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S C H R I F T E N Z U R W E L T L I T E R AT U R BAN D 7
Markus Winkler in collaboration with

Maria Boletsi, Jens Herlth, Christian Moser,
Julian Reidy, Melanie Rohner
Barbarian: Explorations of
a Western Concept in Theory,
Literature, and the Arts
Vol. I: From the Enlightenment
to the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Schriften zur Weltliteratur
Studies on World Literature
Herausgegeben von Dieter Lamping

in Zusammenarbeit mit Immacolata Amodeo,
David Damrosch, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis und Markus Winkler
Band 7
Markus Winkler
in collaboration with Maria Boletsi, Jens Herlth,
Christian Moser, Julian Reidy, and Melanie Rohner
Barbarian: Explorations of
a Western Concept in Theory,
Literature, and the Arts
Vol. I: From the Enlightenment to the Turn
of the Twentieth Century
J. B. Metzler Verlag
The publication of this book was realized with the financial support of the University of Geneva
and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
Die Autorinnen und Autoren

Markus Winkler (Leiter des Projektes) ist Professor für Neuere deutsche und Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Genf.
Maria Boletsi (Co-Leiterin des Projektes) ist Stiftungsprofessorin für Neugriechische Studien
(Lehrstuhl Marilena Laskaridis) an der Universität Amsterdam und Assistenzprofessorin für
Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Universiteit Leiden.
Jens Herlth ist Professor für Slavistik an der Universität Fribourg.
Christian Moser ist Professor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Bonn.
Julian Reidy ist Privatdozent an der Universität Bern und Lehrbeauftragter für Neuere deutsche
Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Genf.
Melanie Rohner ist im Rahmen des vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds geförderten Projektes
“‘Barbarism’: History of a Fundamental European Concept” Postdoktorandin an der Universität
Genf.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über
http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.
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Satz: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde
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© Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature, 2018
Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX
1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Markus Winkler
1.1. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.1. Towards the Critical History and Aesthetic Exploration of a
Fashionable Slogan and Enemy-Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1.2. A Genealogical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Genealogical Premises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.1. From bárbaros as Language- and Affect-Related
Onomatopoetic Word to barbarismus as Rhetorical Term. . . . . 10
1.2.2. The Mythopoetic ‘Invention of the Barbarian’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2.3. The Conceptualization of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2.3.1. The Emergence of the Ethnocentric Enemy- and
Identity-Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.2.3.2. Scholarly Approaches to the Concept and Their
Shortcomings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.2.4. The Aesthetic Exploration of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.3. Structure and Content of Volume I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2. Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1. The Concept of Barbarism in Eighteenth-Century Theories

of Culture and Sociogenesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Christian Moser
2.1.1. Concept-Historical Prerequisites. The Temporalization of the
Concept of the Barbarian and the Construction of a Relationship
between Savagery and Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1.1.1. The Changing Meaning of Barbarian in the Eighteenth
Century—as Illustrated by Dictionary Entries . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.1.1.2. Savagery in Relation to Barbarism: Antiquity and the
Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.1.1.3. Savagery in Relation to Barbarism: the Early Modern
Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
VI Contents
2.1.2. Montesquieu to Ferguson: Barbarism as a Stage of Cultural and

Social Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.1.2.1. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.1.2.2. Montesquieu: Barbarism as an Intermediate Social Force. . . 64
2.1.2.3. Turgot: Barbarism as an Engine of Social Progress . . . . . . . . 73
2.1.2.4. Rousseau: Barbarian Idylls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
2.1.2.5. Adam Smith: Barbarian Economies of Predation and Gifts . 93
2.1.2.6. Adam Ferguson: Barbarism as Social Gambling. . . . . . . . . . . 103
2.1.2.7. Barbarian Origins of Language and of Contractuality:
Smith and Rousseau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
2.1.2.8. Barbarian Art: Herder and Goethe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
2.1.2.9. Conclusion and Prospect: Anthropology; Philosophy of
History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
2.2. Case Study: Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Christian Moser
2.3. Bemoaning the Loss of ‘Vernunft’ and ‘Tugend’: On the Semantics

of Barbarism in Salomon Gessner’s Der Tod Abels (The Death of Abel,
1758) and Maler Müller’s Adams erstes Erwachen und seelige Nächte
(Adam’s First Awakening and Blissful Nights, 1777) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Julian Reidy
3. Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
3.1. The Relationship between Idyll and Barbarism in Schiller’s

Wilhelm Tell (William Tell, 1804) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Melanie Rohner
3.2. “These are the mysteries of the barbarians, my dear”: The C oncept
of Barbarism in Polish Romanticism (Zygmunt Krasiński, Adam
Mickiewicz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Jens Herlth
3.2.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
3.2.2. The Imagined Barbarian: Zygmunt Krasiński’s Letters to
Henry Reeve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
3.2.3. Krasiński’s Irydion: A Half-Barbarian’s Journey from Rome to
“the land of graves and crosses”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
3.2.4. “Let us not disdain the barbarians”: Adam Mickiewicz and the
Re-Evaluation of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
3.2.5. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Contents VII
3.3. Interfering Semantics of Barbarism and Race in Flaubert’s

Salammbô (1862) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Markus Winkler
3.3.1. Why Write a Historical Novel on a Remote War of Barbarians
against Barbarians? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
3.3.2. ‘Barbarism’ and ‘Race’ in the Historiographical Tradition of the
Mercenaries’ War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
3.3.3. The Narrative Staging of ‘Barbarism’ and ‘Race’ in Flaubert’s
Novel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
3.3.4. The Contribution of Flaubert’s Novel to the History of ‘Barbarism’
and ‘Race’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
3.4. Nietzsche’s Concept of Barbarism: From Rhetoric to Genealogy . . . . . 258

Markus Winkler
3.4.1. Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
3.4.2. Variations on the Opposition of Barbarism and ‘Culture’ (Bildung) . 259
3.4.3. The Ambivalence of the Genealogical Approach to the Concept
of Barbarism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
4. On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century: History, Crisis, and

Intersecting Figures of Barbarians in C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the
Barbarians” (“Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους,” 1898/1904) . . . . . . . . . 285
Maria Boletsi
4.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
4.2. Between History, Myth, and Allegory: The Barbarians As Symbols . . 292
4.3. The Intertextual Nexus of Cavafy’s Barbarians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
4.3.1. Cavafy and Gibbon on Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
4.3.2. Cavafy’s and Renan’s Barbarians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
4.3.3. The Barbarian in Decadent Literature and in the Intellectual
Climate of the Late Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
4.3.4. “Waiting for the Barbarians” As an Anti-Decadent Poem . . . . . 321
4.4. Barbarians, Crisis, and Historical Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Acknowledgements
The present study is part of a collaborative international research project funded

from 2013 to 2017 by the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS). The project was
initiated and led by Markus Winkler (University of Geneva). Co-applicant for its
funding was Jens Herlth (University of Fribourg). We are very grateful to the FNS for
its generous support, which included the three-year employment of a postdoctoral
and a doctoral researcher.
This first volume of the study and the preparatory meetings of the international
research team were also realized with the financial support of the Netherlands Or-
ganization for Scientific Research (NWO). The NWO co-funded the research project
through an “Internationalisation in the Humanities” grant (2013–2016) obtained by
Maria Boletsi (University of Leiden). Additional funds were provided by the Uni-
versity of Bonn/Chair for Comparative Literature as well as by the University of
Geneva’s Comparative Literature Program.
We are grateful to the student research assistants at the University of Geneva who
over the past years have conducted extensive bibliographical research on the topic
of the present study. They are Céline Bischofberger, Guillaume Broillet, Jasmin Gut,
César Jaquier, Laura Scharff, and Jeanne Wagner. Céline Bischofberger and Jasmin
Gut also carefully copy-edited several chapters of the present volume, and Guillaume
Broillet performed the laborious final copy-editing of the volume’s entire manu-
script. In addition, Margaret Kehoe, Daniele Leo, Jil Runia, and Lukas Hermann
helped with the copy-editing of selected chapters.
Finally, we extend our thanks to the publisher J. B. Metzler and in particular to
Oliver Schütze, as well as to Dieter Lamping, the main editor of the “Studies on
World Literature” series.
Parts of chapters 2.1 and 2.2 were originally written in German and then translat-
ed into English with the assistance of Alex Skinner. Chapters 2.1.2.7 and 2.1.2.8 draw
on material published in Moser 2018a and 2018b.
As for chapters 3.1 and 3.3, they were originally written in German as well and
then translated into English with the assistance of Katherine Sotejeff-Wilson.
Geneva, spring 2018

M. W.
1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction 1
1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

Markus Winkler
1.1. Preliminary Remarks
1.1.1. Towards the Critical History and Aesthetic Exploration
of a Fashionable Slogan and Enemy-Concept
In the current political rhetoric shared by a large number of Western politicians,
political scientists, journalists, and essayists, the lexeme barbar- is being used as a
fashionable slogan to designate and denounce crimes against humanity, in particu-
lar those committed by Islamist fundamentalists.1 The lexeme functions here as a
concept enabling those who use it to apprehend, verbalize, and objectify the heavily
mediatized experience of terror and horror related to those crimes. In France, this
use of the concept is supported by its presence in the current Code pénal (paragraph
222–1), which speaks of “acts of barbarity”—“actes de barbarie”—as a particular
category of crimes.2
The Code pénal provides no further definition or illustration of the “acts of bar-
barity” as a category of crimes. In this legislative context, like in today’s political
rhetoric, the lexeme barbar- is being used as a self-evident concept that fits incom-
prehensible, heinous acts whose perpetrators, to whom it is applied as well, are to be
considered as excluded from the civil society and even from the human species. We
may infer that inversely, the concept plays an important role in defining that very
society and species; it turns out to be a counter-concept of national, but mostly of
European and—ever since Europe colonized overseas territories—Western identity.
Given that it goes back to the ancient Greek adjective and noun bárbaros and its
ethnocentric coding in the fifth century BC, we may even surmise that it is a basic
or founding concept, a European and Western Grundbegriff. However, it has not yet
been acknowledged as such. Accordingly, there is still no comprehensive conceptual
history of barbarism ranging from classical Antiquity to the present day, despite the
extensive and firm groundwork laid by scholars in classics.3 In the major encyclope-
1 See the examples quoted below, in section 1.2.3.1 of this Introduction.

