Veneziani//interview

Interview by Davide Sabatino (with Geminello Preterossi)

Marcello Veneziani, in your book entitled La Cappa, published in 2022, you paint a rather dark and tragic picture of our present. In a passage of this text, in fact, we read:

"Religion uprooted, fear of God lost, community and territorial ties with a homeland, a family uprooted; every further horizon lost, or every spiritual, cultural, metaphysical opening inaccessible; life remains desolate, in a desert. Living without motive for the masses, killing or being killed without reason for the most disturbed minds. The nihilism of an era becomes nihilicide in its most degenerate peaks" . Considering the repercussions that the nihilistic-consumerist system has on the lives of most people, and taking note of the cultural lack of alternative spiritual visions to this system: what are the most evident contradictions of this infernal Megamachine that has become the "Capitalism of disasters", as Naomi Klein has nicknamed it? From which critical points would you start to explore the theme of spiritual awakening linked to a more political-revolutionary discourse?

The first observation that comes to mind is that we live in an era of substitution of means with respect to ends. In our society, the instruments, the means, such as economics and technology, have become the very purposes of social organization. They are the supreme ends that have in some way displaced politics, culture, the great themes connected to civilization, tradition and religion. In practice, we have wanted to replace, even in life practices, the final horizons of humanity with the instruments of economics and technology. This is the first element that emerges in our society. Which produces that radical alienation that characterizes our era. As for the idea of ​​revolution, it is now applied only to objects, to instruments. In fact, the term revolution is used only in relation to technology, but we no longer speak of the revolution of subjects. Revolution understood as a human element that manages to change historical and political structures, is not spoken of. A determinism has been created that has a basis, let's say, technological and utilitarian. This determinism, moreover, produces a sort of expulsion of all the themes that have characterized the human condition since we have been aware, that is, the themes connected to the sense of the sacred, to thought, to the historical sense, to the community and political bond; all this has become the heritage of a past (now unrepeatable), while the present is judged only through the key of the expansion of these two technical means, which are precisely, on the one hand, the economy, finance and the global market; on the other, technique, with the planetary dominion of technology. Both of these means, therefore, today constitute the only new elements of reference for humanity.

A false ecumenism seems to reign supreme among the speeches of politicians, when, in reality, everyone knows that it is a homologation to the diktats of the neoliberal economy and political order. Do you agree with the thesis according to which there is no politics without the awareness of the existence of an enemy?

A. In fact, the absence of conflict is one of the most dramatic aspects of our era. It is as if the implication were that we have only one direction to follow and that, consequently, conflict does not exist, cannot exist. What exists is only the label of the bandit, the delinquent, the criminal. Or, in any case, of someone who evades this established order. Which, in turn, is founded solely on the idea of ​​the absence of a future different from the present. Therefore, conflict is killed when there is no dialectical possibility of a confrontation between different positions. A confrontation that foresees both confluence and conflict. The possibility of conflict must necessarily exist when we engage in politics. Otherwise, when this possibility no longer exists, because the direction is unique and obligatory, we practically checkmate politics. In practice, a politics without conflict no longer makes sense, because it does not have to plan anything, it does not have to gather the tensions and expectations of a people, it does not have to represent the sense of a community (neither the belonging nor the prospect of a future of this community). So when politics disappears, the "enemy" also disappears. It no longer exists, because the enemy, understood in this way, is always the one who has a different path to ours. The moment I recognize the existence of an enemy, I also give him legitimacy. In that I recognize the fact that he has a path antagonistic to mine. When one wants to erase the figure of the enemy, because one claims that only the criminal, the bandit, that is, the one who evades this sort of universal, inviolable law, exists, then all at once the political criterion, the idea of ​​revolution, the future and therefore, ultimately, freedom have ceased. Because in the end it is the principle of freedom that is denied when one disqualifies one's political opponent by using the label of "devil."

The term “border crossing” has been mentioned. Veneziani also often uses this word in relation to our era. Sociology has been talking about “liquidity” for several years now as one of the predominant characteristics of consumer society. I am thinking, for example, of the very important studies of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. And, in particular, of his famous book Liquid Modernity (Laterza, 2002). Is it possible to start again from this recovery of the concept of physical and spiritual revolution? What are the main obstacles encountered by the woman or man who sets out in this direction?

