Abstract
The question of Europe has been raised continually. Since ancient times, the need to promote trade and the desire to prevent war have driven the search for a basis for European unity.
Various candidates, from that of Roman law in ancient times to the current economic and regulatory union of today have been tried. Such bureaucratic solutions, however, have not proved sufficient.
They regulate external relations, but do not touch what is within. This, however, is the difficulty: how do we understand nations and their relations from within? On an individual level, it is customary to speak of the inner as "subjectivity." By such a term is generally meant the "subject" of experience, the unique and individual self that has experience.
If we are to avoid the Cartesian conceptions of this self, we have to speak of such a subject as an embodied whole: an organic unity that is both conscious of its environment and distinguishes itself from the latter. In what follows, I am going to use Levinas' conception of corporalité (Leiblichkeit in German) to extend of the concept of embodied subjectivity to the national level.
Such an extension, I will argue, is crucial for understanding the group of nations that we call Europe. It is what allows us to catch sight of Europe's particular identity