2 Extended reference included in the Works Cited list, with a link to the English translation.
The current wording, adopted in 1992 and valid since 1994, goes back to paragraph 303 of
the 1810 original version of the Code pénal: “Seront punis comme coupables d’assassinat,
tous malfaiteurs, quelle que soit leur dénomination, qui, pour l’exécution de leurs crimes,
emploient des tortures ou commettent des actes de barbarie.” (“Criminals who, for the per-
petration of their crimes, have inflicted torture or committed acts of barbarism, will be
punished for murder, regardless of their denomination,” my translation, M. W.) In both
versions of the code, there is no further definition of the term actes de barbarie.
3 See, e. g., Jüthner 1923; Bacon 1961; Dauge 1981; Hall 1989; Opelt and Speyer 2001; Mitchell
2007. Droit (2007) is rather a large essay than a comprehensive scholarly investigation in
the concept’s history.
2 Markus Winkler
dias of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) published over the past decades, the
concept does not even receive the status of headword.4
By outlining the history of the concept from the eighteenth century to the present,
our study will contribute to remedying this dearth of research. In doing so, it will
methodologically differ from conceptual history as it has been practiced in philoso-
phy and historiography since the 1960’s. Within these founding disciplines of recent
Begriffsgeschichte, conceptual history focuses almost exclusively on non-fictional and
non-poetic texts, and while its proponents admit that there are no concepts with-
out words, they consider that concepts can to a large extent be abstracted from the
words representing them, since these words are variable over time and (linguistic)
space (Jannidis 2008, 61; Dutt 2011, 42).5 Neither this abstraction nor the focus on
non-fictional and non-poetic texts suit the concept of barbarism.6 As we will explain
in more detail below, this concept was already at its Greek beginnings shaped by
mythopoetic tragedy no less than by historiography and ethnography (and, later,
rhetoric and philosophy). And throughout its history, it has always remained bound
to the onomatopoetic lexeme barbar-. Given this lexeme’s striking presence in all
European languages, barbarism proves to be not only a key concept, but also a key-
word of European and Western identity formation (Borst 1988).7 This in turn entails
that the etymology and the conceptual history of barbarism remain inextricably in-
tertwined.8
One of the reasons for this remarkable intertwinement no doubt is the fact that
the meaning of bárbaros and its derivatives is primarily linguistic and that the sound
of the word made of the reduplicated syllable bar cannot be separated from its mean-
ing: at its beginnings, bárbaros is an onomatopoetic word evoking unintelligible
4 See Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (8 vols., 1972–97), where barbarism is only marginally

dealt with in the articles on “Menschheit, Humanität, Humanismus” and on “Zivilisation,
Kultur”; the heading is also missing in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (13 vols.,
1971–2007) and Ästhetische Grundbegriffe (7 vols., 2000–2005). As for the Historisches
Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (12 vols., 1992–2015), its article on “Barbarismus” is by definition
limited to the rhetorical derivative of the concept. The article by Michel 1988 concerns
only the French history of the concept from 1680 to 1830.—For a comprehensive list and
detailed evaluation of the major institutions, journals, and encyclopedias of conceptual his-
tory, see Müller and Schmieder 2016, chapter VI.
5 Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, an encyclopedia considered by Gumbrecht as epistemologically
obsolete (“ein ‘nachgeborene[s]’ Vorhaben” [Gumbrecht 2006, 26]), practices a more cau-
tious approach by listing for each heading the words that represent it in Greek, Latin, and
the main modern European languages, and by including, at least in some of its articles,
sources that pertain to literature, the visual arts, and music. It is all the more regrettable that
this encyclopedia does not include an article on the barbarian.
6 This unsuitability might be one of the reasons why the concept has not received the status
of a headword in the major encyclopedias of conceptual history.
7 This status of the slogan in European and Western culture does not exclude its adoption in
languages other than European, e. g., modern Arabic.
8 The case of English brave, French brave, German brav provides no counter-argument
(Wartburg 1948 = Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 1, 248–50; Oxford English
Dictionary, s. v. ‘brave’; Knobloch 1986). While Wartburg upholds the etymological link be-
tween the Latin barbarus and the French brave, Knobloch questions it concerning German
brav and proposes another etymology.
language. Thus in Homer’s Iliad (2, 867), the Carians, (Κᾶρες [Cáres]), a tribe in
south-western Asia Minor allied with the Trojans, are characterized as “uncouth of
speech” (βαρβαρόφωνοι [barbaróphonoi]),9 because their language is incomprehen-
sible to the Achaeans. Poetic language, since the Greek beginnings of bárbaros, draws
on this word’s onomatopoetic structure and meaning, as do ancient and modern
rhetoric. And so do the modern literary, poetic, and artistic contributions to the
knowledge of barbarism and to the search for barbarism—“cognizione della barbarie”
and “la barbarie perseguita,” to quote Juan Rigoli and Carlo Caruso (1998, 12): on
the one hand, literature is part and parcel of an attempt to use the concept of the
barbarian for the purpose of scholarly knowledge, an attempt that it shares with
historiography, ethnography, and anthropology. On the other hand, literature may
pursue the barbarian as a force of cultural regeneration. This pursuit aims at realizing
the barbarian through poetic language and form.
Observations on bárbaros as an onomatopoetic word shall therefore be the start-
ing-point of our attempt to list the premises of the present study (1.2.1). The mytho-
poetic use of the word is the second point (1.2.2). While onomatopoeia accounts
for the concept’s making and deepest layer of meaning, mythopoeia accounts for
the—as Edith Hall (1989) has labeled it—“invention” of the barbarian as a politically,
culturally, and ethnically threatening persona. Its subsequent reinventions presup-
pose a third layer of meaning, namely the conceptualization itself (1.2.3), which to
some extent involves the abstraction from or hiding of onomatopoeia and mytho-
poeia; this holds true even for prominent critical explorations of the concept such as
Koselleck’s (1989) important and influential attempt to subsume the concept under
the category of the “asymmetric counter-concepts.” Onomatopoeia and mythopoeia
indeed stand in the way of conceptual history’s traditional methodology. In onomat-
opoeia, sound and meaning are inextricably intertwined; conceptual history on the
contrary abstracts concepts from the words and word-sounds that represent them as
well as from the myths that underlie them.
Against this backdrop of the concept’s semantic genealogy, literature’s and the
arts’ involvement in the modern history of barbarism—an involvement that the
present study will highlight, as mentioned above—may itself be described as genea-
logical: literature and the arts may indeed aim at reenacting the hidden implications
and dynamics of the concept, its provenance and emergence. This staging of barba-
rism, which takes place in the autonomous ‘literary field’ (Bourdieu), bears witness
to a fourth semantic layer, which may be labelled as aesthetic in the modern sense of
the term (1.2.4). Its manifestations oscillate between an aesthetic of barbarism and
a ‘barbarian’ aesthetic, between knowledge of and search for barbarism (see above).
Finally, in the concluding section 3 of this Introduction, we will provide an overview
of the present volume’s structure and content.
Defining the genealogical premises of our study is thus tantamount to outlin-
ing the hidden or forgotten or even repressed semantic layers as well as the criti-
cal and aesthetic exploration of a concept currently used as a fashionable rhetorical
9 English translation by A. T. Murray (1924), quoted after the Perseus online edition.—On
this passage, see Werner 1983, 583.
4 Markus Winkler
slogan—a ‘catchword’ (“Schlagwort”) meant to hit and to hurt, as Arno Borst has
emphasized (1988, 19).
1.1.2. A Genealogical Approach

Before we turn to our premises, we must explain why we qualify them as genealog-
ical and in what sense we use the term genealogy.10 Any application of this term in
cultural criticism has to take into account its well-known use by Nietzsche, Fou-
cault, and their successors to designate a way of “unmasking” (Hoy 2008) and de-le-
gitimizing established and cherished values, concepts or practices by questioning
their founding historical narratives. Thus in Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogy as a
philosophical form of historical research, “a genre of historical-philosophical writ-
ing with a critical intention” (Saar 2008, 312), opposes the ‘Platonic’ modalities of
traditional historical writing insofar as the latter is (supposedly) informed by the
search for pure origins, continuous developments (themselves based on tradition),
and recognizable ends of historical processes (Foucault 2015 [1971]).11 Genealogy
aims at undoing these ontological and teleological implications and the metahistori-
cal point of view that they presuppose by exposing the heterogeneity and shockingly
low provenance (Herkunft) of those values, concepts, and practices as well as the
contingency of their emergence (Entstehung).12 This form of genealogy indeed claims
that historical events are considered to be nothing but the manifestations of instable
power relations: “The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or
regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts. [...] they always appear
through the singular randomness of events” (1984, 88).13 Thus Foucault, following
Nietzsche, points out that whenever genealogy deals with historical periods consid-
ered as highly civilized, “it is with the suspicion—not vindictive but joyous—of find-
ing a barbarous confusion” (1984, 89; translation modified, M. W.).14 Obviously, this
sort of ‘genealogical’ critique of the way we look at established values, concepts, and
practices (such as the asymmetric opposition of civilization and barbarism in the
passage just quoted) is of considerable interest to the present study, also with regard
to our attempt to revise the methodological shortcomings of traditional conceptual
history.15 We nevertheless depart from it in two major respects:
10 A theoretical reflection on the implications of the term genealogy is missing in Droit 2007,
despite the title of his monograph: Généalogie des barbares. See also below, section 1.2.3.2
of this Introduction.
11 On Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche’s genealogies, see Saar 2008; Koopman 2008; Müller
and Schmieder 2016, 575–86.
12 See Foucault’s (2015 [1971], vol. 2, 1282–86) analysis of Nietzsche’s genealogical keywords
Herkunft and Entstehung as counter-concepts of Ursprung “origin.” See also below, sections
3.4.1 and 3.4.3 of the chapter on Nietzsche.
13 “Les forces qui sont en jeu dans l’histoire n’obéissent ni à une destination ni à une mécan-
ique, mais bien au hasard de la lutte. [...] Elles apparaissent toujours dans l’aléa singulier de
l’événement” (2015 [1971], vol. 2, 1294). Foucault refers here to Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie
der Moral II, § 12.
14 “c’est avec le soupçon, non pas rancunier mais joyeux, d’un grouillement barbare et inavou-
able” (2015 [1971], vol. 2, 1295).
15 See below, section 1.2.3.2 of this Introduction.
Firstly, when Foucault and his recent successors present genealogy as a ‘meth-
od’16 of historical research or as radically historicist “critique” (Bevir 2008, 265),
they leave out the fact that their use of the term genealogy is metaphorical.17 In its
dominant, non-metaphorical use, as documented by major language dictionaries,
genealogy means “[a]n account of one’s descent from an ancestor or ancestors, by
enumeration of the intermediate persons” (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘geneal-
ogy’), that is, a family pedigree. Linking the present generation to its predecessors
and tracing the lineage back to its origin (in the ideal case), genealogical accounts
tend to be legitimizing narratives, as witnessed by ancient mythological models such
as Hesiod’s Theogonia or the Genesis (Heinrich 1982).18 A closer look at the myth-
ological model-genealogies however reveals that the mythical legitimization of the
present through a founding narrative of the present’s past origin may also tend to
de-legitimize this origin by narrating e. g., how one generation revolted against the
preceding generation, as is the case in Hesiod. Thus genealogies may also be narra-
tives of emancipation through rupture with the past. Emil Angehrn describes this
ambivalence of the genealogical narrative as follows:
Genealogical accounts of past origins not only link the present to its founding past,
but also lead the present out of its past: The dialectic of origins consists in both found-
ing and liberating the present. Those who trace back their lineage, but also those who
emancipate themselves from their lineage, may both find their proper selves. Knowing
from where one comes as well as knowing from what one has freed oneself are ways of
finding one’s own identity. (1996, 311; my translation, M. W.)19
In their use of the term genealogy, Nietzsche and Foucault obviously emphasize and
even absolutize this emancipatory moment of rupture insofar as their uncovering
of the hidden “barbarous confusion” in the present’s past aims at ending the past’s
authority over the present and its values, concepts, and practices. However, this use
of the term to designate a method of ‘unmasking’ the low provenance and contingent
emergence of presently cherished values, concepts, and practices may well revert to
the genealogical narrative’s legitimizing function as well. Thus in Nietzsche, who was
not the first to apply figures of genealogy to philosophical thought (Weigel 2006, 27;
Willer and Vedder 2013), the genealogical conjectures on the ‘barbarian’ provenance
16 “méthode” (Foucault 2004, 121).

