Wind and Whirlwind: Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Literature and Philosophy [1 ed.] 9789004410275, 9789004375321

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Wind and Whirlwind

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 339

Philosophy, Literature, and Politics Executive Editor: J.D. Mininger (lcc International University)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs and brill.com/plp

Wind and Whirlwind Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Literature and Philosophy

By

Ágnes Heller Riccardo Mazzeo

leiden | boston

This book was originally published in Italian as Il vento e il vortice. Copyright 2017 by Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson S.p.A., Trento, Italy (www.erickson.it, www.erickson.international). Cover illustration by Guido Ravanelli. Used with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Heller, Agnes, author. Title: Wind and whirlwind : utopian and dystopian themes in literature and philosophy / by Ágnes Heller, Riccardo Mazzeo. Other titles: Vento e il vortice. English Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill | Rodopi, 2019. | Series: Value inquiry book series, 0929-8436 ; volume 339. Philosophy, literature, and politics | Includes index. | Summary: “In Wind and Whirlwind the great philosopher Ágnes Heller and social scientist Riccardo Mazzeo explain the pros and cons of utopias and dystopias as they are described in literary works and their relevance to understand the world we live in and the hidden consequences of apparently appealing life trajectories”-Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025573 (print) | LCCN 2019025574 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004375321 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004410275 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Utopias--History. | Dystopias--History. Classification: LCC HX806 .H3513 2019 (print) | LCC HX806 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93372--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025573 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025574 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 ISBN 978-90-04-37532-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41027-5 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

This book is dedicated to my immense spiritual father Zygmunt Bauman and to my brilliant vice children Valentina Visintainer and Riccardo Emilio Chesta: the fire continues to burn.

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Contents Preface  Ix

Part 1 From Utopia to Dystopia: Dreams and Projects of Historical Imagination 1 On the Historicity of Imagination  3 2 The Golden Age, the Philosophical Constructions of “the Just State”  11 3 Reflections on the Utopian Moment and the New Republicanism: Are All Revolutions Betrayed? On “Socialist” Utopias. The Dream of the “Anthropological Turn”  20 4 The Dystopian Moment and the Last Utopias  32

Part 2 Dystopias of the Twenty-First Century: the Bank of Critical Thinking 5 The Circle  59 6 The Possibility of an Island  75 7 2084: the End of the World  83 8 The Beacon of Psychoanalysis on the Billowing Ocean of Utopia  95 9 Some Reservations on Utopia  108 Index  115

Preface In 2016 Ágnes Heller and Riccardo Mazzeo took part in the literary festival “Pordenonelegge”, where they were invited to discuss the book Beauty will (not) save us, written by Ágnes Heller and Zygmunt Bauman, for which Riccardo had written an extended preface. In the wake of their well accepted presentations, and taking account of the general interest, Riccardo suggested that the topic could be expanded for greater rigor of engagement. Thus each of them wrote an essay and both contributions were published together by the Italian publishing house Erickson. In her contribution, Heller, one of our most prominent living European philosophers, talks about the unsolvable tensions and problems of imagination that nourish the deepest roots of utopian thinking. Is utopia erasable? Obviously not, because we are propelled towards a continuously better world. Is it dangerous? Obviously yes, because trying to better a world filled with so many different views exposes us to the very concrete risk of a totalitarian, tragic result, i.e. a dystopia. Mazzeo starts where Heller leaves off, describing three powerful dystopias addressed by contemporary literature: The Circle, by Dave Eggers, 2084, by Boualem Sansal, and The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq. In his comments Mazzeo seeks to clarify the kinds of disasters hypertechnology, Islamic fundamentalism, and cloning can produce for human society. He then comments on the subject from a sociological perspective, agreeing with Heller about urging caution with utopia. The two authors make for a striking and compelling contrast. Ágnes Heller in her long life faced true totalitarianisms. This experience immunized her from extreme temptations once and for all. Riccardo Mazzeo has been influenced by radical thinkers such as Adorno, Simmel, and most recently Zygmunt Bauman, Byung-Chul Han and Hartmut Rosa. Both Heller and Mazzeo, however, are convinced of the palpable danger of the neo-nazi wave spreading like wildfire from the U.S. and Donald Trump to many European countries, including the cynical Órban, Salvini and their buddies. This is the most important reason why a book like this can help form critical analyses of our nations and the world we live in: to prevent oversimplifications likely to have a serious impact on democracy and the pursuit of a life of happiness for us all. On July 19, 2019, Ágnes Heller sadly passed away. ‘Unbelievable that such a strong and almost magic woman was dead, but her memory will always enlighten our way.’

Part 1 From Utopia to Dystopia: Dreams and Projects of Historical Imagination

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Chapter 1

On the Historicity of Imagination Imagination is a unique mental faculty, a fusion between rational and emotional faculties. There is neither thinking, nor practice without a kind of feeling. Even the sense of spatial orientation is a kind of feeling. The so-called secondary instinct, that results from practice, also belongs to the world of feelings. One learns to catch the balls well if one does it by a sense, without thinking. Neither is there any cognitive memory without initial emotional involvement. It is well known, that personal experiences with an intensive emotional involvement will be always transferred from the short-term memory into the long-term memory. Innate drives (like hunger, thirst, copulation) are also feelings, better to say two feelings, the one of need, the other of satisfaction, expectation of satisfaction. Innate affects (fear, rage, curiosity, gayness, sadness, shame) are oriented to, or triggered by, specific objects one has to know, to recognize. Among the above enumerated types of feelings, only drives per se do exist or function without thinking, without language. Yet, speaking of humans, even this is true only about small children, e.g. sucking. Already in case of affects, the perception about the quality and kind of the triggering object or situation, the so called “stimulus”, co-determines the affect itself. Appetite replaces hunger, eroticism copulation. The role of imagination begins already here. One imagines satisfaction with the desirable object even without the presence of the object of the ­possible – desired – satisfaction, as making love with an absent lover… This is an elementary kind or the many functions of imagination. The role of temporality, the sense of future, may be at work here, since a future satisfaction, moreover, a concrete image of a future satisfaction, triggers a strong feeling in the present. To avoid misunderstanding: the elementary function of imagination is not necessarily temporal, given that the triggering object of an affect can also be entirely imaginary. What we embrace can be something else than what we imagine to embrace, what we are dealing with, something else than what we believe we are. For a little boy a stick can be a horse. In this case the boy knows that the stick is not a horse, that he only “imagines” it. But many times this is not the case. The spirit of Hamlet’s father appears to him and he believes him to be his father visiting him from the other world.

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Let me return to the first sentence. Imagination is a unique mental faculty, the fusion of emotional and rational faculties. Which rational faculties? Which emotional faculties? Since imagination plays always a part in all human activities, the question cannot be answered in this very broad framework. It needs to be narrowed down to cases where imagination plays the role of the conductor of the ­orchestra. Imagination is not the orchestra itself, yet it can be its conductor. There are cases where without imagination the orchestra could not play at all. The ­reverse is also true: without the orchestra (rational faculties included) there were nothing for imagination to conduct. Which rational faculties and which emotional faculties are merging in those specific cases? Starting with rational faculties. Some rational faculties like logical procedures, such as deduction or induction, need no imagination as their conductor. Or, if we already know something for sure, be it “know what” (it is a chair) or “know how”(I can sit down), we need no imagination as a conductor, although imagination plays a role in both of them. The kinds of thinking that presuppose imagination as the conductor of the orchestra are, at first sight, association and dissociation. Association is not always, yet dissociation is always, triggered by the unconscious mind, manifesting itself as intuition, inspiration and the like. But what are associated or dissociated by imagination? Beliefs. Imagination plays cards with beliefs. Moreover, beliefs in both understanding of the word “belief”. As “only a belief, not yet knowledge”, and as “more than any knowledge, belief”. In the second case we deal with revelatory imagination. It reveals us more than what we already knew. Beyond convention, beyond the accepted opinion. The rational faculties participating in the conductor role of imagination are thus beliefs (in both understanding of the word) and their manifestations as intuition, as inspiration. What do they reveal? Truth. Unproven truth, unreal truth, truth to be deciphered, found, or at least looked for, under the surface of something where it lies hidden to be unveiled. Truth beyond truth. This is why great rationalist philosophers, like Spinoza, did mistrust imagination. It distorts, it lies, it leads us astray. Kant is more generous, for he offers imagination a place among faculties of knowing, a faculty which participates in aesthetic judgment. Yet it can do its work only in balance with rational understanding. One should admit that Kant made a serious point: without orchestra there is no conductor. Yet in case of a proper balance between understanding and imagination, there are two conductors (imagination and understanding), yet, under the baton of two conductors the poor orchestra cannot play.

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To remain with Kant, in his book Kant and the Problems of Metaphysics Heidegger arrives at the conclusion that imagination occupies different places in the A. version and the B. version of Critique of Pure Reason. In the A. version of the book imagination is said to be an a priori faculty of our mind, in the B. version it is subjected to the a priori faculty understanding (Verstand). A priori is a faculty “before experience”, that is, a faculty whose existence and work do not depend on any previous experience, yet work on experiences in their own way, in subjecting experience to itself, excluding from this work, or rather from this play, other faculties of knowledge and their applications. In my book on Philosophy of Dreams I came to the conclusion that dreams cannot be understood unless one presupposes the existence and the function of a priori imagination. Dreams are namely the very product of imagination, where all the logical categories are invalid. The so called fundamental principles of logical thinking, the law of identity, of contradiction and the exclusion of the third, are totally absent in dreams. There is no distinction between necessity and contingency, between reality, possibility and probability, neither works here causal determination nor teleology. There is no time or space ­either, better to say one can freely move in space and in time without any physical or logical limit. The so-called laws of nature are also invalid. I can be a victim of a plane crash and leave the ruins without the sign of any harm, I can also die while continuing to live. A frog can become a prince and a prince a frog. In dreams, we are never astonished by anything at all. There is no difference between truth and opinion, between right and wrong. Yet, we can speak in dreams, others can talk to us, even God can talk to us, or our dead grandfather or our unborn child. A priori imagination, the imagination independent of, or contradicting to all the laws of understanding and of reason, can still conduct an orchestra. It conducts the orchestra on its own. Yet who sits in this orchestra? Personal experiences, cultural (collective) experiences, stories, the free floating material for an unconscious dream creator. The orchestra – material on which the conductor works, filtered down from conscious experiences, from stories we heard, things we saw, things we fear or are hoping for, things we were thinking about. According to Freud all dreams are either wish fulfilling dreams or dead dreams (Eros and Thanatos), dreams of fear and of hope. The resemblance between wish fulfilling dreams and nightmares on the one hand, utopias and dystopias on the other hand, is difficult to deny. I cannot leap into our topic (utopias, dystopias) yet. First, I have to pay a debt to two still neglected topics. First, emotions, passions which inhabit all kinds of imagination (I said “inhabit”, because they are not attached to it, they

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belong to its essence). Second, all types of imagination in which imagination conducts the orchestra, however, with some help of the concert master called reason. All kinds of emotions may inhabit imagination, just as imagination may coexist with other mental faculties, by serving them. Thus if someone addresses themselves to solve a mathematical riddle, they may be curious, filled with desire to reach the goal, doubting success, yet those feelings must be subjected to the task of solving a mathematical riddle, that is, to a task of logical procedure. Feelings cannot perform the task, they can be helpers as well as obstacles. Is someone contemplates Being, God, Beauty and so on, she can feel piety, enthusiasm, elation, all of them subjected to, or triggered by, the work of reason. The “what is” question (e.g. what is Beauty?) will not be answered by those feelings, feelings are just helpers (or obstacles) of reason in its process of meditation. I enumerated above a few feelings with a purpose. These are namely feelings (curiosity, desire to reach a goal, piety, enthusiasm, doubt) which never occur in our dreams, in the case where a priori imagination is the sole conductor of the orchestra. Which are the feelings, emotions which regularly do appear in our dreams? Not so many. Elementary drives like hunger, thirst, copulation as needs and as satisfactions, and four among the affects, such as: gaiety, sadness, desire (hope) and fear. I propose the following. In cases when imagination conducts the orchestra with the help of the concert master called thinking, those drives and affects (gladness, sadness, desire, as also hope and fear, curiosity, piety, enthusiasm, doubt) are connected to beliefs. Imagination plays cards with beliefs, by using those affects as helpers (or obstacles). To jump into a too early conclusion: these are the main emotional motivations of utopias and dystopias. Rationalist philosophers call the emotions of fear and hope passions. According to Spinoza fear and hope are bad passions and Goethe repeats it: Furcht und Hoffnung sind schlechte Leidenschaften. Why? Because they motivate us for turning away from actuality, prevent us from telling real from imaginary, possible from impossible, being from seeming, truth from opinion, knowing from believing. Let me return to the orchestra. Whether conducted by imagination on its own, or with the help of the concert master thinking (understanding, reasoning, and judging), the orchestra itself is the same. Better to say, the “category” of the orchestra is the same. What is the orchestra? Who sits in the orchestra? Human experience. The experiences of the single person who dreams, plans, believes and acts. This experience presupposes the knowledge of ordinary language, the knowledge to practice rules and norms of one’s environments, the knowledge of the

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­ eaningful world view one appropriates together with the norms, rules, cerm emonies included (e.g. who are the gods, what causes thunder). The experience also includes the stories, the myths, the traditions, the beliefs, briefly the culture of a world. (Speaking of “culture” in the broad “anthropological” sense). No dream or daydream creates a new orchestra, only new music. To put it bluntly: the “orchestra” is the historical consciousness of a given period, of a world. In speaking of historical consciousness I do not mean a (non-existent) mind of a period, but the total sum of beliefs, stories, texts, the cultural memory of any human world. Neither reason nor imagination can transcend this world. But every good conductor can make the orchestra play different melodies. So can also imagination. Yet – to continue the musical example – in all compositions of a historical period, that is in the content of any historical consciousness there are dominants and subdominants. In the same world they remain fairly constant. Since the topic I want to address is utopia and dystopia, I have to talk briefly only about some constants fitting to this context. Fear and hope just as gladness and sadness are the frequently experienced emotions in all wakes of life and in every historical period, since they are present in all healthy persons of the human species. But what we are afraid of, what we desire or what we are hoping for, can be essentially different. There are historical variables, and personal variables, yet personal variables are also embedded in those historical variables. It is variable, among others, what a world thinks to be real or thinks to be imaginary. The borders are elastic, yet they exist. When nowadays a child tells his mother that he saw a devil in the lobby facing him and talking to him, the mother will surely answer (at least in Europe) that he only imagines it, for devils do not exist. Few centuries earlier the parent might have believed in the reality of the child’s experience and pondered about the sins she committed to let the devil visit her house. Two centuries ago stupid girls hoped to marry a prince, today they hope to marry a famous movie actor. Daydreams are familiar to all of us. All of us had daydreams. In daydreams, just as in night dreams, it is imagination than conducts the orchestra, yet here it needs as a helper, as the concert master, that is, thinking, understanding. Contrary to night dreams, daydreams are often teleological, the dreamer desires to achieve what she is dreaming about, even if she knows how unlikely this may be. One can stop daydreaming if one decides to stop, one can also tell the probable from the improbable (“Oh, it would be beautiful, but unfortunately it is unlikely”). The daydream of hope is always pleasant, because the painting of our future is drawn so desirable that it is a good feeling just imagining it. At the same time, the daydream of death, the death of the beloved, of

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misfortune, of being cheated, betrayed by someone, of loneliness, illness, end of the world, make us sad, melancholy, depressed. Imagination is then filled with fear. Contrary to night dreams, when after waking up we realize happily that this was only a dream, a daydream of fear does not evaporate easily, it leaves a permanent spiritual wound on our soul or even our character. Many heterogeneous life-experiences are homogenized also into literary “genres”. Imagination plays a central role in all these homogenizations of experiences. We are dealing here always with beliefs in both senses of the word (only belief, more than knowledge, belief and emotions, obviously not always the same emotions). Aristotle said that in case of tragedy, the dominant emotions triggered by the recipient and purifying their spirit are fear and pity (empathy). Some other emotions play the leading part in the reception of comedy or of epic or lyric poetry. Imagination homogenizes experience in a variety of ways (variable according to the genre). But variable as it is, imagination is also limited. There are two limits to imagination. First historical consciousness, the material ordered by it, the beliefs it plays cards with, then the genre itself. The term “limit” may be inappropriate, because the limited is not experienced as limit, rather as the inexhaustible source of inspiration. Aristotle discussed comedy on the “material” that existed in his time. He had no experienced this as a limit. An ancient Greek tragedy could have not been written in prose. Yet, tragedy writers have not experienced this as a limit. It became experienced as a limit at the time when historical consciousness changed, that is the limit has been already transcended. (Hegel wisely said that there is a limit only if it is transcended). A passionately debated question in times of the Elizabethan tragedy was conducted exactly about a limit: can one step beyond the so called trinity, unity of time, of place and of action in a tragedy? Will this still remain a tragedy? The discussion itself proved that historical imagination already included the transcendence of this limit. I mentioned dominants and subdominants in the music played under the baton of historical imagination. They, of course, develop. The first tragedy by Aischylos (The Persians) worked on a historical topic. Yet, mythology replaced immediately history and thus became the dominant source of tragedy throughout the whole ancient history, Rome included. Philosophy replaced wisdom literature only in Greece, becoming one if its dominant literary genres. In the first centuries A.D. Greeks understood Judaism and Christianity as philosophies, for imagining and believing in, an only spiritual God, “belonged” then to philosophical imagination and had nothing to do with religion as they understood.

