We live in a historical moment in which the profound meaning of European civilization is at stake

Modern Technology is different from Hellenic technè

https://www.barbadillo.it/120860-tecnodestra-tra-potenza-e-pensiero-europeo/

Vanguards of the Origin. Ideas for a Techno-Right

Uwe are coming from reading a collective volume that made us think. We are referring to, Avanguardie dell'origine. Idee per una tecnodestra , in bookstores by Polemos editrice (pp. 90, euro 12). The anthology collects seven essays by Adriano Scianca, Carlomanno Adinolfi, Andrea Anselmo, Guido Taietti and Francesco Boco (the latter contributed to the publication with two writings) and opens with a preface by Alberto Brandi. The authors share some basic premises. First of all, they are convinced, and we with them, that we live in a historical moment in which the profound meaning of European civilization is at stake. Those who dedicate themselves to thought today must start from a certainty: in the hyper-industrial age we think, to quote Alain Badiou, "from the end" not only of philosophy, but of any given identity, community positioning. The other shared premise concerns the “unavoidability” of Technology (the expression is from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler). From the Gestell it is necessary to move in order to think and act. With respect to the present state of things, any merely “conservative” response, any political attitude animated by nostalgia for the “good old days”, neo-Luddite, is ineffective, passive, as it shares the same political-ideological horizon of the “religion of rights”, yet another variable of progressive universalisms.

On the contrary, if we have understood correctly, the essays of Avanguardia dell'origine tend to radically question the theoretical assumptions that prevailed in European thought through metaphysics starting from classical philosophy. They are upstream of the monocratic vision, descended from monotheisms, which became history in a long temporal process. The last moment of this process is represented by the governance that fully responds, from a political point of view, to the needs of cognitive and computational capitalism. We now live virtually, the infosphere created by the contemporary Gestell (which Guido Taietti and Francesco Boco deal with) is canceling reality, the true, corporeal relationships that bind men. The emergency exit from this impasse is identified by the authors in the recovery of the European spirit: " a spirit in which opposites meet, in which the vision of ancient fortresses overlaps with spaceships that soar in the interstellar void towards new worlds " (p. 8), Brandi argues. All the essays are animated by an archeofuturist tension that, starting from the assumptions of Italian Futurism, embraces the theses of Guillaume Faye. Andrea Anselmo dedicates his writing to the theme, centered on the analysis of the initiatory depth of the pages of Ernst Jünger, not coincidentally the author of Der Arbeiter , to arrive at the proposal of revaluation of the Technique proper to the French thinker.

The same ideal direction can be deduced from the contribution of Carlomanno Adinolfi. He proposes the conciliation of divergent realities, barbarism and civilization, which would be made possible, in his opinion, by the recovery of Technology as a purely Indo-European archetype. It is the Hero , a figure neglected by the dominant culture, who becomes, in this perspective, the new subject of history. Heroes , Carlyle knew well, are such when, in the anti-utilitarian action that leads them to sacrifice their lives, they do not limit themselves to claiming a given past, but: « the meta-historical source of our identity » (p. 9).

The philosophical foundation of these theses is to be found in Adriano Scianca's essay, Dynamis. A philosophy of forces , which opens the volume and represents its most relevant moment. The author discusses Plato's assertion of the Sophist , in which the Athenian philosopher supported the idea that being is nothing other than dynamis : " To be is to produce or suffer an effect, to act or suffer [...] reality is a power that is exercised by producing effects " (p. 11). Scianca is right in maintaining that dynamis as en-ergheia precedes the distinction between act and potency. In his opinion, the translation of the term dynamis with "possibility" and Aristotelian ontology itself, in which potency would be linked, in a constitutive relationship, with the potency-of-not , as clarified by Agamben, would have sterilized the meaning of dynamis , understood by Scianca as a purely affirmative force. In reality, our position on the subject is different: to escape from the outcomes of metaphysics it is exactly to the "possible" that we must look. The origin, for the writer, is the always possible : it is given, as the inaugural Greek philosophy knew, only in physis .

In its space, the acts are nothing but periechein , “that which momentarily envelops” the never-normalizable dynamis , as Andrea Emo and Julius Evola argued in their criticism of the hermeneutic line that, in relation to the Act, has developed continuously from Aristotle to Gentile. Thinking, sic et simpliciter, of the dynamis as an “affirmative force” risks, in our opinion, leading the “philosophy of forces” back into the arms of subjectivism, a very clear outcome of metaphysics. It is no coincidence that Scianca's exegesis explicitly refers to Nietzsche, to perspectivism, even if read in nominalistic terms which, as shown by Giampiero Moretti, in Heidelberg romantica , clearly indicates how the great German thinker, with the theorization of the will to power, was the last metaphysician. Heidegger himself was of this opinion. To get out of metaphysics, and recover, given Löwith's lesson on the subject, physis – mixis as the only transcendence to look at, it is necessary to save that “non-power” of dynamis that always prevails in acts. They are nothing but the momentary positivization of an original negation .

Modern Technology is different from Hellenic technè . If the scope of the former is unavoidable and, with it, it is right to deal politically, it is necessary to reconcile Orpheus and Prometheus, not to absolutize one of the two terms. Prometheanism, left to itself, takes no account of the Greek limit marked by physis , which prevents any possible trans-humanist hybridization. Having said this, even in the rhapsodic terms that a review imposes, we share with Scianca the need to escape from the dualisms of world and superworld, of essence and existence, of body and soul because: « The philosophy of forces is […] a thought of immanence, of immediacy, of fullness » (p. 15) and cannot therefore be thought of in axiological terms. For us, overcoming the dichotomy of being and nothing remains central. The latter, the principle, the nothingness-of-being, the freedom-power, gives itself only as being in the eternal metamorphosis of physis .

Regardless of the interpretative differences, we are grateful to the authors of Avanguardie dell'origine for having presented crucial issues, from a theoretical and practical perspective, which should therefore be discussed in spaces other than those of a simple review.