The travel or the communication illusions

Abstract

In France, and even beyond it, to travel has become lately a subject of such interest that it can’t be considered just a trending phenomenon, but a fundamental contemporary behavior. The reasons announced by the uncountable occasional nomads are registered by communication: reaching the Other, they say, is an answer to a great concern on culture and humanization. However, can or should this comforting turn satisfy us? In a notorious diatribe, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has criticized this great obsession with transhumance. The philosopher Jean Brun, in his turn, has developed a particularly reductive interpretation on the vagabonds of the Occident, tormented by the finitude of their own way of being-in-the-world. Of course there were and there are travellers really opened, desiring the unknown and the risks inherent to it. And it’s also possible, as Heidegger’s travel journals seems to suggest, that the authentic travel is the one which, even in an ephemeral way, let us face not the eternal wander, but ontological recentering.