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Utopias are creations of imagination combining certain beliefs of their age with the passion of hope. Dystopias a creations of imagination combining certain beliefs of their age with the passion of fear. Since hope and fear are emotions present in all healthy specimen of the human species in all ages and places, the difference among utopias and among dystopias depend on the differences of dominant beliefs. Beliefs themselves are embedded in historical imagination. Historical imagination is thus both the inexhaustible source and the limit of the systems of beliefs. The story I am telling will be thus a story of the historical changes in the systems of beliefs. Systems of beliefs are not presented, or represented by one “genre” alone. This is also true about utopias and dystopias. Two literary genres carry them over for more than two thousand years. They are roughly: literary fiction, poetry and epic poetry on the one hand, philosophy on the other hand. Only roughly, because neither wisdom, literature, nor apocalypse, as a literary genre, fit entirely into the enumerated categories. One could also add to the list of genres presenting utopian or dystopian visions, painting (in our age mainly films). They do not simply illustrate mythological, philosophical or literary images, but broaden the ways of their presentation. The word “images” characterized mainly utopias in literature, poetry and mythology and not in philosophy. Philosophical utopias are rather constructed than depicted. The best known and most influential utopias, however, normally combine visual presentation and construction. Finally: although utopias and dystopias are “genres”, utopian and dystopian imagination reaches farther than their proper territory. Since they reflect on, or embody, one aspect of the historical consciousness in which they are embedded, the dividing line between conscious or unconscious imagination is blurred. One can also formulate this in a different way. In philosophy of art it is frequently said (last time I think by Adorno) that poetry or art, in general, is a utopian reality. By which they mean that poetry and literature, or art in general, embody revelatory truth about the world in which they are created. I am ready to admit this, yet the word “utopia” is used in another, more traditional, sense in this study. The utopia (and dystopia), the story of which I will tell, is the story of the genre where beliefs and two passions (hope or fear) are combined. It will be a story of social utopias an dystopias which lay not greater claim to revelatory truth than any other genre in the world of art and philosophy. I will tell just the story of cultural daydreams, dreams about the majestic and the terrible, born out from the imagination of different epochs, as embodied in certain texts

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which are still representing for us, latecomers, the imaginary institutions of those ages. The punch line of the story waits till the last and longest chapter of this writing. The punch line means here self-reflection. What can we find out about our own age while taking products of our own historical imagination under scrutiny? What do they tell us about ourselves?

Chapter 2

The Golden Age, the Philosophical Constructions of “the Just State” Thus, hope and fear are passions, emotions shared by all healthy specimen of our species. Yet beliefs are different. As a result, utopias and dystopias are also different. It depends on the world, on the historical consciousness of a people what are they hoping for and what are they afraid of. Just another question: whether what they are hoping for has been in the past, in another place or in  the future. How can one hope for, or be afraid of, something that has been in the past, in the beginning, something one has already lost, overcome, ­forgotten? Putting dystopias into brackets for the time being, how can one believe that “utopia”’ is already behind us? There is no only one ancient world, but several. But since the story is told from its (temporary) end, the present time, it seems enough to scrutinize the master narrative of the modern European culture, that is the narratives which shaped our world-understanding and self-understanding: Greek and Roman stories on the one hand, Biblical stories on the other. Ancient Greeks and Romans never drew poetic pictures about a future different from their own world. Even Boethius, the Christian martyr of the 5th century, could not imagine the future but as the future of the Roman Empire. Their conception of history was based on two philosophical presuppositions. First: something potential is becoming actual: what has been there, as possibility, will be realized, nothing else can be. As a male child will become a man and not a lion. After having arrived at the pick decline starts. Second: things develop through several stages to return finally to their beginning. Like the forms of government aristocracy-oligarchy-democracy-tyranny, through revolution return to the beginning (e.g to the Law of Lycurgos in Sparta).That is, history is either cyclic or “autobiographical”. Revolution meant always returning to the beginning. The beginning was fancied as the best: the arch-spring, the age of innocence, the world of a perfect constitution which should be (if it can be) achieved once again. Speaking very roughly, there were two kinds of antic utopias.

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First: Utopias of Desire

Utopias of desire are fantasies, images of a world as the opposite of the present, the “real” one. It is imagined as a world without limitations, without taboos, without restrictions, where all our needs are satisfied, as a natural world in contrast to the artificial world. A dreamlike utopia, a poetic utopia giving voice or image to deeply rooted, even unconscious human longings.

Second: the Utopias of a Just Society, a Just State

Of a stable order, of security, where the limits will differ from the limits of the “present”. A world, or rather a state, the order of which is invented, or rather constructed by philosophy. A philosophical model of society believed to be workable if not necessarily also realizable. The philosophically constructed utopias do not embody longings deeply rooted in human imagination, they rather result from a cognitive effort to oppose a viable image of another social organization to the present, destructive state of affaires. Utopias of Desire Whereas constructed utopias, mainly philosophical utopias, utopias concentrating on the construction of a model of just society, are changing, due to the change of the historical consciousness, this can be hardly said about the utopias of desire. Desires expressed in those utopias are somehow humanly universal, deeply seated in one of the layers of our unconscious soul. This is perhaps why utopias of desire, almost independently of the circumstance whether located in the past, in another place, or in the future, might seem perhaps ridiculous, naive or just a poetic fiction or a religious promise in the eyes of those who read them or listen to them in later times. But they will never be rejected as repulsive, as disgusting, as slavish. I need to mention in advance that utopias of desire will die out exactly at the same time as utopias of justice, stability or organized happiness. Yet, whereas constructed utopias, utopias of justice, utopias of hope, utopias of organized happiness will be replaced by constructed dystopias, dystopias of fear, of doubt of despair, utopias of desire will entirely whither, at least from the cultural imagination of the age. The most typical utopia of desire in the ancient Greek-Roman world was the legend about the golden age. The “golden age” was everything the present age was not. It was the embodiment of the satisfaction of all needs, all desires.

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A world free of all malaise, hatred, conflicts, of untimely death, ruse, jealousy, enmity, starvation. A world were humans are living in harmony with nature and with one another. Where all trees offer sweet fruit for everyone, one needs only to pick one. Where men and women are not dressed artificially, whether they sing and dance and love naked. The sun shines all the time and all have a share in divine unorganized happiness. I will quote in some lengths passages from Ovid’s poem The Golden, Silver, Iron Ages, namely the verses of the golden age, to illustrate Greek-Roman utopian beliefs of desire. First was the Golden Age. Then rectitude-spontaneous in the heart prevailed, and faith. Avengers were not seen, for laws unframed, were all ­unknown and needless. Punishment-and fear of penalties existed not […] they dwelt without a judge in peace […] The towns were not entrenched for time of war […] There was no thought of martial pomp secure and happy multitude enjoyed repose. Then of her own accord the earth produced a store of every fruit. The harrow touched her not, nor did the plow share wound their fields […] The valleys through unploughed gave many fruits […] If one goes through the list of the described blessings of the golden age, one will immediately notice that the contents of the utopias of desires are fairly constant from the Greeks onwards until the end of the Middle age, and even until the 19th century. This content can be described as the satisfaction of all human needs. A world without social or political limitation, a life of beauty and elegance. A world where nature is also transformed: trees bring always fruits. A world of abundance, without care. If one thinks for a moment at the significance of the word “care” (Sorge) in Heidegger, one will immediately draw the conclusion that the utopia of satisfaction of all desires contradicts the modern vision of the human condition. The Bible also begins the story of human time with a golden age. God planted the garden of Eden, with “every tree pleasant for the sight and good for food”. Yet, since the garden of delight did not offer space for curiosity, and the first man and woman lacked in nothing but in liberty, they offended the only command. After their disobedience the “human condition”, “care” set in: love making, labor, pain, envy, murder. The Bible also introduces, for the first time, the utopia of desire placed in the future. Redeemed by God the world will be a peaceful place. Nature will also be changed and so human life. “No more shall be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the chid will

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die at hundred years old […] They shall not labor in vain […] The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw as the ox… they shall not hurt and destroy […]” (Isaiah 65/20-25). The future “golden age” is presented poetically in prophetic vision (vision, moreover apocalypse, were also poetic genres). As mentioned, all the subsequent images, fantasies of the golden age remained very similar. Men and women were always longing for human life other than the human condition, even if in different orchestration. The utopia of desire is not of this world, and not only in the Bible. Whether the desired world is realizable is not the main question, for it is sorely not. The main question is whether the desired world is desirable at all. Let me invite you as witnesses to well known works of art. The painting by Brueghel The Land of Cochagne (that is Schlaraffenland) and the painting by Bosch The Garden of Earthly Delights. If a painting can give an answer to a philosophical question whether the utopia of desires is desirable at all, Brueghel’s painting does. It is namely deeply ironical. It portrays the dream as the mockery of the dream, the mockery of utopian or unconscious desires. Three men are lying under a huge mushroom, food and drink on it as if it were a table, two of the men are sleeping, the third is daydreaming. Weapons and books are lying beside them, manuscript under the head of daydreamer. A cooked pig is running in the back, a knife in its side. One has only to use the knife and slice a piece of pork out from the pig. A chicken is ready on a plate. A walking egg has already satisfied a need, it is empty. You see behind the “who” of theses desires. They are the desires of peasants who work day and night without rest, who have to work to get some food and drink. How wonderful it would only be to lie under a tree while the fried bird is flying into your mouth! No weapons, no books, no care, no master. The irony of the picture says: Schlaraffenland is not just unrealizable, but also undesirable. Yet there is no sarcasm, no biting satire: the painter understands the dream, for he understands those who dream it. Bosch’s tryipichon The Garden of Earthly Delights does not present e­ arthly delights of very earthly creatures in a Brueghel kind of humorous realistic way. It is a highly symbolic, surrealist presentation, full of puzzles. Volumes were written about this panel and many thousand interpretations of its meaning. To speak of them does not belong to our topic. In the context of the “utopian image” it is not decisive, whether the “earthly delights” depicted in the second p ­ anel are the sins of the flesh, inherited from the original sin the painter referred to in the first panel, neither is the complex symbolism of the ­presentation… What matters is the image of “earthly delights” itself…

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These earthly delights are the return to Eden. An Eden not for two but for everyone. Return to nakedness without shame, return to play, to a life without work, without obligation, without society. A life of togetherness between men and women, a life in a beautiful garden, surrounded by fantastic animals playing with one another and with fantastic human creatures. A life of joy, of games, of pleasure, of togetherness, without death. Some interpretations speak as of a painting of the unconscious soul, the dreaming soul. Let me ask again (on the ground of these paintings): is the satisfaction of all desires desirable? Even while contemplating the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, we can answer either ways. As also while contemplating Shakespeare’s poetry. In the drama The Tempest Gonzales speaks about how would an island governed by him look like: “No riches, poverty, no contracts, successions. No occupation: all men idle all: and women too: but innocent and pure […] all things in common nature can produce. No sword, pike, knife, gun or need of any engine.. all abundance, to feed my innocent people […] for no kind of traffic should I admit: no name of magistrate. All the elements of the utopias of desire are present here. But they are presented just as “daydreams” of a good man, mocked by the evil ones. Not as a really possible future, but as the characterization of the thoughts and also the naivety of goodness. The utopias of desire accompany us from the ancient ages through the renaissance up to the modern age. Up to Karl Marx. For Marx (a modern author) the utopia of desire is not behind us, but ahead of us. So he dreams in his youth, in the Paris Manuscripts, and also close to the end of his life, in his Critique of the Gotha Program. How did Marx describe the communism of desires? Very much like Ovid. There will be no state, no laws. There will be no politics, no armies, no war. There will be no market, no economy at all, no money, gold will have no value. Nature will provide its wealth far beyond human needs. All human needs will be satisfied. What “all needs” are standing for it is for us to decide. There will be no justice, for justice is needed only in times of scarcity, not under the conditions of abundance. There will be no masters, no servants, no rules, nor obedience or command. Marx felt ill at ease when it came to death: death will still exist, as the victory of the human race against the single individual. Utopias Constructed Philosophically Almost all books written on utopias begin their presentation with Plato’s Republic (Politeia). He (in the name of Socrates) introduces the topic of the ideal state or rather the idea of the state while discussing the issue whether it is

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b­ etter to suffer or to commit injustice. Let us address this question first “en gross” he suggests, on the model of the state. The “idea” of the just state is not a world without laws, to the contrary: the idea is Justice itself, and justice can reign only in a just state with just laws. Where there are laws, where there are duties, where there is work, where there are soldiers, rules and those subjected to the rules. Where not all needs will be satisfied, to the contrary, different needs are to be allocated to different casts in the interest of the state (justice) itself. The stratification of the classes, or rather casts, is the following: the lowest cast is the case of desires, the virtue of which is temperance, the “middle” class is the class of the armed men and women, whose main virtue is courage. Finally, the upper cast is the cast of philosophers whose virtue is wisdom. Since all the three casts embody one of the virtues of the human soul, state where the cooperation of the three casts, with the dominance of the master cast (philosophers) is granted and maintained, is the just state. Justice means in a just state that every member of a cast performs the task allotted to the cast, everyone should do his own work. This is the case also in the lowest casts, the cast of agricultural and manual workers. They should perform the same work throughout their whole life. The division of labor needs to be fixed, private property is not admitted. This is not a dream, but a model. The aim of the model is stability. Changes are avoided, for every change destroys the state. The conclusion is based on historical experience. This is a very simplified rendering of Plato’s utopia indeed, since I neglected the transcendental, essentially philosophical aspects of the conception. I wanted only to show the difference, the oppositions between the two kinds of utopias. Plato’s state has very little in common with the utopias of desire, if only for the reason that desire, imagination of desires included, is in his philosophy the lowest of all human capacities. Whereas in the utopias of desires no pleasures are forbidden, even if people do not practice them all, here all of them, even if one is permitted, are strictly regulated. Personal, individual freedom is excluded, whereas in the utopias of desire everyone is free to do whatever one just likes doing. It was mainly on this ground that Karl Popper termed in his book Open Society and Its Enemies Plato’s state “totalitarian”. Despite the contrast between Plato’s constructed utopia and the utopias of desire, there are still common features (projects?) within the two. On the one hand, the circumstance that there is no private property in ­Plato’s state. There can be no contracts, no trade, no selling and buying. Nakedness is not shameful. Boys and girls of the middle cast exercise together naked. Moreover, women can be soldiers just like men. There is no family. Although

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during the period of fertility state agents will decide who should impregnate whom, in order to produce healthy children, after the age of fertility love is free. On the other hand, most of the utopias of desire raise a claim to justice. In Ovid people were (in the golden age) living according to the justice of nature. In the Bible, the utopia was always presented as the “other”, the opposite of an unjust world. People will be just the grace of God. Only Marx insisted, that justice, the virtue of scarcity, will have no place in a world of abundance. I presume, that no single person in our world would like to live in Plato’s state, in this philosophical constructed utopia. Plato knew, just as both those authors who imitated his project of politeia, as also those who rejected it, said that the project is unrealizable. This is why it was written down as a utopia, even before the word “utopia” existed. For us, as for many generations before us, it is a blessing that the project is unrealizable, for it is also undesirable. Worse than that: it is unlike a beautiful dream. Plato’s Republic remained the model for constructed philosophical utopias also during the Renaissance, and first of all for the work that gave the name for the genre, for the Utopia by Thomas More (Morus). The model remained, but historical imagination changed substantially, and this change left its mark on the work in many ways. Morus’ age was the age of the feverish discovery of unknown continents, islands, people, the age of experiences with other worlds, other customs, other ways of life and the stories told about them. The interest in “otherness “was enormous, diaries of travelers were swallowed as sugar, and many things became believable, that previously sounded unbelievable. It was surrounded by this “atmosphere” that Morus presented Utopia, his perfect state, not as if it were constructed by philosophical imagination, but if it existed. The story presupposed that the way of life, the customs, the virtues of this island were not invented by Morus, not at all, but had been established by a wise leader, a modern Lycurgus, called Utopus. Moreover, the writer was never there, has never seen it, just heard about its existence by someone who did, a man called Raphael Hythloday, well versed in the works of Cicero. The first book of Utopia contains mainly a conversation between the seaman and the author. Its message is the radical criticism of the state of affairs in England, where the author occupied high political position, finally that of Lord Chancellor. Morus reports (through Raphael) the misery and poverty of the English countryside where “sheep have eaten up the livelihood of men”. (His arch-enemy Cromwell gave a very similar report about mass poverty and starvation to the Parliament, while suggesting some remedies which had been rejected.)

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The second book is consecrated to the description of the ideal state, that is to the ideal commonwealth. The contrast between the bitterness of the report about the hopeless state of the Commonwealth and the enthusiastic report on the glorious state of Utopia, also follows the tradition. Plato, too, contrasted the ideal state to all the “really existing states”, and especially to democracy and tyranny. This will be also the model of all utopias of the future. It should be remarked, that at one point of the book when Morus reflects on the report of the alleged sailor, he admits that Utopia cannot be realized, but it is like the state he wishes his Commonwealth to be. Despite all the similarities there is an essential difference between the ­model (Plato’s Republic) and Morus’ Utopia. This difference expressed the change of historical imagination. There are no casts in the modern utopia. The  Commonwealth consists of men and women of equal possibilities and obligations. There are bondsmen, still, but they are not members of the Commonwealth and treated rather humanly. Birth does not warrant social positions. Every leader is elected for one year to the position he holds. And there is strict monogamy. What is then essentially common between the ancient and the Renaissance philosophical construction of the ideal state? The abolishment of private property. It was believed that private property was the cause of inequality among men, and as such the cause of all evils. Without private property there would be no wars, no violence, no domination, no competition, no envy, no jealousy, no tyranny. How can one satisfy the needs of the population without private property? Everyone should work, but not too much: roughly 6 hours per diem. Yet, agricultural work is a must. The elected leaders sole duty is to oversee workers. At the same time, the needs of the people of Utopia are modest. They do not need luxuries, in fact all of them needs the same. Some place to live, some food to eat, some free time to do what they want. The houses are similar, and every ten years they move into another. The clothes are made from the same material, the same color. They get them from the same storage. There is no money, of course. There are common meals and before the shared meals, some moral passage from a book is read. The children under 5 are brought up together in nurseries. The older ones serve during the common meals. All the cities can have no less than 10, no more than 16 adults. The utopians hate war, but they need to breed men and women also as good soldiers in order to defend their Commonwealth. (Until this point Morus’ utopian community looks like a Kibbutz in early Israel). The citizens of Utopia believe that the soul is immortal, that we should live according to nature (the population of this island is Christian and stoic!).