17 Saar hints at the fact that Nietzsche’s use of the term genealogy is metaphorical, but that it
has become in the meantime “a central philosophical topos”—“ein zentraler philosophis-
cher Topos” (2007, 11; my translation, M. W.).
18 Accordingly, genealogies served during the Ancien régime to prove aristocratic descent
(Weigel 2006, 24).
19 “Die genealogische Herkunftsgeschichte ist nicht nur Rückführung auf das gründende Er-
ste, sondern auch Herausführung aus ihm: Die Dialektik des Ursprungs ist die von Be-
gründung und Befreiung. Nicht nur wer sich seiner Herkunft versichert, sondern auch wer
sich von ihr emanzipiert, kann sich selber finden: Nicht nur wissen, woher man kommt,
sondern auch, wovon man sich frei gemacht hat und wohin man geht, ist ein Modus der
Identitätsgewinnung.”
6 Markus Winkler
of aristocratic societies lead to a vindication of barbarism as powerful wholeness

capable of generating ‘higher’ forms of human and social life.20
Reflecting on the metaphorical status of the philosophical use of the term gene-
alogy therefore makes us realize that this use conveys a semantic complexity that
opposes conceptual simplification. In contexts other than those of genealogies in
the non-metaphorical sense, the term indeed becomes part of an ‘absolute’ meta-
phor (as opposed to metaphor as a rhetorical figure of speech). Absolute metaphors
are, to quote Hans Blumenberg, “foundational elements of philosophical language,
‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality” (2010,
3);21 they have a “conceptually irredeemable expressive function” (3),22 which con-
sists in ‘guiding’ and ‘framing’ concept-based and theory-oriented research and as
such undergoes historical change.23 We hold that thinking the history of presently
cherished values, concepts, and practices in terms of genealogy proceeds from an
‘absolute’ metaphor in the Blumenbergian sense and that this metaphor may unfold
a de-legitimizing or legitimizing dynamic.
As we have already hypothesized, literary and artistic ‘genealogies’ of barbarism
may betray an analogous ambivalence: they may either vindicate barbarism or un-
cover it or do both. And as will become clear throughout the present study, our own
premises are to a large extent based on those literary and artistic genealogies. How-
ever, using the term genealogy to metaphorically qualify these premises will prevent
us from simply reproducing the interference of legitimization and de-legitimiza-
tion—an interference traces of which are to be found not only in Nietzsche, but also
in Foucault (the above-quoted passage, in which he characterizes the genealogical
uncovering of the “barbarous confusion” as joyful, is but one example).24
This means, secondly, that we try to make the above-mentioned interference in-
strumental by drawing on the metaphor’s de-legitimizing as well as its legitimizing
dynamic. On the one hand, we qualify our premises metaphorically as genealogi
cal because they are intended to de-legitimize the current fashionable use of the
lexeme barbar- by pointing to the contingency of the lexeme’s emergence and of
its successive meanings. This tendency of the metaphor is obviously close to Fou-
20 See Nietzsche: Jenseits von Gut und Böse, § 257–259 and Zur Genealogie der Moral I, § 11.
These and other passages will be discussed below, in chapter 3.4.
21 “Grundbestände der philosophischen Sprache [...], ‘Übertragungen’, die sich nicht ins Ei-
gentliche, in die Logizität zurückholen lassen” (1960, 9).
22 “begrifflich nicht ablösbare[] Aussagefunktion” (1960, 9).
23 On the pragmatic function of absolute metaphors, see Blumenberg 1960, 11, 59 (English:
2010, 5, 52); on ‘absolute’ metaphors as “leading metaphorical representation” (“meta-
phorische Leitvorstellungen”), see 1960, 9–11, 17, 19, 20, 23–24, 69; 2010, 3–5, 10, 13, 14,
17–18, 62–63, and 2001, 193: “Metaphern sind [...] Leitfossilien einer archaischen Schicht
des Prozesses der theoretischen Neugierde” (“[M]etaphors are fossils that indicate an ar-
chaic stratum of the trial of theoretical curiosity,” 1997, 82); on the ‘framing’ function of
metaphors, see Busse 2012, 300–01, and on the genealogical tree as absolute metaphor in
Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, see Weigel 2006, 27.
24 Hence from our point of view, it does not go without saying that genealogy is an unam-
biguously critical form of historiography (“eindeutig kritische Geschichtsschreibung”; Saar
2007, 10).
cault’s definition of genealogy as critical “history of the present” (1995, 31),25 and,
as such, it has affinities with the ideology critique of the Frankfurt school as well
(Hoy 2008, 280–84). On the other hand, the very definition and objectification of
those meanings as semantic layers, namely onomatopoeia, mythopoeia, conceptu-
alization, and aesthetic reflection, resorts to mental functions, or, to quote Ernst
Cassirer, “symbolic forms.” These are “forms of human culture” (1944, 279) and as
such the supra-historical, non-contingent, founding, and legitimizing ‘conditions of
possibility’ of those layers, namely of the structural characteristics of each of them
and of the—metaphorically speaking—genealogical link between them. To be sure,
the lexeme’s concrete meanings emerge contingently at various stages of its history,
but as forms, they are—metaphorically speaking—interrelated and non-contingent,
insofar as they are autonomous “configurations towards being,” that is, ways not of
copying, but of constituting reality (1953, 107).26 Our resorting to them as consti-
tutive, legitimizing factors in turn legitimizes our attempt to systematize the ways in
which the word barbarian becomes significant.
Hence these mental functions or symbolic forms determine neither the con-
crete successive meanings of the lexeme barbar- nor the historical moments of their
emergence: as symbolic form, myth e. g., does not account for the fact that the (Per-
sian) barbarian was ‘invented’ in the fifth century BC.27 This historical moment and
the referential meanings of the ‘invention’ are contingent, as is—to quote another
example—today’s fashionable recycling of the enemy-concept of the barbarian to
designate Islamist fundamentalists. Thus our systematization does not involve—as
Foucault in his reading of Nietzsche’s genealogies suggests—any metaphysical-tel-
eological attempt to define the ‘essence,’ ‘origin’ or ‘end’ of barbarism as a keyword
and key-concept of Western identity-formation; we will on the contrary warn against
such attempts.28 But our systematization also opposes the tendency to essentialize
the discontinuity and coincidence that Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s (at times dog-
matic) formulations often betray, e. g., Foucault’s already quoted insistence on the
all-pervading “haphazard conflicts” and the former’s claim that there is necessarily a
world of difference between the cause of a thing’s emergence and its final usefulness
(Zur Genealogie der Moral II, § 12).29 The conceptual history of barbarism speaks
against this claim: as we will see throughout the present study, this history is char-
acterized by the interplay of discontinuity and continuity, the latter being in part at-
25 “histoire du présent” (2015 [1975], vol. 2, 292).

26 “Prägungen zum Sein” (1988, 43).
27 See below, section 1.2.2 of this Introduction.
28 On Koselleck’s homage to Carl Schmitt’s notion of the enemy-concept, see below, section
1.2.3.2 of this Introduction.
29 “[...] vielmehr giebt es für alle Art Historie gar keinen wichtigeren Satz als jenen, [....] dass
nämlich die Ursache der Entstehung eines Dings und dessen schliessliche Nützlichkeit,
dessen thatsächliche Verwendung und Einordnung in ein System von Zwecken toto coelo
auseinander liegen” (1980-KSA, vol. 5, 313). (“[...] on the contrary, there is no more im-
portant proposition for every sort of history than that, [...] namely that the origin of the
emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation
into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate [...],” 2006, 51). See section 3.4.3 of the chapter
on Nietzsche in the present volume.
8 Markus Winkler
tributable to the “symbolic forms” that are at stake and in part to the onomatopoetic
provenance of the lexeme barbar-. The conceptual history of barbarism is not just
a series of ‘interpretations’ that violently replace each other. On the contrary, the
subsequent ‘interpretations’ have not replaced the violence inherent in the very word
barbarian—a violence that, as we will see, stems from the lexeme’s onomatopoetic
beginnings and pervades its mythopoetic as well as its conceptual use. Uncovering
and de-legitimizing this (often repressed) continuity is one of the critical tasks of our
genealogical approach to the conceptual history of barbarism. But the de-legitimiz-
ing effort is bound to the legitimizing a priori of the forms of meaning that become
manifest in the concept’s history.
As a metaphorically induced figure of thought used to qualify a specific approach
to history (conceptual and other), critical genealogy thus unfolds a dynamic that is
not only “radical[ly] historicist,” as Mark Bevir claims in his reading of Nietzsche and
Foucault (2008, 273), but also critical-phenomenological (in the Cassirerian sense
of the word, 1988, 9–11; 1987, 18).30 It is telling that the proponents of a radically
historicist concept of genealogy themselves use a key formula of transcendental (in
Cassirer’s words: phenomenological) criticism when they point out that genealogi-
cal research deals with the “conditions of possibility” of presently cherished values,
concepts, and practices (Bevir 2008, 272; Koopman 2008, 347). Using this formula
contradicts the putative radical historicism insofar as it refers to the non-historical,
a priori forms of culture, that is, to the forms by means of which perceptions and
the affects they are related to become significant and communicable; speaking of a
‘historical a priori,’ as Foucault does in his earlier works,31 is rhetorically provocative,
but epistemologically misleading.32
Accordingly, we question the opposition that in an article inspired by Kant’s
“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” (“An Answer to the Question: What
Is Enlightenment?”), Foucault establishes between “transcendental” criticism on the
one hand and “archaeological” and “genealogical” on the other. Whereas the former,
he claims, deals with “the search for formal structures with universal value,” the latter
is “a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves
and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying” (1984,
46)33—an investigation which Foucault, again provocatively and misleadingly, labels
as “historical ontology of ourselves” (45). As we have tried to show, this alternative
is invalid, as is Foucault’s claim that only genealogy as he defines it will enable us to
30 The critical phenomenology of symbolic forms is an expansion of Kantian and neo-Kantian

