Sunset of the West?
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 19, 2024
The question of the end of the West is often discussed in the texts published in this column. It’s good not to misunderstand here. It’s not about the resigned — even if lucid and bitter — contemplation of the last act of a decline that Spengler and other pseudo-prophets announced even too long ago. They were not interested in anything other than that decline; after all, they were complicit and even pleased with it, because in the haversacks and safes of their spirit there was just nothing left; that was, so to say, their only richness, from which they did not want at any cost to be defrauded. This is why Spengler could write in 1917: “I only wish to add the desire that this book might not be entirely unworthy alongside Germany’s military achievements”.
For us, on the contrary, the death of the West is the happy utopia, something like the stirred-up earth and the desert of sand, which our hope needs not to find in it some nourishment, but to rest our feet on it, waiting for the first chance to throw it into the eyes of our adversaries. The death of the West has not deprived us of anything alive and essential, and nostalgia is therefore out of question. And hope interests us only as the way that takes us towards something that we already know, because we have always had it and we are not willing to give it up. It is the vertical ray of light, rising from the flat, dark horizon of the West. He only who has already died can die here; he only who is already always alive can live.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 19, 2024
The question of the end of the West is often discussed in the texts published in this column. It’s good not to misunderstand here. It’s not about the resigned — even if lucid and bitter — contemplation of the last act of a decline that Spengler and other pseudo-prophets announced even too long ago. They were not interested in anything other than that decline; after all, they were complicit and even pleased with it, because in the haversacks and safes of their spirit there was just nothing left; that was, so to say, their only richness, from which they did not want at any cost to be defrauded. This is why Spengler could write in 1917: “I only wish to add the desire that this book might not be entirely unworthy alongside Germany’s military achievements”.
For us, on the contrary, the death of the West is the happy utopia, something like the stirred-up earth and the desert of sand, which our hope needs not to find in it some nourishment, but to rest our feet on it, waiting for the first chance to throw it into the eyes of our adversaries. The death of the West has not deprived us of anything alive and essential, and nostalgia is therefore out of question. And hope interests us only as the way that takes us towards something that we already know, because we have always had it and we are not willing to give it up. It is the vertical ray of light, rising from the flat, dark horizon of the West. He only who has already died can die here; he only who is already always alive can live.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 1817. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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