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Women and men have to see each other naked before marriage. Premarital sex is excluded and punishable. Adultery gets punished mostly with slavery. Wives obey their husband, children their parents. In the church, men and women are seated separately. This are the only items in Utopia, where one can see (what we know from his personal history) that Morus was a puritan Catholic, who punished the enemies of the true faith by execution, to be at the end also executed on the ground of just another true faith. England was, indeed, not the island of Utopia. The other well-known Renaissance utopia was modeled not just on Plato but also on Morus, written by a heretic priest, Tommaso Campanella. He termed his utopia, also written in the form of a dialogue: The City of the Sun. The fundament of this utopia is also the abolishment of private property, the alleged source of every malaise. In one thing Campanella returns back from Morus to Plato, namely in biopolitics. Women prior to age of 19 and men prior to age of 24 are better not to mate but afterwards everything is permitted except sodomy. Yet, even if everything is permitted, the officials in control of Love determine who is fitted best to whom, according to size, health and other parameters. Before mating they have to look at beautiful sculptures. If a woman does not get pregnant from one man she is sent to another (obviously the Victorian creed that only women are responsible for infertility was not yet generally accepted). Yet, women are common property only for breeding’ sake. (It will be a headache of future utopians who believe that private property is the cause of all evils, how to defend the private property of a wife? Morus needs to be corrected!). The first future oriented utopia appears at the very end of the Renaissance times (again a Lord Chancellor suggests it) in the (unfinished) New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. The title refers polemically back to Plato. The city of Atlantis is the great island of old times, perished, according to the legend taken up by Plato, now resting deeply under the sea. The new Atlantis will be built by humans in the possession of science and technology. The idea of “progress” has thus entered historical imagination. “New” will be better than the “Old”. This modern view will remain dominant until the 20th century.

Chapter 3

Reflections on the Utopian Moment and the New Republicanism Are All Revolutions Betrayed? On “Socialist” Utopias. The Dream of the “Anthropological Turn”



The “Utopian Moment” and the New Republicanism. Are All Revolutions Betrayed?

A utopian moment is neither a utopia of desire nor a utopian philosophical construction. It is the historical actors’ strong belief to be engaged in creating through their actions a better world, a new world, a free world. They have normally strong conceptions, ideas about the new world still dawning. This idea is not like a Schlaraffenland, not a world without care, not an erotic playground, but a world of new institutions. Neither does contain this idea an image of a perfect society, designed in all details. There are very different “utopian moments” in modern history. Their ideas can be different, dependent on place and time, and especially from the project. Yet, one thing is common in all the utopian moments. They are carried by enthusiasts, ready even to sacrifice their life, not just for the victory of the “cause”, but for the “realization” of their ideas. Although the moral content of the ideas they are devoted to can be in the eyes of an external judge good, indifferent or even evil, this does not influence the enthusiasm of the actors who carry the utopian moment. It is important that for the actors and creators of a utopian moment victory means the realization of their ideas, the embodiment of their ideas in a state, in a society, supported by a population, through revolution or evolution. The idea of progress is the precondition of the utopian moment. The idea of progress goes normally with the conviction that there is a “universal” history which “moves constantly ahead”, even with some retardations, but still. The question why it moves constantly ahead, and what is the moving force, can be answered in many different ways: it progresses by God’ will, by the human desire for freedom, by the world spirit, by the cumulating knowledge, by the development of the means of production. Yet, whatever moving force one presupposes, progress is a teleological concept. The world (our world) keeps moving towards something, towards betterment, towards perfection, towards freedom.

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The idea of progress is not just the condition of the utopian moment but also its fundament. The “new, the better” world of the future is prepared by the present, by our present. But it will come, because it is due to come. The old simile of Socrates is taken up with another content. As Socrates considered himself the midwife helping the birth of true thoughts, the modern actors believe to be the midwives helping a really true world to be born. I term the utopian moment “revolution”. There are two kinds of revolution. One of them happens, the other takes place. That the idea of progress as evolution (evolution of human world, of human nature in history) was the condition of the utopian moment was taken for granted by several European thinkers already in the 18th century. Not as if everyone accepted it. Even one of the supporters of the Enlightenment (and not just traditionalists) as Moses Mendelssohn raised his voice against the “grand narrative” of progress, even against his friend Kant. According to him, concepts as progress, evolution, perfection apply only to individuals, but not to histories. The diversity of ideas, the clash of opinions belongs to a world of constant upheavals. All contract theories from Hobbes to Rousseau contain a utopian moment. All of them construct a past, a “beginning” in order to justify essential socialpolitical structures, institutions conceived as “best”’ for the future. In most of them, private property, the enemy of most “closed” utopias, can occupy its place. Utopias (like the one by Plato, Morus and Campanella and by some authors of the 19th century I will discuss later) are closed societies, for they are protected (according to the plan) against foreign influence against all changes. They presupposed that private property has such a destructive influence on any world, that a utopia has to be protected against it. Most contract theories, however, do no share this view. At least personal property is the condition of individual liberty, and individual liberty on its part is the condition of political liberty. All utopias include a kind of “anthropology”, a view about human nature as such, and the actors or authors of utopian moments are no exceptions. Some of them presuppose that humans (in general) are born with empathy, the others that they are aggressive by nature, that they are altruists or rather egoists by nature. The societies, the political institutions they devise, suggest or create, are supposed to develop the best in “man”. As Kant suggested, we need institutions under the framework of which even the race of devil would behave decently. Kant occupies in this story a special place, since he presented the idea of progress as the condition of the utopian moment of republicanism. As he was also the one who, on the ground of the republican utopian moment, devised the utopia of perpetual peace.

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Already the title of his work The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Position (in Weltbürgerlichen Absicht) mobilizes two utopian moments: universalism and cosmopolitanism. Needles to tell, why they are utopian ideas, given that they remained utopian until the present day, where they are, just because of their utopianism, rejected and ridiculed by many. Kant does not state that “there is progress in history”, rather that “we better presuppose that the nature of history includes a teleology as development to the better”. He immediately clarifies his “anthropology”. Humans are the sole rational (vernüftig) beings on Earth who are able (and thus who ought) to perfect themselves by reason. At the same time humans are characterized by unsocial sociability (ungesellige Geselligkeit) that is their social character includes egoism and antagonism. The condition of their perfection is the establishment of a civil society governed by law, where freedom of the citizens is granted and warranted by those “external” laws (that is not by transcendental freedom, in ourselves). The republic, where everyone is free to do whatever he wants unless restricting thereby the liberty of others. The utopia of perpetual peace presupposes the utopian moment called republic. Cosmopolitanism presupposes republicanism. Republics need to enter into the cosmopolitan contract. The condition of this treaty includes the following restrictions: no republic should have standing armies, external debts. They should not interfere with the constitution of another state. Mutual confidence needs to be established if this is achieved, republics need to forge a common constitution. The preconditions of a common constitution are the followings. All the contracting states need to be republican, all citizens free as humans, all of them subject to common laws, all equal before the laws. This is the order for maximizing human liberty, in the state and among the states. Most difficult is to establish and maintain federalism. The right of nations includes anyway universal hospitality (see migrants). Kant is aware of the utopian character of the project. Eternal peace and its condition is a transcendental idea, not empirical (nor real). First of all, because of the contradiction between moral and politics. Kant tries to bridge this contradiction in an appendix of the work, yet preserves the transcendental aspect, by referring to the primacy of “duty” against power, might, and interest. Kant’s transcendental federalism looks still workable for Jürgen Habermas, thus he shapes the transcendental idea of the European Union strongly on the Kantian model. Leaving philosophy behind for a while, I’d rather turn to the utopian moment in social and political movements. Both in revolutions that “break out”,

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that is in political revolutions, and in revolutions that “take place”, which were termed by Hans Jonas “ontological/technological revolutions”. Why do I speak of utopian moment in those cases at all? What is utopian in political, ontological, technological or (today) sexual revolutions? Even if in the aftermath, that is, after a revolutionary wave is over, the participants in the revolutions, be they activists, enthusiasts or just onlookers, feel themselves “betrayed”. This is not what we were fighting for! This is not what we have dreamt about! Marx once remarked that the realm of freedom turned out to be the realm of bourgeoisie. We could now add, that the realm of communism turned out to be the realm of mass murder. The political or social believers feel normally betrayed. Or at least strongly disappointed. This is why I spoke of a utopian moment. The utopian moment includes unconditional belief, almost certainty about the blessed future that is in sight, that can be achieved through our action, movement, fight, or labor. Yet the world, the society, the state they were dreaming about will never be just like they have supposed it to become, the dream project will not be “realized”. Yet, different revolutions are not “betrayed” to the same extent neither in the same way. To which extent they are, and in what ways, depends mostly on two factors. First, on the content of the original belief, whether the “betrayal” was inbuilt in the utopian moment itself or not. Second, whether the feeling of “betrayal” responds to the experience that not all promises were kept or, albeit were kept, not in the way they were promised (I return to this case soon). Or, that the opposite of the promises, maybe even something entirely different happened, so that retrospectively the revolution itself together with its utopian moment will look rather as a dystopia (as in the cases of all totalitarian revolutions)… It stands to reason that lost revolutions cannot be betrayed but rather kept in remembrance as “utopias behind us”… The first historically significant utopian moment in our history was the American revolution, the last the movement of 1968. There are two things in common between them: a very strong feeling of doing something entirely new, the strong presence of the utopian moment. And that neither of them was betrayed, although some activists, enthusiasts, fighters, felt strong disappointment, even betrayal in their aftermath. The circumstance that the first was a political revolution combined with a war of independence, whereas the last just a social movement is important, but not as far as the utopian moment is concerned… The utopian moment of the American revolution was clearly formulated in the Declaration of Independence, where all the modern values were

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e­ numerated as the foundations of the new Commonwealth. The same u ­ topian moment characterized the choice of sovereignty. When the question was raised in the assembly of the newly constituted United States whom they should invite as their king (as the British did) and Adams stood up declaring: “We will be a Republic” the idea was not only new, but contradicted all theories which maintained that republic is suited only to small states, best to city states. Indeed, the United Sates became a republic, independent and democratic. Still, many enthusiasts felt that the revolution had been betrayed, different enthusiasts for different reasons. Some of them, because whereas the Declaration of Independence stated that all men are born free, some constitution of some states of the United States included the institution of slavery. Others were rather disappointed because Hamilton established the Bank of America, whereas a free state, they believed, can have no banks, no rule of money like it does in England. The utopian moment was gone. Slavery was abolished in the bloodiest of civil wars, and banks play certainly a far greater role in America today than in Hamilton’s time. The utopian moment in the movement of 1968 was clearly formulated in the well-known slogan: In order to achieve the possible we need to reach out for the impossible. They did. Some of the “impossible” ones, e.g. the end of consumer society, the dominance of communal life, general self-management etc. remained impossible. Others, e.g. sexual liberation, end of dress codes, right of homosexuals, student participation became possible. Some are disappointed and mourn the end of their dreams, others, albeit dissatisfied with the results, participate in politics or in new civil movements. Between the American revolution and the movements of 68 there were utopian movements aplenty, among them the Great French revolution, and the totalitarian revolutions (Russian and German) in Europe, and several others in Latin America and Asia: all of them were betrayed or followed by disappointments for the enthusiasts, although not for their critics and enemies. (As we all know the expression “Revolution betrayed” originates by Trocky).

The Last Utopian Constructs. The History of Socialism from Utopia to Utopia. The “Anthropological Turn”

When I speak of the “last utopias”, I mean the last social utopias. Technological utopias, were kept alive by the ongoing technological revolution, and still are. True, certain promises of technological revolutions were also betrayed. Whereas industrialization promised the alleviation of workers from the burden of labor, some (like Sismondi) cried out in disappointment, that

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by now all workers became slaves of the division of labor. For several cultural critics technological development as such is the work of a kind of devil, that destroys European civilization and thinking. We are “enframed”, so Heidegger says, by technological imagination. All in all, however, technological revolutions promise always something new, they have their own enthusiasts, actors, believers (not necessarily natural scientists) and include a utopian moment. From Jules Verne’s novels until contemporary science fictions. The reason of the contrast between the disappearance of social utopias and the steady presence of scientific utopias (together with their critics) is simple: the change in the role that the idea of progress plays in the present historical imagination. The idea of progress seems to have lost its battle on the field of society, politics and even arts, but has preserved its relevance in the field of sciences. In science we deal with knowledge, and scientific and technological application of this knowledge still accumulates, even with increasing speed. Accumulation of knowledge can be understood as progress, even if some side effects of the process are most disturbing. Yet, as long as knowledge cumulates, as long as new and new technological devices are discovered, created and distributed, one can talk about progress, despite all the side effect. Similar progress, that is, accumulation of “know how” and “know what” can also be expected in the future. These new devices and the new ways of life their use it implies, are further on criticized by social theorists, vilified as means of manipulation, for creating false needs, for their hostility against morality and good life. None of them will stop technological progress, although they can press for legislation, limiting some employment of some technologies (like in the use of nuclear energy or experiences with human cloning). Hope, fear and desire are radically regrouped in the “utopian moment”. The dominant feeling in the utopias of the golden age and the like, is nostalgia. Utopia is behind us. Neither hope nor fear. Paradise lost. The Biblical future-directed utopias of redemption, of the Kingdom of God, are purely hope motivated. Yet, since this hope rests on the absolute trust in God and His promises, hope as trust is close to certainty. The believers know for certain (otherwise they were not believers) that the Kingdom of God is close, or that the Messiah will arrive, even if we do not know when. The philosophical constructs of the “just state” or “just society” by Plato, Morus and Campanella are accompanied by the hope of possibility. The hope of possibility is based on two pillars: getting rid of the two fundamental obstacles of civil war, of loose morals, of injustice: private and personal property on the one hand, unregulated sexual practices on the other hand, with

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the ­preference of communal property and bio-politics. Precisely because the two pillars of the utopias, which presuppose the domination of a central force, even if freely accepted, are not attractive to modern men and women, we would not like to live in any of the utopias. For us, they look rather as dystopias. Even if one forgets Plato and chooses Morus instead, and in addition forgets all kind of bio-political aspects of his utopia, the model remains attractive as a form of life only for a very small minority, and even for a small minority only if their community is based on a strong common belief, religious or other. Yet in this case utopian spirit, hope is not vested in the community itself, but in the higher purpose (religious or other ideas) what the community serves. The “utopian moment” is the consummation of the utopian hope. Desire becomes active. Carriers of those utopian moments are not dreaming about a golden age behind us or before us. They do not rest their hope in a great designer, neither in divine redemption. They resolved to fight out and to create the shining future, the very new future themselves. They can be motivated by resentment and hatred against social injustice, the suffering of the poor, by all the evils in the world, just as all utopians before them, but they are also relying on the knowledge of the historical circumstances which make a radical change to the desired and beloved better future possible. Their hope is not just motivated by desire but also by understanding. Although they, too, draw plans of an alternative society, they are motivated by ideas. They can be transcendental ideas pure and simple, like Freedom, Justice, Equality, Fraternity. Even pure transcendental ideas require their translation to the empirical level. As in case of republicanism (freedom as political liberty, as right of individuals and minorities, as elected institutions and so on) equality (before the law), fraternity (friendship, unity, solidarity?). The empirical translation of transcendental ideas happens through the beliefs and conceptions, the aims a movement serves. If these combinations imply or request the acceptance of a revelatory concept of truth, we are dealing with ideologies. (Ideology is a modern political idea presented by the actors as absolute truth). One reason why revolutions are betrayed is the necessity of the empirical translation of the transcendental ideas, working as ideologies. Hope is the main passion, for hope is in the utopian moment, not a belief in certainty, it is founded on possibility or probability. This is why the passion, the enthusiasm of the actors is needed. These are namely the conditions of the plan to realize those ideas (ideas cannot be realized, this is why the revolutions are betrayed). In case probability is presumed, that weight of responsibility rests on the shoulders of actors, since it is also presumed that the free and just new world will arrive if we, the actors, do everything in our power to transform

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probability into reality. Hidden behind the mask of conditional hope lurks the face of fear: fear of defeat due to our failure. Many a revolution were defeated, yet amid the drive of the utopian moment fear was pushed into the background, for otherwise one could not speak of a utopian moment at all. Engels wrote a book with the following title: History of Socialism from Utopia to Science. He refers to “utopian socialists” like Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet and others whose ideas were not realizable, remaining only dreams, for they were based on free floating imagination and not on science. He contrasted to them the works of Marx, based on science. Scientifically based socialism is not utopian, because the prediction of socialism is deduced from scientific understanding of history, of the capitalistic mode of production and expropriation that lead necessarily to new socialist (communist) social order. One does not need “history” to disprove Engels’ prediction. Rather the opposite of his prediction was proven true. Surely, neither the models of Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet and other early socialists could be installed in a state or on a larger social plan. Yet, at least, isolated communities could be established based in their ideas and become viable, even for a long time, especially in America. Most of those communities soon dissolved, but some of them still survive until the present day. There was even a popular book written by the American behaviorist Skinner, Walden Two, a fiction that presents the viability of such community in the 20th century. As I already mentioned in reference to Morus, some socialist ideas can be preserved and practiced in real life in small communities if isolated from the surrounding way of life, provided that the members of the community share the same idea, conviction, mostly, although not exclusively, religious ones. In contrast, the Marx’s model of scientific socialism has never set foot on Earth, while its fake version was substituted to it by power-hungry dictators. The last significant, that is influential utopias, which were meant not as fictions, but as models, were the socialist utopias. The condition “not as fiction” does not exclude “stories”. For example Cabet’s Icaria followed the Morus type of utopian narrative. Yet, since “historical consciousness”, that is, the European understanding of our world in terms of temporality, as also in terms of its driving force, has dramatically changed, so did utopias. I speak (in accordance with the tradition) about socialist utopias. Yet, where not all utopias socialist utopias? The dreams about a world without work, without state, without laws, without private property, a world where all needs are satisfied? Was the golden age, the Schlaraffenland, the project of Shakespeare’s Gonzales, not a socialist image? Is the idea that private property is the root of all evils not a socialist conviction? Why does the tradition refers

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only to utopias as “socialist” from times of the Enlightenment times until the 20th century? First all socialist utopias share the “utopian moment”. Although philosophical constructs, but, unlike all the previous utopias, they are not just theoretical propositions. They initiate social movements or are referred to by such movements. They have followings, they establish institutions, communities, they organize parties. True, the firebird of a “utopian moment” does not start to fly in here at times of upheavals. In fact, very few utopian socialists are friends of political revolutions. Their utopian moment results from the idea of a slowly developing social evolution or from the idea of an act of foundation. All socialist utopias are future oriented. They share one or the other variant of the “grand narrative”, of the image of the progressively developing human history. They all believe that they are the handmaids of a new social order, a better one, eventually perfect one. Most of them are great admirers of the industrial revolutions, of the progress of sciences and technology. They share the conviction that it is modern science that made the new world, socialism possible. Most of them are communitarians. That is, they believe that modern technology, science, can be best furthered and used for the sake of all people in communities. Saint-Simon, for example, speaks of a working class, that will include industrial workers, managers and business men and put an end to the rule of the leisure class, the rule of idle, who live from the manual or mental work of others. Yet, there are also other propositions. Although not all the utopian socialists blame private property for all social ills, they prefer collective proprietors against individual one. Most utopian socialists also incorporate the “republican moment”, a kind of democratic structure of communities. Still, some features of earlier utopias remain in force, ­especially the regulation of private, intimate life. Even if there is little biopolitics left here and nuclear family is mostly preferred, personal diversity is absent for these utopias, or at least their “use” is regulated. They do not supply very attractive suggestions for the demand of most modern men and women. None of the utopian authors believes to be a utopian. The most attractive ideas during the 19th century were namely socialism and science. Thus, all utopians based their projects on science. All of them believed in progress and the inevitability of the dawn. The only difference between some “utopians” and Marx was that some among the formers trusted in a master mind, a socialist Lycurgos, who does not only design the new world on paper, but also does the work of organization.