transcendental criticism. On the compatibility of genealogy and phenomenology, see Hoy
2008, 289–94.
31 “a priori historique” (2015 [1966], vol. 1, 1211–12 = Les mots et les choses, I, 5, 7; 2015
[1969], vol. 2, 135–41 = L’ Archéologie du savoir, III, 5)
32 See also Cassirer’s critique of Durkheim’s use of the notion of ‘a priori’ (1987, 230–31; 1955,
192–93).
33 This article was first published in English in the Foucault Reader (1984, 32–50), where it is
presented as “based on an unpublished French manuscript by Michel Foucault” (iv) and
“[t]ranslated by Catherine Porter” (32). On its French version, first published in Foucault’s
Dits et écrits (1994), see the explanations in 2015, vol. 2, 1650–54 (notes on “Qu’est-ce que
les lumières ?”).
“separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of
no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (46). To Foucault’s
simplistic alternative, we oppose a ‘genealogical’ approach which is simultaneously
historical and (in the Cassirerian sense) phenomenological. As such, it draws not
only on the conflictual interplay of legitimization and de-legitimization that char-
acterizes mythological genealogies (see above), but also on the structural hallmark
of the figural representations of genealogies (mythological and other), namely the
no less conflictual interplay of systematic classification and historical derivation.34
To conclude this section of the present Introduction, we should emphasize that
our attempt to do justice to the epistemic value of genealogy as ‘absolute’ metaphor
and to make its ambivalence instrumental is a key element of our methodological
departure not only from Foucault’s notion of genealogy, but also from the method-
ology of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), as it has been practiced over the past
decades. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht has pertinently pointed out that one of the short-
comings of the philosophical practice of Begriffsgeschichte, as it materialized in the
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, was Joachim Ritter’s, the editor’s, refusal to
include metaphorology (2006, 15–17). Yet metaphorology serves conceptual history
insofar as it deals with the pre- or non-conceptual substratum of concepts:
[M]etaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the under-

ground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations; but it also aims to show
with what ‘courage’ the mind preempts itself in its images, and how its history is pro-
jected in the courage of its conjectures. (Blumenberg 2010, 5)35
Blumenberg’s methodological reflection obviously is relevant not only to concepts

as objects of historical analysis, but also to the conceptual-theoretical framework
of the analysis itself. Thus our heuristic choice to metaphorically qualify our ap-
proach to the conceptual history of barbarism as genealogical draws on the sub- or
pre-conceptual dynamics unfolding from genealogical narratives and their figural
representations. This choice however cannot—and need not—contribute to the solu-
tion of another important and to this day unresolved theoretical problem of Begriffs-
geschichte, namely the relation between conceptual history and social or otherwise
extra-conceptual, pragmatic history (Sachgeschichte).36
As for the exclusion of metaphorology from philosophical conceptual history, one
may very well assume that this is concomitant with the latter’s lack of sustained inter-
est in literature’s and the arts’ contribution to and exploration of that history—a lack
that also informs the research in the history of political concepts, as it materialized in
34 See Weigel 2006, 36, who characterizes the structure of genealogical patterns as ‘the in-
terplay of synchronic classification and diachronic derivation’—“das Zusammenspiel und
den Widerstreit zwischen synchroner Klassifikation (mit dem Effekt der Bildung von Ein-
heiten) und diachroner Ableitung (als Projektion in die Dimension der Zeit).”
35 “Metaphorologie sucht an die Substruktur des Denkens heranzukommen, an den Un-
tergrund, die Nährlösung der systematischen Kristallisationen, aber sie will auch faßbar
machen, mit welchem ‘Mut’ sich der Geist in seinen Bildern selbst voraus ist und wie sich
im Mut zur Vermutung seine Geschichte entwirft” (1960, 11).
10 Markus Winkler
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. From a retrospective point of view, it thus proves to be

part of the methodological shortcomings of Begriffsgeschichte in general.
1.2. Genealogical Premises
1.2.1. From bárbaros as Language- and Affect-Related Onomatopoetic
Word to barbarismus as Rhetorical Term
While there seems to be no consensus about a possible oriental (Akkadian and/or
Sumerian) origin of the Greek adjective and noun bárbaros, etymologists agree on its
status as an onomatopoetic word the type of which is well represented in Indo-Euro-
pean languages, as witnessed by the Sanskrit barbar “stammer” and the Latin balbus
“stammering” (Frisk 1960, 219–20; Chantraine 1986, 165; Beekes 2009, vol. 1, 201).37
To determine the significance that the onomatopoetic form and meaning of bárbaros
has for the history of the concept of barbarism, we first must define the term ono-
matopoeia itself.
Onomatopoeia is, as the interplay of the term’s two components (ὄνομα [ónoma]
“name” or “word,” and ποιέω [poiéo] “make”) indicates, a form of word-making. As
for the specific meaning of the term, scholars in general consider it as “a relation
between signifier and signified in which the signifier is motivated, in part, by its
sound” (Bredin 1996, 561). By analyzing the possible forms of this relation, Hugh
Bredin arrives at distinguishing between three different types of onomatopoeia. The
first, namely “direct onomatopoeia,” is constituted by the resemblance of a word’s
sound and “the sound that it names” (558). A word of this type thus fulfills two cri-
teria: its denotation “is a class of sounds; and [...] the sound of the word resembles
a member of the class” (558), as in the English hiss, the German zischen, and the
French siffler. The difference between these three verbs indicates however that even
“direct onomatopoeia” is only partly motivated. Bredin goes on to claim that without
convention, that is, conventional denotation, a directly onomatopoetic word could
not even be experienced as onomatopoetic (558).
The second type, namely “associative onomatopoeia,” “occurs whenever the sound
of a word resembles a sound associated with whatever it is that the word denotes”
(560). An example is the bird name cuckoo, the acoustic resemblance being here to
the song that the bird produces and not the bird itself (560). According to Bredin,
barbarian also belongs to this second type: “A famous historical example is barbar-
ian, whose root, the Greek word bárbaroi, was devised as a name for non-Greeks
because their strange languages sounded to Greek ears like the stuttered syllables
‘ba-ba’” (560). We will discuss this typification further down.
As for the third type, namely “exemplary onomatopoeia,” it rests according to
Bredin not on denotation, but on connotative instantiation, as for example in nimble:
“The word sound nimble does not sound like anything that can be denoted by the
word, and it cannot resemble the idea connoted by it, since sounds and concepts
cannot ‘sound alike’; concepts have no sound. Instead, the word sound instantiates
37 Chantraine and Beekes reject the hypothesis, still upheld by Frisk, of an oriental origin of
bárbaros.
or exemplifies nimbleness, since it is itself a nimble sound” (564). Bredin’s choice of

