The west - a prescription or dialogical proscription

Abstract

The taxonomy of humanity can be dictated by numerous categories: civilization, race, ethnicity, tradition, culture and so on. While often perceived only as descriptive and "fixed naturally", none of these categories is able to specify the identity of a particular group without committing some conceptual inconsistency or offering a reasonably coherent and systematic classification of the human species in general. Still, it is impossible to say that they are unreal or merely illusory. On the contrary, they constitute the social reality and play significant roles in the discrimination of one group of people from and in opposition to others. The West – likewise, with its symmetrical opposite, the Rest of humanity – is one of those clearly defective categories in the rationality of its conceptual coherence. She has no consistency unit. Rather, it presents itself as a putative unit, and contains contradictions in itself, so that it can be unified only in the future. It is a social imaginary that functions primarily as a myth on a global scale, such as race. Still, unlike race, it tends to present a cartographic association. Due to this affinity with cartographic imagination, the dichotomy between the West and the Rest is often invoked as a schematic trope of dialogue in order to denote and understand various instances of social conflict and distancing in spatial terms, but with the result of postulating the West and the Rest as territories, as geographical delimitations. This article then questions how can the West exist?