The age of war is the age of the rule of geopolitics. Then, as it appears, the most favourable opportunity is given for acquiring of consciousness of the political. Thus one immediately comprehends something infinite, all-embracing and inexhaustible, which in the period of peaceful life had its outer and inner traits, recognisable framework of one of the many human activities. Geopolitics is "politics", but only if we understand it as the most fundamental politics, or the politics of all policies. Whether there were peace or war, every politics, without exceptions, even where we can use that word only figuratively (if there is any other use of it at all), every politics is always already a geopolitics, in the literal sense of the word. But, at the time of war, geopolitics itself, as that which refers to "reality" and to the "real" in each case, as a real politics (Realpolitik) or the politics of the real, acquires its real traits. Geopolitics itself is realised geopolitically. Geopolitics appears as the mode of the constitution of reality itself - of "the most real", earthly reality - in the incessant and vertiginous dynamics, in the political dynamics. Maybe it is the privileged or even the only mode of "our" dealing with "reality", with the totally bare things. Those are the times when we finally learn, as a collective subject of knowledge, "who is who" and "what is what", when the other(s) appear completely "exposed" and "unveiled".

War is an event of realisation (of the individual, the society, culture etc.), or at least it irresistibly appears to be such. It is not just one among many similar events, but the one behind which all others lag, thus showing themselves as subsequent and derived. We can never get so close to reality as we do in war. Nothing is so real as the reality of war: people in war, culture in war, nature in war... Only in war can reality be fathomed to such an extent: so much that it is unbearable for many. That's why it is an opportunity for many to let their imagination get carried away. Never so many human gestures, actions, works, appear to be more fictitious and hollow. We never renounce them so easily, but we also never reach out for them with clearer consciousness than then.

Geopolitics is real politics (Realpolitik), the politics of closing in, of acquaintance with and appropriation of reality. Geopolitics is the war-politics or the politics of war - and therefore, it doesn't emerge only during the war. Nor is the war its ending - just like the war is not the beginning of struggles to life and death - since geopolitics is still "just" politics. There is no "realisation" of politics that would put an end to it, even a temporary one. Or at least we still cannot foresee such an ending. If war can be the end of politics in the peaceful sense, if such a sense exists, then geopolitics is that which remains from politics in war. And that is what is political to the greatest extent, politics itself in its nakedness. The realisation of politics is that which is mostly political, and not something that comes afterwards. Politics is, in fact, never enforced, because it is always being enforced and is nothing but its own self-enforcement. Politics is always "politicised"; it can never be found as a "pure" idea before any practical enforcement; we never find it placed somewhere, not even in the so-called "centres of power and decision". In that sense, the "ruling" politics is never completely the politics of those who are in power, it is not something they have in their hands, but is always already "popular" politics or the politics of the entire society.

When we think about the essence of the political, or of that which was once called by that name, we shouldn't talk like politicians, nor like those who reach for a certain politics. We shouldn't be tricked by the differences and specificities of political platforms and options. Like any intuition of essence (Wesenschau), this one also requires restraint and impartiality. The whole culture of theoretical consideration is based upon that. Thus, in the classical, metaphysical disposition of knowledge, of the pure sphere of theoretical action, people tried to attain the essence of the political, which, as essence, allegedly rules over all political phenomena. But this rule of the essence has itself proved to be a particular epistemological politics, which is seen through by those who follow the lead of the "deconstruction of metaphysics". Geopolitics, which is in the first place the fundamental politics of every discourse or discursive "practice", teaches us that one cannot think or speak from nowhere, not from a place that has no name, a place which doesn't always already belong to someone, which floats above the ground, without a toponym, above all "natural" limits and borders. At the time of flourishing of geopolitics, two figures represent the most unacceptable or notorious: "the occupation of the foreign land" and "floating above the ground". It is always the matter of defending one's own land, of everything that is the most proper: which had once been grown and created on it. It is always something concrete. The most concrete things on earth are the things of geopolitics - or, in other words, there is nothing concrete which isn't already its thing. Indeed, to think geopolitics, to "philosophise" about it, might be an impossible or, as is also said in such times, "a futile job". Unless one solicits philosophical traits from geopolitics. On their encounter, geopolitics at once makes philosophy into "geophilosophy", thus opening its eyes to that which it always had been. Geopolitics returns all things to their earthly origin, to their chthonic substance, to the beginning of time, to what they have "always been".