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Among these utopians Fourier deserves special attention. First because he was no friend of modern sciences, because he found modern science unscientific, unfit as the foundation of a new, perfect social arrangement. Real science addresses itself, so he believed, to human passions, for only a science of human passions can serve as the foundation of a new, perfect world: a world without conflicts, war, hatred, envy, jealousy, etc. Thus, the new organization of work is based on the science of passions. There is no evil passion. (He Fourier relies on Descartes, who made one exception: fanaticism). If every man and woman could live in the way as they are driven by their passions, would perform work adequate to their passions, there would be no evil in the world, just universal harmony. Like in a musical composition. For example, Nero would work as a butcher and be entirely satisfied, never harming fly. Men and women would live in communities, in so-called phalansters, perform primarily, although not exclusively, agricultural activities. They are organized in so called “series” where unity, cooperation is granted by the difference of individuals. All phalansters will include an opera and a church to satisfy spiritual needs. That trade should be excluded from the harmonious world is taken for granted. Fourier also deserves special attention for he does not believe in universal progress. One can speak of a kind of evolution from savagery to barbarism, and finally to civilization, but it is by no means a progressive development, neither a regressive one. This is also why he does not put premium on the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Finally his utopia does not presuppose an anthropological turn. People, just as they are, can leave in harmony, they do not need to be changed to the better, the different characters should rather be used for the establishment of proper institutions. His conception resembles seemingly the Kantian one, I already quoted: we need institution in the framework of which even the race of devils will behave decently. Kant meant liberal republican institutions based on rational principles, the institutions of liberty, whereas Fourier meant institutions based on the free development and practice of passions. Albeit Fourier’s project, contrary to that of Cabet, was never tried out, some of his ideas became influential. Anarchist movements, for example, relied upon the conception of the unhindered development of all passions as the foundation of good life and good society, without laws and state. The abandonment of the enlightened idea of human perfection became self-evident for all dystopian models of the 20th century only. Yet, we have not arrived there.

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Marx, the most influential and also most brilliant socialist philosopher of the 19th century did rest his expectation (more than hope) on the development of technology (the means of production). Particularly on the presumed knowledge that the capitalist mode of production limits, stops, the development of technology. He drew this empirically obviously false conclusion from a modern science: economy, the modern science. Yet, in fact, he drew the conclusion not straight from economy, but from the critique of political economy, that is from a philosophical conception. His philosophical conception was modern, heavily relying on Hegel’s grand narrative, yet post-metaphysical in his formulation. Among all the utopians of the 19th century he remained the sole still influential thinker, due precisely to the post-metaphysical character and brilliance of his philosophy. What is so remarkable on the utopian aspect of Marx’s philosophy, is the combination of all philosophical attempts at creating a utopia, a kind of an utopian synthesis. All utopias ancient and new say “yes” after saying “no”. They all start with a serious critique of the state of affairs in the empirical world, such as inequality, despotism, poverty, amorality, injustice and all the forms they took. The Biblical prophets were no exceptions. Neither was Marx. The utopias of desire describe or present a world where all need are satisfied, where nature and men are living in harmony, where there is no law, no state, no war. As I mentioned already, so does Marx in the Paris manuscripts and in the Critique of the Gotha program. From Plato to Morus (and several utopian socialists) offer a model to show how a just society looks like and how its institutions work without money, without commodity exchange, without decision of labor. Marx does devises such a structure several times, yet in entirely different ways. First he joins one of Fourier’s conceptions: the end of division of labor. For example: there will be no painters, just people who-among others-also paint. In the Grundrisse he envisages a world, where everything will be automatic, and men will stand outside production. In the second volume of Capital he suggests a combination between Morus and the labor value theory. All people will work and get a piece of paper proving the hours they spent in work. Then they will take this paper into a big storeroom, where they can get the equivalent for their working hours. (Far more complicated than commodity exchange.) Marx is not interested in communal life, neither in representation, for politics (democracy as much as tyranny) will be abolished. But how can one take seriously the possibility of a future, where (just in the golden age) there is no command and no obedience, there are not even communal obligations, requirements, where people will be decent by desire, good

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without facing any censure not to speak of sanctions. Let me repeat Kant: “We need institutions in the framework of which even the race of devil would behave decently”. He, as seen, conceived republican institutions, the institutions of perpetual peace included, within the framework of which people, as they happen to be, would be decent, albeit not good. But how and why should or could men behave decently without such institutions? Already Kant made an attempt at the absolute, radical utopia, the utopia of an anthropological turn, or an anthropological revolution. Let us presuppose a world where all states are republican. Although no more wars, there are still states, still laws, still inequality, relations of command and obedience, and they are needed since members of the human race are not listening to the moral law but follow their “darling selves”. Yet, can we think further, at least vest our hope beyond? What can we hope for? The r­adical transformation of the human nature in two steps. First: the revolution of the mind, so that everyone would be motivated by the moral law alone. Second: the reform of nature, so that nature will accommodate to the moral law, while finally the two (transcendental freedom and nature) will merge. Due to the anthropological revolution everyone will be good, and the world of the invisible church will be set on earth. In the Paris Manuscript Marx repeats the same scheme. Human history was (still is) the history of alienation, where human essence (termed by him “generic essence”) got richer and richer whereas “human nature” of classes and individuals remained poor or got even poorer not just in a material but also in a spiritual sense. Communism is not the end, not the goal of history, but the vehicle of abolishing (aufheben) alienation. Human essence and appearance will be united. Whence human essence and appearance will be united, there will be no need of laws, prohibitions, no egoism, no altruism, for everyone will be equally good. I speak of radical, absolute utopia in contrast to all the earlier ones from Plato until Fourier. Paradoxically, the absolute utopia is the only realistic one. For, even the well-known utopia of creating institutions within the framework of which all humans as they are, will behave decently, without property, without a state, without courts, and especially without communication with a world “outside”, is itself contradictory. Who will create, maintain, those institutions? How can a world develop without challenges, conflicts, competitions at all? Only the radical, absolute idea of an anthropological revolution cannot be betrayed. Yet, can it be hoped for? Did the absolute utopia of the anthropological turn disappear together with all the others?

Chapter 4

The Dystopian Moment and the Last Utopias

The Dystopian Moment

As the utopian moment presupposes the belief in social and historical progress, the possibility of perfection, thus the dystopian moment mirrors or expresses the loss of this belief. It differs from the disappointment in the results of a revolution (revolution betrayed), for the carriers of the dystopian moment have already lost faith in revolutions, as they lost faith in progress in general. Stendhal’s Julien Sorel has not lost his enthusiasm for Napoleon, for a cause that had been defeated. Yet the hero of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education Frédéric Moreau has lost no illusions, for illusion, at least on the historical theatre, he never had. He lives through a revolution, but for him revolution looks just a comic spectacle. The period of “decadence” sets in. What was called in its time “decadence” was, among others, the appearance of the dystopian moment. The great enthusiasm for progress, revolutions, who vested their faith in, or hope for, a better future which inevitably comes, slowly disappears. The belief in progress will soon be vilified also by some revolutionaries. Like by Sorel, who spoke of “the illusion of progress” and vested his hope in a so called “general strike”, where in a social catastrophe, a man-made Armageddon, capitalist society will go to hell. The idea of progress became the property of social democracy, a movement based, according to Sorel and other critics, on the false belief of evolution, on the continuation of boring everyday politics, without heroism, nothing to believe in or fighting for. And if there is nothing hoping for and fighting for, even individual human life becomes empty without aim, reason, a burden to carry rather than the blessing for open possibilities. Schopenhauer, an isolated thinker in the times of Hegel, became popular at the time, when his work and name was carried by dystopian waves. One thing was shared by the carriers of the utopian and the dystopian moment: “social criticism” and “cultural criticism”. We have seen that all utopians, from Plato – or even from the biblical ­prophets – onwards up the socialist utopians, were the scourges of their respective societies, states, habits. In times of the first appearance of the “dystopian moment”, “cultural criticism” was added to the list. Whereas Marx was not yet interested in the question whether the grandeur of musical composition or tragedies was gone because of market fetishism, the utopians of the 20th century complained about the dusk of artistic creation and reception due to art’s

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subjection to the market. There is no more grandeur, capitalist society subjects culture to the market, destroys taste. The “end of art” so understood became, both for utopian and dystopian authors, the major symptom of social decay. While “cultural criticism” became a widespread and popular European habit in our times, it was still new in the 19th and early 20th century, both in utopian and dystopian interpretation. Still, it is not difficult to tell the utopian versions from the dystopian versions of “cultural criticism”. The authors of the utopian versions saw still some light glimmering in the future, even not progress, yet, still some perspective. In contrast, the dystopian authors saw nothing in the future but hopeless darkness. In the eyes of the majority of dystopian “cultural critics” European culture was already doomed for good, whereas Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s famous booklet about the dialectic of Enlightenment offered not just a dystopian but also a utopian reading. Heidegger’s “cultural criticism” provided none. The greatest philosophical genius of the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche, offered plenty of ideas, thoughts, points of references for both utopian and dystopian “moments” and he was exploited by both. Whether the recipients preferred the description of the “last man”, or of the “overman”, whether they referred to “the barbarism of the blond beast” or to Nietzsche’s confidence in the “free European spirits”, who might reinstate the noble virtues – all of them found their spiritual nourishment in Nietzsche’s spiritual food. Even his most frequently quoted or misquoted sentences about the death of God, were utilized by both parties. In the interpretation of the utopian believers the sentence meant, that since our Master in Heaven died, we become entirely free to control our future. In the interpretation of the dystopian believers it meant, to the contrary, that we lost the meaning of life. The project to re-write the table of values meant for the utopian believers, that there will be new, better values to live by in the future, values worthy for free men. Whereas, dystopian believers interpreted the idea as the prophecy of a final, although well deserved, end of the Jewish-Christian world, of the Law, of the ten commandments, the very cornerstone of our European culture. In their view men were stronger in the past, since they followed their best instinct, the instinct of life, whereas by now they became boring cowards. The present is a desert. On the other hand, a new generation of healthy, fearless, strong, noble and free men will arrive in the future. Choose, if you must. Nietzsche’s fruitful duality described truthfully the duality of the historical spirit in the second half of the 19th century. The duality of thoughts and images which could be understood both as utopian or dystopian suggestions. The same duality strongly influenced the emotional and intellectual ambiguity of the coming age as well.

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The historical consciousness of the times together with its emotional input moved the scale rather towards the dystopian moment, and interpreted, rather understood, the “death of God” as the departing of the Divine from our Earth, leaving boredom and emptiness behind. All hopes for something better were gone, even if scientific and technological utopias flourished first and foremost in fiction (beside Verne, Wells). Progress lost its shine, life “petty bourgeois” and boring, romantic love turned to be Victorian. Nothing that ever existed in human imagination is lost entirely in any historical time, just shifted from one sphere into another. This can be said also about utopian imagination of the end of the 19th, and the beginning of the 20th century. The idea of creating something “new”, the illusion of progress that lost its shine in social imagination, found a secure place in artistic imagination. One “new” movement followed another “new” one, one “ism” another “ism”. The world of art became for a while the “utopian reality”. Whoever expected something entirely new to appear on the historical horizon went to an exhibition and not to a political meeting. Yet, only select few had access to this double “sublimation”. The other revolution of the times, the psychoanalytical one, initiated by Freud, could not satisfy the utopian desire, to the contrary. If someone ridiculed the absolute utopia of the anthropological revolution, it was Freud. If someone was persuading us to wait not redemptive power from political and social utopias, it was Freud. Still, we, humans, can hardly live without hope. Only few of us can enjoy the masochistic pleasure of “everything lost”, the pleasure of an inevitable dusk. The “dystopian moment” was also temporarily lost very soon after its first showing, in July 1914, when Europeans embraced the new hope that became later known as the original sin of Europe: WW1. Due to the whirlwind of the war Europeans seemed to regain again the utopian moment abandoned during the preceding few decades. Europeans felt themselves again as the actors of history, creating something new. Yet, their newly regained hope was not vested in the future of humankind, but only, exclusively, in the victory of their nation state and the defeat of another. The utopian moment of this hope turned out soon to be phony. Just as the revolutionaries have been betrayed, the war enthusiasts were thousand times betrayed. Not just those who lost, also those who won. Yet, the very time when the dystopian moment won its first victory, the utopian moment also received a strong reinforcement, by the promises of totalitarian movements, especially by early Communist and early Nazi movements. The most representative and most influential dystopian theories also ­appeared directly after WW1. One was Spengler’s work Decline of the West

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(­Untergang des Abendlandes), the other was The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset. The first appeared just after the war (although written earlier) and contributed to the attraction of totalitarian ideas, the second referred to some early experiences with totalitarian movements already. Both the Decline of the West and The Revolt of the Masses reported the emergence of mass society. Let me mention in advance that all dystopian fictions already presuppose “really existing” mass society. Especially Spenglers’ book received wide attention. His starting point was very close to that of Hegel, while formulated on a far lower theoretical level. Toynbee operated with a similar scheme. The scheme is as follows: every culture resembles a human life. Cultures are born, they go through a period of youth, they arrive at a mature age, the highlight of their culture, and then they begin to decline. The same is the fate of the Western culture, why should it be different? By now, West is in the state of old age, of decline. Spengler added to this conception that one needs to distinguish culture and civilization. Culture is spiritual, ethical, community building, whereas civilization is technological, and atomizes communities into a sum of self-seeking individuals. That is, the increasing rapidity of the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the application of new technologies is not the foundation of progress, rather the unmistakable sign of decline and decomposition of our civilization. This reversal of the evaluation of the historical role of technology from a progressive into a regressive power looked as the final farewell to technological utopias. As it turned out, it was not. Technological utopias are the only utopias still with us. They are fairy tales for adult children. Yet, the association of technology on the one hand, and progressive social and cultural development on the other, was lost. The characters of technological fairy tales and their stories (like Star Wars) are well known from 19th century adventure fictions. Thus there is no social utopian fiction in contemporary Europe, hailing the benefits of technological innovations. Those innovations, real and imagined ones, enrich rather dystopian fantasies. Whereas in the utopian thinking of the 19th century technology and science were not just blessings but also guarantees of a just society to come, in the dystopian moment of the 20th century they were believed to be the vehicles of manipulation, means of the destruction of personality, individuality, difference. Two, already mentioned, slogans dominated modern European historical imagination from the second half of the 19th century until our present days. One was – and is –, the already briefly discussed “death of God”, the second was and is “The end of…” (the end of history, of religion, of art, of philosophy, of the West, of humankind, of life on Earth, etc.). The ambiguity of these slogans characterized the thinking of roughly 200 or more years.

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Let me begin with the “death of God”. Although it became a slogan after Nietzsche (as the cry of the madman in Merry Science), it goes back to Hegel, as almost everything; it was voiced by Heine, and after Heine by the madman of Nietzsche. All of the above mentioned thinkers were Germans, and this is not a minor issue. German philosophy and art theory from Winckelmann to Hannah Arendt shared a reference point: ancient Greece. Germans, as the people of thinkers and poets (Denker und Dichter) were believed to be the modern Greeks. Moreover, ancient Greece was not just a reference point, but frequently also a model. Schiller wrote a poem, The Gods of Greece. The gods of Greece died, he wrote, they remained with us only as works of art. So may also our Christian God die, and remain in the world just as an image in works of art. Briefly, the conception of the “death of God” was based on a misunderstanding. As we also know from Assman, the ancient gods were parts of the ancient cultures. This is why they died together with their cultures. In contrast, the God of monotheism is not a part of the Jewish or Christian or Muslim culture. Monotheism (the sole religion properly) can live together, and in fact has lived together, with very different cultures, from Babylon, through Rome, via feudalism, to modernity. The question is not the viability of the prediction. The question is the popularity of the slogan. First: the slogan could justify both utopian and dystopian thinking. The utopian interpretation sounded briefly as follows. Up to our time men believed in a Master whom they were obliged to obey, who punished them or rewarded them according to His own standards. When God dies, we become free. We will be the sole masters of our life, and of the world that we transform according to our will. From the Enlightenment until the idea of the deification of men, all philosophies and ambitions (from Feuerbach to Ibsen’s hero Gabriel Borkman) could be thus justified. I mentioned Ibsen’s hero John Gabriel Borkman, only to indicate the ambiguity of the slogan. Borkman’s idea of world domination is also a kind of madness. Borkman was only a contingent example of the dystopian use of the slogan of “God is dead”. One of Dostojevskij’s characters, for example, voices the writer’s conviction, that if God does not exist everything is permitted, for humans will be unable to tell good from evil. The “death of God” sounded for him as the death wish for ethics, morality or even death itself. The dystopian moment. The second reason for the popularity of the slogan was the experience called nowadays “secularization”. In this interpretation the statement about the “death of God” has not meant that no one believes in God anymore or

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that no one goes to Church. It meant that civil life and political life does not need God; business, politics, intimate life, science, even education can flourish ­without making any reference to God. God “dies” when religion becomes just a private issue, the issue of private belief and conscience. Mentioning “secularization”, whatever it now means, it is worthy to speak about the other, already more than 200 years old, slogan group of the European scene, that begins as “the end of…”. Just another ambiguous slogan that was exploited by the utopian and dystopian imagination alike. The modern story of the “end of” begins also with Hegel. He speaks simultaneously about “the end of History”, “the end of art”, “the end of religion”, “the end of philosophy”. None of these “ends” has a utopian reading. For there can be arrival without departure. Arrival in the present, yet no departure towards a radically different and better future. This is what “end of history” for Hegel meant. The present (modern) world is the consummation of all values created in the past. There are losses, yet the gains override them. There was progress, yet it will not be, for there is nowhere to progress anymore. In the beginning of written history one man was free, later a few men were free, in the modern world all men are free. Freedom is the sole measure of progress. We cannot go further, then “all men are free” only backwards. Marx criticizes Hegel only at one point: it is not true, that by now all men are free. Yet by the consummation of modernity, in a communist world, all humans will be de facto free. We are still living in history, but communism is no more like history, it is the end of prehistory, “a real history”, that is, the consummation of all values of prehistory. Of course, Hegel’s “end of history” was also to be interpreted as a dystopian idea, for it declared the end of all utopias… Living at the beginning of the 21st, at the end of 20th century, we are still familiar with the slogan of “end of history”. It was used and misused several times. It appeared first as the regeneration of the utopian moment after the collapse of the Soviet regime. Our age, thus the reborn hope declares, will see the victory of democracy throughout the whole world: the end of history is close in sight. This illusion was soon lost, hope miscarried. Then came the fashion of a so-called “post histoire”, a slogan that made even less sense than the miscarried utopian moment of “end of history”. The most fruitful use of the “end of” is openly fictional. Beckett’s drama, Endgame, this “absurd”’ fiction, is not the first, neither the last among them, but the artistically most sophisticated. As mentioned, Hegel’s “end of history”, the culmination of progressive historical development also includes losses. End of philosophy, end of art, end of religion - all also presumed as losses.

