The New Musselman
The New Musselman

Figures on the Threshold, Ethics of the Contact Zones and The Renewed Possibility of History

Summary/Abstract: The paper will open several avenues for research and reflection by revisiting Marian Crișan’s Morgen, Tarr Bela’s Werckmeister Harmonies and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique. The key element will be the figure of the refugee as a figure-on-the-threshold that enacts essential transformations inside a community. Its contemporary position as the new musselman (Primo Levi’s definition) redistributes the way history and identities can be defined. The way a society falls into fascism upon a traumatic intrusion (as the whale in Tarr Bela’s movie), the ruins of violence and their challenge to ethics and especially the passages and the contact zones will lead us to the concept of concrete universality and the possibility of a renewed belief in the possibility of history.

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