Hence, in the fire of war, at the time of the greatest human suffering, there remains nothing that would be the "thing" of philosophy. At least it appears to be so. The question is how can one speak in the name of philosophy: by being restrained, observing impartially, by analysing coldly, by bringing the unrepeatable moments to concepts... In a word, how is it then possible not to name? When no name must remain silent or be forgotten? And that should be done in the name of those who claim the right, maybe more than others, to the full consciousness of reality and to their own clear conscience. Husserl had, at the time of the rise of Nazism, come to realise the "absolute responsibility" of philosophers. Not presupposing the preceding "work" of politicians and others who name the proper names of things.

In war, perhaps, no one is fascinated with politics like philosophers. They know best what it offers: the pleasure of immediate naming, of identification that vouches for the closeness of reality. Geopolitics is the model of realisation for every politics, and politics is the model of realisation for all discourses, and for all the discursive genres subsumed under the class of theory. No wonder that, behind the need for "practical" realisation (of an idea, a concept, a theory), we always find some political desire, the effects of politics at work. When somebody speaks about reality, which is always a reality of some particular nation, of some culture and tradition, doesn't he already "enforce" certain politics, doesn't he, unknowingly, aim some past or future war? That's why different politics, in those decisive moments of breaking out of the "real" conflict between them, are represented gnoseologically: as differences between "more" or "less" reality. The enemy politics is always "illusory", fighters of the right side are always fighting ghosts. The culture that lies out there, on the other side of the front-line is not only foreign, infinitely foreign, but also completely unreal. One's own culture never becomes so real as it does in war. Nothing brings about the sobering up, the return to oneself, landing down to earth, as does the struggle unto life and death. Thinking of geopolitics means thinking this "aterrisage" (Baudrillard).

But, geopolitics, even at the peak of its realisation, remains politics. The reality which emerges there is not the "wild being" (Merleau-Ponty), it is not the unbearable reality of a "psychotic blow", as psychoanalysis describes that which is the most irksome: the encounter with "things in themselves", at the moment when no name designates them, when no sense mediates. There is no "absolute realisation", that is, if we can speak about something like that at all, because that would mean a momentary decline of culture. Realisation is always a social act, a collective deed of the members of a culture, a product of cultural production whose matrices and models are set by tradition. In "authentic" cultures, one cannot be "more real" than his ancestors. In war, it is probably most difficult to hide "the way things are", suddenly we see them as never before; but if we look at them really well, we see that they are exactly such as our ancestors left them for us. If we again call upon psychoanalysis or upon ethnology, which is close to it, we shall determine that it is a case of the realisations of the collective imagination, of the symbolical constructions of the social milieu. One can best see that war is an act of realisation of politics on the example of politics (as it is most commonly defined in a now entirely worn-out formula), but one can thus also see that every "realisation", every "practical enforcement", is a matter of politics, which cannot be entirely real as long as it is at work. And it will always be an essentially peaceful politics that threatens with its final realisation. War is always an end of politics, its totally irreal end, for there can never be such a war that would make it completely redundant.

Geopolitics itself cannot be thought as something concrete, since it appears on the side of the ontological construction of everything concrete, determined, established. The ends of geopolitics are the ends of the discourse in which everything utterable is created. At the time of war, they are more impalpable and more unattainable than ever before. Geopolitics is nothing other than transcendental geophilosophy which submits all discursive productions to gravitation. No one can administer and dispose with it from some determined place; and thanks to it, everyone should, whatever he otherwise says, find his place on earth. When it is strong enough, and it is apparently never without strength, nothing can be said that would elude its values, which are all estimated on the basis of only one question: "Where do you speak from?"