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To answer the question how far they are losses and whether they are losses at all, it would take up much time and space. To remain with the present topic: given that these “ends of” indicate also at some losses, they are certainly not utopian statements, neither are they dystopian ones. However, they can be, and have been, mostly mobilized by works embodying the dystopian moments, whenever “historical imagination” itself became dystopian. Like: commercialization, works of art bought and sold (Adorno et al.), no “Great Art” (Nietzsche et al.), no mirroring anymore “reality” (Lukács et al.). Contemporary art is despised as “inferior” by aesthetes, since the dystopian moment became the dominating fashion. In his last lecture on philosophy of religion Hegel adds some afterthoughts to the “end of religion” statement. Among the spheres of the “absolute spirit”, that is the realm of meaningful world explanations (art, religion and philosophy), the highest, that is philosophy, will replace the other two. There is a ­problem, however, Hegel says: philosophy does not require a spiritual ­congregation. It remains the spiritual food for the few. The “eternal truth” will disappear, he complains, what a contradiction! At this point, a dystopian interpretation ­likely remains. Heidegger’s famous lecture The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking is one of the last and surely the most influential dystopian understanding of Hegel’s prediction about philosophy. In modern life exactly the “absolute spirit” disappears, together with the highest stage of the development of absolute spirit, philosophy. No meaningful world explanation remains.

The Last Utopias

The last utopias were offered as remedies against the dystopian moment. As blood fusions against lost hopes, against ennui, against the prison of the socalled “ivory tower”, against the feeling of hopelessness and needlessness. Some of those remedies turned out poisonous. They were the utopian moments in totalitarian ideologies. In fact, totalitarian ideologies, and their political practices, swept away all previous utopias. For they disqualified both issues common in almost all ­utopian constructs. First and foremost: the abolishment of private property, the preference of the so-called “public interest” against private one, public “happiness” against individual one. Secondly: the regulation of producing children, the social control of genetic inheritance, the regulation of procreation. It turned out that instead of promoting personal freedom and equality, the abolishment of private property gives rise to tyranny and political inequality.

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As a result, Soviet communism killed already the utopia of the abolishment of private property, whereas Chinese communism or Khmer Rouge finished the “work” for good. Communal life was soon perceived, after the experiences of all totalitarian states, as ultimate conformism, brain washing, crushing all the remnants of free thinking. After the experience with Nazism the idea and practice of biological engineering was taken up by dystopian fiction as terror and racism. Retrospectively even the bio-politics of utopias by Plato or Campanella look dystopian. Popper, in his famous work Open Society and its Enemies discredited Plato, Hegel and Marx as forerunners of totalitarianism. He, in my mind, mistook the philosophical concept of totality and absolute truth for the political concept and practice on totality. True, both concepts operate with the revelatory concept of truth, yet in philosophy the revelatory truth is transcendental, whereas in totalitarian politics it functions as ideology, as an empirically, even scientifically “proven”, truth. While the new utopias began just blossoming at least before WW1, their different variants could remain close, even if later they parted ways. The young Lukács, for example, had in his youth a fruitful friendly correspondence with Gentile, whereas he despised all the so-called liberal bourgeois theorists like Croce. The ideas of the utopians of early communism were rather empty in their content, yet very much inspired by religious imaginary. The proletarian revolution was regarded as “dies irae, the day of wrath”. Intellectual carriers of the ideas were not motivated by the image of a peaceful, beautiful, human future, yet by the image of the total revolution that divides the present “of absolute sinfulness” (Lukács) form the future redeemed world. In his very influential work and the only original work of Marxian philosophy after Marx, History and Class Consciousness, Lukács fixes the moment of the absolute revolutionredemption to the “imputed consciousness” of the proletariat, and its ultimate recognition. On the other hand, Lukács and so many others rest their hope – with Sorel – in the liberating force of violence. Violence, liberating violence, was supposed to be the redeemer. In fact, infatuation with violence as the saving power of a nation, a race or of humankind, remained, perhaps, until the mid-20th century, the sole meeting point of all the diverse redemptive utopias of the grand leap. The idea of redemptive violence can be religiously inspired as Messianic violence, as in Benjamin, or politically inspired, such as the enthusiasm for violence by Sartre. In early 20th century communism, the old social-democratic slogan returned for the last time, with an entirely different message. The final end is .

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nothing, the movement is everything. Revolution, the final catastrophe, is ­everything, it is both the means and the end and we do not need to ponder about that what comes after. The early communist enthusiasts did not understood themselves as utopians. The Marxian claim, that modern communism is based on rigorous ­science was underwritten without questions asked. The great moment of Revolution, this man-made Armageddon, which will give birth to the new Kingdom, shaped their imagination more than any scientific inquiry. It is because the domination of the redemptive paradigm of the last wave of utopianism was described as a kind of secularized Apocalypse. No question, that the Biblical language, the biblical metaphors and symbolism filled those images with energy. Still, the expression of “secularization” does not fit. Since the Bible was and is one among the two master narratives of European culture, it has always offered language, symbolism for all the different visions and projects, and does it also now. Embracing humankind on the one hand, killing enemies for the sake of a truth on the other hand, it can be called “secularization”. (Not all early communists subscribed to the redemptive paradigm, or if they did, only conditionally, like Gramsci. They do not belong to the story of utopia and dystopia). The main ideologue of Nazism, Rosenberg, spoke about the “Myths of the 20th century”, yet Nazism was not the “secularization” of a myth. Ideology is neither religion nor myth. It has a long history reaching until yesterday as an attempt to apply the redemptive concept of truth on empirical politics,, where it does not apply in the modern world. Among the philosophers and ideologues of the early 20th century there was one who stood openly for utopia, and another, who grasped the essence of the utopian moment. The first was the philosopher Ernst Bloch, the second the sociologist Karl Mannheim. In his book The Spirit of Utopia (Geist der Utopie), first published in 1918, Bloch clearly expresses the messianic motivations and features of some early communists. Yet, he is unique among them, for he does it openly. The last section of this book is titled: “Karl Marx, death and the Apocalypse” and, as the title suggests, has more to do with the Bible and the Zohar, than with the author of Capital. In his book Ideology and Utopia, written already in the twenties, Mannheim turns from prophecy to social analysis, from faith to understanding, to discuss visions and forms of consciousness as manifestations of a historical “position”. There is no doomsday scenario, the object of his inquiry is not the future, but the present.

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The Victory of Dystopian Thinking. The Dystopian Fictions

Dystopian thinking is not just like a “dystopian moment”. Dystopian moments, as seen, can also have a utopian interpretation. Dystopian thinking, however, bars the way for of utopian imagination. It enters the territory of dystopia like dystopian fiction, yet it is not identical to dystopian fiction. Dystopian thinking can manifest itself in sociological writings on contemporary politics, on the general situation of the world, books written on history, on social history, on the state of the arts and sciences, on universities, on health services, education in general, the so called “empirical sciences”. Mostly, they claim to reject speculations. Their claim to stick strictly to the presently empirically accessible and confirmable data is pony. Every present becomes past at every second. If the future of the present appears in those works at all, as it normally does, it appears as either as extrapolation or as speculation. Their extrapolations normally prove wrong (not their fault, since the ruses of history goes on) while their speculations are basically always dystopian. Like destruction of our habitat due to global warming, general pollution, our increasing reliance on nuclear energy (with the threat of a nuclear war), global migration, never-ending wars. They tell us how crazy we are to keep buying and swelling things we do not need, to let starving a huge population of our earth, in a world of growing inequality. A world where in one part one cannot feed children, in another part one does not have children, where globalization destroys the unique character of each and every culture, where uniformity destroys personalities, where application replaces innovation, knowledge (information) replaces thinking, and all these developing from bad to worse etc. As gloomy extrapolation of all our ills, dystopian thinking also mobilizes imagination. Yet, to return to the simile from first chapter, imagination is here not the conductor of the orchestra. In dystopian fiction, it is… No world is uniform, surely, there are also empirical scientific works that extrapolate the present state of affairs in direction of a progressive future and government propaganda surely paints a rosy image of it, but as typical expression of historical consciousness they cannot be taken seriously. Dystopian fictions cannot be taken “seriously” even if they are deadly serious, yet for another reason. Nothing is more serious than satires or caricatures extrapolated into the future, but they remain satires and caricatures all the same. I will now ask the question: what kind of world is ours if its most serious picture is drawn by dystopian satires and caricatures? I cannot answer the

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q­ uestion, I can only try to look into those mirrors and ask you to accompany me in my literary excursions. Among several dystopian fictions I choose the following ones for this literary excursion: Huxley: The Brave New World (1931), Orwell: 1984 (1949), Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Harris: Fatherland (1992), Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (2005), McCarthy: The Road (2006), Houellebecq: Submission (2014). There were many hundred dystopian novels written since the 20th century. Their number grew exponentially since the fifties and keeps growing in the 21st century. They were shown in movies, in television series. I had to select among them only a few. The selection was not accidental, although I might have neglected some fiction of importance. I tried to include into the discussion works with some literary quality, neglecting books written for teenagers or adult children. Even though, the aesthetic quality of the chosen works is uneven, for I had to consider also the ­impact, the influence of books with less aesthetic quality. There are among them really good novels, and just representative ones. There are parodies, satires, as well as “normal” love stories of normal people in absurd circumstances. Another criterion of selection was that all essential types of dystopian novels should be represented at least with one example. Whose future are they dealing with? The demise of Europe? The destruction of the Western culture in general? The catastrophe of the whole human race? Further on: I had to exemplify the main causes, the indications, ideologies characteristic to the world of a dystopian novel. Are they social? technological? biological? I also tried to include all the major targets of dystopian fictions: totalitarianism, both Nazi and Bolshevik, technological manipulation, bio-politics, demise of our culture, destruction of the world (Doomsday), and what is common in them all: the ­flexibility of “human nature” and the importance of remembering and forgetting. I also wanted to exemplify the dilemmas of all utopias of dystopian imagination. What is the desired end? happiness? freedom? harmony? satisfaction of all desires or the limits to satisfaction? Moreover: what is happiness? what is freedom? what is harmony? what is justice? what is spirituality? what is individuality? does one need to choose? While trying to exemplify all these major questions on a few selected works, I had to pick works written in different times since mid-20th century until the present, in order to be able to show the modifications of historical imagination. The last three novels written after 2005 differ from all the earlier ones

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insofar as they do not present an alternative (worse) organization of social life, even less are they parodies of traditional utopias. To my last remark I add a question mark. Almost all dystopian novels were written in English. Most of the authors are British, Canadian or American. Why? No dystopian novel presumes that all humans are born with empathy or that they are born with aggressive instincts. No dystopia makes us believe in an “anthropological revolution”, in the possibility of a future decent and moral humankind without need for laws or regulations. All of them exemplifies the malleability of the human race, ready and able to live in almost any circumstances, accept all ways of life as the only possible, right, proper ones, believe in everything the others believe in. This is, in itself, no discovery, just reference to historical facts. In fact, “homo sapiens” lived amid the greatest variety of social organizations. No newborn is programmed for this or that particular social life, but for social life in general, that is, it can adjust to any of them. Dystopian works suggest that we, modern people, cherished the illusion that the human condition can be different, that we occupy a privileged place in history. The illusion that modern men and women became independent individuals, who got used to think with their own mind, to choose, to figure out themselves what is right and what wrong. That history still progressed and this progress cannot be reversed. What we once won we cannot lose. Dystopian novels show, they “prove” that we can lose. Totalitarian institutions, both Bolshevik and Nazi, have proved it already. Individuality, difference disappear fast whenever people are conditioned for not being individuals, where thinking with their own minds is not just punished, but also regarded as sinful. In such and similar circumstances they will always do what others do, and believe in what others are believing in. There is only one condition of successful brain washing: no one should see, or know, any alternatives to the existing one. The age of the dystopian moment and especially of dystopian fiction was also the age of Freud’s popularity. It appears in all of those novels at least one single person who does not fit, who cannot successfully assimilate. Unbehagen in der Kultur, says Freud, is the result of never entirely accomplished accommodation. Something remains amiss, some feeling of discomfort remains. In dystopian fiction this sense of “discomfort” is linked to the experience or knowledge of “otherness, of being somehow a stranger in one’s own world. The tension between successful conditioning on the one hand, and the feeling of “discomfort”, that develops slowly into a kind of resistance, on the o­ ther, is portrayed already in Huxley’s novel Brave New World. John, the “­savage”,

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a­ lthough an (unwanted) offspring of people from the “new world”, was brought up in a Mexican reservation. He got used to the way of life of those “savages”. Huxley is honest. There is no paradise lost. The “old world” is bad enough, brutal, ugly and dirty. It is just different, less mechanical, more organic, less hypocritical. Two tourists from the “new world” visit the reservation, identifying the savage as their own countrymen (Mr. Livingston, I suppose?) and take him home. Yet, since John knew a different way of life, he will remain a stranger in the “new world” just as he was among the “savages”. An outsider. For him the “brave new world” becomes less and less “brave”. He chooses life outside all societies. This turns out to be impossible. Thus, he hangs himself. There were also others who felt “discomfort” in the same new world (among them a young man called Bernard Marx) but at the end, they will also be happy, since the “new world” knows how deal with discomfort. They keep namely an island where all “strange” people will be sent (deported), where they can live among themselves without poisoning the environment with their ideas. The same pattern recurs in all dystopian fictions. In Atwoods’ novel, the handmaid still remembers a former husband. Although this memory is far from pleasant, it is a sign of the existence of another world. She is finally rescued from the “Republic of Gabriol” by rebels, although we do not know the outcome of her escape. Montag, the fireman (Fahrenheit 491) is a functionary, a true believer, a man in power, who begins to feel discomfort after an accidental meeting with a young woman. In the above mentioned novels the feeling of “discomfort” develops slowly in and through the story itself. In contrast, we meet Winston (in 1984) already as a man who does not entirely “fit” into the totalitarian world. He tries to look for some otherness, for reminiscences, recollections from another life. He is defeated by such brutal means, both spiritual and bodily torture, which are not at the disposal to the masters of other dystopias. What can dissatisfaction or discomfort rely upon? Where can those men and women alien or alienated in the “new world” get a faint picture of another one? An alternative one? And, perhaps also a better one? From history and from poetry. The masters of “new world” know this well. No one in their realm should have access to history and poetry. All the books should be put on fire, no one single can remain: this is the reason why firemen have such a high status in Bradbury’s a novel. The Big Brother (1984) is more radical. In his world it is not enough to outlaw books of literature and forget history, one has to write new books which changed history. In the realm of the Big Brother, every year a new history is invented, new conspiracies, new enemies, and, of course, new

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victories. As all novels have also to be rewritten for the use of a propaganda apparatus. As long as history remains unknown or replaced by a newly invented one, there will be one single good, one single truth, one single way of life. The possibility of escaping from the lies of the “new worlds” rests in the possibility to uncover the truth about history, to recognize falsifications for what they are: lies. The story of uncovering the truth about crimes in history can become the plot of a thriller, for it goes, like all thrillers, about uncovering a crime. The hero of Fatherland is a detective, who works in Berlin a quarter of a century after Nazi Germany has won WW2. Whole of Europe is run by Hitler (now 75 years old), America and its president Joseph Kennedy is an ally (the father of John and Robert Kennedy sympathized with Nazi Germany for a while), only Canada remains neutral. Berlin is built after the projects of Hitler’s famous architect. A war is still going on in Siberia, and to send people there equals death penalty. Otherwise life goes on as normal. One day a detective, called March, who has also accepted the world in which he were brought up as self-evident and all right, is charged with the investigation of a murder case, in which high standing Nazi officials might have been also implicated. While going on with investigation, fighting against all the obstacles put in his way, as all detectives in all thrillers do, he finally discovers that there were people called Jews living here once upon a time. No one knows about them, past is eliminated. What happened to them is the next question in March’s investigation. He wants to find the “original crime”. Thus, finally he arrives to Auschwitz. We see him for the last time with a revolver in his hand, but we do not know how and against whom he will use it. History, historical crimes cannot remain hidden, forgotten, not forever. (The book by the renowned American author Philip Roth Plot Against America is the American version of Harris’ novel.) The favorite source of the liberating knowledge of “otherness” is, in several dystopian fiction literature, especially Shakespeare. (In a German dystopian novel it could have been Goethe). John, “the savage” (Brave New World), gets hold of an old Shakespeare volume in the Mexican reservation and keeps it. It is from Shakespeare’s poetry that he comes to see the shabbiness of his “savage” life, to greet the guests from the “new world” with the words of Miranda (“brave new world”). Montag (Fahrenheit) also finds two texts from the lost world: one by Shakespeare, the other from the Bible. These texts liberate him from happy ignorance. Kierkegaard said (albeit the authors of these fictions in all probability did not know him): innocence is ignorance. Yet is ignorance innocence? In a totalitarian world knowledge, even intelligence is suspect, even a crime. Only the

