The fall of the West
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 16, 2026
The word “Occidente” (“West”), with which we define our culture, derives etymologically from the verb cadere (to fall) and literally means: “that which is falling, that which never ceases to fall”. Also connected to this verb are the terms caso (case, chance) and casuale (chance, random). That which never ceases to fall and set (occasus is the Latin for sunset) is for this reason also prey to chance, to an unceasing randomness. It is therefore not surprising that the government of men and things takes today the form of intervention protocols, independent of certain outcomes, in a world conceived as available and calculable just because of its being random. The West exists and rules itself only in the time of its end and its constant fall and, like its God, is uninterruptedly in act of dying. But just herein lies its strength: an incessant death is properly endless; an infinite transience or randomness is meant to be just unarrestable.
A strategy that seeks to confront this perpetual decline must find in it an interstice or an interruption where the West loses its continuity and falls down once and for all. This abysmal caesura is memory. The West, as it is random and fleeting, has no memory of itself, knows no way or form where something like a memory may for a moment burst forth and grow up. It can certainly construct, as it does, archives and registers in which to chronologically arrange the events — the cases — of its history, but it lacks the capacity to truly carry out a past, to open itself to something that breaks the uniform thread of its representations. Anamnesis, memory, instead, takes the form of an interstice where the decline — chance — is halted for an instant and lets a heterogeneous and unrepresentable past appear as if it had never been. “Oh, past, thou abyss of thought!” (Schelling): only the thought that resolutely descends into this abyss can lead the West once and for all to its end.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, February 16, 2026
The word “Occidente” (“West”), with which we define our culture, derives etymologically from the verb cadere (to fall) and literally means: “that which is falling, that which never ceases to fall”. Also connected to this verb are the terms caso (case, chance) and casuale (chance, random). That which never ceases to fall and set (occasus is the Latin for sunset) is for this reason also prey to chance, to an unceasing randomness. It is therefore not surprising that the government of men and things takes today the form of intervention protocols, independent of certain outcomes, in a world conceived as available and calculable just because of its being random. The West exists and rules itself only in the time of its end and its constant fall and, like its God, is uninterruptedly in act of dying. But just herein lies its strength: an incessant death is properly endless; an infinite transience or randomness is meant to be just unarrestable.
A strategy that seeks to confront this perpetual decline must find in it an interstice or an interruption where the West loses its continuity and falls down once and for all. This abysmal caesura is memory. The West, as it is random and fleeting, has no memory of itself, knows no way or form where something like a memory may for a moment burst forth and grow up. It can certainly construct, as it does, archives and registers in which to chronologically arrange the events — the cases — of its history, but it lacks the capacity to truly carry out a past, to open itself to something that breaks the uniform thread of its representations. Anamnesis, memory, instead, takes the form of an interstice where the decline — chance — is halted for an instant and lets a heterogeneous and unrepresentable past appear as if it had never been. “Oh, past, thou abyss of thought!” (Schelling): only the thought that resolutely descends into this abyss can lead the West once and for all to its end.
(English translation by I, Robot)
As Tennessee Williams said, “In memory everything seems to happen to music”. Photo © 陈漫 (Chén Màn). |
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