Geopolitics is nothing other than the politics of naming. It is primarily the politics of language or the language policy. Its most proper habitat, from which it always starts its campaigns, is there: thus overstepping the threshold of "linguistic politics" in the narrow sense (which is, therefore, not preservable as literal). Here, we can only enumerate some fundamental geopolitical facts or, which is more correct, present one basic fact in a few brief and quite free formulations. There are many languages on earth. Everything that exists has its name, and that name originates in a particular language which is always capable of naming the whole universe. One language is one world which always extends itself in a limited area, which has its own "visible" ends that can be inscribed on the earth's surface. All names are proper names, they always belong to someone, in the first place to a language in whose grammar we never find "foreign" names. Proper names are always somehow toponyms, age old monuments by which the forefathers have "appropriated" the fore-nature or founded a home for the succeeding generations.

Geopolitics is always one and the same politics that resides in the foundation of the conflicting language policies. Geopolitics is usually a binary geologic which doesn't allow any two languages to extend at the same time in the same place; at least not two languages that have become as "substantially" heavy as the process of renovation of "authentic" culture requires. War is always waged by two languages, sufficiently non-transparent and "planified", or at least two dialects, two idioms, two familiar names. Geopolitics is therefore the politics of naming in space, which is always earthly, where there are not only "our" names but the "foreign" ones as well. It is a question of the correct naming which lives off its difference from the incorrect naming, and which has become the question of the difference between life and death of those who name. Politics always teaches us how to name: this is the main thing for geopolitics as politics par excellence. Politics is always a politics of the relationship with the other, but this other is never so strange, and name never expresses this strangeness more strongly than it does in geopolitics. Insofar as the Others, our mortal enemies, escape us, reality, which is always represented as earthly reality, even their own reality, gets closer to us. This "social" movement is above all the "linguistic" movement of nations' distancing from and approaching to proper names. The expropriation of others' names as a reappropriation of proper names. It is not, therefore, strange that, with the appearance of "real politics" on the social scene, "proper names" become so "heavy" that the whole language is inevitably reduced to its "lexical level", whereas the denoting function - according to the most self-understood image of language, given by metaphysics - becomes the function in which the whole language is exhausted. That's why language can become a simple means of manipulation, and even the deadliest military weapon, all the more so since this is its completely illusory, "linguistic" transformation.

Geopolitics - which can consequently be thought only by starting from the "proper name" - brings contemporary philosophical thought, or the thought that tries to inherit "philosophy", to its greatest temptations. As some recent works, undersigned by significant names, show, the most puzzling of all questions standing before us is this one: what is "proper name"? It is from there that one should think "property" and "identity", and then also "society", "culture", "history", in a word: all fundamental phenomena of human existence. Long after the so-called "linguistic turn", after the development of the radical consequences of de Saussure's discovery of the "arbitrariness of the sign", geopolitics, as it seems, demands the hardest thing from "deconstruction". We shall venture one of its possible formulations: to think the whole language starting from the possibility of all its signifiers ("for their part") carrying one name - such as, for example, the name of that language.

The poet might have the hardest time trying to resist the exaltation because of the renewed and hardened language, because of the words which have suddenly regained their original naming power: in war, particularly in war which threatens to exterminate a whole nation, language can be brought back to the nation, and the nation back to language, language back to earth, and earth back to language... Still, the philosopher is still the last one to be able to write a eulogy to war. It is probably never so hard to think "philosophically" as it is in war. Geopolitics "lets" (gibt) the highest be said when there is least thought and lets the least be said when one thinks the most. But, precisely because of that, the challenge of geopolitics might become irresistible for philosophy, which carries in itself the telos of the final reconciliation, the possibility of eternal peace, thus bearing out of itself the "proper names" which are not assigned to anybody in advance, which easily extend over all limits, whose "naturalness" no one denounces better than philosophy.

That's why the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, or the war against Bosnia-Herzegovina, should be thought immediately, without waiting for some disinterested observers "from the side", who will, being privileged on account of the insubstantial bond with this soil and of their conceptual language, once give us scientific explanation of what has happened. This war, or these wars, should be thought in the name of so many so obvious things, and in the name of the geopolitical exemplarity of Bosnia-Herzegovina for any existing geophilosophy.

