1955: 44). A unity in the manifold can be found in politics as well: “politics is an art of unification; from many, it makes one” (Walzer 1967: 194). I will use the metaphor of the fantastic family as a symbolic representation of the European Union to unveil and explore Europeans’ deeply felt desire—the wish to find in public life the resolution, love, and wholeness that were lost; to unite what vanished, or never existed but which was intensely sought after; and to integrate what remained fragmented in private life. Especially in today’s transitional period of uncertainty, our feelings may reflect a profound yearning for an ideal family; for a father figure able to protect, create, order, and guarantee prosperity; for a mother figure who holds us in her hands, nourishes and loves us; and for a “house” where we can feel “at home.” I will portray Europe as a state of mind, visionary and real at the same time (rather than as an objective, external reality). I will explore the European integration process as a special “art of unification,” in which unification suggests people’s constant search, also in public life, for