Heritage of our times
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 31, 2023
The meditation on history and tradition that Hannah Arendt published in 1954 bears the title, certainly not by chance, Between Past and Future. For the German-Jewish philosopher who had been a refugee in New York for fifteen years, was a matter of questioning herself about the void between past and future that had arisen in the West’s culture, that is, about the now irrevocable breaking of the continuity of every tradition. This is why the preface to the book opens with René Char’s aphorism Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament (our inheritance was left to us by no testament). At issue was, i.e., the crucial historical problem of receiving an inheritance which is no longer in any way possible to convey.
About twenty years earlier, Ernst Bloch in exile in Zürich had published under the title Heritage of Our Times a reflection on the heritage that he tried to recover by rummaging in the cellars and repositories of the bourgeois culture now in decay (“The times are in decay and in labour at the same time” is the ensign that opens the preface to the book). It is possibile that the problem of an inheritance deemed inaccessible, or practicable only through thorny ways and half-hidden glimmers raised by the two authors, each in his own way, is by no means obsolete and concerns us, indeed, closely — so intimately that at times we seem to forget about it. We too experience a void and a rupture between past and future; we too, in a dying culture, must seek, if not a birth pang, at least something like a parcel of good that has survived the debacle.
A preliminary investigation into this purely juridical concept — inheritance — which, as often happens in our culture, expands itself beyond its disciplinary limits to involve the very destiny of the West, will therefore not be useless. As the studies of a great legal historian — Yan Thomas — clearly show, the function of inheritance is to ensure the continuatio dominii, that is, the continuity of ownership of assets which pass from the dead to the living. All the devices that the law makes up for the vacuum that risks being produced on the death of the owner have no other purpose than to guarantee the succession of property without any interrumption.
Inheritance is, perhaps, not the right term to think of the problem that both Arendt and Bloch had in mind. Since in the spiritual tradition of a people something like a property simply does not make sense, in this context an inheritance such as continuatio dominii does not exist nor can it in any way interest us. Indeed, accessing the past, conversing with the dead, is possible only by breaking the continuity of ownership, and it is in the interval between past and future that every individual must necessarily place himself. We are heirs to nothing and we have no heirs anywhere — and it is only on this condition that we can resume the conversation with the past and with the dead. The good is, indeed, adespota and unappropriable by definition, and the obstinate attempt to grab the ownership of tradition defines the power which we reject in all its forms, in politics as in poetry, in philosophy as in religion, in schools as in temples and law courts.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 31, 2023
The meditation on history and tradition that Hannah Arendt published in 1954 bears the title, certainly not by chance, Between Past and Future. For the German-Jewish philosopher who had been a refugee in New York for fifteen years, was a matter of questioning herself about the void between past and future that had arisen in the West’s culture, that is, about the now irrevocable breaking of the continuity of every tradition. This is why the preface to the book opens with René Char’s aphorism Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament (our inheritance was left to us by no testament). At issue was, i.e., the crucial historical problem of receiving an inheritance which is no longer in any way possible to convey.
About twenty years earlier, Ernst Bloch in exile in Zürich had published under the title Heritage of Our Times a reflection on the heritage that he tried to recover by rummaging in the cellars and repositories of the bourgeois culture now in decay (“The times are in decay and in labour at the same time” is the ensign that opens the preface to the book). It is possibile that the problem of an inheritance deemed inaccessible, or practicable only through thorny ways and half-hidden glimmers raised by the two authors, each in his own way, is by no means obsolete and concerns us, indeed, closely — so intimately that at times we seem to forget about it. We too experience a void and a rupture between past and future; we too, in a dying culture, must seek, if not a birth pang, at least something like a parcel of good that has survived the debacle.
A preliminary investigation into this purely juridical concept — inheritance — which, as often happens in our culture, expands itself beyond its disciplinary limits to involve the very destiny of the West, will therefore not be useless. As the studies of a great legal historian — Yan Thomas — clearly show, the function of inheritance is to ensure the continuatio dominii, that is, the continuity of ownership of assets which pass from the dead to the living. All the devices that the law makes up for the vacuum that risks being produced on the death of the owner have no other purpose than to guarantee the succession of property without any interrumption.
Inheritance is, perhaps, not the right term to think of the problem that both Arendt and Bloch had in mind. Since in the spiritual tradition of a people something like a property simply does not make sense, in this context an inheritance such as continuatio dominii does not exist nor can it in any way interest us. Indeed, accessing the past, conversing with the dead, is possible only by breaking the continuity of ownership, and it is in the interval between past and future that every individual must necessarily place himself. We are heirs to nothing and we have no heirs anywhere — and it is only on this condition that we can resume the conversation with the past and with the dead. The good is, indeed, adespota and unappropriable by definition, and the obstinate attempt to grab the ownership of tradition defines the power which we reject in all its forms, in politics as in poetry, in philosophy as in religion, in schools as in temples and law courts.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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