 
Poetics of the Proper Name

Name, even a "proper name", and especially a "proper name", always recalls other names, but it also always differs, emancipates itself. Everything a name does, it does in its own name, it does that as a proper name. "Proper name" is the most proper of the name, which cannot be subsumed under the essence of name. For nothing questions the essence as something that allegedly governs and disposes of names, better than the proper name. In fact, there is no essence of the name, just like there is no essence of the sign, discourse, language... The essence, or that which is always named that way, hides its origin from name, as well as the violence it performs on it. Perhaps all violence comes exactly from there, from the essence external to the name, from that which is above the name, from the possibility to gather together and classify the names on the basis of something that supersedes them. And that, of course, can only be the name. But, nothing oversteps the name like "the essence of name", no essence exerts so much violence as does this alleged essence of the name. Thereby the name is not humiliated nor dissolved, but is really elevated and glorified, above itself. Above itself, to the limit of the nameless, to the limit of its bearability, because the essence itself is always some name, it is always carried by some name, it is always some name that appears "in its name", soliciting it in front of the other names. As the proper, the most proper name, as incomparably more proper than the common "proper names". How many languages acquired supremacy over other languages exactly in the name of the essence on account of their names? Doesn't every native language claim the indisputable right to such a privilege, because of the incomparable properness of its names?

The name as the name, itself as such - is there anything more strange, more cramped, more threatening? It is always some family, which is always first a Wittgensteinian "family of names", that hides this sight from us. The essence, or "the essence of the essence", as the absolutely separated name, as the name which is not that, which doesn't belong to anything any more and isn't connected to anything, especially not with other names. Could anyone ever represent the name itself, think name as the name? And, doesn't every representation - for, when it comes to names, it is always a matter of representation - incline to the representation of one and only name above all names? Let's call it the "royal name" syndrome. Every name is a proper name and hides a possibility of its glorification. It always strives to turn the discourse it belongs to, and for which it is nothing special, into the natural energy of its glorification, of its elevation above all other signifiers, and primarily above other names.

When one asks above what is the proper name elevated, than the answer is that it elevates itself above other names. It is elevated by making other names from everything other, from that which is not itself. A name can survive only together with other names, only by being a name among other names. It is always a privileged name for itself, because its property is special and single, assigned only to it. Proper name strives to distinguish its belonging to itself and its properness. The more name is "true", it belongs less and less to anything or anyone, and above all to other names. Hence, the bearer of the name can himself be fascinated by its hugeness. Fascination with a big name is always a fascination with an exceptional property. Name elevates itself above property, which is always its own property, so to speak. For, one cannot think property without a proper name. Property that belongs to no one belongs to everyone, it is a property without name, which is the end of property. Name can never come to a property after the fact, without its being marked, more precisely constituted, by another name. Property is always already marked by name, name always already marks property. In fact, there is no naming, signifying or appropriating relationship between name and property. That cannot be thought: if one indeed wants to think the proper of the "proper name". Name is always already property and property is always already some name. What name? The name which is never absolutely proper to itself, in so far as it is always a name of some language, and therefore strives to posses itself beyond all other names, not only on the edge of all other languages, but of its own language as well. Every name, in its self-appropriation, wants to appropriate the whole language, thus absolutely becoming what it had been from the very beginning: the name of its language. Therefore: "the name that carries language", which, in the overturning of this double genitive, means: language carried by one of its proper names. The impossible task to carry a language like one carries a proper name. Language exists as long as it is carried by its proper names, and they can never simply carry it. Language is dead if it leaves behind only its biggest and most proper names: toponyms. No element of language can be distinguished and rejected from the others in the way a toponym can. Every proper name, and a toponym most of all, hides that which carries it, because it always names the carrier, it always puts itself in his place and designates that which is being carried, promulgated and carried out.

