This Brazilian cartoon gleefully overturns a European discourse of exemplarity that, already showing wear at the seams, foundered on the rocks of the economic crisis. Like other expensive technological showpieces, the Costa Concordia carried entirely too much symbolic ballast. Its sinking in January 2012 furnished the metaphor for the condition of the Euro, the EU, and innumerable heads of state. Redoubling the wreck's pollution of the Italian coastline was its metonymic contamination of Italy's national image, already a decadent reflex of the European model. The Concordia was never just a cigar, but the ship of state, irresponsibly captained.
The paper traces the overdetermined career of the Costa Concordia. Every phase--the grandiose design, the spectacular launch, the ignoble wreck and ensuing trial, the competition for the contracts to dismantle--was framed in the navigational metaphors that Derrida has shown to guide Europe's exemplary self-conception: the avant-garde of a progress objectified in technological developments enabling the conquest of new territories. Modern Italy, insecure in Europe's economic and prestige hierarchies, invested heavily and late in such objectifications. By 2012, the materialized metaphor had devolved from crusade to cruise, perversely confirming the valuation of technocracy over democracy. Might today's reversal, with history arriving in pirogues from the other shore, foster a beneficial overturning?
