The foot on the head of a pharaoh: Jean-François Champollion's statue in the courtyard of the renowned Collège de France has become a bone of contention. Created around 1870 by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi – the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty in New York – its imagery is contradictory: conceived as a heroic monument to the pursuit of knowledge, it is also overshadowed by a tragic shadow that refers to Champollion's crisis-ridden worldview. Celebrated for deciphering hieroglyphics and writing a new history of humanity, between 1827 and 1829, during encounters with members of the North American Osage Nation in Paris and during his stay in Egypt, Champollion had formative experiences with colonial social destruction and cultural death, which were closely linked to the understanding of world knowledge to which he himself owed his rise and fame. Champollion's doubts and actions raise questions that Markus Messling takes as a starting point to reflect on how we deal with the legacy of colonialism in Europe.
"Markus Messling poses a fundamental question: Given the state of the world today, how should we conceive of universality as an ethical ideal, an epistemological perspective, and a political project? Universality, he emphasizes, is the enigma we cannot do without. Messling unfolds Bartholdi's statue of Champollion as an allegory of the Enlightenment, as a witness to imperial evils, and as a monument to the intertwining of knowledge and doubt – thus showing that only an idea of universality understood as a tragic virtue can adequately prepare us for the obligations and responsibilities of the present."
– David Scott (Columbia University)
Softcover
Markus Messling, born in 1975, is Professor of Romance and General Literature and Cultural Studies at Saarland University and Director of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE). He is a full member of the Academia Europaea and has held visiting professorships and fellowships in Paris, Cambridge, London, and Kobe, among other places.