literary examples (Pope, Keats, Joyce et al.) to illustrate this connotative relationship
is convincing insofar as these examples highlight the affective values of the words
being used. Yet by stating that “the connotation of a word is the concept instantiated
by all the members of the class” (558), that is, by denotation, Bredin does not take
into account these very values; his notion of connotation thus proves to be inade-
quate. Like J. St. Mill, whom he quotes on this occasion, he assimilates connotation
to what we would rather designate as intension, namely the sum of the object-related,
distinctive semantic attributes contained in a concept, its extension being the range
of objects to which it is applied or has been applied.
This rather cognitivist assimilation might explain why Bredin attributes the word
barbarian only to the second type, namely associative onomatopoeia. Etymological
research however suggests that bárbaros (as adjective) was first related directly to a
linguistic sound experience: Beekes for example defines the word as “an onomato-
poeic reduplicative formation, which originally referred to the language of the for-
eigner” (2009, vol. 1, 201). Hall stresses that “[o]riginally it was simply an adjective
representing the sound of incomprehensible speech” (1989, 4). It seems that the se-
mantic attributes “‘foreign(er), non-Greek,’ also adj. ‘uncivilized, raw’” (Beekes 2009,
vol. 1, 201) were associated with this primary linguistic experience and meaning and
not vice versa, as Bredin’s typification suggests. Accordingly, we may surmise that
as an onomatopoetic word rendering the experience of incomprehensible, foreign
speech, as well as incomprehensible animal sounds (Jüthner 1923, 1–2, 7, 128, n. 30;
Opelt and Speyer, 818),38 bárbaros had already at its origins affective values linked
to the expressive and conative (appealing) function of language rather than to the
representational; as we will see, onomatopoeia is even akin to mythopoeia in that
it opposes the net distinction between signifier and signified.39 We will therefore
avoid the term connotation to designate these values because it suggests that they
are secondary.
The expressive and the appealing functions of onomatopoeia have been neglected
by current definitions (e. g., Brogan 1993; Matthews 2007, s. v. ‘onomatopoeia’; Glück
2016, 480–81). Yet they are already hinted at in Quintilian’s definition to which all
modern definitions remain indebted, as Bredin himself acknowledges (556). Quin-
tilian, who counts onomatopoeia among the tropes (while admitting that it might
also be considered as a figure of speech, cp. Inst. 8.6.31–32 with 9.1.3–5), translates
the Greek term with “fictio nominis” and observes: “Et sunt plurima ita posita ab
iis qui sermonem primi fecerunt, aptantes adfectibus vocem” (Inst. 8.6.31). Harold
Edgeworth Butler translates as follows: “It is true that many words were created in
this way by the original founders of the language, who adapted them to suit the
sensation which they expressed” (1920–22).40 This translation is misleading insofar
as in the Latin original, the word (vox) is adapted not to sensations, but to affects (af-
38 One instance is to be found in Herodotus 2.57. This passage however suggests that ‘barbar-
ian’ language was compared to animal sounds, the reference to the latter therefore being
secondary.
40 English translation quoted after the Perseus online edition.
12 Markus Winkler
fectus), that is, to states of mind or body attached to sensations (sense impressions),
as Helmut Rahn emphasizes in his German translation by choosing the compound
“Gefühlseindrücke” (1988, vol. 2, 231). Quintilian thus hints at the creative—‘poetic’
and ‘fictional’—power of onomatopoeia and at the affective value that it expresses
and conveys. In the sentence quoted above, he even relates it to the very origin of
language.
In his article, Bredin observes that “we want language to be onomatopoeic” (560),
and he claims that onomatopoeia is a “linguistic universal” (569). To better under-
stand this attractiveness and significance of onomatopoeia, we may resort to Ernst
Cassirer, who in his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen underscores that it indeed
represents a fundamental quality of all language, namely the constitutive layer of
affect and emotional stimulation to which language remains bound: “[A]ll meaning
is rooted in the stratum of affectivity and sensory stimulation and is referred back
to it over and over again” (1957, 109; translation modified, M. W.).41 According to
Cassirer, all language rests on this sub-conceptual, affect-related expressive function
as its primary layer of meaning (“primary expressive experience,” 110);42 in language
development, the “representative function” (109–110),43 a term that Cassirer bor-
rows from Karl Bühler, occurs later and only gradually prevails. Onomatopoeia thus
is rooted in this primary function of language:
All the phenomena that we call onomatopoeia belong to this sphere, for in the genu-
ine onomatopoeic formations of language we are dealing far less with the direct imi-
tation of objectively given phenomena than with a phonetic and linguistic formation
which still remains wholly within the purely physiognomic world view. Here the sound
attempts, as it were, to capture the immediate face of things and with it their true
essence. Even where living language has long since learned to use the word as a pure
vehicle of thought it never wholly relinquishes this connection. And it is above all the
poetic language which persistently strives back toward this original physiognomic ex-
pression, in which it seeks to plunge as in a primordial source and eternal fountain of
youth. (110; translation modified, M. W.)44
We may infer from these observations that as onomatopoetic words, bárbaros and
its derivatives not only mean incomprehensible foreign language, but also express
41 “Alles Sinnhafte wurzelt [...] in der Schicht des Affekts und der sinnlichen Erregung und
wird immer wieder auf sie zurückbezogen” (1954, 128).
42 “primäre[s] Ausdruckserlebnis” (128).
43 “Darstellungsfunktion” (128).
44 “Alles, was man als Onomatopöie zu bezeichnen pflegt, gehört in diesen Kreis: denn in
den eigentlich-onomatopöetischen Bildungen der Sprache handelt es sich, weit weniger
als um direkte ‘Nachahmung’ objektiv-gegebener Phänomene, um eine Laut- und Sprach-
bildung, die noch ganz im Banne der rein ‘physiognomischen’ Weltansicht steht. Der Laut
unternimmt hier gleichsam den Versuch, das unmittelbare ‘Gesicht’ der Dinge und mit die-
sem ihr wahres Wesen einzufangen. Die lebendige Sprache gibt, auch wo sie längst gelernt
hat, das Wort als reines Vehikel des ‘Gedankens’ zu brauchen, diese Verflechtung nirgends
auf. Vor allem ist es die dichterische Sprache, die immer wieder in diesen Grund des ‘phy
siognomischen’ Ausdrucks zurückstrebt und in ihn, als ihren Urquell und ihren ständigen
Jungbrunnen, eintaucht” (128–29).
feelings associated with incomprehension, namely rejection and aversion or, occa-
sionally, curiosity and even fascination. To be sure, scholars consider as open the
question whether in Homer’s characterization of the Carians as barbaróphonoi the
word is already being used pejoratively.45 The ancient rhetorical term barbarismós/
barbarismus however reflects the association of the use of foreign language with in-
appropriate and amiss language: already in ancient Greek the term means both (Ar-
istot. Poet. 1458a), and in Quintilian, who provides a very detailed and differentiated
description and evaluation of the various kinds of barbarismus, the term refers to
aesthetically and morally offensive incorrectness of speech (the Latin words for this
being foeditas and vitium, Inst. 1.5.1.). It is revealing that he presents as the first kind
of such incorrectness the insertion of foreign words into Latin speech (Quintilian
mentions here among others African, Spanish, and Gaulish, Inst. 1.5.8). Quintilian
admits though that the bad qualities of linguistic barbarism may exceptionally turn
out to be excellent qualities (virtutes) when consciously used by poets as figures of
speech (Inst. 1.5.1. and 1.5.57).46 There is indeed a certain degree of ambivalence in
Quintilian’s assessment of linguistic barbarism: what is offensive may turn out to be
attractive. Quintilian’s admission of barbarism as poetic licence, that is, barbarism as
an exceptional and isolated deviation from the norm of the aptum, may in modern
poetry and art even become an aesthetic and cultural value attached to revolutionary
ideals of cultural and social renewal.47
A scene from Une tempête, Aimé Césaire’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tem-
pest, enacts from a postcolonial point of view this link between the ancient rhetorical
notion of barbarism and the modern vindication of barbarism as well as the under-
lying affective value of the onomatopoetic French word barbare. When Caliban, the
‘negro slave’—“esclave nègre” (1969, 7), is first called in by his master Prospero, he
enters the scene by pronouncing the word “Uhuru,” a Swahili word for freedom that
is of course unknown to Prospero, the Eurocentric humanist and colonizer:
CALIBAN : Uhuru !
PROSPERO : Qu’est-ce que tu dis ?
CALIBAN : Je dis Uhuru !
PROSPERO : Encore une remontée de ton langage barbare. Je t’ai déjà dit que je n’aime
pas ça. D’ailleurs, tu pourrais être poli, un bonjour ne te tuerait pas !
45 See above, the passage from the Iliad quoted in section 1.1.1 of this Introduction. On this
passage, see Losemann 2015; Jüthner 1923, 3–4; Werner 1983, 583; Boletsi 2013, 69. Con-
trary to Werner, Boletsi argues that the depiction of the Carians as barbarophones is de-
preciative and insinuates their inferiority. According to Jüthner, the reason for Homer’s
singling out of the Carians as linguistic barbarians (whereas the Trojans are not qualified as
such) is the fact that the Greeks had exchanges (hostile or friendly) with these people; on
the contrary, Homer’s knowledge of the Trojans was based only on myth. Therefore, Homer
does not establish any ethnic differences between Greeks and Trojans.
46 For a brief history of the rhetorical notion of barbarism, see Erlebach 1992. See also Jüth-
ner 1923, 43. On onomatopoeia as barbarism, see Ueding and Steinbrink 2011, 227: “Bei
Wortneuschöpfungen wird die Onomatopöie als Barbarismus aufgefaßt.” (“Onomatopoeia
is considered as barbarism when it is neologistical,” my translation, M. W.).
14 Markus Winkler
CALIBAN: Ah ! J’oubliais ... Bonjour. Mais un bonjour autant que possible de guêpes, de
crapauds, de pustules de fiente. Puisse le jour d’aujourd’hui hâter de dix ans le jour où
les oiseaux du ciel et les bêtes de la terre se rassasieront de ta charogne ! (24)
CALIBAN: Uhuru!
PROSPERO: What did you say?
CALIBAN: I said, Uhuru!
PROSPERO: Mumbling your barbaric language again! I’ve already told you, I don’t like it.
You could be polite, at least; a simple “hello” wouldn’t kill you.
CALIBAN: Oh, I forgot ... But make that as froggy, waspish, pustular and dung-filled “hel-
lo” as possible. May today hasten by a decade the day when all the birds of the sky and
beasts of the earth will feast upon your corpse! (1999, 11; translation modified, M. W.)
The African word which Caliban uses as an aggressive onomatopoetic battle-cry is

rejected by Prospero as an offensive barbarism in the rhetorical sense of the word.
Moreover, Uhuru as well as barbare convey the affective value attached to their sound
qualities. But instead of replacing his ‘barbarian’ language with politesse-formulas,
as suggested by Prospero, the oppressed slave Caliban elaborates on it, as does—on
the level of the dramatic form (in the external communication system)—the poet
himself, who transforms the slave’s barbarian “curse,” adapted from Shakespeare
(The Tempest 1.2.324–27, 324–47, 366–68), into revolutionary verbal violence. Bar-
barism in the rhetorical sense of the term, namely the introduction of foreign words
and taboo swearwords into the ‘metropolitan’ language of the master and colonizer,
is ‘appropriated’ and even vindicated to create a hybrid text, a veritable barbarolex-
is.48 Thus Césaire not only reminds us of the hidden semantic layers of the lexeme
barbar-, namely its linguistic origins and its colonialist backdrop—which also goes
back to its Greek origins (Jüthner 1923, 11; Hall 1989, 50)—, but he also uses its
ambiguity ‘contrapuntally’ to question its function as a European identity concept.49
And he highlights the link between the ancient rhetorical notion of barbarism or
barbarolexis and the modern postcolonial notion of textual hybridity.
1.2.2. The Mythopoetic ‘Invention of the Barbarian’

