World war III is not over yet
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 5, 2022
“We live in an epochal crisis. I believe that we are not yet at the bottom, not even in the middle of such crisis. I’m thinking about it more and more. I am convinced that the cultural, intellectual and political scenario has not yet expressed all its potential. We have to consider ourselves at the end of the third world war”. The war Dossetti was talking about in this 1993 interview was more or equally as devastating as the other two, because it was fought only by evil in the name of evil, between equally evil powers, albeit apparently with less bloodshed. But according to all evidence this war is not over yet — it has taken other forms and we are in it without being able to see its end. We are in the planetary war against the virus, we are an interested party in the thousand civil wars that divide peoples from within, and in spite of ourselves we are involved in the war in Ukraine as the occasion of a white world war, which is carried out especially in the language and minds of human people.
It is possible, however, that Dossetti was right and that this interminable war somehow coincides with its end, i.e. the end is, so to say, always ongoing. “We are facing the exhaustion of cultures” — he added — “I do not see the birth of a new thought either on the secular side or on the Christian side. We are all immobile, fixed and stuck in a now, which somehow we try to patch up”. The fighting powers have in fact no salvation and no truth to offer, but only a continuous, impendent threat of disease and death and the hatred and war of each one towards all. They are, in such sense, at the end and the atrocious planetary civil war they’re waging is the form of their end.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, September 5, 2022
“We live in an epochal crisis. I believe that we are not yet at the bottom, not even in the middle of such crisis. I’m thinking about it more and more. I am convinced that the cultural, intellectual and political scenario has not yet expressed all its potential. We have to consider ourselves at the end of the third world war”. The war Dossetti was talking about in this 1993 interview was more or equally as devastating as the other two, because it was fought only by evil in the name of evil, between equally evil powers, albeit apparently with less bloodshed. But according to all evidence this war is not over yet — it has taken other forms and we are in it without being able to see its end. We are in the planetary war against the virus, we are an interested party in the thousand civil wars that divide peoples from within, and in spite of ourselves we are involved in the war in Ukraine as the occasion of a white world war, which is carried out especially in the language and minds of human people.
It is possible, however, that Dossetti was right and that this interminable war somehow coincides with its end, i.e. the end is, so to say, always ongoing. “We are facing the exhaustion of cultures” — he added — “I do not see the birth of a new thought either on the secular side or on the Christian side. We are all immobile, fixed and stuck in a now, which somehow we try to patch up”. The fighting powers have in fact no salvation and no truth to offer, but only a continuous, impendent threat of disease and death and the hatred and war of each one towards all. They are, in such sense, at the end and the atrocious planetary civil war they’re waging is the form of their end.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Max Oppenheimer, The World War, 1916. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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