At one point in its history, the tango was popular in the world of Buenos Aires’

At one point in its history, the tango was popular in the world of Buenos Aires’s
brothels. Toward the end of the 19th century, young immigrants — single, male, working
class — who had come to Argentina to try their luck would seek comfort in the drink,
entertainment and female companionship there. Argentines as distinguished as Jorge
Luis Borges have insisted that the tango was born in these brothels. Others vehemently
deny it. But the fact remains that the tango has preserved something of the anguish of
the young and uprooted who danced it there.
Theirs is quite a performance. These men we see panting on the dance floor are not
some ordinary youths seeking to entertain themselves. They’re people who have gone
through the meat-grinder of uprooting and survived it; they’ve come as close to death as
one can without dying. It seems that the memory of a personal catastrophe, followed by
a miraculous survival, has somehow remained inscribed in the dance’s movements. Part
of what makes the tango so erotically charged is that death is always so close at hand. To
this day the tango has carried with it this uncanny mix of vulnerability and strength.
•
There are many types of uprooting. The brutal expulsions like those now devastating
hundreds of thousands in countries like Iraq and Syria are common in the cycles of
politics and war. But it can be more subtly political, too, as was Dante’s banishment
from Florence at the hands of the Black Guelphs, or economic, as it was for the
immigrants dancing in the Argentine brothels. Each person who survives this uprooting
and finds himself in exile experiences an existential earthquake of sorts: Everything
turns upside down, all certitudes are shattered. The world around you ceases to be that
solid, reliable presence in which you used to feel comfortable, and turns into a ruin —
cold and foreign. “You shall leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the
bow of exile shoots first,” wrote Dante in “Paradiso.”
From Ovid to Dante to Czeslaw Milosz, exile has been portrayed as a catastrophic event.
If such an uprooting comes to the exile as a form of death, it is not just his own death,
but that of the world that dies with him and in him.
To live is to sink roots. Life is possible only to the extent that you find a place hospitable
enough to receive you and allow you to settle down. What follows is a sort of symbiosis:
Just as you grow into the world, the world grows into you. Not only do you occupy a
certain place, but that place, in turn, occupies you. Its culture shapes the way you see the
world, its language informs the way you think, its customs structure you as a social
being. Who you ultimately are is determined to an important degree by the vast web of
entanglements of “home.”
Uprooting is a devastating blow because you have to separate yourself overnight from
something that, for as long as you can remember, has been an important part of your
identity. In a sense, you are your culture, customs, language, country, your family, your
lovers. Yet exile, should you survive it, can be the greatest of philosophical gifts, a
blessing in disguise. In fact, philosophers, too, should be uprooted. At least once in their
lives. They should be exiled, displaced, deported — that should be part of their training.
For when your old world goes down it also takes with it all your assumptions,
commonplaces, prejudices and preconceived ideas. To live is to envelop yourself in an
increasingly thicker veil of familiarity that blinds you to what’s under your nose. The
more comfortable you feel in the world, the blunter the instruments with which you
approach it. Because everything has become so evident, you’ve stopped seeing anything.
Exile gives you a chance to break free. All that heavy luggage of old “truths,” which
seemed so only because they were so familiar, is to be left behind. Exiles always travel
light.
The redeeming thing about exile is that when your “old world” has vanished you are
suddenly given the chance to experience another. At the very moment when you lose
everything, you gain something else: new eyes. Indeed, what you eventually get is not
just a “new world,” but something philosophically more consequential: the insight that
the world does not simply exist, but it is something you can dismantle and piece
together again, something you can play with, construct, reconstruct and deconstruct. As
an exile you learn that the world is a story that can be told in many different ways.
Certainly you can find that in books, but there is no deeper knowledge than the one that
comes mixed with blood and tears, the knowledge that comes from uprooting.
Exiles travel light because they barely exist. And that’s another important lesson
philosophers can learn from exile: Uprooting gives you the chance to create not only the
world anew, but also your own self. Deprived of your old world, your old self is left
existentially naked. It is not only worlds that can collapse and be rebuilt, but also selves.
Selves can be re-made from scratch, reassembled and refurbished. For they, too, are
stories to be told in different ways. Often with uprooting there also comes a change of
languages, which makes the refashioning all the more fascinating. You can fashion
yourself in very much the same way a writer fashions her characters.
•
Socrates rarely left his native Athens, yet he fully understood the philosopher’s need to
practice uprooting if they are do their job properly. He refashioned himself into a
foreigner as a matter of philosophical method. As a recent biographer put it, Socrates
claimed “to be a foreigner in his own city, even to the extent of not speaking the Attic
dialect.” Not content with just taking an “ironical distance” from the Athenians, he
deliberately uprooted himself from the city, cut off his ties and burned his bridges.
Socrates turned himself into an outsider in his own city, but didn’t move to another. He
became “átopos,” which meant “out of place,” but also “disturbing” and “perplexing.”
Being átopos is crucial if you are to be a straight-talking philosopher, as Socrates was.
There is in every community something that has to remain unsaid, unnamed, unuttered;
and you signal your belonging to that community precisely by participating in the
general silence. Revealing everything, “telling all,” is a foreigner’s job. Either because
foreigners do not know the local cultural codes or because they are not bound to respect
them, they can afford to be outspoken. To the extent, then, that philosophy is exposure
of “everything,” especially of things no one wants to hear about, foreignness is highly
necessary for its practice. The philosopher, at least the straight-talking kind, is bound to
remain a metaphysical gypsy.
Socrates’ case is telling. Like few others he saw the philosopher’s need to uproot himself
from his own community. Yet he refused to go into an actual exile himself, preferring
instead a symbolic one. He lived in Athens as if he were a foreigner. This means that he
practiced philosophy as a rather dangerous pursuit. Such a tightrope walking can never
take you too far, especially when you, performing it with no safety net, make incessant
fun of your audience.
An Argentine poet called the tango “un pensamiento triste que se baila”: a sad thought
that is danced. I am not sure. The tango is not just something sad — it is sadness itself
that is danced. The ultimate sadness that comes from the earthquake of uprooting. If
philosophers don’t manage to get them themselves exiled, at least they should take up
tango for a while.                                                                                              Read the article below and describe a moment in your life that you felt the need to create an “exile.” if you would rather, describe something that you feel the need to “exile” from. from a philosophical point of view, explain the positives you see in an exile.