To be displaced from one’s country of origin and upbringing—the experience of over 175 million people in the world, on a conservative estimate—is a wrench perhaps comparable in impact to that of war, long-term hunger or imprisonment.footnote¹ It has similar roots to these in the odium theologicum of modern power-holders, although displacement is of course a relatively milder variant. In this sense, too, it is quite unmetaphorical. Instead of a person creatively carrying over (meta phorein) meanings, across accepted borders of sense, a person is here bodily pushed over borders by forces beyond his or her control. But all our lives are shot through with ways of apprehending ourselves and others (what is a border? and a person?), so that right at the outset a secondary, metaphoric usage of displacement needs to be brought into play: the sense of feeling alien and out of place, a widespread unease sometimes deepening into despair, that seems so intrinsic to the experience of modernity. Marx, of course, found the root of alienation in the labour process. The acute critic of the first modern mass democracy, Thoreau, postulated that most people live lives of quiet desperation, but the sentiment is most often articulated by and about intellectuals, from Nietzsche to Sartre to Said.

But this depends on how we define intellectuals. Sociologically, they have been characterized as those middle-class people, largely university graduates, who ‘produce, distribute and preserve distinct forms of consciousness’—images, stories, concepts.footnote² In another sense, however, anybody is a potential intellectual insofar as she or he attempts to articulate meanings and make sense of the forces shaping our lives, as Brecht and Gramsci put it, combining a lived concern for knowledge and for freedom. For the present purpose I would differentiate between two poles, one of critical intellectuals and the other what Debray has called reproductive or distributive intellectuals: the engineers of material and human resources; admen and design professionals; the new bishops and cardinals of the media clerisy; most lawyers—in other words, the ‘organic’ mercenaries, for whom postmodern cynicism dispenses with the need for alibis. Most distributive intellectuals work to reproduce, at one level or another, the means of psychophysical repression. The critical intellectuals, those who produce new forms of consciousness and subconsciousness, are most likely to be alienated from today’s regimes, to feel themselves what used to be called ‘inner émigrés’ or undeclared exiles.

Yet this is too ambiguous a category to be used at the outset of an investigation into ‘actually existing’ displacement. The metaphor, ‘all modern thinkers are exiles’, might tend rather to conceal the brute fact of bodies not only psychically but physically in exile, and the new ways of feeling, thinking, and living that this brings; to elide the experience of working and downtrodden people. The metaphor is of Christian origin, evoking the expulsion from Eden; and the quasi-Christian insistence on the alienation of the post-lapsarian soul seems to obscure ‘what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings’.footnote³ I want therefore to hold the metaphor in abeyance; yet also to keep it in mind for later use, because it wonderfully illuminates, first, some central facets of the phenomenology or inner sense of exile, of the existential alienation or opposition most displaced persons feel toward where they were displaced from and displaced to; and second, some of the cognitive and creative uses to which displacement can be put.

Accordingly, this essay will first attempt to establish a typology and a brief phenomenology of displacement, and then consider some of its applications for intellectuals. It pretends to no more than a first orientation in this field, leaving out such key historical factors as the world market, demographic trends, war. It addresses itself only to the modalities and consequences of people getting, more or less reluctantly, from an original society to a new and at least initially strange one. Therefore, it will speak little about how the ‘target’ society deals with such people (asylum etc.), and not at all about the modalities and consequences of their return to the ‘source’ society, if that happens; nor about the important economic and political fallout of the communications between such a diaspora and its source.

‘Anyone prevented from returning home is an exile,’ wrote Edward Said—as a Christian-born Palestinian Arab and critical intellectual, an addetto ai lavori if ever there was—in his 1984 essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’. Said goes on to speak about refugees and émigrés, and I shall use insights by him and others to construct a typology as a guide to the labyrinth of what I shall provisionally call forced displacement. Here, however, the term ‘exiles’, which can loosely encompass also refugees and émigrés, will be taken in the stricter sense of people forced out from their original society for political reasons (though elsewhere it may become necessary to use it for the whole category of ‘forcibly displaced people’).

To be prevented from returning home, one must first have left under pressure and in circumstances which make a return impossible, although the particular individual may not have been fully aware that this would be the case. A cognate but experientially and existentially quite different category is expatriates, such as my fellow-members of the Cambridge Club of Toscana and Umbria, who have moved from England to Italy’s even greener and more pleasant land to work and mostly marry. According to Said, ‘expatriates voluntarily live in an alien country’, the best-known group in cultural history being perhaps the Americans in Paris after the First World War: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Stein, Miller; and the somewhat more complex cases of their black compatriots, such as Baldwin and Wright, or of Irishmen like Joyce and Beckett. Pure expatriates are those who can and usually do return, whose physical and metaphoric alienation from their mother-country is therefore not so thoroughgoing as to be permanent. ‘Expatriates may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions’: they retain their original nation-state rights and are spared the sense of indefinitely durable, very possibly final sundering or expulsion from the society of their youthful acculturation.footnote⁴ In a looser sense, temporary power-holders and missionaries in the colonies, as well as scholars investigating other societies, are also expatriates.footnote⁵ The latest avatar of the colonial administrator is the swelling class of elite technicians of capitalist globalization—the international bankers, planners, policy makers, accountants and ngo employees flitting between the cities of five continents. Yet almost all expect to return to enhanced status at home, and fall totally outside this discussion. Finally, expatriates remind us that the possibility of moving to a new location may be quite positive, and that this could also be the case for a number of displaced persons from less fortunate categories. It is, alas, the bleaker aspect of displacement that must first of all be faced.

The precondition for talking about this category, then, is the existence of people who grow up and are acculturated in one national society, with its mores, language, sights, sounds and all other treasures of youthful experience, and who move to live in another country without certitude of return. Not rarely such people, especially intellectuals, move to several other places—Joyce to Paris, Italy and Switzerland; Nabokov to Germany and the usa. Here a first distinction needs to be made, between what I shall call single exiles—though as with the Joyces, this is often a nuclear family—and multiple or mass exoduses, by those whom I shall call refugees. If we term the original society O, and the new, strange one S, we come to this initial overview: