ABSTRACT
The term “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena: It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For people, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character. Modern enchantment with “small things,” though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. The public realm, as the common world, gathers people together and yet prevents their falling over each other, so to speak. Without the transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible.
