LABIRINTI E CASEMATTE

The Middle Ages next to come

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 28, 2025

A passage from Sergio Bettini’s book on L’arte alla fine del mondo antico (Art at the end of the ancient world) describes a world which is difficult not to recognise as similar to the one we are living in. “Political functions are assumed by a state bureaucracy; that accentuates and isolates itself (anticipating the Byzantine and medieval courts), while the masses become abstentionist (seed of the popular anonymity of Middle Ages); however, within the state new social nucleuses form around the different forms of activity (seed of the medieval corporations) and the large estates, that have become autarchic, herald the organisation of some large monasteries and of the feudal state itself”.
If the concentration of political functions in the hands of a state bureaucracy, its isolation from the popular base and the growing abstentionism of the masses are perfectly suited to our historical situation, it is sufficient to update the terms of the following lines to recognise something familiar here too. To the large estates evoked by Bettini correspond today economic and social groups which act in a more and more autarchic fashion, pursuing a logic completely detached from the interests of the collectivity, and to the social nucleuses that form themselves within the state correspond not only the lobbies which act within state bureaucracies, but also the embodiment of entire professional categories into government functions, as has happened in recent years for doctors.
Bettini’s book is from 1948. In 1971 Roberto Vacca’s book, Il medioevo prossimo venturo (The Middle Ages next to come), was published, in which the author predicted a catastrophic evolution of the most advanced countries, which would no longer be able to solve the problems related to the production and distribution of energy, transportation, water supply, waste disposal, and media and information literacy. If Vacca could write that the announcements of imminent catastrophe were in those years so numerous so as to produce a properly so-called “ruinographic” literature, nowadays apocalyptic predictions, especially those related to climate, have at least doubled.
Even if disasters — such as those produced by nuclear energy — are, if not probable, certainly possible — the demotion of the systems in which we live is conceivable without this necessarily taking the form of a catastrophe. The political, economic and spiritual break-up of European countries is, for example, now obvious even if they will continue to survive for a while yet. How, then, to think of the advent of a new Middle Ages? How can the political abstentionism that we see around us turn itself into a “popular anonymity” capable of inventing new and anonymous forms of expression and life? And how the isolation of state bureaucracies and the spread of autarchic potentates can herald the appearance of phenomena similar to the large monasteries, in which the exodus from the existing society produces new forms of community? It is certain that this can happen only if an initially small, but growing number of individuals will be able to read in the dissolving political forms the omen of new or more ancient forms of life.

(English translation by I, Robot)