Pre-national exile carried no stigma of deprivation

Evidence

In Western antiquity a man in exile does not feel he is helpless or inferior, because he does not feel burdened with deprivation-of a nation that for him does not yet exist. It even seems, if one is to believe the biographies of numerous Greek thinkers induding Plato and Aristotle, that sorne experience of voyaging and exile is considered necessary for a being’s cornplete fulfillment. Plato was the first to attempt to base legitimacy not on community within territory (as it was before and would be later) but on the City in the rationality of its laws. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s genealogy of legitimacy-discourse in race-struggle historiography and to the Society Must Be Defended counter-history motif; identity anchored in culture-versus-nation prefigures later anti-essentialism critiques.
• DEFINE: Illuminates the historical specificity of exile as a felt burden that only appears once nations exist — relevant to distinguishing exilic identity from errantry.