In the scene just quoted from Césaire’s play, Prospero qualifies not only Caliban’s
language, but also his very personality as barbarian. After apostrophizing him as an
ugly monkey (“singe [...] si laid !” 1969, 24), he adds:
48 Barbarolexis is a term used by the fifth century Latin grammarian Consentius to designate
the lexical form of linguistic barbarism. See Lausberg 2008, §§ 476–78. On ‘abrogation’ and
‘appropriation’ of the colonizer’s language in post-colonial writing, see Ashcroft, Griffiths,
and Tiffin 2002, chapter 2.
49 On ‘contrapuntal’ reading and writing, a key concept of postcolonial criticism, see Said
1993, 59–62.
Puisque tu manies si bien l’invective, tu pourrais au moins me bénir de t’avoir appris à

parler. Un barbare ! Une bête brute que j’ai éduquée, formée, que j’ai tirée de l’animalité
qui l’engangue50 encore de toute part ! (25)
Since you’re so fond of invective, you could at least thank me for having taught you to
speak at all. You, a barbarian...a dumb animal, a beast I educated, trained, dragged up
from the bestiality that still clings to you. (11; translation modified, M. W.)
The synecdochic use of the word meaning unintelligible or offensive language to

designate the person speaking this language provides the linguistic basis for the most
striking semantic aspect of the passage, namely the definition of the ethnically dif-
ferent and enslaved “barbarian” as an animal-like, subhuman brute. Césaire satirizes
this Eurocentric and even racist use of barbare which continues to inform today’s
rhetorical use of the concept. To assess the significance of this use, we have to turn to
its historical beginnings, namely the Greek mythopoetic ‘invention’ of the barbarian
as dramatic persona and as category “encompassing the entire genus of non-Greeks”
(Hall 1989, 10).51
In her seminal study, Edith Hall has shown that the oldest extant Greek tragedy,
namely Aeschylus’ Persae of 472 BC, “is the first fully fledged testimony to one of the
most important of the Greeks’ ideological inventions and one of the most influential
in western thought, the culturally other, the anti-Greek, the barbarian” (1989, 70).
Hall goes on to explain that, while referring primarily to the Persian invaders, the
barbarian as category soon came to mean all non-Greeks because the Persian empire
“covered so many of the foreign peoples with whom the Greeks had contact” (11).
Denoting all non-Greeks, it “was to reflect and bolster the Greeks’ sense of their own
superiority” (11), as witnessed by the topical opposition of Hellenes and barbarians.
It is only in relation to this function that the heterogeneous referents of the word
(e. g., Persian and Scythian) and their respective semantic features (e. g., ‘oriental’
luxuriousness and nomadic wildness) become compatible (Winkler 2009, 31–32).
In tragedy however, the ethnocentric asymmetric opposition of Hellenes and bar-
barians remains bound to the mythopoetic construction of the barbarian as tragic
persona. Thus in Persae, the catastrophic defeat of the Persian army at Salamis and
Xerxes’ own downfall are staged as a confirmation of the rule, emerging from the
mythological tradition, “that excessive prosperity and satiety lead first to hubris and
then to destruction” (Hall 1989, 70). The destruction is a punishment inflicted by the
gods, as the ghost of Darius powerfully underscores in his final rhesis (Pers. 800–28).
Persae may therefore serve as an example of the way the mythopoetic shaping of an
outstanding contemporary historical event tends to prevent a historical analysis of
this event or to deprive it of its historicity (Barthes 1970, 225). The event turns out
to be the repetition and affirmation of an event or events situated in an indefinite
50 The verb enganguer is derived from the noun gangue, which refers to an enveloping sub-
stance.
51 As for the specifically modern missionary impetus, also present in Prospero’s words, to
educate and humanize the barbarian, see our remarks on Goethe below, section 1.2.4 of this
Introduction.
16 Markus Winkler
remote past and narrated by myth. Thus in Persae, Xerxes’ story might recall the
mythical narrative of Phaeton (Hall 1989, 69, n. 52).52
As mentioned above, Persae is the earliest testimony to the mythopoetic invention
of the barbarian; as such, it has informed Herodotus’ historiographical and ethno-
graphical discourse on the barbarians (Hall 1989, 69).53 These beginnings of the eth-
nocentric coding of the lexeme barbar- remain present even in today’s mythicizing
images of cruel oriental ‘barbarians.’54 We may therefore formulate the following
hypothesis: the ethnocentric (and later Eurocentric) concept of the barbarian as the
culturally and ethnically ‘other’ has a mythopoetic layer of meaning; throughout
the history of its use, this concept is underpinned by myth as a form of signifying,
of producing meaning—a form which imposes tight limits on the way we perceive
the ‘other.’ Being ruled by a law that Cassirer labels the “the concrescence and co-
incidence of the members of a relation” (1955, 64),55 the mythical way of shaping
reality remains affect-related and opposed to empirical knowledge (1987, 89). Myth
precedes or prevents the differentiations fundamental to the latter, e. g., that between
signifier and signified or name and object, as does onomatopoeia; Cassirer himself
hints at this correspondence between onomatopoeia and mythopoeia by stressing
their affect-relatedness which opposes representation (Darstellung) insofar as the
latter is based on a net distinction between form and content (1954, 125–29; 1988,
140–41).56 Accordingly, from the perspective of myth, the resemblance between the
sound of the onomatopoetic word bárbaros and its meaning is not a variety of deno-
tation or connotation (nor an association with one of them), but the manifestation
of an essential identity, as is the synecdochic use of the language-related word for
the speaker of the word.
This correspondence between onomatopoeia and mythopoeia helps us under-
stand that as an onomatopoetic word, bárbaros lent itself to the mythopoetic inven-
tion of the barbarian. Thus in Persae, Aeschylus not only “used implicit suggestion
and aural effect to create within Greek diction the impression of barbarian speech”
(Hall 1989, 77), but also had the Chorus designate their own speech as ‘barbarian’
(Pers. 633–35).57 Thereby and by the other instances of the word in Persae (187, 255,
337, 391, 423, 434, 475, 798, 844), an essential “concrescence and coincidence” of all
the features making for the Persians’ barbarism is being suggested.58 These features
include the sound of the onomatopoetic word, the carefully constructed strange
sound of the speech to which it refers, and, above all, the excesses, foreign to Greek
discipline (sophrosýne, Hall 1989, 125) and freedom, of Xerxes’ tyranny (involving
the enslavement of his subjects), of his cruel and sacrilegious warfare, and of his and
52 Hall points to analogous mythopoeia in visual art, see Hall 1989, 67–69.
53 On Herodotus’ notion of the barbarian, see also Opelt and Speyer 2001, 819–21.
54 A good example is the Frank Miller and Lynn Varley comic 300 (1998) and its filmic adap-
tation by Zack Snyder (2007).
55 “Konkreszenz und Koinzidenz der Relationsglieder” (1987, 82).
56 See also Barthes 1970, 199: “pas de mythe sans forme motivée” (“there is no myth without
motivated form,” 1991, 125).
57 Hall (1989, 76–79) lists all the devices used by the poet to ‘barbarize’ the Persians’ language.
58 On these elements and the poet’s possible sources of information on Persia, see Hall 1989,
74–98.
the Chorus’ wild dirge in the tragedy’s exodus. Obviously, this mythopoetically in-
duced ‘concrescence and coincidence’ of linguistic sound and meaning, of behavior
and customs (including the exotic features of the Persian garments), suggests a sub-
stance-like, space-related barbarian identity and serves the ethnocentric purpose of
opposing it asymmetrically to that of the Pan-Hellenic winners of the battle.59 Persae
indeed is “the first unmistakable file in the archive of Orientalism, the discourse by
which the European imagination has dominated Asia ever since by conceptualizing
its inhabitants as defeated, luxurious, emotional, cruel, and always as dangerous”
(Hall 1989, 99).
However, the mythopoetic ‘invention’ of the barbarian in Greek tragedy is con-
siderably more subtle and contradictory than the apparently non-poetic, knowl-
edge-oriented discourse on the barbarian, be it orientalist or other. Thus in Persae,
the semantic tensions and contradictions constitutive of tragedy as genre (see below)
leave their mark on this ‘invention’: the tragedy not only constructs, but also si-
multaneously questions the rigid opposition between Hellenes and barbarians. One
instance of this is Atossa’s allegorical dream of two majestic women one of whom
represents Greece and the other Persia, the ‘barbarian land’—γαῖαν [...] βάρβαρον
(Pers. 187). Although they seem to engage in a feud, they are designated as blood-re-
lated sisters—κασιγνήτα γένους ταὐτοῦ (185–6)—, that is, closely related members
of the same family. In Aeschylus’ tragedy, Greeks and barbarians indeed share fun-
damentally the same religious beliefs and values. Accordingly, the pathos (in the
Aristotelian sense of the term, Aristot. Poet. 1452b) of the Persians’ tragic downfall
is meant to have a deeply moving effect on the Greek spectators of the play and
stimulate their sympathy.
The preceding observations apply to the tragic ‘barbarization’ not only of his-
torical foreigners (the Persian invaders), but also of mythical figures considered as
foreign. Except for Persae, this second form is adopted in the other extant Greek
tragedies that contributed to the invention of the barbarian. The tragedies of this type
refract “heroic myth through the prism of fifth-century polis ideology” (Hall 1989,
48), the topical formula of which was the opposition of Hellenes and barbarians.
Well-known examples are Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, where the Trojans as barbar-
ians receive Persian attributes, in particular that of being slaves, or Euripides’s Medea,
whose ‘barbarian’ Colchian protagonist is characterized by her wildness (agriótes),
uncontrollable wrath (thymós), and—after she has murdered her children—her
beast-like monstrosity (Med. 103, 1079, 1329–43).
Yet this ‘barbarization’ of mythical figures is no less ambiguous than that of his-
torical figures. It also involves the interference of two conflicting semantics. One of
them stems from secular polis ideology and the other from religious beliefs that are
still attached to the old heroic myths. According to Jean-Pierre Vernant (2001), this
interference is one of the very foundations of Greek tragedy. To be sure, the opposi-
tion that Iphigenia establishes to articulate her final agreement to being sacrificed by
her own father seems to mythicize this opposition:
59 On the interrelation of the notions of Pan-Hellenes and barbarians, see Jüthner 1923, 5–6.
18 Markus Winkler
βαρβάρων δ᾽ Ἕλληνας ἄρχειν εἰκός, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ βαρβάρους,