Wanting to attempt a comprehensive discussion on what is happening, I believe that if we compare our era to previous eras and if we also compare today's life systems with those of yesterday, we are certainly faced with reasons for pride and pride in the present. We live in the era with the greatest well-being, and therefore in the longest era that history has ever known. And yet, at the same time, what we feel is that we are almost reaching a point of no return. That is, we are losing conditions that constituted the way of being and thinking of men connected to the religious sense, to the political sense, to the sense of roots, of identities, of culture. And the most worrying thing is that we are not replacing this universe of principles and references with anything other than the pure expansion of technical-economic power. My impression is that the point of no return towards which we are going is a point of total dehumanization in which one day we will no longer realize that we have stopped thinking about revolution, stopped thinking about politics, stopped connecting to history, that is, stopped reactivating the basic vital functions that pertain to humanity; but rather we will realize that we have stopped thinking like men, delegating to artificial intelligences the task of organizing our future.

We are sliding into a post-human or inhuman condition without even realizing it. As if it were a convenience or a more comfortable, more technologically advanced way of living about which there is no point in asking questions, because that would only mean regretting the past and settling on positions that are historically outdated. This is the most dramatic aspect of our era: the fact that we are reaching a point of no return beyond which we will have the complete atrophy of all those spiritual, mental, freedom, dignity and intelligence faculties that have constituted, for better or worse, the humanity we know. Therefore, on the one hand, the material conditions of existence, at least in the West, are better than those of any other past era; but, on the other hand, the spiritual, cultural and mental conditions of our existence are proceeding in the direction of total alienation. In such a context any discourse on revolution, on the evocation of the idea of ​​the figure of Christ or, more simply, the very idea of ​​a change not even intended as revolution but as a banal reform of politics, becomes something impracticable. Because things are done independently of the will of the subjects and beyond historical and political processes.

Perhaps, Venetians, should we take this refusal to mirror ourselves in our own spiritual horizon as a sign of the apocalyptic times we are living through? If we were to arrive at a somewhat clear conclusion to this dense conversation of ours, can we say, without fear of contradiction, that today tradition is the true revolution?

I believe that in fact tradition can really constitute an important element to generate a revolution. Because tradition today is the real transgression. Everything that in this era is in some way controlled by the global canon, if we think about it, is exactly the opposite of the idea of ​​tradition. This global order allows only that which conforms to its own time and that separates itself from every time preceding or following ours. We live a continuous and permanent fracture with the past, with the future and with the sense of the eternal that should spring from the religious feeling of our life. And it is precisely there that this leaden form which is the Cappa occurs, that is, this denial of every other possible horizon other than the dehumanizing one. Being able to reconnect the present to the past, the present to the future, the present to something that transcends the present and therefore has a desire for eternity, truly constitutes the true revolution with respect to our era. Naturally tradition does not mean cult of the past, tired and mechanical repetition of what has happened. Nor can it mean going back. It simply means learning to establish a sense of continuity and to believe that we are within a chain in which we are neither the terminal link nor the pinnacle of humanity. The truth is that we are only a part of this long story. We must therefore rediscover the sense of our limit and reopen ourselves to this idea of ​​continuity.

In this sense, I believe that tradition represents the only possible revolution that we can hope for today. Certainly the most radical. It, if well understood, calls into question the idea that man is only a subject created by Chance. It clarifies that the human being does not self-manage, does not self-create or self-destruct. On the contrary, for the traditional vision the human is always dependent on a system of relationships, inheritance and principles. Which, of course, are reworked by the subject with his intelligence and his freedom; but, nevertheless, they constitute the sign of his belonging to a world that he did not create and within which he finds himself living. The real revolution, therefore, consists precisely in leaving this dominant paradigm, which I do not know whether to define as modern, ultra-modern or the end of Modernity, but which has certainly now engulfed us and is forcing us more and more every day to forget our humanity.