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ignorant can believe to be innocent, yet they are not. Who remains an ignorant inhabitant of the brave new world will never grow up… Yet, even ignorance, even stupidity, cannot be fully trusted in a manipulated or totalitarian world. In all the dystopian fictions from Huxley’s book (1931– 1932) onwards, means of indoctrination (radios, televisions, meetings) are at work day and night. Apparatuses that constantly repeat the same texts, televise the same pictures, tell everyone what is right, what is beautiful and what is true. Having been repeated thousand and one times, these truths become self-evident, and as such also boring. The great drug (soma) helps you through all your psychical and physical pains. “Newspeak” saves you from the complications of thinking. Conditioning, or brain washing, is not a game played just once, it continues throughout one’s whole life. One is constantly conditioned also by one’s mates, the members of one’s community. The greatest enemy of successful conditioning, besides knowledge of history and poetry, is solitude. Anyone who prefers to withdraw, to be alone even for a short while, is suspect. Why does she escape from observation? Community, community, community. Others tell you what to do, what to think, how to behave. One does not pursue one’s own happiness, for others do it for them. To repeat: loneliness is criminal, “togetherness” is splendid. This was one of the reasons, why traditional utopian images impressed modern men rather as dystopian fictions. Since from Plato until Fourier, all utopian societies were strictly collectivist. Plato’s state is just, because everyone performs his or her allotted work. In Fourier “harmony” is achieved because the kind of activity is allotted to everyone that fits his or her passion best. Individuality, individual trying and error, is abolished. Only absolute utopias are not ridiculed in these dystopian novels. The utopias of the golden age or of the anthropological revolution have no dystopian parodies. They will be treated as absurd dreams. The question of genesis, of how these new societies were established, when and why, is raised and also answered at some point in every dystopian fiction. The answers are different, yet one point of reference is always there: they were established after a devastating war, and mostly even after an “atomic war”. According to information or gossip circulating among the dystopian dwellers, it was after the third world war and after a revolution that the institutions of the new world were constructed, established and started to work. In most of dystopian fictions a real or a fake war is still going on. In the novel Fahrenheit (1953!) war happens twice. At the end of the book, Montag, who is already hiding in the forest with other intelligent Robin Hoods, all of them professors of humanities once upon a time and preservers of world literature in their mind,

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experiences a new “atomic war”. This “atomic war” lasts only a minute, yet lifts the whole town into the air and destroys it. This “end” could serve also as an introduction to the new wave of films and novels about survival of one or a few during the new Armageddon. The “day after”. The name Montag means Monday in English, and stands for new beginning. Modern technology plays a significant role in all dystopian novels, with the exception of “after Doomsday” scenario, where, albeit the cause of destruction, is also destroyed, and cannot play a role anymore. Technologies are major protagonists of dystopias above all as technologies of observation, of conditioning, of communication, of entertainment, and of reproduction. Common in all of them are, of course, technologies of brain washing. All the technological devices and their functioning shown in these fictions are extrapolations. Extrapolations of already existing technological possibilities and also of old fairy tale dreams. In the brave new world, e.g. people ­commute in helicopter taxis. Both helicopters and taxis were known, yet helicopter taxis, helicopters of personal use, were just literary extrapolations. At the same time the helicopter taxis remind us of the old story of the flying carpet. It was in such a personal helicopter taxi that Bernard Marx flew from London to Mexico and from Mexico to London, in 6 hours each. It was quite “dystopian” fantasy that someone lived on the 32th floor of a building, but the contemporary reader would not find this funny or absurd any longer… One thing is important to note: even if technological imagination plays a role in all the dystopian visions, dystopian visions are not about technology at all, but about the use of technology. Novels where technological fantasy occupies the central place, where machines control humans, like in Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano, are not dystopian novels. Dystopia is not about technology, but just like utopia, about the human condition. The “mechanical hounds” (in Fahrenheit) are means used by human persecutors. Humans control humans, humans oppress and brainwash humans, even if they do it with means of machines. There is no essential difference between the function of machine guns and mechanic hounds. There is one dystopian novel where the very technological procedure that plays the central role in the novel, was well known and practiced at the time of the publication of the novel. This technology is organ transplant, and the novel is Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s novel was written at the time when organ transplant was already widely practiced, and the scarcity of transplantable organs was also widely felt. As it always happens in situations of scarcity, illegal trade was in, and m ­ oney

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could buy (almost) everything. There were also other thrillers written on the topic (e.g. people killed on operation table for using their transplantable organs). Ishiguro’s book is no thriller, but a tragic dystopia, where the already practiced technology (organ transplant) was combined with a technological extrapolation: the artificial creation of humans in test tubes. The specificity of this novel is that it does not portray some future “otherness”. Not all children are created artificially, the children in the novel are the exception not the rule. Those artificially created boys and girls are like boys and girls in general, only brought up and educated in an isolated children’s home under the guidance of women who knew their destiny what children themselves did not yet know. These young girls and boys create artworks, among them some very good ones, they do love and they grieve, they hope and they fear. The only difference between them and other girls and boys is that they are created and brought up for a special purpose: donating their organs. First they have to donate one organ (e.g. one lung), an operation they mostly survive. Afterwards comes the second donation (for example a kidney), finally the last – where none of them survives. Needless to say, that this dystopia is also a metaphor of human life. This is the latest (we do not know whether the last) dystopian fiction where the artificial creation of human beings, one of the parodies created by in Huxley, plays a role. Yet, “bio-politics”, the political use of genetics, inheritance, purity of a race, health, is an important ingredient of all dystopias (as they were also of many utopias). How to have healthy children? A healthy new generation? Who should propagate with whom? The question is complicated in Atwood’s novel, for here the “community” had to cope not with the scarcity of organs but with the scarcity of babies. “Health” is preferred among everything else with the exception of indoctrination. Health and gymnastics, competitions, games, are very useful for two reasons: they require collective activity and exclude mental activity. Mental activities are anyhow outlawed in all dystopian communities, even if in some of them leaders, controllers, can have access to them. “Sexual life” has different functions depending on the character of a novel. With the exception of Handmaid’s Tale this function is not reproduction. First of all health, then protection against sublimation, then means of observation, and accidental pleasure. It can be promiscuity (one night stand in Huxley), it can also be monogamy, yet the common in all sexual encounters is the total absence of passions, emotions. The dystopian sex is boring. The sole example of the opposite is the love relation in 1984, but it develops against the rules, it is the forbidden fruit, and will be betrayed.

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Whenever someone devises a new social structure and not just dreams about one, he has to presuppose scarcity in one or the other thing (be this something food, sexual partner, work of one or another type) and thus division of labor. In this respect there is no big difference between utopias and dystopias. In addition, both utopian and dystopian social structures thus constructed have to guarantee stability and also the satisfaction of all the inhabitants. For without general satisfaction stability cannot be warranted, since civil wars may occur. In addition isolation from the outer world, commerce with other cultures has to be avoided. This we know already from Plato, Morus, Fourier and the like. Plato could not exile Shakespeare from his ideal state yet, but he exiled Homer. The task, as mentioned, was similar: stability, isolation, division of labor, satisfaction of all. Plato termed this state of affairs justice, Fourier harmony. Just like in case of utopias, all dystopian societies are characterized by social stratification, the system of command and obedience and division of labor. In totalitarian dystopias (1984 and Fatherland) this is self-evident, since the parody refers to the “original”, the model, thus there was no need for great exaggeration. Yet in invented cases of a “new world” (Fahrenheit, Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World) it was. Huxley used the Plato scheme in a technological version. For Plato men were born either with golden soul, or with silver soul or, finally with iron (or copper) soul. They will belong to different casts. The cast of the “golden souls” (philosophers) govern. In Huxley people are created in tubes, as alpha, beta, gamma, delta or epsilon creatures, they are thus determined by birth to become the members of one or the other rank or cast. Here one does not need to take trouble to find out who is possessed by which passion, for no one will have any passions or emotions, and all of them will be predestined by chemistry to be happy in the place he or she occupies. Harmony, security is granted. All needs will be satisfied for needs are already pre-organized for one or the other kind of satisfaction. The other “models” do not speak of such an elaborate, biologically guaranteed, division of ranks and estates. Yet, a command/obedience structure is described in all of them, where hierarchy can never be questioned. Not even by sweetheart, that is by a sexual slave of a commander, as in the case of the handmaid’s tale. Huxley’ superiority as an author lies in his courage to go to the extremes and write a satire about the modern world and its dreams in Swift’s style (without the country of horses, since that would not be dystopian). I mentioned that brain washing, control are in almost all dystopian fictions the warranty of stability. But stability for what purpose? Is stability its own purpose? Plato makes us believe that justice is the purpose. In fact, stability itself

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is the purpose. A Controller (in Huxley) makes us believe that stability secures “the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers” but does it? Is happiness just the lack of unhappiness? Or, to ask some follow-up questions: is justice just the lack of injustice? Is freedom just the absence of unfreedom? Slippery is the soil, better to grasp the rail. The rail is termed security. No conflict, no tragedies, no suffering, no worries at all. The absence, the negativity. The Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamazov, or if you wish, the devil, appears in two dystopian novels to answer the questions I raised. Controller, Mustapha Mond (Brave New World), confronting the savage, explains all. Stability was needed deadly, after nine years of civil war. What is happiness anyhow, he asks? People are happy for they get what they want and they never want something they cannot get. Whom should they mourn, what about should they have emotions? They have no parents, children, friends. “And liberty! he laughed. Independence is a state not made for men”. Moreover casts are needed, for a society of alphas would be unstable, and Epsilons would go mad in doing alphas’ work. Art and science are incompatible with happiness, if art is about beauty and science about truth. What religion is concerned, religious works are pornographic old books. Anyhow, religion compensates for losses. But here there are no losses. Christianity without tear, this is what soma is, ensures the Controller. Close to the end of Fahrenheit an old professor, Granger, teaches Montag the exact opposite. After talking about books of old, which as Phoenix, even if burned, will always reborn from their ashes, he finishes his talk as: “Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal”. Looking at the dates of publication one can draw the preliminary conclusion that structures, stratifications, rules of dystopian cities of “new world” were described during the second half of the 20th century. These days, engaged anti-Soviet leftists and liberals of all shades shared the same fear: fear of manipulation, of being manipulated by a power beyond political, social control. They generally distinguished between hard and soft, brutal and refined manipulation. Brutal manipulation equals totalitarian ideology and practice, still very much alive and expanding in those times. Refined manipulation equals “Americanism”, where neither force nor violence is needed to achieve total uniformity. They were afraid of losing the heritage of Western culture and democracy. They were afraid of losing their individuality, their difference, to be turned turn into “one dimensional men”. They were afraid of learned barbarism, of the marketing of works of art and ideas. They were also afraid of losing the space of intimacy, bowing before sexual fashions.

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In one word: these dystopias were grotesque or absurd fictional answers to mass society. They voiced Unbehagen in mass society. Loss without hope. In the 21st century, after the demise of the Soviet system and its satellites, and the growing skepticism in an all-powerful consumer society, the fear of a manipulated world and totalitarianism in general yielded to other fears. None of the three dystopian novels written in the 21st century followed the 20th century patterns. They extrapolate some features, innovation of the present tendencies they fear. Neither Never Let Me Go nor Submission invent another world. They speak about dark, disturbing potentials already visible in the present. They fear that these potentials will become actual, and thus will happen very soon, happens perhaps just now. There is still a novel that stands out by its seemingly “traditional” character: The Road. In times of the cold war another big Fear (beside manipulation in mass societies) appeared in the Western horizon: the fear of a nuclear war, of manmade Apocalypse, Doomsday. Doomsday movies became so popular that beside stories about nuclear showdown, other universal “endgames” were also welcome. The destruction of the human race could result for example by a plague caused by a yet unknown deadly virus or by a collision with another planet. At the end, the survivors start again their normal life, lovers remain together, and the plague is finally conquered by a genius. There are dozens of this kind. “Road” novels became also popular, partly because of a new leftist fashion of being constantly on the road, partly because of the increasing fear of homelessness, of not belonging anywhere to anyone. The fear of collectivity, of the crowd, of accommodation, assimilation is slowly replaced by the fear of loneliness, of being abandoned, of being alone, of non-belonging. I would not consider most of those films and writings as dystopias for, to repeat, dystopian works, like utopian ones, are dealing with the human condition. Neither do I consider works which deal with a dominant kind of fear in popular imagination (as spreading of deadly viruses), for such fears come and go in a greater speed than many others. I see in the novel by Cormack McCarthy The Road the most elaborate, or, if I am permitted to say, the “classic” example of the genre. The weaknesses of the genre are still there. Among them the situation of ultimate danger and devastation of others are just like a street accident: the onlooker likes watching it. The genre also appeals frequently to sentimentality, to the natural sympathy for love and solidarity, here: between father and son. Further on: there is the usual appeal of bravery, especially among extreme circumstances. In this novel both characters are brave: father and son. Still, there is no tragedy, no catharsis in the Aristotelian sense, for no liberation of self-pity

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or fear is possible. Where the situation is so absurd, so unlikely, tragic effect can have no place. This book is a classic of its own genre for two reasons. First, because it fuses cleverly naturalistic observations with mystic elements. The story of father and son begins some years after a nuclear war. There are very few survivors. The father wants to save his son, leading him somewhere there is still hope of life. Starving, looking for something to eat do they wander on the “country road “(where there is no more country). They see houses, bridges, they explore kitchens, even a boat which are all described in a naturalistic way. Nature is destroyed, but rain, snow, lightning are just like usual. Yet, this “naturalistic” voyage is also a mystical one. The boy is the “carrier of fire”. What fire? We do not know. Yet, we, readers, feel that the boy’s arrival at some destiny is the arrival of the human race to salvation: the victory of the good against evil. It hits us also as a kind of justice that the boy, not the father, arrives at the haven (not the Heaven), since the son is the embodiment of empathy. The son stops, against his father’s will, to help an old man on the road, who is called Ely. The father saves the son, he saves goodness, but in order to do it, he needs to kill, needs to abandon sufferers. The biblical allusions are not direct, but indirect. This saves the novel. Second, this book takes up again the thread of the old question about “human nature”. In the world these wanderers take the road there is no state, there are no laws, no courts of justice, no property, no division of labor, no stratification. It is the “state of nature”. It is everything but the golden age. It is Hobbes’ state of nature. Where there is starvation, there is cannibalism. We do not need a fiction to learn it, we learned it already from history. For example from the history of the famine in Ukraine in the 20th century. We already know that the most dangerous animal for a man is a not an animal but another man. Up to this point we sign the statement, that “all men are born with aggressive instincts”. Yet, the father and the son are also men. The dominant instinct of the son is empathy. Good and the evil are humane alike. No anthropology can answer the moral questions. The good is the exception. But, it exists. Why is the son good? The Road gives an answer to the question of utopias and dystopias alike: namely that there is none. The two other dystopian fictions of the 21st century are places in the future of the present. The first (Never let me go) was still written in English; the second

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(Submission), however, by a French author. The fear embodied in this dystopian novel is not the end of modern civilization or of the modern world, even less the end of all worlds. Not the dangers of modern technology, of manipulation in general, but the end of the European culture, exemplified on French culture. (The book by the renowned author Philip Roth Plot against America was also written in the 21st century). Houellebecq’s novel Submission is a political pamphlet just like 1984. The story goes also about submission as in the case of 1984. Submission to a totalitarian power. The historical time is, however, very different. Those books are more than a half century apart. After the so called “end of history” neither Bolshevik ideology nor Nazi ideology threaten Europe’s survival, at least so it seems at the present, since they remained on the scene as extremist movements and no one knows whether they could return. They provide, for the time being, albeit targets of justified fear, no material for new dystopias. Totalitarian ideology and terror, however, do not disappear in the modern world. They just change. One new ideology, one new kind of terror takes the place of the old ones. The most modern totalitarian ideology is “Islamism”. Not Islam as a religion, but Islamism, as ideology. It refers to Islam as Hitler referred to Nietzsche and Stalin to Marx. They catch their following among others by these “references”. Not just in the “East”, but also on the European continent, also in France. (The book was written prior to the terrorist attacks in Paris). Submission, just like in 1984, yet this time not under torture, but under the combination of threats and promises. In France, the party of “Moslem Brotherhood” wins the elections. The “anti-hero” of the novel (who writes it) is a French intellectual, a university professor, a devoted catholic, bored and disappointed in everything. Politics, right wing and left wing he equally despises, humanism an empty world. Women do not stay with him, although he practices all sexual tricks wonderfully. The only girl he really likes leaves for Israel. Muslim Brotherhood (the contemporary Big Brother), once in power, offers him everything: high position, recondition, publication, money, with one condition: he has to convert to Islam, that is to Islamism, in becoming a propagandist of an Islamist Empire. He finally accepts. This submission is darker than that of Winston in 1984. Not just, because here the man submits without danger to his life and personal freedom, but because this book is not a satire, even less a caricature, but “realistic” enough. Così fan tutte, così fan tutti. Thus all people do under certain circumstances the same. They do not forget, they betray their past. Earlier I made mention of two novels where the usual devil of Ivan Karamazov or of Adrian Leverkühn appears again and delivers his well known speech

