Two living Italian thinkers engage me these past few years. There were others dead who influenced me also, from Ancient Rome to Carlo Levi, before 2020. After 2020 Agamben and Veneziani in this hour during and after Covid where my emotional urgency seeks return to Humanity and not bow down to the Nullity of A.I Colossus.
Erich From wrote well on idolatry. The idol is a thing made by man's hands, yet one before which he bows down as if he were the slave and the work of his hands were the master. When he does so he is not fully alive, because he makes himself the worshipper of a thing, that which is 'not-life'.
The Return is the key expression of Marcello Veneziani's thought and work. The vision of existence as a curious and tormented journey towards the origin: the human vocation is not stability, which concerns gods and stones, nor pure going, which concerns machines and automatons, but returning, as the mature recomposition of life with its source; the wanderer's restlessness is nostalgia for the Home. The return is the literary and philosophical thread but also sentimental and even civil, of Veneziani. In the philosophy of return, Veneziani finds his "four authors" in a coherent sequence, Plato and Plotinus, Vico and Nietzsche. Theory and phenomenology, love and despair of return. And behind it the great literature of the return, from Homer to Dante, from Leopardi to Proust. Veneziani does not seek the novelty of an original theory but an original knowledge to connect with, expressed in the sensitivity and language of his time, while not enclosing himself in it. He does not claim to discover truths that no one had ever thought or known until now, but aspires to bring back to mind a metaphysical knowledge that lies dormant and neglected, inside and outside of us.
The hairpin thought develops in his work in the return to the still alive past which he calls Tradition, community connection and sense of selective continuity; and in the openness to the future that he defines as Amor fati, acceptance of what happens and conversion of becoming into the arms of the being from which it originates; guided in transit by the invisible bride, metaphysics. In this light, literature is nostalgia for life that flows, philosophy is a theory of return, theology is a return to the One, metaphysics is a sense of destiny, as an intelligence of life and of the world.
https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/il-pensatore/senso-e-destino-di-unopera-autobiografia-intellettuale/
Biomadness in power
by Marcello Veneziani
But what kind of society is emerging? It is a daily tam tam that affects life, death, birth, family. There is a Great Factory of Opinionmarching one way, on a crash course in the demolition of humanity as we have hitherto known it. And it imposes the race towards an upside down world in forced stages. The mother becomes a superfluous entity, to be suppressed or reduced to a rented uterus for the joy of homosexual couples who want to buy a child. And the magistrates, contradicting the law, confirm the full legitimacy of their wishes and add that there is no need for genes to be called parents. But the word parents, look at it, comes from the word geniuses. The term "adoptive parents" can be accepted because a father and a mother make up for the biological parents; but two men of the same sex who by their own desire decide to have their child are not parents in any sense. At most they are guardians. The mother is not a replaceable accessory.
The parricidal and matricidal society is a society without children, except those born in test tubes. We deplore the policy that does not immediately follow the emotional wave and does not legislate on the matter as ordered by the Wave, with its creators and its magistrates. And instead the deafening and embarrassing silence of Pope Bergoglio goes unnoticed, who in the face of the upheaval of life and of the family, from wombs for rent to assisted suicides, talks about something else, pretends nothing has happened... A generation is demolishing the experience of many generations that preceded it, with an absolute presumption.
What is at the origins of this madness?There is a loss of boundaries, of a sense of measure, of nature and of limits. It's me, only me, who decides when to die and how; it is I who decides, without the help of a woman, to have a child, renting a uterus or shopping overseas. I decide whether or not to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, even if a person's life is involved. Freedom and modernity are reduced to setting no limits to my desires. The rest doesn't count for anything, others, emotional ties, fatherhood, motherhood, the responsibility of being in the world and of bringing it into the world. Nothing matters other than my will. This is the madness of our time, the immeasurable power of one's desires which is presented as Right, Freedom and Autonomy. And those who oppose it are accused of living in the Middle Ages. Forgetting that we too, born into families of fathers and mothers, we were born and raised in that Middle Ages. If defending motherhood, fatherhood, family and life are signs of the Middle Ages, then what is modernity, the triumph of the inhuman, the loss of limits, the dictatorship of the Ego, the abolition of nature? No, gentlemen, this is not the future, this is the end of civilization and the escape from humanity in the name of a genetically modified transhuman, where identity is replaced by desire, the human by the mutant and the we are by the I want. Don't confuse the end with a beginning. this is not the future, this is the end of civilization and the escape from humanity in the name of a genetically modified transhuman, where identity is replaced by desire, the human by the mutant and the we are by the I want. Don't confuse the end with a beginning. this is not the future, this is the end of civilization and the escape from humanity in the name of a genetically modified transhuman, where identity is replaced by desire, the human by the mutant and the we are by the I want. Don't confuse the end with a beginning.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
I had a conversation with my woke-ish progressive daughter not long ago that we are still living in the Middle Ages, in fact long before. That time and progress have made no real difference to our inner most thoughts and actions. We still deal with the same issues of power politics, suppression of dissent, political assassinations, inter-family vendettas, murder, genocide - just with more tech and the ability to commit mass murder more efficiently and at scale.
She lives in a small bubble of a safe and friendly community, husband, child, two dogs, mortgage, car, holidays, yoga. 'But what do we do about the far right???' she opines fretfully? There is no far right, I tell her, not by the media definition. 'But what about the Nazis?' That's short for the National Socialist Workers Party. 'Oh.'
But none of this matters in the bubble of conformity and community and being Good Citizens. It's all about the weather and what's for dinner and shopping and Look how the prices have gone up! and let's plan another skiing trip. Their view of life and the world is informed by daily doses of the BBC and the occasional spiritual book of the latest thing to find out who you really are.
This attitude seems to be the majority, at least here in the UK. I've encountered no resistance to the march of slavery encroaching, except online. It's as if no one cares. There's an acceptance of the social order being controlled by 'them', the authorities who know about these things. A blind trust, a dismissal of personal agency. We pay them taxes to do their job, after all.
As the noose tightens, asphyxiation may be a gentle, welcome relief from the hidden fears creeping softly in the night, unbidden. Could the collective death wish be the path of least resistance as the egregore approaches? For many, that must be the subconscious reality.
There is only so much one can shove under the rug.