With the presentiment of the limits of the metaphysical comprehension of language, which builds language from the name and sees a name in every linguistic enunciation, language has abruptly been "set off" and "moved". The name of F. de Saussure perhaps best signifies the beginning of that vertiginous movement of language, the explosion of the "fluxes of the signifier" about which J. Lacan spoke with such pleasure, or in which he found so much pleasure. Hardly anyone will ever follow their movement with more passion and be more exhilarated with their unrestrainedness than G. Delleuze and F. Guattari. Deconstruction is after all nothing but finding of the living tropic movement under each piece of the hard ground marked with a constant name. The name of J. Derrida marks the overturning of the primacy of proper name, which has always already a little bit fallen out from the tropic movement, in relation to the discourse. It is not a simple overturning, because it puts into question the fundamental possibilities of any primacy, privilege, property, rule... But, can a proper name be deconstructed? It can least be harmed by a mere return to its origins, a renewed drowning or swimming in the currents whose shores are illusory, pointing at its discursive origin, to the linguistic substance from which it is built. The first act that led to the so-called "linguistic turn", behind us now for more than a half a century, the passage "beyond" and "further" from the name towards the discourse, the act which, as one sees clearly now, the "proper name" could easily allow, again demands the return to the name, because we "leave" the discourse with unfinished business. What remains to be deconstructed is that which hid the possibility of deconstruction throughout the whole history of metaphysics. The rest of deconstruction to which it should somehow approach. In that, nothing guarantees its success, structural linguistics the least. All of Derrida´s recent books deal with the "proper name", which neither is nor can be a topic, a thesis, an idea, etc. What now makes the linguistic question cramped is exactly the twofold character of the name, the fact that it is somewhere already discerned, in the worst case already fallen to the ground. Indeed, always only metaphorically. By the return of the name "to" the discourse, which is nowhere without name nor represents any being or body, we manage to deconstruct the "properness" or the "property" carried by the name, but that turns out to be too easy. Deconstruction is realized at the most formal level and its political consequences hardly overcome the linguistic frameworks. Linguistics is politically caricaturized rather than offering so promising and alluring effects. By the return from the "nature", from the "things themselves" to the always unstable and questionable tropic which always executes a certain political power and economic demands, the proper name paradoxically loses much, unacceptably much of its properness. A too fast or too slow success becomes a bitter disappointment: it is not this, this remnant or this rejected surplus, which should be deconstructed. It is exactly the "essence of the name" that should be deconstructed, not its linguistic kernel, or not in the manner that it be "peeled off" to its kernel. The properness of the "proper name" should be sought for on the side of its "essence", which doesn't mean neglecting the achievements of deconstruction and the return to Aristotelian epistemological politics, the onto-theo-teleo-politics. It seems that regression to pre-deconstructivist achievements is no longer allowed. The transparency of the sign is an unrepeatable historical event, just like Freud´s opening of the "second scene".

The essence of the name points at the place where the name, always single and alone, as on the graveyard, is inscribed. Where it, in fact, falls to the ground. The essence of the name is the toponym, if we want to describe the topos of proper names or the fact that the possibility of every topos (place, space, habitat, etc.) hides proper names. Even the possibility of the "space of all spaces", of geometrical space which is carried, as Husserl showed in his Vienna lecture (1935), by the European name or the name of the European - which allegedly has no "natural borders/limits/" (neither western or eastern, neither southern or northern). The most proper space of the proper name is the "earthly space". Names, in the name of their properness, demand that the space or, more precisely, the ground be considered; just as the discourse in the name of expropriation which it carries along demands the speech about time. It is in that manner that Derrida speaks about the "spatialization of time" and about "temporization of space" in the steps of the différance, which is primarily "linguistic difference".

