TABUCCHI’S INQUIETUDINE AS THE (UN)BORDERING OF EUROPE

Abstract

The literary trajectory of Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012) constitutes one of the most profound ontological interrogations of the concept of the “boundary” (confine) in late 20th-century European thought. This paper posited that Tabucchi’s literary geography is a “liminal space” where identity and belonging fundamentally vacillate, instead of a map of fixed territories. Against the backdrop of hardening political borders, Tabucchi proposed an “anti-geography” of (un)bordering, driven by Inquietudine, which functioned as a core mechanism for dissolving Europe’s ontological, geographical, and political boundaries. This study examined Tabucchi’s process of (un)bordering across three critical dimensions. Ontologically, it analyzed the deconstruction of the fixed self and linear time through the Game of the Reverse and “pendulum effect,” exploring a multilayered temporality where the boundary between the living and dead is annulled. The geopoetic dimension investigated the fictionality of national borders by defining language as a “portable homeland” and exploring the “shifting West” through the Azores and India. Politically, the study explored intellectual responsibility, metaphorically defined as “gastritis,” which interrogates the hidden facets of judicial and official truths. Tabucchi’s “aesthetics of absence” transcended exclusive nationalism to foster a new European subjectivity capable of accommodating the Other. Based on the premise that the earth is merely “on loan,” he demonstrated that we are all fundamentally “strangers to geography and existence.” This paper argued that Tabucchi’s work proves that constant wandering on the border constitutes the most dignified form of human existence. This is a powerful philosophical response to the modern crises of isolation, mapping a universal subjectivity that stands in solidarity with the Other on a shared, “borrowed” planet.