Nietzsche, Pamuk, and the “Good Europeans:” Approaching Otherness Through the Transformative Power of Imagination.

The paper argues that the creation of new cultural horizons out of the interlocked and sometimes conflictive traditions in modern democracies can succeed only to the extent that the confrontation between ‘master’ and ‘slave’ moralities turns into a mutually inspiring cultural practice, through which they transform each other (the ‘enemy’) and in the process imaginatively alter the boundaries of their identities. Nietzsche sketches a model of such cultural practice through the experiment of “good Europeans.” The paper further develops and gives full political relevance to Nietzsche’s experiment through an interpretation of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The White Castle: the story of an Ottoman ‘master’ and his Italian ‘slave’ who engage in an inspiring and transformative cultural practice, through which the frontiers of each other’s identity are altered and expanded through the power of imagination, in ways that produce new cultural syntheses. Through such exercises the “power of a novelist’s imagination” opens an “inspiring and critical new space” between cultural worlds from which the either/or thinking of nationalism and Westernization, as well as, the obsessions with identity can be overcome. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]