A Cultural Dream: Europe in the Plural

This article is the English translation of the ‘inaugural lesson’ that began Professor Mieke Bal’s year as professor of the ‘European Chair’ at the Collège de France. How, asks Bal, to overcome Europe as Babel (where no one understands the other), Europe as nostalgia (regretting lost time and idealizing the past), the pessimism close to despair of Europe as apocalypse? While she refuses to offer a positive, practical answer, Bal does propose an approach to some of the major issues at stake in the ongoing invention of Europe. Here she dreams of ‘Europe in the plural’, the ongoing invention of Europe as a semiosphere that, by way of its multiple differences, encourages mutual curiosity and debate, interaction, interculturality, and sharing between cultures and languages. This is the ground, proposes Bal, for that cultural ideal of Europe in the plural. It is also the ground from which spring Bal’s lectures at the Collège de France, which are to be presented in a series of articles forthcoming in Journal of Visual Culture.