It means the two banks are most distinguished from each other by the connection between them. The bridge can also connect two separate spaces without unifying them.
Generator of differences
On his part, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze sees the bridge as the generator of differences or the means by which two different things connect, but it is also the way in which the two connected things most clearly express their differences.
To cross a bridge, as Quebecois songwriter Jean-Pierre Fernand writes, is “to cross boundaries, to leave the familiar intimate space, where one is in his or her own place, in order to enter a different horizon, a strange, unknown space, where one is exposed to others, and uncovered without being in his or her own special place.”
This sense of the polarity of human space, made up of the reassuring, stable inside and the uncertain, dynamic outside, was expressed by the ancient Greeks as a pair of united, and yet, opposing deities: Hestia and Hermes.
Fernand writes: “Hestia, the goddess of shelter and warm home. It constitutes a familiar space, planting it in the heart of the depths, while making it a fixed, limited, and stable interior, and a centre that achieves for the group of the family members, with the spatial stability it guarantees, the permanence in time, uniqueness on the surface of the earth, and security towards the outside.
As much as Hestia enjoys stability and architecture, and as much as she is closed to humans and the wealth that she protects and preserves, Hermes enjoys nomadism and wandering around the world, as he moves non-stop between one place and another, indifferent to the borders, fences and doors that he breaks into at his own whim.
He is the master of communication and connection.
He keeps running after encounters, he is the god of the roads where he guides the traveller. He is also the god of the expansive lands that cannot be penetrated by roads, the god of pastures where he leads the cattle, which is the moving, mobile wealth that he takes care of, just as Hestia takes care of the wealth that is locked inside houses.
The two gods contradict each other, but they are also inseparable.
One constituting part of Hestia belongs to Hermes, and one part of Hermes belongs to Hestia. Strangers coming from afar, those guests who are sent over, find their shelter and food in the temple of the goddess Hestia, in the abode of private residences and public buildings.
In order for there to be a true interior, it must open itself up to the outside in order to receive it in its bosom.”
Every culture has its share of Hestia and its fortune of Hermes. For culture to thrive, it must cross bridges, it must embrace what it, at first, finds strange.
However, this ‘falling into’ may take on many forms, starting from simply trying to get to know the other, to breaking away from every form of privacy of the self.
The China example
In order not to be satisfied with staying within our own culture, let us cross the bridge towards another ancient culture — China’s.
Let us review an inaugural lecture at the Collège de France given by American literary scholar and cultural theorist Professor Anne Cheng entitled “China, Is It Thinking?”
Cheng attempts to refute the opinion that Chinese thought is essentially an “old wisdom” that has been closed to itself and devoid of what could shake the global culture.
It is strange that this idea still resonates with Western scholars themselves, and perhaps they were the ones who came up with it.
Thus, the reductionist view that makes Chinese thought the “absolute other” is negated — a view that considers that the orientation towards this thought may be a way to get rid of the dominance of European egocentrism and a completely new alternative to “Western” culture.
This reductionist view holds that Chinese culture can no longer think because it thought a lot in the past.
What Cheng is trying to precisely prove is that China continues to think and that it “no longer accepts to remain passive, like a rigid image that submits itself to be studied.
Rather it has become an effective interlocutor who contributes to our arguments, and for one reason, that it has devoted itself for nearly 30 years now to acquire everything that Western humanities brought, and it has recently been devoted to repossessing its intellectual and cultural heritage, based on what is stored in its past.”
No doubt, we may see ourselves in this picture, drawn as it is over China’s current position in relation to its heritage, trying to shake up the image that has been established about it.
Subordination to cultural centre
This also provides us with an answer to the objection that some of us make regarding our own openness to Western thought, and our neglect of what other contemporary cultures may offer us that may spare us from every single-minded view and free us from all subordination to any cultural centre that revolves around a specific cultural identity.
Let us conclude with the words of Professor Cheng: “I prefer to move, to-and-fro, and to wander from one bank to the other. Opposing what might be like a ‘dialogue’, I prefer multilateral discussions. Instead of ‘otherness’ that freezes confrontation, I look for differences that perceive things in the colours and movements of life.”
We should remember that these differences, “which perceive things in the colours and movements of life,” will not crystallise except by the extension of bridges.