μῆτερ, Ἑλλήνων: τὸ μὲν γὰρ δοῦλον, οἳ δ᾽ ἐλεύθεροι. (Eur. IA 1400–01)
And it is right, mother, that Hellenes should rule barbarians, but not barbarians Hel-
lenes, those being slaves, while these are free. (Euripides 1891)60
These famous two lines, which were to become a rhetorical commonplace, exemplify
in a particularly striking way tragedy’s projection of polis ideology into mythical
past. The effect of this projection seems obvious: the legend of the virgin Iphigenia’s
sacrifice to the goddess Artemis shall provide a prestigious legitimizing fundament
to polis ideology. On the other hand, human sacrifice is considered by the Greeks as
a genuinely barbarian institution and the murder of relatives a barbarian crime (e. g.,
IA 380–91 and 463–66). Accordingly, the Greeks themselves take on a ‘barbarian’
hue in Euripides’s tragedy (Winkler 2009, 32–39; Aretz 1999, 208).
In Medea as well, the asymmetric opposition of Hellenes and Barbarians is both
validated and questioned: Jason uses it in a revoltingly arrogant way to reject Me-
dea’s accusation of opportunistic felony (to marry King Kreon’s daughter, he has left
Medea and the two sons that she has born him, thereby breaking the oath he had
sworn to her under divine law). Identifying Hellas with “the rule of law” (nómos) and
barbarian territory with the rule of “force” (ischýs), and referring to Medea’s obscure
origins in barbarian Colchis, he insinuates that she has no reason whatsoever to
complain about his felony, given that despite those origins, she has had the immense
chance to be brought by him to Hellas (Med. 536–44).61 However, Jason’s argument,
although in accordance with the political legislation of classical Athens, proves to be
entirely implausible in the light of another argument he has advanced earlier in the
same epeisódion to justify the exile to which King Kreon has sentenced Medea and
the two children: there he claims that she should have accepted the decisions made
by those who have more force—κρεισσόνων βουλεύματα (449), kreísson being the
comparative of the adjective kratýs meaning ‘having force,’ ‘being powerful’. With
this argument, Jason does not hesitate to identify the law with the right of the strong-
er—namely the king and his entourage. Thus it becomes evident to the spectators
that in Jason’s ethnocentric discourse, there is in reality no clear divide between law
and order—nómos and díke—on the one hand and barbarian force on the other.
Another element of this ambiguity is the fascination with the barbarian woman. In
the reply quoted above, Jason alludes to Medea’s fame. Later, her uncompromising,
inhuman revenge, which aims at preserving that very fame, takes on characteristics
of male heroic ethos, as analysts of the play have pointed out (Winkler 2009, 34–35).
Her heroism is further stressed by her connection with the divine (she is the god He-
lios’ grandchild). The ‘invention’ of Medea as barbarian woman—before Euripides,
she was indeed not designated as barbarian (Winkler 2009, 27–28)—thus conveys a
fascination that brings home the inclusion of the barbarian in the very political and
cultural space from which it is being excluded (Kreon has sentenced Medea to exile).
Euripides’s staging of this dynamic already hints at an ambivalence the modern aes-
60 English translation by E. P. Coleridge (1891), quoted after the Perseus online edition.
61 For the English translation by David Kovacs (1995), see the Perseus online edition.
thetic exploration of which crystallized into the title figure of Constantine Cavafy’s
poem Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους (“Waiting for the barbarians,” 1904).62
Modern literature has indeed the potential to recall and re-enact the ambiguity
and ambivalence that characterize the mythopoetic invention of the barbarian and
the affect-relatedness that this invention shares with the onomatopoetic fabrication
of the word and with its use as a rhetorical term. As early as Greek tragedy, this
affect-relatedness becomes manifest in ambivalence, namely conflicting feelings to-
wards the staged barbarians (or even the Hellenes when they take on a barbaric hue,
like in Iphigenia in Aulis and in Medea). A certain ambivalence also becomes mani
fest in Quintilian’s evaluation of barbarismus as vitium that occasionally may turn
out to be a virtus; and in the same way, the feelings attached to the onomatopoeic
word seem to be conflicting feelings.63 We may thus summarize our first two prem-
ises as follows: ambiguity and ambivalence are constitutive semantic layers of the
lexeme barbar-, of the rhetorical coining of the term barbarism, and of the mytho-
poetic invention of the barbarian in tragedy. Yet the conceptualization of barbarism,
to which we will turn now, tends to hide or even repress them.
1.2.3. The Conceptualization of Barbarism

1.2.3.1. The Emergence of the Ethnocentric Enemy- and Identity-Concept
In Aeschylus’ and Euripides’s plays quoted in the previous section, the use of bár-
baros as an ethnocentric enemy- and identity-concept begins to emerge. But the
staging of the word’s phonetics and semantics, that is, the dramaturgy of the bar-
barian, opposes the disambiguation, which is a constitutive factor of the word’s
conceptualization. This disambiguation takes place when the word is being used in
philosophical or otherwise scholarly or would-be scholarly language. The word is
then treated as a context-independent element of such language, that is, as a term.
A term is meant to convey knowledge when it is related to an object in and through
a proposition (Aussage). A concept is a term’s meaning; we speak of concepts when
we abstract the term’s intensional and extensional meaning from its sound and the
letters it is made of. In other words: conceptualization involves that we leave aside
the phonic and graphic qualities of the word which represents the concept (Kamlah
and Lorenzen 1973, 30, 86–87).64
A very controversial passage of Aristotle’s Politics may highlight the way in which
the use of the word bárbaros as a concept in propositional statements emerges and at
the same time deviates from the staging of the word in the mythopoetic dramaturgy
of the barbarian. In the second chapter of Book 1 of his treatise, Aristotle states that
the distinction between female and slave which applies to the Hellenes does not
apply to the barbarians because they lack that which (or whom who) rules phýsei,
by nature (τὸ φύσει ἄρχον οὐκ ἔχουσιν—“no class of natural rulers,” Pol. 1.1252b);65
62 See Maria Boletsi’s case study below in chapter 4.

63 See above, section 1.2.1 of this Introduction.
64 As for the both intensional and extensional quality of concepts, see below, section 1.2.3.2 of
this Introduction.
65 English translation by H. Rackham (1944), quoted after the Perseus online edition.
20 Markus Winkler
thus all barbarians are slaves. (This is a of course a justification of slavery as an in-
stitution insofar as the large majority of slaves living inside the polis were of foreign
origin, Jüthner 1923, 12; Cartledge 2001.) Aristotle quotes in this context “the saying
of the poets—‘’Tis meet that Greeks should rule barbarians,—’”(φασιν οἱ ποιηταὶ
“βαρβάρων δ᾽ Ἕλληνας ἄρχειν εἰκός”), and he approves this saying, given that bar-
barians and slaves are by nature (phýsei) the same—ὡς ταὐτὸ φύσει βάρβαρον καὶ
δοῦλον ὄν (1.1252b).66 The first half of Iphigenia’s famous statement functions here
as evidence to substantiate the claim that the barbarians, being slaves, are politically
inferior to the Greeks (which in fact is what Iphigenia herself claims in the second
half of her statement) and therefore have to be treated as such.67 The evidence is
based on what Quintilian later labels the ‘authority’ (“auctoritas,” Inst. 5.11.39) of
certain poets’ sayings, as well as on the use of Iphigenia’s statement as a topos in the
sense of context-independent commonplace (locus communis). As for the underlying
argumentative topos, it is later labeled by Quintilian as natio, that is, the determina-
tion by one’s family or ethnic origin. To exemplify this category, Quintilian refers
himself to the ethnic ‘otherness’ of the barbarians: “natio, nam et gentibus proprii
mores sunt nec idem in barbaro, Romano, Graeco probabile est”—“then there is na-
tionality, for races [!] have their own character, and the same action is not probable
in the case of a barbarian, a Roman and a Greek” (Inst. 5.10.24).68
Aristotle’s use of the line quoted from Euripides as evidence based on authority
and ethnicity (modern authors, as we have seen, will speak of ‘race’) involves that
this line is decontextualized as well as disambiguated. Thereby, the word bárbaros be-
comes a concept fit to be used in propositions; in fact, the line is quoted by Aristotle
as a normative proposition, as a rule based on observation. The de-contextualization
lays the ground for the conceptualization insofar as the questioning of Iphigenia’s
statement in the play depends on its dramaturgic context. It is this context that makes
for the ambiguity of both bárbaros and its opposite Héllen, that is, for the questioning
of their apparently rock-hard opposition.
Already in Plato’s Republic (Politeía), bárbaros functions as a largely decontextual-
ized, hardened enemy-concept (Resp. 470b–e), although in his Statesman (Politikós),
the philosopher is aware of the logical incorrectness of the opposition between Hel-
lenes and barbarians, Hellenes being a proper noun and barbarians being a common
noun (Plt. 262c–d.), and although as early as Thucydides, we find the premises of an
evolutionist relativizing of their opposition.69 Later, from Isocrates to Hellenism and
early Christian writers, the opposition undergoes a series of revisions and criticisms,
but its exclusionary function is never overcome (Winkler 2009, 39–40). Borst (1988,
25) observes accordingly that since Late Antiquity, the ethno- and later Eurocentric
function of barbar- as an enemy-concept has prevailed. And as such, it has proven
historically transferable:70 the reference of the concept, that is, its extension, adapts to
66 On this passage, see Jüthner 1923, 26–27; Hall 1989, 164–65, 196; Detel 1995, 1039–42.
67 On Iphigenia’s statement, see above, section 1.2.2 of this Introduction.
68 We quote Butler’s translation (see above, footnote 40 of this Introduction), which by choos-
ing ‘race’ for the Latin gens reflects the modern racialization of the concept of barbarism.
70 On the historical transferability of counter-concepts, see Koselleck 1989, 216; 2004, 159.
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Title: Little Sunshine's holiday

A picture from life
Author: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Illustrator: Etheldred B. Barry
Release date: September 6, 2023 [eBook #71576]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1900
Credits: Donald Cummings, David E. Brown, Ed Leckert, and

the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE

SUNSHINE'S HOLIDAY ***
LITTLE SUNSHINE’S HOLIDAY
Works of
Miss Mulock
Little Sunshine’s Holiday

The Little Lame Prince
Adventures of a Brownie
His Little Mother
John Halifax, Gentleman
L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY

(Incorporated)
212 Summer St., Boston, Mass.