Every proper name "elevates" itself, preferably above all other signifiers, because it carries, like everything else in the discourse, the irresistible and unstoppable tropic movement. Names, and among them proper names, are signifiers which are most submissive and most suitable for being thrown out, thrown over, launched by this movement. And to put an end to this movement. Every name ends or starts again some turn, swing, the curve of discourse, just as a point marks the end of an always unfinished sentence, announcing or calling upon the next one. Behind each name lie the figures of discourse, the tempestuous movements and winding streams, and all those figures, as Derrida showed in his famous essay "La mythologie blanche", inscribe themselves on the path of their movement into the figure of heliotrope. It is the circular path of every image-like expression, which receives its light from the metaphorical sun or the sun of metaphor. The proper names also draw their "meaning", or better, their naming power from there. They are not simply obstacles to this movement, say earthly obstacles. This can best be seen in the age of the domination of proper names, at the age of geopolitics: names live off the tropism, which, if completely submitted to them, points at the special circulation of "proper names" in nature. When names start being put high above the discourse, but never so high as in the age of the flourishing of geopolitics, then, thanks to its circularity, heliotropism is turned into geotropism. Everything that is brought out by the metaphoric movement, and which cannot be brought out any more by the power of that movement, "falls to earth". Geotropic is the poetics of geopolitics, or of the dominant discourse at the age of the struggle for living space. It is the tropism which prepares the discourse for the domination of the name. Then, the whole language celebrates its closeness to things, and one does not speak of anything but the property or the proper. The function of denomination or the denomination of the name becomes immensely strengthened. One word, and the word is then always the name, can take or restore life. Or the reality, which is more than ever an earthly reality. All the names are then lowered to the ground, in a kind of aterrisage of which J. Baudrillard spoke, thus showing their real origin. And the earth is revived as if no longer metaphorical, but in the most literal sense. From it, every geotrope draws its meaning - and each figure of the discourse became a geotrope - in order to give the name it takes such a weight that it easily, so easily, touches the ground from the discourse. One cannot say anything anymore without naming something, and that in a substantial sense: as if you are pointing your finger at such a relief, a very distinguished relief. At the time of flourishing geotropic - and every flourishing, every flower, every rhetoric ornament belongs to the botanics of discourse which is derived from it - all names fall where they always tried to fall: on the earthly ground, in the very, essential, most essential reality. Semiotic production, fragility of each name, arbitrariness of the sign, then hides mostly from itself: in the textual hyper-realism. In the very act of writing, writers want to be everything else but the writers of texts.

 
Nostalgia for an Authentic Culture

"Authentic cultures" are cultures in which the social connections are familial or are built as familial. Ethnology has, in its tempestuous development through the 20th century, brought them close as forgotten, original, primary ethnic or tribal cultures. It is well known that the nostalgia for the different, "more human", "more intimate", forms of culture than the one which counts many years of "linear" development, has contributed a lot to the development of ethnology or cultural anthropology. The flourishing of this young science coincides with the age of greatest crises and disappointments in Culture which carried the attributes of being "rationalistic", "humanistic" and the like. Ethnology has, among other things, described the difference between the European (today "planetary") and the former "primitive" cultures, by the difference between the term "society" (Gesellschaft) and "community" (Gemeinschaft): by the difference between the social tissue made of the insubstantial (economic dependence, civil loyalty, etc.) and the substantial social connections (blood relations, mythical unity, etc.). Therefore, French thinkers Delleuze and Guattari, founders of schizoanalysis, could point out the schizophrenic character as the essential determination of the society they live in (seeing in it the promise of the greatest liberty). Today Baudrillard, among other thinkers and scientists who deal with the same questions, under the sign of hyper-production (hyper-economy, hyper-politics, hyper-sexuality, etc.) tries to describe that biggest remove between the culture to which we all belong today, whether we like it or not, and the traditional cultures. All these removes and differences, according to this author, inscribe into the orbital path of a cultural production which escaped every earthly bond, where the gravitational force lost its cultural power. (The prefix "hyper", through which we now can reach the fundamental social categories, points at the extraterrestrial, to the overcoming of every earthly measure, to the conspicuous insufficiency of all ecological capacities - where the question of waste can be exemplary). Baudrillard thus incites us to think the relationship with the earth as the fundamental interior link of culture with the "reality" or the fundamental "social" connection. As that which saves it from disintegration and that from which it draws its vital strength.

