Finis Italiae
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 11, 2023
There has been talk of an end of Europe, if not of the West, as the event that dramatically marks the epoch we are living in. But if there is a country in Europe where some data allow to certify with sober precision the date of the end, this is Italy. The data in question are demographic data. Everyone knows that our country experienced decades of demographic decline which ranks it as the European country with the lowest birth rate. But few realise that this means that the persistence of this decline would lead Italian people to extinction in just three generations.
It is at least singular that we continue to worry about economic, political and cultural problems without taking this data into account, which nullifies all others. Evidently just as it is not easy for one to imagine one’s own death, so one does not want to imagine a situation where there will be no more Italians. I’m not referring to the citizens of the Italian state, which didn’t exist a little more than a century ago and whose dissolution, after all, doesn’t worry me that much. Rather, I am saddened by the perfectly real possibility that there will no longer be anyone to speak Italian, that the Italian language becomes a dead language. That is, that no one may read Dante’s poetry as a living language anymore, just as Primo Levi used to read it in Auschwitz to his companion Pikolo. This saddens me infinitely more than the disappearance of the Italian Republic, which on the other hand did all it could to lead to that end. Perhaps, the wonderful cities will remain, and perhaps the works of art will remain: there will no longer be “the fair land there where the Sì doth sound”.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 11, 2023
There has been talk of an end of Europe, if not of the West, as the event that dramatically marks the epoch we are living in. But if there is a country in Europe where some data allow to certify with sober precision the date of the end, this is Italy. The data in question are demographic data. Everyone knows that our country experienced decades of demographic decline which ranks it as the European country with the lowest birth rate. But few realise that this means that the persistence of this decline would lead Italian people to extinction in just three generations.
It is at least singular that we continue to worry about economic, political and cultural problems without taking this data into account, which nullifies all others. Evidently just as it is not easy for one to imagine one’s own death, so one does not want to imagine a situation where there will be no more Italians. I’m not referring to the citizens of the Italian state, which didn’t exist a little more than a century ago and whose dissolution, after all, doesn’t worry me that much. Rather, I am saddened by the perfectly real possibility that there will no longer be anyone to speak Italian, that the Italian language becomes a dead language. That is, that no one may read Dante’s poetry as a living language anymore, just as Primo Levi used to read it in Auschwitz to his companion Pikolo. This saddens me infinitely more than the disappearance of the Italian Republic, which on the other hand did all it could to lead to that end. Perhaps, the wonderful cities will remain, and perhaps the works of art will remain: there will no longer be “the fair land there where the Sì doth sound”.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983. Courtesy of WikiArt.
2 comments:
Do you think it is possible to reverse the decline in fertility rates?
I do not know. In many ways, it's a sociological issue, and not only an economic one, though the economic suffering of large parts of Italian society may have its influence. Professor Agamben wants to save the language from the fate of a country in free fall, "whose dissolution, after all," - he says - "doesn’t worry me that much", but at the same time he warns that if the number of people speaking the language declines to its point of no return, it will be impossible to save the language. So in the end it is about solving or not solving the quadrature of the circle.
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