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of temptation to his target. Yet, whereas the Controller (in Brave New World) could not persuade the “Savage”, here the temptation speech is crowned by success, because the soul of the target was “ready”. The devil is called Rediger, a Muslim edition of the Bolshevik interrogator in Darkness at Noon. He is a high standing Islamist functionary and politician, who used to be earlier “identitarian”, that is, extreme nationalist in old Le Pen’s style. He drank alcohol (he still does) and reads Nietzsche. Then he liberated himself first from atheist humanism (this is well taken by our anti-hero) and came to realize that Toynbee was right: civilizations are never destroyed from outside, they commit suicide. Europe has committed suicide already. So did Christianity. Rediger refers in one breath to Auschwitz and to the same sex marriage as two different signs of the demise of Christianity. The Anti-hero, the writer of the book converted, he took two wives, who could not abandon him. He is elected the rector of the university. He is now happy and starts a new life. The authors of the earlier discussed dystopian novel were leftist or liberals, Houellebecq is, judged from the text, conservative. Yet, there are two common features in all dystopian novels irrespective of world-views: fear and mourning. Mourning for a loss and fear from the future. What is lost and mourned is in all of them free choice. The freedom of choice between good and evil as the human condition. Before starting to discuss dystopian imagination as a manifestation of our contemporary historical consciousness, I raised the question what happened with our world? A world without utopian moment, without utopian thinking, without believing in progress, in the future, in a better, more just life, even in divine justice? Was Rediger, the devil, right? Does our civilization commit suicide? Europe of the 20th century, where Europeans murdered in 60 years hundred million Europeans alone seems confirming Rediger’s judgment. Nowadays ­Europeans fail to reproduce themselves and are not ready to defend themselves. Why are there no books written which show us a future world, a future ­Europe without temptations, without manipulation, without war, terror, where people can choose collectivity and solitude alike, where they can be freer and happy simultaneously, where there is security yet also conflict. Why not? Do we like to mourn? Do we prefer fear to hope? Is it perhaps more elegant, more fashionable? As I said, in the first, philosophical chapter of this booklet, imagination plays cards with beliefs. Can one make people to believe in something they do not believe in, and thus let imagination play cards with loaded deck? Yes,

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and yes, this is exactly the fundamental belief of dystopias: that beliefs can be forced, manipulated, changed by earthly powers, that beliefs can be the carriers of slavery. Utopian fictions in the 19th century were promises. Promises, which were either unmasked as phony or have been betrayed. Dystopian fictions of the 20th-21st century are warnings. They cannot satisfy the most humane desire: happiness through freedom, peace through conflicts. The only desire they try to satisfy is the desire not to tell lies, the desire of honesty. They leave us empty handed. For the future cannot be foreseen, neither the images of hope or of fear are predictions. Hegel once spoke about the “ruse of history”. Aristotle said that about the future we cannot make either true or false statements. The messages of historical consciousness in utopian or dystopian imagination are neither true nor false. Hegel once said that we learn one thing from history, namely that we never learn anything from history. This time, I think we may have learned something. Dystopian imagination itself is namely the result of learning. When dystopian fictions tell us: you will submit, we can answer: we will not. This is a bet. One bets on the future. Most dystopian novels suggest that as long as there is one single good person on earth, there will be always someone who does not submit. One of the professors of Fahrenheit summed up the truth of dystopias: “Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never is such an animal”. If there is no such animal, there remains choice. Not to despair, not to give up, yet not to pursue empty illusions either. Without optimism and without pessimism, as Voltaire suggested, “cultivez votre jardin” (cultivate your garden)? Let me stop here. Not yet. For, I want to pick up still my earlier suggestion. That something similar happens here and now to what happened once at the first appearance of the dystopian moment. At those times utopian thinking did not disappear, it simply changed “genre”: it became located in art, especially in painting. As I mentioned, technological utopias are now flourishing. Yet, these utopias can also have a dystopian reading, thus they do not replace social utopias. Do we perceive nowadays a manifestation of utopian imagination that cannot have dystopian reading? I think “yes”, better to say, I suggest “yes”, there is such, namely contemporary architecture. I suggest that it is contemporary architecture where utopian imagination is still the conductor of the orchestra of the “matter”. Let me start from the beginning. Social utopias are four dimensional.

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In the first utopias there was the beginning, that is the remote past. The space was the garden of delights or the garden of Eden. They pictured the time and the place of happiness, the hope of happiness. Renaissance utopias, just like that of Plato, were the utopias of otherness. They were shifted to another place, for example to an island, isolated from the world of the present. Imagined as unchanged and non-changeable, a no-time community of justice. The hope in security and social justice. The “utopian moment” and the “dystopian moment”, those of hope and those of fear, those of liberation and those of enslavement alike, were both placed into the space of the dreamer, in view of the future of the present. So was the “republican moment”, the hope of liberty. The absolute utopia of the anthropological turn or revolution was the mirror image of the golden age. A golden age not behind us, but ahead of us. Not in the remote past but in the remote future. This is the ultimate utopia of unity of freedom and happiness. Now dystopias suggest that “ask for no guarantees, ask for no security”. That is: cultivate your garden. This utopia of responsibility as civic courage. The slogan to “cultivate our garden” does not suggest the demise of social-historical imagination, but responsibility taken for social imagination. One can be responsible for social imagination if imagination relies on probability, and not only on possibility, and even less on impossibility. Briefly: if social imagination cannot be conductor of the orchestra, just one of its instruments. A world without imagination, as the conductor of the orchestra were empty, and is impossible anyhow. The question is not whether there is such an imagination, only whether there is a “utopian” one. To repeat my suggestion: utopian imagination, as the conductor of the orchestra, opens new futurist places in contemporary architecture. Contemporary architecture embodies utopian reality. Briefly: the works of contemporary architecture are individual, that is personal. There are no styles, not even “postmodern” styles. The most remarkable building are public spaces: churches, museums, opera houses. Public but not communitarian spaces, not habitats but places where individuals can form a community for common elevation, contemplation in the realm of the “absolute spirit”, without giving up personal liberty and still enjoying the moments of happiness. They are now the embodied utopian reality.

Part 2 Dystopias of the Twenty-First Century: the Bank of Critical Thinking

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The Circle “Dream!” The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. “Dream,” one said, the word laser-cut into the red stone. “Participate,” said another. There were dozens: “Find Community.” “Innovate.” “Imagine.” She just missed stepping on the hand of a young man in a grey jumpsuit; he was installing a new stone that said “Breathe”.1 This is one of the first images in the novel by Eggers that encloses an infernal whirlwind of dystopia, devastation and destruction within a graceful, fragrant, enchanted shell with “ambrosia and vermilion nectar”: a herald of hopes and visions able to climb as high as paradise, in a shell of sapphire and wonder like that of every utopia. At the end of our conversation at the Pordenonelegge book festival, Ágnes Heller and I announced this book, which was still waiting to be written, and we said, “within every utopia smoulders a dystopia”. An announcement by a great philosopher and a modest essayist: a promise to be maintained, and one, I believe, is certainly possible by drawing inspiration precisely from one of the three great contemporary dystopias, The Circle by Eggers, that dominates the scene in a disquieting way, alongside The Possibility of an Island by Houellebecq, and 2084 by Boualem Sansal, published in 2015 by Gallimard. I have chosen three contemporary dystopian works that are quite distant from one another from a geographical and cultural viewpoint because I believe that a common matrix exists within that danger of dystopia which is hidden deep in the heart of every utopia: a transversal, inescapable matrix that is buried deep, and shared– whether this refers to a United States, infatuated with technology and transparency, or the decadence of ancient Rome that characterises our European Continent, and France in particular, or in the reproposal of Orwell’s Dystopia, 1984 seen from an Islamic perspective. At the beginning of time, all living creatures were immortal. Unicellular organisms were able to survive thanks to their simplicity. They were like crystal 1 Dave Eggers, The Circle, McSweeney’s, 2013, pp. 1–2.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004410275_006

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clear water, unfreezable and inextinguishable: surging forth as if unaware of itself in a relentless, incoercible, sovereign flow. Death emerged in the world with the appearance of more complex living beings, and especially, mankind. The human being was discrete, composed of asymmetrical elements, leftover pieces, upheaval, and constant changes. The common aspects represent 99 percent in the human species, while the difference is about 1 percent, which proves that we are all made of the same stuff, and yet each individual is different, even monozygotic twins. This discontinuity, this complexity, makes human beings not only wonderfully and tragically imperfect but mortal as well. The principle of Utopia rises from the desire to conquer both imperfection and death. In his poem on utopia, Eduardo Galeano said that if you move two steps forward you see that utopia also advances two steps ahead, if you run ahead and shorten the distance by ten steps, you see it take a leap of the same length: you cannot seize it, you cannot catch up, it will always escape you in any case. So, therefore, what is the use of utopia, the very concept of utopia? Galeano provides this answer: “Utopia teaches us to move forward”. An intrinsic part of our nature is the iron-willed desire to advance, to evolve, and to build new worlds better than those in which we currently live. It is this indomitable impulse that transformed us from living as cave men to growing food and raising livestock, gradually leading to this sequence of the new increasingly more perfected human figure. However, the darkest point of this evolution, this growth, this improvement, is hidden in our amnesia but which comes to the surface incessantly: our condition as imperfect and mortal beings. That imperfection that Muslims call “the tribute to Allah”, which is celebrated in a tangible manner by inserting at least one fault in their rugs that are woven with such infinite dexterity, and death that is the condicio sine qua non that enables the human race to perpetuate itself through the arrival of new lives that replace those that precede them. These are not problems that can be resolved through moral or technical evolution or thanks to the illusion of cloning, but are elements that make up life itself.

From the Constrictions of Ideology to Blissful Self-Immolation

We are living in a time that is orphaned of the great ideologies of the 20th century: those Doctor Jekyll utopias that were transformed in just as many Mister Hyde dystopias. Communism dreamt of a classless world, without poverty, without humiliation, almost recapturing in a naturally “perfected” version, the utopia of

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­ homas More: it aspired to 6 hours of work a day for each individual, but endT ed with the massacre of 25 million people under Stalin and the incarceration of an incalculable number of people in the inhuman conditions of the gulags. On this subject Kundera wrote: Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.2 And what of the Nazi Swastika? The Gammadion cross was the solar symbol of multiplicity already back in ancient Greece and Rome, but the Nazis reversed the meaning, giving it the name of Hakenkreuz leading it to rise as the symbol of destructive racism. Nazism dreamed of a world “purified” of unclean and contaminating elements such as Jews, homosexuals, and the handicapped. A project that led to extreme consequences, that of the work of a cardinal figure of the Enlightenment, according to the example by Bauman: that of a gardener who must clear the park (of life) of all the weeds and inappropriate plants so that the garden may shine in all its glory showing its maximum levels of vitality, harmony and beauty. As well as the purity of the race, the “values” of Nazism were beauty, health, and strength, but the results of these highly desirable characteristics were shown in the devastating ferocity against anything that did not conform with these canons: a war that involved the whole world, and six million killed in the gas chambers were the obscene testimony of the aberrations of a project of this kind. Alternating with the great constructions of the last century were the visions based on personal emancipation that conformed far more to the individualized world in which we live, with its belief in the miracles and innovations of technology. Mae, the main character of the novel mentioned in the opening lines, has spent 234,000 dollars on her education and finds herself working in a bland and depressing job until her friend Annie finds her a position in a futuristic structure that employs the top brains, the most dynamic intelligence, and which appears to be a paradise. Her hometown, and the rest of California, the rest of America, seemed like some chaotic mess in the developing world. Outside the walls of the 2 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Harper & Row, 1985, p. 190.

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Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here all had been perfected. […] Who but utopians could make utopia?3 In that paradise, the first signs of a disturbing scenario started right from the beginning: our heroine was immediately given a new tablet and cell phone, both engraved with her name and in which all her data, songs, photos, and messages were downloaded, and which, within a few minutes became accessible all the other employees of the Circle, and which could never be erased even in centuries to come. It is interesting to note how dystopic situations like those described, are already part of our current reality without our being very aware of it. A reality in which anything that is posted on Facebook is immediately non-erasable and is accessible to whoever wants to take advantage of it. The true main character of The Unbearable Lightness of Being,4 returns to mind: Tereza, the undesired daughter of a mother who demanded complete visibility of the existent, display of the body and of all its manifestations: At home, there was no such thing as shame. Her mother marched about the flat in her underwear, sometimes braless and sometimes, on summer days, stark naked. Her stepfather did not walk about naked, but he did go into the bathroom every time Tereza was in the bath. Once she locked herself in and her mother was furious. […] Once her mother decided to go naked in the winter when the lights were on. Tereza quickly ran to pull the curtains so that no one could see her from across the street. She heard her mother’s laughter behind her. […] She laughed, and all the women laughed with her. Tereza can’t reconcile herself to the idea that the human body pisses and farts, she said.5 1. Tereza cannot accept a reality “where the whole universe is nothing more than a huge concentration camp of identical bodies but with an invisible soul”. Tereza does not believe that the true nature of a person is shown through the disinhibited display one’s body, and “wants her soul to rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship”.6 In his books, Kundera insists on the infinite value of the “small percentage of the unimaginable” that identifies each human being and makes them unique. Tereza calls this “soul”, Lacan “object-little (a)”, but in the end, it still refers to what is irreducible to the 3 4 5 6

Eggers, quoted, p. 31. Milan Kundera, quoted. Ibidem, p. 57. Ibidem, p. 59.

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order of language and to order in general, something that resists but does not adapt or conform. The obsession of permanent self-exhibition was a constant theme of Big Brother in 1984, and was the Leitmotiv of the film The Lives of Others,7 in which the East German authorities spied on everybody. However, it is a mere illusion to believe that in today’s democracies all this is simply a distant memory. The world’s greatest surveillance expert David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman, have written a book together that leaves no doubt on the question: “As power moves with the speed of electronic signals in the fluidity of liquid modernity, transparency is simultaneously increased for some and decreased for others”.8 Already Foucault had identified a kind of double bind, a double personality, of an anti-ethical presence in attitude and behaviour in those under surveillance: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection”.9 The difference with the dystopic scenarios of the twentieth century lie in the fact that at that time Foucault’s Panopticon principle was justified by current ideology: People needed to be under surveillance for the greater good, to create a better world, and the awareness that one could be intercepted in one’s own nonconformity, constituted a strong deterrent, however, while being constantly aware of being subjugated to a superpower who was, in any case, perceived as overwhelming and menacing. Now that the ideologies have been silenced and that the panacea is represented by technological progress, our constant self-confessions our complacent and ignorantly enthusiastic desire to confess our every action is expressed in our careless use of credit cards, our postings on Facebook, and the declarations we make on social media. In his conversations with Lyon, Bauman quotes Étienne de la Boétie and his Discourse on voluntary servitude: […] he or she presaged the stratagem developed several centuries later to near perfection in the liquid modern society of consumers. Everything – pattern of domination, philosophy and pragmatic precepts of management, vehicles of social control, the very concept of power (that is, of the 7 Das Leben der Anderen is a 2006 film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. 8 Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance. A Conversation, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, p. 12. 9 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, English translation Discipline and Punish, Pantheon Books, 1977.

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way to manipulate probabilities to increase the likelihood of desirable conduct and reduce to a minimum the chances of the opposite) – seems to be moving in the same direction. Everything moves from enforcement to temptation and seduction, from normative regulation to PR, from policing to the arousal of desire; and everything shifts the principal role in achieving the intended and welcome results from the bosses to the subordinates, from supervisors to the supervised, from the surveyors to the surveyed; in short, from the managers to the managed.10 Basically, where previously the choice of servitude, or subjugation, was obligatory in order to avoid punishment, the new instruments of power use their leverage on the irrational blend of our supposedly autonomous willingness to advance precisely in the direction that we flatter ourselves we have chosen freely. On the other hand, the new dominating methods are infinitely less expensive than those used in the past, because surveillance operations incurred considerable costs, and the fact that factory workers found themselves in the same boat implied a certain solidarity among employees, together with a class conscience and a certain solidarity, even though they were a little rougher between the management and the employees, since, to survive, work in a factory had to be completed in one way or another. But today, in the new globalised world, a person like Marchionne is able to re-establish the fiat in the United States and to pay tax in any small state with the least demands; so an employee has no choice but to convert himself to become controller and manager of himself, in the hopes that his work will satisfy his bosses’ expectations, sighing with anxiety and working to breaking point to avoid being sacked from the position he occupies. I believe that this new process can be understood in a wider sense, beyond what Lyon describes as “Ban-opticon”, in the words of Didier Bigo, to define “a system aimed at banishing these global fringes […], defining who is welcome and who is not, creating excluded categories who are not banished by a specific State-nation, but by an amorphous and non-unified cluster of global powers. They work virtually, using a series of on-line data bases, especially data on events that have not yet occurred, like those in the film Minority Report”.11 And this does not even consider that the voluntary display of what would once have been deemed extremely private helps those with power leverage to carry out their social sorting, in establishing who is to be cosseted and nurtured according to his propensity for adequate consumption levels. This is the contemporary equivalent of what was once defined as a “worthy life”, and 10 11

Bauman and Lyon, quoted, p. 57. Ibidem, p. 61.

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which, on the contrary, should be the object of more aggressive attention, with more frequent and harassing control, as occurs in Islamic countries.

The Three-Headed Monster

Let us return to the Circle. The whole story begins with the brilliant and innovative mind of Tyler Alexander Gospodinov, called Ty, sociopathic and perhaps affected by Asperger’s syndrome. Ty, became tired of the enormous number of passwords and identification codes that, as we know, have become necessary for managing our lives, increasingly more controlled and directed by the net. At a certain point he manages to create a Unified Operation System, that is able to harmonise and concentrate what was previously fragmented, and to invent a method, TruYou, through which anybody can perform any operation personally by connecting directly and creating a clean slate eliminating the complications of identity theft, fraud, and the anxiety linked with on-line navigation. However, Ty is an inventor, not a businessman. So he takes on two other ”Wise Men”, Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton, who cover two essential roles in the company: the convincing, reassuring, friendly and smiling face of the first, called by everyone “Uncle Eamon”, and the business-minded power of the second. The company is launched by this triumvirate, and an ever-­increasing number of inventors arrive to sell their ideas to the Circle, sparking off a relentless process of innovative creations and solutions. It seemed perfect, more advantages for all, less trouble for everybody. Naturally, the problem is that, if something exists, it becomes obligatory for everybody to use it. All these people who must communicate and conform to standards of transparency, health and beauty are enthusiastic, although some resistance appears, and a few rumblings can be heard in the system. When Mae, the main character, meets Josef, with “comically ugly teeth” she opens her eyes wide in surprise. “Already she’s looking at my teeth!” he wailed, pointing to Mae. “You Americans are obsessed! I feel like a horse at an auction.” “But your teeth are bad,” Annie said. “And we have such a good dental plan here.” Josef unwrapped a burrito. “I think my teeth provide a necessary respite from the eerie perfection of everyone else’s.”12 The Circle’s inventors aspire to becoming all-seeing, all-knowing. Tiny cameras called SeeChange, are scattered throughout the world and interconnected, to provide real-time information in this kind of “dawn of the Second 12

Eggers, quoted, p. 56.

