Down Under

A mirror for the Anglo-Sphere then at a certain point this is South Africa

https://substack.com/inbox/post/107699773

Agamben

Europe, which was constituted as a pact between nation states, not only has and has never had any reality outside of money and the economy, but is today reduced to a ghost, in fact wholly subject to the military interests of a power and it is foreign to it. Some time ago, taking up a suggestion by Alexandre Kojève, we proposed the constitution of a "Latin empire", which would economically and politically unite the three great Latin nations (together with France, Spain and Italy) in agreement with the Catholic Church and open to Mediterranean countries. Whether or not such a proposal is still topical today, we would like to draw to the attention of interested parties today that if something like Europe is to acquire an autonomous political reality, Of Monarchy conceived as the unitary principle which was to order the particular kingdoms towards peace as "an ultimate end". In other words, it is possible that, in the extreme situation in which we find ourselves, precisely political models that are considered completely obsolete can find an unexpected relevance. But for this it would be necessary for the citizens of the European nation-states to rediscover a bond with their own places and with their own cultural traditions strong enough to be able to lay down their state citizenships without reservations and replace them with a single European citizenship, which would be embodied not in a parliament and in errands, but in somewhat similar symbolic power to the Holy Roman Empire. The question of whether or not such a European empire is possible does not interest us or correspond to our ideals:

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The way out from our contemporary predicament consists, for Agamben, in nothing less than the messianic overcoming of Western politics as we know it. In his interventions on the pandemic Agamben almost seems to deplore the inglorious end of the bourgeois democracies that he has built a career criticizing, but his current call for “new forms of resistance”34 must be soberly read (despite and against his current apocalyptic tones) in the context of his philosophical critique of the state of exception. What this resistance will consist in cannot be defined or described a priori, but if there is one thing that the 2020 pandemic has taught us, it is that this new political strategy cannot be reduced to an all-too-common and essentially anarcho-libertarian focus on individual freedoms (to which also Agamben’s project ultimately amounts35) but will have to be a positive collective project towards the common good.

CARLO SALZANI is Guest Scholar at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Vienna, Austria. His recent publications include the volumes Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy (2020), co-edited with Felice Cimatti, and Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (2018), co-edited with Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte

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Friends your generosity in this moment in life makes a difference as my wife, she is 80, very slowly in winter day by day recovers and rehabilitates from tumor removal on her cerebellum.

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity