The 30's are ahead of us

With our self driving car speeding us down the road

https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-gli-anni-trenta-sono-davanti-a-noi

The 1930s are ahead of us

In November 1990, Gérard Granel, one of the most lucid minds in European philosophy of those years, held a conference at the New School for Social Research in New York whose title, certainly significant, did not fail to provoke some scandalized reactions among right-thinking people: The Thirties are ahead of us . If the analysis conducted by Granel was genuinely philosophical, its political implications were in fact immediately perceptible, since in question, in the apparently anodyne chronological syntagma, were purely and simply fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and Stalinism in Soviet Union, i.e. the three radical political attempts to «destroy and replace with a “new order” the one in which Europe had until then recognized itself». Granel had a good hand in showing how the European intellectual and political class had been just as blind to this triple novelty as it was – in the 1990s as today – to its disturbing, albeit changed, resurgence. It is hard to believe that Leon Blum, leader of the French socialists, could declare, commenting on the German elections of July 1932, that, in front of the representatives of the old Germany, «Hitler is the symbol of the spirit of change, renewal and revolution» and that therefore von Schleicher's victory would have seemed to him "even more desolate than Hitler's". And how can we judge the political sensitivity of Georges Bataille and André Breton, who, in the face of protests over the German occupation of the Rhineland, were able to write without shame: «in any case we prefer Hitler's anti-diplomatic brutality, more peaceful, in facts, of the drooling excitement of diplomats and politicians." The thesis of this essay, which I highly recommend reading, is that what defines the historical process underway, in the 1930s and in the 1990s in which he wrote, is the same primacy of the infinite over the finite, which, in the name of a development that is intended to be absolutely without limits, seeks to abolish in every sphere - economic, scientific, cultural - the ethical, political and religious barriers that had previously contained it in some way. And, at the same time, also through the examples of fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, Granel showed how a similar process of infinitization and total mobilization of every aspect of social life can only lead to self-destruction.
Without going into the merits of this certainly persuasive analysis, I am interested here in underlining the analogies with the situation we are going through. The fact that the 1930s are still ahead of us does not mean that we see the aberrant events in question reoccurring today in exactly the same form; rather, it means what Bordiga had intended to express by writing, after the end of the Second World War, that the victors would be the executors of the vanquished. Governments everywhere, whatever their color and location, act as executors of the same will, accepted without benefit of inventory. On every side we see the same unlimited process of productive increase and technological development that Granel denounced continue blindly, in which human life, reduced to its biological basis, seems to renounce any other inspiration other than bare life and shows itself willing to sacrifice without reservations, as we have seen in the last three years, their political existence. With the difference, perhaps, that the signs of blindness, of the absence of thought and of a probable, imminent self-destruction, which Granel evoked, have multiplied dramatically. Everything suggests that we are entering - at least in the post-industrial societies of the West - the extreme phase of a process whose end cannot be predicted with certainty, but whose consequences, if awareness of the limits does not awaken again, could be catastrophic. .

January 15, 2024
Giorgio Agamben

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