The old and the new
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 7, 2025
Why are we able to describe and analyse the old that is dissolving and, instead, are unable to imagine the new? Perhaps because we believe more or less unconsciously that the new is something that comes — no one knows where from — after the end of the old. The inability to think the new manifests thus itself in the careless use of the prefix post: the new is the post-modern, the post-human — in any case something that comes after. Exactly the contrary is true: the only way we have to think the new is to read it and decipher its hidden meanings in the forms of the old that passes and dissolves. That’s what Hölderlin clearly asserts in the extraordinary fragment on The declining fatherland, in which the perception of the new is inseparable from the memory of the sinking old and must in some way lovingly assume its figure. What has had its day and seems to dissolve loses its topicality, empties itself of its meaning, and somehow becomes possible again. Benjamin suggests something like this, when he writes that in the moment of memory the past, that seemed to be accomplished, appears to us unaccomplished and thus gives us the gift of the most precious thing: the possibility. Only the possible is truly new: if it were already topical and effective, it would always be deciduous and aged. And the possible does not come from the future; it is, in the past, what has not been, what perhaps will never be, but what could have been, and which therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only if we are able to grasp the possibility that the past — that is, the only thing we have — offers us, for a moment, before disappearing forever. It is in this way that we must refer to Western culture that everywhere around us is now falling apart and dissolving.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 7, 2025
Why are we able to describe and analyse the old that is dissolving and, instead, are unable to imagine the new? Perhaps because we believe more or less unconsciously that the new is something that comes — no one knows where from — after the end of the old. The inability to think the new manifests thus itself in the careless use of the prefix post: the new is the post-modern, the post-human — in any case something that comes after. Exactly the contrary is true: the only way we have to think the new is to read it and decipher its hidden meanings in the forms of the old that passes and dissolves. That’s what Hölderlin clearly asserts in the extraordinary fragment on The declining fatherland, in which the perception of the new is inseparable from the memory of the sinking old and must in some way lovingly assume its figure. What has had its day and seems to dissolve loses its topicality, empties itself of its meaning, and somehow becomes possible again. Benjamin suggests something like this, when he writes that in the moment of memory the past, that seemed to be accomplished, appears to us unaccomplished and thus gives us the gift of the most precious thing: the possibility. Only the possible is truly new: if it were already topical and effective, it would always be deciduous and aged. And the possible does not come from the future; it is, in the past, what has not been, what perhaps will never be, but what could have been, and which therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only if we are able to grasp the possibility that the past — that is, the only thing we have — offers us, for a moment, before disappearing forever. It is in this way that we must refer to Western culture that everywhere around us is now falling apart and dissolving.
(English translation by I, Robot)
林風眠 (Lín Fēngmián), Chinese opera series: Legend of the White Snake, ca. 1960s. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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