Images from Paradise. Eszter Salgó
reunification, the idyllic feeling of paradise and homecoming. This book seeks to unveil supranational institutions’ attempts to sell infinite pleasure and to perform a traumatolytic function.
All the symbolic totems, captured so often through familial and nonfamilial metaphors and re-presented more and more frequently as images, are poetic devices that serve to reinforce the mythical dimension of the European integration project and to contribute to the sacralization of European politics. Metaphor is not a special trick used in verbal and visual communication but a natural form of expression. For the Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) all the first tropes are corollaries of the poetic logic; in line with metaphysics, they give meaning and passion to insensate things, and each one of them could be seen as “a fable in brief” (1725/1948: 116). Additionally, the world in its infancy was composed of poetic (heroic) nations where the first poets, like children who take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons, attributed to bodies the being of animate substances—reason and passion—and in this way made fables of them. Vico recognizes in this poetic wisdom the crude beginnings of all human activities: it is the poetic or creative metaphysics out of which morals, economics, and politics developed. For this Italian intellectual, poetic truth is metaphysical truth, and physical truth, not in conformity with it, should be considered false.
Since the verbal and pictorial metaphors used in politics activate in their audience unconscious responses and reinforce the emotional impact of the political message, they should not be viewed as stylistic ornaments of political rhetoric but rather as illustrations of fantasies, as the symbolic (figurative) expression of unconscious desires and fears. The word metaphor derives from the Greek metapherein, which means “to transfer” or “to carry” from one realm to another. Karsten Harries’s Metaphor and Transcendence (1978) suggests that, in modern poetry, metaphors express a pursuit of unity, a yearning for a magical presence. As this philosopher and art historian underlines, metaphors imply lack; they speak of what remains absent: “God knows neither transcendence nor metaphor—nor would man, if he were truly godlike” (1978: 84). Through metaphors we express our striving for words that would be the “creative words of God” (1978: 90), which could create a poetic (sacred) world out of the fragments of the world, let us rediscover where we belong, and allow us to leave the familiar reality for the sake of a more profound transcendental vision.
Metaphors in the political discourse have a similar function. The imagery used in political speeches and in visual messages allows the storyteller to take leave of the ordinary world, to carry his or her listeners from painful reality into the realm of fantasy, from the profane to the holy. Verbal and pictorial metaphors become an additional instrument for sacralizing politics and reinforcing the emotional bonds. Today, the official discourse in supranational institutions is overwhelmed with metaphors, symbols, allegories, and analogies. By interpreting this imagery, we may gain some insight into the sealed kernel of Eurofederalists’ palingenetic agenda, their desire to leave behind the profane (painful) reality and let a new, sacred community emerge. Conscious of the fact that complex or overly abstract images would not be internalized easily by European citizens, and therefore would not fulfill their political-communicative function (they would increase rather than diminish Europeans’ sense of confusion and uncertainty), the architects of the European cosmogony project have opted instead for familiar representations already present in European rhetoric for several decades. By reviving the terminology of the ancient family-politic, they have further enhanced the fantasy dimension of their political narrative; the illusion of a return to the idyll of the primordial mother-child relationship and the feeling of the communal rebirth and magic recreation of the fantastic family have become even more powerful.
Convinced that familial tropes and images represent respectively the principal linguistic and visual means of our imagination, this book explores the use of these metaphors in the elite-driven project of building a new community and constructing a European identity. Since “psychoanalysis is essentially a metaphorical enterprise” (Arlow 1979: 373), I will act psychoanalytically and attempt to unearth and interpret the consciously conveyed metaphors and translate into words the unconsciously enacted ones. This publication must necessarily be divided into three parts—necessarily, because every good book is divided into three parts (Hamvas 1945/2007: 209). According to this great Hungarian metaphysical thinker, the perfect division is three: three is the manifestation of the divine, and three is the number associated with wine (which the krater chosen by Draghi contained in ancient times). This publication explores the sacralization of European politics through the analysis of visual communication—how the European elite have turned the political ideology of federalism into a soteriology, how they have appropriated from religion the function of myths (part 1), symbols (part 2), and rituals (part 3) and thereby sought to attribute a transcendent quality to the vision of United States of Europe. Official visual narratives claim to display the real image of Europe. This book shows how the illusionary character and even the logic of forgery underlying the elite-driven cosmogony project of giving birth to a new Europe is illuminatingly exposed in the currency iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and in the communication campaigns launched to raise awareness of the new sacred totem (the new euro banknotes) and of the sacred ritual (the 2014 EP elections). While trying to sell the European Union’s cosmogony project, these visual tools reveal the authoritarian nature of European utopianism and the betrayal of the promise of building together with citizens a new democratic Europe.
Similar to nation-states, the European Union requires institutional narratives to create a basis for legitimate political authority and members’ allegiance. In the first part, “Numinous Stories about Europe’s Rebirth,” I will discuss the many ways Europe’s official storytellers have been narrating the paradise myth, preaching about the spiritual renewal and rebirth of Europe to convince citizens that the European integration process will conclude with the restoration of pristine unity. I will portray federalism as the European manifestation of what Roger Griffin portrayed as “palingenetic ultranationalism,” a political religion that conducts what Slavoj Žižek defined as “politics of jouissance,” with the fantasy of the “ever-closer union” constituting a objet petit a. I will explore the soteriology that conjures up a fantasy world, where all obstacles that hinder the realization of the paradise dream are disregarded and where there are no limits to what the EU can achieve. We will discover why the Europa fable is still relevant for today, how the human yearnings concealed in this story reflect the spirit of our time, and why it can be seen as a perfect visual metaphor for federalists’ palingenetic myth of the United States of Europe. We will speculate on what drove the ECB to embellish the new banknote series with the face of Europa and discard the ambivalent figure of Dionysos. I will highlight the similarities between the two protagonists’ stories, focusing in particular on their homeward voyages and on their seductive and transformative power. An iconological interpretation of the rich symbolism of the Europa myth’s artistic representation on the vase will be offered.
In the second part, “The Promise of a New Symbol,” Europa will be portrayed as a totem, a condensation symbol, the holy icon of the European integration process. It will attempt to explain the pictorial turn that has taken place in the EU’s communication strategy and how Europa has become the visual metaphor of the euro and the protagonist of many of the official visual messages of the Commission and the ECB. The imagery of the European currency will be compared to the iconography of national currencies, with an emphasis on their function and power. The analysis of the visual communication strategy of the ECB (centered around the “sacred gaze” of Europa) will allow readers to gain a better understanding of the supranational elite’s politics of transcendence and its political marketing strategy—their endeavors to sell Europeans a new story of abundance, fulfillment, and homecoming by creating the (illusion) of a carnivalesque atmosphere for the occasion of the euro’s tenth anniversary.
The third part, “European Festival Tales,” will seek new answers to the question “What the devil does a man need?” that Czesław Miłosz posed in The Captive Mind (1953) by further elaborating on the theme of political allegiance, in particular on citizens’ affective attachment to the European Union. The meaning