Culture always preserves the memory of its origin, of the cultivation of the earth as its primary form. Every culture preserves something of its "natural purposivness", and that is what makes it agriculture. Isn't it time, precisely because we are climbing so high and because we cannot find our natural habitat anywhere, to return to culture as agriculture? Maybe because we've lost every reliable center of gravity and because no permanent property is assigned to us in advance, we can, finally, see the agricultural traits in every culture. Today we miss something important in culture, something like the reality itself. As is well known, Freud called this feeling of living without a natural shelter "discontent in culture". Discontent is a "natural" feeling in culture, a feeling of a tolerable intolerability.

Above all traditional cultural differences, which gave so much trouble regarding cultural relativism, absolute difference now appears: between owning and not owning the land. And the land itself - even if we own it to the greatest extent, say as land-owners - cannot appear to us any more. Land as land, as the essential reality. Lyotard called it "the disappearance of the referent" (sign), in order to describe recent movements in culture/language (not in order to repeat the banality that there is no "immediate nature" in culture, nor culture without narcissistic traits). We cannot even ask: "what is land?", search for its essence, just as Derrida showed that we cannot ask "what is a sign?" or "what is language?" Earth is a symbol for us, the symbol of all symbols, the symbol of the lost substantial bonds of the society. For the substantial bonds are always natural (the model of the family) - and therefore always already lost. We owe no one this insight more than to Levi-Strauss.

Culture, every culture - even this one without "natural limits", "extraterrestrial", which approaches all other cultures, which are incapable of preserving their "specific weight" in front of it, and does that from "above" - preserves memory. Every culture preserves memory of its origin. That is the fundamental agricultural act of every culture: nourishing of the heritage. Historical botanics. Cultural tradition is primarily the transfer of memories, their flow which preserves them at their spring. The most ancient tradition, the tradition of all traditions, preserves the primal memories, the ones about the authentic origin, about the origin "from the very earth". In tradition we find, in the silent, barely noticeable and brotherly helping, many hands which preserve tradition, the hands of our ancestors. Tradition is, in fact, preserving itself for itself, always in the greatest proximity and complicity with the native or mortal soil, in order to preserve the proximity to the oldest ancestors - who had long ago been in "natural" proximity to the earth, so close that they planted and cultivated culture for us. And they did that by, and only by, speaking the authentic language, the language which directly touched on the earthly things. The primal cultivation of land, the collective act of its taking, could only be a linguistic act. It has been memorized by the names of the ancestors that "fell on earth". We find the monuments of this primal taking in the oldest toponyms. Each of them says that the names of our ancestors fell on earth so that they could be appropriated once and for all, the ground from which the culture of descendants will grow. Their speech still echoes in the "cultivated" spaces through the toponyms or the language which kept the names readable on toponyms. One should, today more than ever, think this inscription of the name on the soil, the naming of mountains and rivers, which can survive both reliefs and cultures. It is not a matter of myth, of the mythical tradition, of the mythical cultures, but of the myth of the culture itself, first of all of the "mythical" weight of toponyms, from which every myth acquires its fascinating substantiality.

Every culture nourishes the nostalgia for the lost proximity to earth, in so far as every culture is an agriculture to some extent. And this proximity is always lost, if every proximity to the earth was linguistic. What are the linguistic capacities of the proximity to earth? The ones that preserve the memory, that enable something to be something: names. Even after the so-called "linguistic turn" we have to deal with names, with the same "elements of language" which have obstructed us from seeing through its metaphysical structure for millenniums. Today, names are again taking us beyond linguistics, semiotics, philosophy of language as politics, geopolitics and geophilosophy. Names, names in the proper sense of the word, are toponyms, they preserve the secret of the proximity of language (culture, history, nation) to the earthly soil.