The German pictures.
(See page 139.)
LITTLE SUNSHINE’S
HOLIDAY
A PICTURE FROM LIFE
BY
MISS MULOCK
Illustrated by
ETHELDRED B. BARRY
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1900
Copyright, 1900
By L. C. Page and Company
(INCORPORATED)
All rights reserved
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
DEDICATED TO
Little Sunshine’s Little Friends
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
The German Pictures Frontispiece
Sunshine says Good-bye to the Gardener and His
15
Wife
Sunshine and Franky 40
Nelly and Sunny on the Steps 59
“Her little bare feet pattering along the floor” 75
Four Little Highland Girls 87
Little Sunshine Goes Fishing 101
“Engaged in single combat” 118
Two Little Churchgoers 163
Climbing the “Mountain” 187
Tailpiece 207
LITTLE SUNSHINE’S HOLIDAY.
CHAPTER I.
While writing this title, I paused, considering whether the little girl to
whom it refers would not say of it, as she sometimes does of other
things, “You make a mistake.” For she is such a very accurate little
person. She cannot bear the slightest alteration of a fact. In herself
and in other people she must have the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth. For instance, one day, overhearing her mamma
say, “I had my shawl with me,” she whispered, “No, mamma, not
your shawl; it was your waterproof.”
Therefore, I am sure she would wish me to explain at once that
“Little Sunshine” is not her real name, but a pet name, given
because she is such a sunshiny child; and that her “holiday” was not
so much hers—seeing she was then not three years old, and every
day was a holiday—as her papa’s and mamma’s, who are very busy
people, and who took her with them on one of their rare absences
from home. They felt they could not do without her merry laugh, her
little pattering feet, and her pretty curls,—even for a month. And so
she got a “holiday” too, though it was quite unearned: as she has
never been to school, and her education has gone no farther than a
crooked S, a round O, an M for mamma, and a D for—but this is
telling.
Of course Little Sunshine has a Christian name and surname, like
other little girls, but I do not choose to give them. She has neither
brother nor sister, and says “she doesn’t want any,—she had rather
play with papa and mamma.” She is not exactly a pretty child, but
she has very pretty yellow curls, and is rather proud of “my curls.”
She has only lately begun to say “I” and “my,” generally speaking of
herself, baby-fashion, in the third person,—as “Sunny likes that,”
“Sunny did so-and-so,” etc. She always tells everything she has
done, and everything she is going to do. If she has come to any
trouble—broken a teacup, for instance—and her mamma says, “Oh,
I am so sorry! Who did that?” Little Sunshine will creep up, hanging
her head and blushing, “Sunny did it; she won’t ever do it again.” But
the idea of denying it would never come into her little head.
Everybody has always told the exact truth to her, and so she tells the
truth to everybody, and has no notion of there being such a thing as
falsehood in the world.
Still, this little girl is not a perfect character. She sometimes flies into
a passion, and says, “I won’t,” in a very silly way,—it is always so
silly to be naughty. And sometimes she feels thoroughly naughty,—
as we all do occasionally,—and then she says, of her own accord,
“Mamma, Sunny had better go into the cupboard” (her mamma’s
dressing-closet). There she stays, with the door close shut, for a little
while; and then comes out again smiling, “Sunny is quite good now.”
She kisses mamma, and is all right. This is the only punishment she
has ever had—or needed, for she never sulks, or does anything
underhand or mean or mischievous; and her wildest storm of
passion only lasts a few minutes. To see mamma looking sad and
grave, or hear her say, “I am so sorry that my little girl is naughty,”
will make the child good again immediately.
So you have a faint idea of the little person who was to be taken on
this long holiday; first in a “puff-puff,” then in a boat,—which was to
her a most remarkable thing, as she lives in a riverless county, and,
except once crossing the Thames, had scarcely ever beheld water.
Her mamma had told her, however, of all the wonderful things she
was to see on her holiday, and for a week or two past she had been
saying to every visitor that came to the house, “Sunny is going to
Scotland. Sunny is going in a puff-puff to Scotland. And papa will
take her in a boat, and she will catch a big salmon. Would you like to
see Sunny catch a big salmon?” For it is the little girl’s firm conviction
that to see Sunny doing anything must be the greatest possible
pleasure to those about her,—as perhaps it is.
Well, the important day arrived. Her mamma was very busy, Little
Sunshine helping her,—to “help mamma” being always her grand
idea. The amount of work she did, in carrying her mamma’s clothes
from the drawers to the portmanteau, and carrying them back again;
watching her dresses being folded and laid in the trunk, then jumping
in after them, smoothing and patting them down, and, lastly, sitting
upon them, cannot be told. Every now and then she looked up,
“Mamma, isn’t Sunny a busy girl?”—which could not be denied.
Sunshine says good-bye to the gardener & his wife.
The packing-up was such a great amusement—to herself, at least—
that it was with difficulty she could be torn from it, even to get her
dinner, and be dressed for her journey, part of which was to take
place that day. At last she was got ready, a good while before
anybody else, and then she stood and looked at herself from head to
foot in a large mirror, and was very much interested in the sight. Her
travelling-dress was a gray waterproof cloak, with a hood and
pockets, where she could carry all sorts of things,—her gloves, a
biscuit, the head of her dolly (its body had come off), and two or
three pebbles, which she daily picked up in the garden, and kept to
wash in her bath night and morning, “to make them clean,” for she
has an extraordinary delight in things being “quite clean.” She had on
a pair of new boots,—buttoned boots, the first she ever had,—and
she was exceedingly proud of them, as well as of her gray felt hat,
underneath which was the usual mass of curly yellow hair. She
shook it from side to side like a little lion’s mane, calling out,
“Mamma, look at Sunny’s curls! Such a lot of curls!”
When the carriage came to the door, she watched the luggage being
put in very gravely. Then all the servants came to say good-bye to
her. They were very kind servants, and very fond of Little Sunshine.
Even the gardener and his wife looked quite sorry to part with her,
but in her excitement and delight the little lady of course did not mind
it at all.
“Good-bye! good-bye! I’m going to Scotland,” she kept saying, and
kissing her hand. “Sunny’s going to Scotland in a puff-puff. But she’ll
come back again, she will.”
After which kind promise, meant to cheer them up a little, she
insisted on jumping into the carriage “all by her own self,”—she
dearly likes doing anything “all my own self,”—and, kissing her hand
once more, was driven away with her mamma and her nurse (whose
name is Lizzie) to meet her papa in London.
Having been several times in a “puff-puff,” and once in London, she
was not a bit frightened at the streets or the crowd. Only in the
confusion at Euston Square she held very tight to her mamma’s
hand, and at last whispered, “Mamma, take her! up in you arms, up
in you own arms!”—her phrase when she was almost a baby. And
though she is now a big girl, who can walk, and even run, she clung
tightly to her mamma’s neck, and would not be set down again until
transferred to her papa, and taken by him to look at the engine.
Papa and his little girl are both very fond of engines. This was such a
large one, newly painted, with its metal-work so clean and shiny, that
it was quite a picture. Though sometimes it gave a snort and a puff
like a live creature, Sunny was not afraid of it, but sat in her papa’s
arms watching it, and then walked gravely up and down with him,
holding his hand and making all sorts of remarks on the things she
saw, which amused him exceedingly. She also informed him of what
she was going to do,—how she should jump into the puff-puff, and
then jump out again, and sleep in a cottage, in a quite new bed,
where Sunny had never slept before. She chattered so fast, and was
so delighted at everything about her, that the time went rapidly by;
and her papa, who could not come to Scotland for a week yet, was
obliged to leave her. When he kissed her, poor Little Sunshine set up
a great cry.
“I don’t want you to go away. Papa! papa!” Then, bursting into one of
her pathetic little furies, “I won’t let papa go away! I won’t!”
She clung to him so desperately that her little arms had fairly to be
untied from round his neck, and it was at least two minutes and a
half before she could be comforted.
But when the train began to move, and the carriageful of people to
settle down for the journey, Sunny recovered herself, and grew
interested in watching them. They were all gentlemen, and as each
came in, mamma had suggested that if he objected to a child, he
had better choose another carriage; but nobody did. One—who
looked like the father of a family—said: “Ma’am, he must be a very
selfish kind of man who does object to children,—that is, good
children.” So mamma earnestly hoped that hers would be a good
child.
So she was,—for a long time. There were such interesting things to
see out of the window: puff-puffs without end, some moving on the

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Barbarian Explorations of a Western

Concept in Theory Literature and the

Wundt, Avenarius, and Scientific Psychology: A Debate

Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in

How to Be a Dictator The Cult of Personality in the

How to Be a Dictator The Cult of Personality in the

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First

Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the

Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century From Triumph

The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and

Markus Winkler in collaboration with

Herausgegeben von Dieter Lamping

Die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

J. B. Metzler ist ein Imprint der eingetragenen Gesellschaft Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE

Einbandgestaltung: Finken & Bumiller, Stuttgart (Foto: Finken & Bumiller)

1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2.1. The Concept of Barbarism in Eighteenth-Century Theories

2.1.2. Montesquieu to Ferguson: Barbarism as a Stage of Cultural and

2.3. Bemoaning the Loss of ‘Vernunft’ and ‘Tugend’: On the Semantics

3. Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

3.1. The Relationship between Idyll and Barbarism in Schiller’s

3.3. Interfering Semantics of Barbarism and Race in Flaubert’s

3.4. Nietzsche’s Concept of Barbarism: From Rhetoric to Genealogy . . . . . 258

4. On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century: History, Crisis, and

The present study is part of a collaborative international research project funded

Geneva, spring 2018

1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

1 See the examples quoted below, in section 1.2.3.1 of this Introduction.

4 See Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (8 vols., 1972–97), where barbarism is only marginally

1.1.2. A Genealogical Approach

16 “méthode” (Foucault 2004, 121).

of aristocratic societies lead to a vindication of barbarism as powerful wholeness

25 “histoire du présent” (2015 [1975], vol. 2, 292).

30 The critical phenomenology of symbolic forms is an expansion of Kantian and neo-Kantian

[M]etaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the under-

Blumenberg’s methodological reflection obviously is relevant not only to concepts

Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. From a retrospective point of view, it thus proves to be

or exemplifies nimbleness, since it is itself a nimble sound” (564). Bredin’s choice of

The African word which Caliban uses as an aggressive onomatopoetic battle-cry is

1.2.2. The Mythopoetic ‘Invention of the Barbarian’

Puisque tu manies si bien l’invective, tu pourrais au moins me bénir de t’avoir appris à

The synecdochic use of the word meaning unintelligible or offensive language to

βαρβάρων δ᾽ Ἕλληνας ἄρχειν εἰκός, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ βαρβάρους,

1.2.3. The Conceptualization of Barbarism

62 See Maria Boletsi’s case study below in chapter 4.

Title: Little Sunshine's holiday

Author: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

Illustrator: Etheldred B. Barry

Release date: September 6, 2023 [eBook #71576]

Original publication: Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1900

Credits: Donald Cummings, David E. Brown, Ed Leckert, and

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE

Little Sunshine’s Holiday

L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY

212 Summer St., Boston, Mass.

A PICTURE FROM LIFE

All rights reserved

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1. Theoretical and Methodological Introduction

1.1.2. A Genealogical Approach

1.2.2. The Mythopoetic ‘Invention of the Barbarian’

1.2.3. The Conceptualization of Barbarism