ABSTRACT
It seems we no longer comfortably take a seat on this West-östlicher Diwan, a semantic space which had been united by a hyphen and was held together by an undividable, shared space and the common logos of poetry, it looks as if the common seat has been separated into two distinct, if not opposed entities, namely East and West. However, what is meant by ‘East and West’ and how is the ‘Beyond’ in the title of this book to be understood? In a literal sense, the terms indicate first of all marks of orientation that operate from a privileged, stable and secure point of view, namely ‘Europe’. If Hegel – Goethe’s Zeitgenosse – remarks that Asia ‘is a West to America, but just like Europe is the centre and the end of the old world and the absolute West, Asia is the absolute East’ (Hegel 1992: 130), what is indicated are not neutral geographical or cartographical positions, rather, the spatial metaphors open up to a broader semantic field, its historically widely branched legacy and its inherent work of spacing and timing. Thus, the term ‘West’ designates not just quite specific cultural, socio-historical and political configurations, but points to specific concepts of time and space. The following remarks will take up some of the discursive components of the ambivalent legacy which are to ground the (historically) exceptional occidental configuration, or to be more specific: the European particularity that attained universal significance, validity and force, elements at the same time that show how questions of what might be the distinctive features of Europe, its specific modernity and its – alleged – identity have been negotiated (Friese 2004a).