What does it mean to deal with the cultural production as an agricultural action with the semiotic consciousness? Maybe it primarily means to deal with the fundamental politics, the politics of all policies, moved by the nostalgia of culture for the earth. And this nostalgia has never been greater than today. If the cultural production were regarded highly enough, if it were amazingly efficient, than this nostalgia could be turned into a crazy desire. Into the desire for the complete and final realization or naturalization of culture. The experience of national-socialism could perhaps be interpreted as an experience of the return to the earth of a European culture (whose "natural basis" is, by definition, a simulacrum). The return which, indeed, could only be symbolic, mythical to the greatest extent. Only an agriculture par excellence could place the symbol of the Sun so high, to govern its whole "botanical growth". The most horrible thing in Nazism, or that to which this most horrible thing owes its existence, is this "naturalness" of culture, the fact that all its characteristics are simply "natural". No culture before that tried so much to realize its botanical, animal, biological, geographical, geological traits - or at least not from such distance from the earth. Premonition that some such "authentic" culture could again so abruptly and so violently be realized on European soil, provokes the greatest concern. European cultures - when we say "European" we think of Husserl's insight that Europe isn't anything "geographically determined" - should be protected from the sudden fall to the "natural" ground.

National-socialism can be described as an inherent effect of the most successful movement of the culture which wants to be written with a capital initial. The enormity of the danger hides therein: we find it as "natural" shadow of the greatest cultural values and achievements. Exactly in the name of its illusorines, its sickness, monstrosity, one should dare to see how little that social system was a mere illusion, a sick extremity, a monstrous deformation. How much it had the great nostalgia of all great cultures behind it - the nostalgia for the authentic, natural, substantial traits of culture. National-socialism remains the greatest temptation of the "developed" cultures. We must never oversee the measure of the height which the German Hochkultur had set for all future totalitarisms. Which in no way means that we no longer have any means to defend the most precious achievements of "authentic" cultures. That would be the greatest success of Nazism. That would mean falling for the same difference given by its ideologists: to the difference, which excludes all mediations, between authentic and degenerated culture. Regarding the Third Reich, we must dare to speak about a cultural regression to the "authentic" form of culture, to talk about the greatest regression to the most authentic form - so authentic that culture really acquires natural traits. That's exactly what Hitler's state looked like: an animal empire or a botanical garden in which the laws, norms, customs were strictly obeyed. All true members of the nation had to be totally normal persons, healthy specimens, and nothing was more repulsive than the disturbed, the deprived, the insane. That's why Hannah Arendt posed the greatest challenge to the interpreters of Shoah when she described Eichmann as a "normal" person. Nazism posed the measure of an absolute socialization unrecorded even in pedagogics textbooks. That's why it is always possible that, behind the garden fence of a model family, there operates a death-factory, to whose work all the family members diligently contribute and "don't know anything" about its production.

Perhaps we still aren't sufficiently aware of Freud's discovery that successful socialization is based on the "death drive". (Perhaps there is nothing more dangerous than the "totally" socialized people, psychiatric role models?) Nazism stands at the side of the "pleasure in culture", that is the exalted respect for cultural norms: it discovers "the kinship between desire and law" (Lacan). As an "impossible solution" or a "final solution" of the question of culture, being "the most natural form" of life in culture, it looks irresistible for the masses. All the important analyses of this modern historical phenomenon, carried out during the past half a century, followed that direction: finding the "authentic" speech, the "normal" individual, the "model" family, the "familiarized" collective, in a word, the renewal of the substantial community (Gemeinschaft). One should again read Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism from 1933(!), the first great work of interpretation of the non-interpretable, and see, for instance, with what success fascism tried to regain the family's traditional role, taken away by capitalism. One should "go through" a lot, not only in reading, in order to be able to say, together with Derrida, the philosopher for whom one could not say that he avoids responsibility, to say: "I don't believe that we know yet what Nazism is. That task lies in front of us.".

Which in no way means that it has become impossible, after all this time, to recognize, name, fight against Nazism. That fight lies ahead of us. But it is the truth, the frightening truth, that it is always possible, despite the greatness of the crime it brings about, to make it relative, normal, to reappropriate and domesticate it. The greatest evil seems "human, all too human" - since all the measures have become superhuman. Since our distance from earth achieves the "critical point", the desire that awakens the Nazi myth could be elementary: to finally speak so that the Other can hear me, to finally really name Things, to finally live in a real Fraternity. Doesn't Nazism offer us the most efficient means of preserving the memory - about it?

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