The Thirties are still before us
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 15, 2024
In November 1990, Gérard Granel, one of the most lucid minds in the European philosophy of those years, held a lecture at The New School for Social Research in New York whose title, certainly meaningful, did not fail to provoke some scandalised reactions from right-thinking people: The Thirties are still before us. If the analysis conducted by Granel was genuinely philosophical, its political implications were indeed immediately perceptible, since what was in question in the apparently anodyne chronological syntagma were purely and simply fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany and stalinism in Soviet Union, i.e. the three radical political attempts to “destroy the economic, political and spiritual order by which Europe recognised itself and replace it with a ‘new order’”. Granel had an easy play in showing how the European intellectual and political class had been just as blind to this triple novelty as it had — in the Nineties as now — to its disquieting, although changed, resurgence. It’s hard to believe that Léon Blum, leader of French Socialists, may have declared, commenting on the German elections of July 1932, that, compared to the representatives of the old Germany, “Hitler is the symbol of the spirit of change, renewal and revolution” and that, therefore, von Schleicher’s victory would have appeared to him “even more desolating than Hitler’s one”. And how should we judge the political sensitvity of Georges Bataille and André Breton, who, in the face of protests over the German occupation of the Rhineland, dared write without shame: “we prefer, at any rate, Hitler’s anti-diplomatic brutality that is more pacific, in fact, than the politicians’ and diplomats’ slobbering excitation”? The thesis of this essay, which I highly recommend reading, is that what defines the historical process underway, in the Thirties as well as in the Nineties when he was writing, is the same primacy of the infinite over the finite, which, in the name of an unfolding that is intended to be absolutely without limits, seeks to abolish in all spheres — economic, scientific, cultural — the ethical, political, and religious barriers that, somehow, had contained it until then. And, at the same time, also through the examples of fascism, nazism and stalinism, Granel showed how such a process of infinitisation and total mobilisation of any aspects of social life can only lead to self-destruction.
Without going into the merits of this certainly persuasive analysis, I am rather interested here in highlighting the analogies with the situation we are going through today. The fact that the Thirties of the twentieth century are still before us does not mean that we see the aberrant events in question repeating themselves in exactly the same way; rather it means what Bordiga intended to express by writing, after the end of World War II, that the victors would be the testamentary executors of the vanquished. Governments everywhere, whatever their colour and position, act as executors of a same will, accepted without benefit of inventory. On all sides we see the blind continuation of the very same unlimited process of productive increase and technological development that Granel had been denouncing, in which human life, reduced to its biological basis, seems to renounce any other inspiration other than bare life and shows itself willing, as we have seen in the last three years, to sacrifice, unreservedly, its own political existence. With the difference, perhaps, that the signs of blindness, of absence of thought, and of a probable, imminent self-destruction, which Granel had been evoking, have multiplied dramatically. Everything suggests that we are entering — at least in the post-industrial societies of the West — the extreme stage of a process whose end cannot be predicted with certainty, but whose consequences, if awareness of limits does not awaken again, could be catastrophic.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, January 15, 2024
In November 1990, Gérard Granel, one of the most lucid minds in the European philosophy of those years, held a lecture at The New School for Social Research in New York whose title, certainly meaningful, did not fail to provoke some scandalised reactions from right-thinking people: The Thirties are still before us. If the analysis conducted by Granel was genuinely philosophical, its political implications were indeed immediately perceptible, since what was in question in the apparently anodyne chronological syntagma were purely and simply fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany and stalinism in Soviet Union, i.e. the three radical political attempts to “destroy the economic, political and spiritual order by which Europe recognised itself and replace it with a ‘new order’”. Granel had an easy play in showing how the European intellectual and political class had been just as blind to this triple novelty as it had — in the Nineties as now — to its disquieting, although changed, resurgence. It’s hard to believe that Léon Blum, leader of French Socialists, may have declared, commenting on the German elections of July 1932, that, compared to the representatives of the old Germany, “Hitler is the symbol of the spirit of change, renewal and revolution” and that, therefore, von Schleicher’s victory would have appeared to him “even more desolating than Hitler’s one”. And how should we judge the political sensitvity of Georges Bataille and André Breton, who, in the face of protests over the German occupation of the Rhineland, dared write without shame: “we prefer, at any rate, Hitler’s anti-diplomatic brutality that is more pacific, in fact, than the politicians’ and diplomats’ slobbering excitation”? The thesis of this essay, which I highly recommend reading, is that what defines the historical process underway, in the Thirties as well as in the Nineties when he was writing, is the same primacy of the infinite over the finite, which, in the name of an unfolding that is intended to be absolutely without limits, seeks to abolish in all spheres — economic, scientific, cultural — the ethical, political, and religious barriers that, somehow, had contained it until then. And, at the same time, also through the examples of fascism, nazism and stalinism, Granel showed how such a process of infinitisation and total mobilisation of any aspects of social life can only lead to self-destruction.
Without going into the merits of this certainly persuasive analysis, I am rather interested here in highlighting the analogies with the situation we are going through today. The fact that the Thirties of the twentieth century are still before us does not mean that we see the aberrant events in question repeating themselves in exactly the same way; rather it means what Bordiga intended to express by writing, after the end of World War II, that the victors would be the testamentary executors of the vanquished. Governments everywhere, whatever their colour and position, act as executors of a same will, accepted without benefit of inventory. On all sides we see the blind continuation of the very same unlimited process of productive increase and technological development that Granel had been denouncing, in which human life, reduced to its biological basis, seems to renounce any other inspiration other than bare life and shows itself willing, as we have seen in the last three years, to sacrifice, unreservedly, its own political existence. With the difference, perhaps, that the signs of blindness, of absence of thought, and of a probable, imminent self-destruction, which Granel had been evoking, have multiplied dramatically. Everything suggests that we are entering — at least in the post-industrial societies of the West — the extreme stage of a process whose end cannot be predicted with certainty, but whose consequences, if awareness of limits does not awaken again, could be catastrophic.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky, Thirty, 1937. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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