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­ nlightenment”, as they want everybody to be aware of whatever occurs. ImE possible not to recall Adorno: “behind the apparent clarification and transparency of human relations, which no longer admit anything undefined, naked brutality is ushered in”.13 In this case as well, dystopia already exists in our world of today: “The drones can now be as tiny as hummingbirds but the nectar they seek is increasingly high resolution images of those in their path”.14

A Discordant Voice

The first discordant voice that rises from the group is that of Mae’s ex-­boyfriend, Mercer. By now, Mae has been completely swallowed up by the perpetually interconnecting mechanism. Her Second Enlightenment has become second nature and it has become normal for her to express and declare even her most private communications. Mercer argues with her: “Even when I’m talking to you face-to-face you’re telling me what some stranger thinks of me. It becomes like we’re never alone. Every time I see you, there’s a hundred other people in the room. You are always looking at me through a hundred other people’s eyes.”15 He analyses it: It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnatural extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact your’e purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.16 But Mae remains impervious. She is a young girl from an isolated small town, the daughter of parking-garage parents, and feels so strongly gratified by the position she has been given in the new centre of the world and is too occupied by her job, so that even when she is not working (since she socialises through 13 14 15 16

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951, English translation Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life, Verso, 2005, p. 38. Bauman and Lyon, quoted, p. 14. Eggers, quoted, pp. 131–132. Ibidem, p. 134.

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zings, which she was told, is part of her job) she is not able to stop and reflect on Mercer’s constructive criticism or the frenzy of the crazy merry-go-round she has climbed on. She even manages to silence her inner voice which wants to rebel when she is told “it is very nice” to spend some time with her parents, but that her participation level at community events is too low, especially if one attends an event and refrains from posting or zinging a comment. When they meet again, Mercer tells her that he feels the Circle is a “sect that wants to take over the world”, and points out that all those who have attempted to discredit the company have been immediately attacked with severe legal action, and have been silenced and defeated. The Circle hoards unpleasant information on all those who dare to disagree, exaggerating the details, even inventing discrediting accusations to neutralise any opposition, but this is common practice in life today as well, as shown very efficiently by the important writer and journalist, Jon Ronson, in his latest book.17 Ronson discovered a false Twitter account, claiming to be Ronson: it turned out to be a research student at Warwick University who sent out vulgar and stupid comments in Ronson’s name. He was very upset by the event, but it inspired him to write the book that describes how many lives have been destroyed with the best intentions by people who consider themselves irreproachable. Returning to the Circle, Mercer then tells Mae something that reflects situations that exist today with infinitely similar scenes of solitude in the midst of the crowd: Here, though, there are no oppressors. No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai.18

From Orwell’s Newspeak to Tweets

The philosopher, Jean-Michel Besnier, has written a book that explains the transformation and impoverishment of language in today’s world.19 We recall 17 18 19

Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Picador, 2015. Eggers, quoted, p. 262. Jean-Michel Besnier, L’homme simplifié, Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2012.

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that the Newspeak in 1984 was an extremely simplified idiom, almost a ground zero of the written word. In Orwell’s novel, the IngSoc (English Socialism) reformers hide behind the impersonal subject trying impose their Newspeak, not only to correct the imprecisions and “subsidiary meanings” of Oldspeak or to decerebrise their contemporaries, “but to make any other form of thought impossible” which is not required by the world they wish to impose. Orwell provides a representation of the theory that Roland Barthes was to develop later, at his inauguration at the Collège de France: “for fascism is not to prevent from saying, it is to force to say”. In other words, it means formatting minds with purified semantic categories that are then able to interpret only those realities stripped of any kind of density, and ready to be manipulated by the techniques possessed by the ruling figures. Newspeak does not invent a vocabulary with new words, but destroys by “reducing language to minimum.20 Like the Circle, Fascism emptied words of their infinite sonority, their shades of meaning, that ambivalence so characteristic of mankind that it finds its maximum expression in literature. The acronyms that reign supreme today move in the opposite direction: tags and smileys debilitate messages making them seem like a long row of willows that presumes to describe the complexity of the human forest. The Third Reich was a leader of acronym invention. People said knif to express “Kommt nicht in Frage” (“I wouldn’t dream of it”), the equivalent of today’s habit of terminating a message with “Please answer asap” (“as soon as possible”)…. or rasap (Reply asap) which is even worse. Or acronyms like the Centro di Arte Contemporanea sulla Cultura Alimentare of Bologna, defined as C.A.C.C.A. (S.H.I.T.) in a City Council tweet… but above all we are lost in the ever-increasing number of acronyms that have almost become a foreign language. Primarily, the Newspeak common to Fascism and the Circle will give precedence to action over content, performing a drastic semantic reduction, which in Hobbesian terms, will assume a minimal meaning, without obstacles, spreading out in movement and strength, thus sacrificing all the shades and depth of meaning of reflection on oneself and on the world. Fascism is made up of action, as daring and bold as you like, and the cancellation of everything that can help perceive and perhaps speak of asymmetry, leftovers, and fragility. Our era of “doing”, without too much sidetracking, distinctions, or distractions is a well-ordered Fasttrain composed of 20

pp. 47–48.

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standardized people, or those able to be standardized, politically correct, amiable, non-rebellious, unstimulated, polite and so committed to contributing towards corporate harmony that they never remain impressed on our memory or the ethical direction of our actions.

Mae’s Descent into Hell

The heroine of the Circle scales Mount Olympus without even realising it is actually her descent into Hades. Mae maintains many of her considerate characteristics: she loves her parents and worries about her father’s multiple sclerosis, for a moment to the point of considering leaving the Circle to look after them and help them with the constantly worrying problems raised by the insurance; she is fond of her best friend Annie, who is from a wealthy family and who found her the position at the Circle; she is attracted by two men with whom she has a relationship, although the first, Francis, made insecure by a childhood of abuse and foster care, suffers from premature ejaculation. He has such a need for public recognition that he talks about Mae in a room full of people and films having sex with her, although he knows (or rather because he knows) the film will never be cancelled. The other man, Kalden, is obviously dangerous, perhaps a hacker, an infiltrator. She cherishes the private pleasure of renting a kayak to go out to watch seals, observing the humans and sea creatures she crosses on her route. However, slowly, but with herculean effort and determination, the Circle, manages to smooth off her sharp corners. They provide impeccable free health insurance for her parents, and at the same time, place 16 cameras in their house to ensure total visibility. On the other hand, they put pressure on Mae for the debt that she has implicitly accepted in order to cut down the number of visits home, making her remain almost permanently in the company structure. They subject her friend to a new experiment that allows her to completely reconstruct her past, but horrifying events emerge, such as the Irish slaves owned by her ancestors back in England, and the black slaves they bought on arrival in America. There were also facts concerning her parents, a charming couple who had even witnessed a poor man drown without attempting to save him or call for help. These incite Annie to send “a very strange zing out into the world. It said Actually, I don’t know if we should know everything” 21 and this titubation provokes Mae’s irritation and creates a watershed that constitutes Annie’s public and private end. Mae’s passion for kayaking and her n ­ octurnal 21

Eggers, quoted, p. 439.

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outing in a boat taken without the owner’s permission are discovered by the SeeChange  drones: this induces her to offer herself for total transparency, wearing a device that makes her constantly visible to her one and half million followers and anybody else.

In the Spotlight

The second part of the novel opens with the description of a shark, “bizarre creature, ghostlike, vaguely menacing and never still”22 that is shown by Mae through the camera set in the necklace she wears every morning: “[The camera] saw everything that Mae saw, and often more. The quality of the raw video was such that viewers could zoom, pan, freeze and enhance. The audio was carefully engineered to focus on her immediate conversations, to record but make secondary any ambient sound or background voices. In essence, it meant that any room she was in was scannable by anyone watching”.23 As can be seen at the end of the book, the full visibility of the spectators and the voracious blindness of the shark appearing at the same time, is by no means accidental. The true fury is blind and uncontrolled; it strikes in every direction, tears apart and devours everything it finds within reach. On the other hand, the constant being on display in a world sanitised of any type of problem, is a kind of “education in death”. What is missing is the voyage of discovery, the exposure to risk, and the slow sculpture that occurs in the body of those who experience actual life. One finds oneself creating self-regulating mechanisms that reach extreme forms and that inevitably finish by being self-injected to become an integral part of oneself, as Mae soon discovers by experience: The first time the camera redirected her actions was when she went to the kitchen for something to eat. The image on her wrist showed the interior of the refrigerator and she scanned for a snack. Normally, she would have grabbed a chilled brownie, but seeing the image of her hand reaching for it, and seeing what everyone else would be seeing, she pulled back. She closed the fridge, and from the bowl on the counter, she selected a packet of almonds, and left the kitchen. Later that day, a headache appeared – caused, she thought, by eating less chocolate than usual. She reached into her bag, where she kept a single-serving aspirin packets, but again, on her screen, she saw what everyone was seeing. She saw a hand searching her 22 23

p. 309. Ibidem, p. 310.

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bag, clawing, and instantly she felt desperate and wretched, like some kind of pill-popping addict.24 For their part, Mae’s parents have no desire to be constantly exposed. With Mercer’s help, they black out twelve of the sixteen cameras installed. Their disobedience, for which their daughter will be criticised, even reaches the point where (having exceeded a certain limit) they refuse to thank people for the thousands of messages Mae has organised for them to receive. Certain people send ten messages a day and complain that they do not receive a rapid answer. Naturally, Mae considers her parents ungrateful. She harasses them. She oppresses them. They finish by leaving their home, as does Mercer, who writes a final letter: We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? You people are creating a world of ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive.25 In reality, the craving to always be “in the spotlight” has already arrived in our lives in certain ways. In 1998, there was a lot of talk about Peter Weir’s film, The Truman Show, in which the main character, an undesired baby, was adopted by a television crew and for thirty years was viewed in real time by TV viewers while he continued his life unaware that he was surrounded by professional actors, including his parents and wife. The film has a consoling end: Truman finally discovers he has lived all his life in a fake world and manages to find the courage to escape and venture out into the real world. If this can be considered a consolation, for thirty years, the public never once posed themselves the ethical problem of watching a person totally unaware of the fact he was acting in the midst of a scenario. The salient point, however, is that he had no choice about being constantly exposed to the eyes of others, while today, certain families act this way deliberately. For the moment, this happens mostly in the United States, but it has increased in Italy as well. The phenomenon is called family vlogs (short for video-blogs) and these people deliberately choose to be viewed constantly on YouTube where every day they post videos “documenting” their insipid lives, and drumming up amazing popularity. The Shaytard family from Idaho, with their four children, have three million followers on YouTube and in 24 25

p. 331. p. 434.

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five years have had over two billion viewings. A Neapolitan in Italy is attempting the same thing, but not starring his beautiful blond foreign wife so much as his beloved little son: he could become the star of tomorrow. Marino Niola has a theory on the reasons for this inexplicable phenomenon: Perhaps it is because the existence of each one of us has become a succession of last-minute moments, that we consume, always in a hurry, without managing to give them an overall sense. It is a temporal order. We live through them, that’s all. And if we try to describe them, we do it in detached fragments, photograms that have the same episodic nature as a selfie, a video, an image or some thought that we put on line. We hope to rediscover that depth of time, that succession of before and after, that these days is blended with our eternal present.26

Collateral Damage

Mae continues to advance like a caterpillar, collecting one success after another. One day, from the podium she presents one of the latest innovations, SoulSearch, that is able to identify anybody who is sought by the police; to give a demonstration she selects a case at random from the computer. He is an English escaped prisoner who has not been seen for ten years. The three billion Circle users were warned in advance, and already there are a million on line. Thanks to the diffusion of the photo and the enormous user participation, the fugitive is identified, hunted down, almost lynched and arrested in a little more than ten minutes. At this point, glowing with satisfaction, Mae has a truly terrible idea, and diffuses the photo of Mercer “A fugitive from friendship”. He is found in Oregon after only a few minutes, in the woods at the foot of a mountain. A crowd of people rush to his house, and Mercer has no choice but to escape in his pick-up. Mae sends drones after him and manages to establish voice contact with him to be able to speak to him. But hearing her voice, Mercer drives faster and faster is a desperate attempt to escape her voice. From the drones, come a woman’s voice: Mercer, submit to us! Submit to our will! Be our friend! Mercer turned his truck toward the drone, as if intending to ram it, but it adjusted its trajectory automatically and mimicked his movement, 26

Marino Niola, Lo show della quotidianità ultima frontiera del reality, Repubblica, 26 ­October 2015.

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staying directly in sync. You can’t escape, Mercer! the woman’s voice bellowed. “Never, ever, ever. It’s over. Now give up. Be our friend!” […] The audience was cheering, and the comments were piling up, a number of watchers saying this was the greatest viewing experience of their lives. And while the cheers were growing louder, Mae saw something come over Mercer’s face, something like determination, something like serenity. His right arm spun the steering wheel, and he disappeared from the view of drones, temporarily at least, and when they regained their look on him, his truck was crossing the highway, speeding toward its concrete barrier, so fast that it was impossible that it could hold him back. The truck broke through and leapt into the gorge, and for a brief moment, seemed to fly, the mountains visible for miles beyond. And then the truck dropped from view.27 Yet not even this “collateral damage” seems to touch Mae. Although she loves her parents, who come to the funeral, but who do not speak to her, Mae finds another father in Bailey, the kindest of the “wise men”, who reassures her saying that the outcome of the event depended only on Mercer: after all, he had simply needed to accept the help he had been offered, “a hug from humanity”.

The Shark of Totalitarianism

The last pages of the novel describe an experiment. All the fish species found in the Mariana Trench are placed in an aquarium and preserved to recreate the original habitat. The three Wise Men come to watch with Mae, and she discovers that Ty, whom she had never met, is actually Kalden, her lover, who had worried her because of his appearance and hacker behaviour. In a few bites, the shark gobbles up the octopus and sea horses, and remains alone to swim around the tank, permanently hungry. Then Ty and Mae meet away from the cameras, and Ty explains what the consequences would be if the Circle were to close containing, not 90, but 100% of the information. Mae resists: she wants to be visible and thinks that most of the population feels the same way. Ty tries to convince her: “But Mae. We saw every creature in that tank, didn’t we? We saw them devoured by a beast that turned them to ash. Don’t you see that

27

Eggers, quoted, p. 465.

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everything that goes into that tank, with that beast, with this beast, will share the same lot?”28 Ty, the utopist who realised his idea was on an apocalyptic slide, is denounced by Mae to the other two Wise Men; the last pockets of resistance are crushed, the Circle is closed and nothing can re-open it. It seems like the unique prophesy uttered by the great poet Brodskij, more than twenty years ago:29 “But I do think that the coming world, the coming epoch, will be less moral, more relative, more personal, less, I would say, human”. In 2001, one of today’s greatest living novelists, Jonathan Franzen, his first masterpiece, The Corrections,30 tells the story of a family that no longer functions as such, although all the right elements exist, since the parents love their three children, and the family of five all love one another. But there seems to be a counter-force that inserts itself between any collective or even individual harmony. In his novel, Franzen grasped a structural, epochal change, without analysing it in the setting, but making it vibrate painfully in the blind streets of each character. If Mae had not lived in the hyper-technological era of the Circle (and our era), the fascination exercised by the Word of the Three Wise Men would not have prevailed on that far more modest, but at the same time far more vibrant attraction of her ex-boyfriend Mercer, based on true encounters, on live dialogues, instead of a flood of anonymous zings. 28 29 30

Ibidem, p. 490. Josif Brodskij, Conversation, edited by Cynthia L. Haven, University of Mississippi, 2003. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Chapter 6

The Possibility of an Island

Ordinary Perversion

In his clever and inspired essay on Ordinary Perversion,1 Lebrun talks about the emerging of a new psychic economy, which could produce “newsubjects” which have never existed until now, germinated from a legitimacy crisis arising from the gap between personal interests and those of society. Already, Hannah Arendt had stated that if authority was revoked from political and public life, the responsibility of making the world go round would fall on the shoulders of each individual, but in this case, consciously or not, everybody ignores the need for order in the world, for the need to give orders, and to obey other orders. Are these the final consequences of Enlightenment? Jürgen Habermas, the defender of Enlightenment, had explained that Enlightenment poses a problem because its rational morality is focused on individuals and does not foster solidarity, or the collective action guided by morality. This separation between society in its ordered, coordinated, and moral entirety, and the orphans of transcendence, of the leaders and the masters, including the pater familias, has produced, on one hand, a sense of loss and isolation (with nothing to lean on and a new dimension of irremediable insularity) and on the other, a perception of omnipotence. If parents no longer feel they represent authority and always indulge their children, then the children will grow believing that everything is possible; they will not experience the necessary frustrations that are essential to inspire what makes culture possible: sublimation. When the novelist, Niccolò Ammaniti, came to Rimini to participate at one of the Erickson conventions “La Qualità dell’integrazione scolastica e sociale” (The Quality of Scholastic and Social Integration), he told the three thousand people in the audience that he had suffered as a small child when he was “sent to take a rest” on summer afternoons, because he felt no need of a “rest” and he found himself with a space in his day that was forlornly empty, idle and boring, that he would have been able to fill with games, activity, and other children. However, he added that now he is grateful to his parents for this confinement, that he had considered so unfair at the time: he found himself forced to fill this

1 Jean-Pierre Lebrun, La Perversion ordinaire. Vivre ensemble sans autrui, Paris, Denoël, 2007. (Ordinary Perversion: Living Together Without the Other 2007).

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time with imagination, creativity, and reflection, and he explained that his narrative strength originated during those afternoons. But today, who has time to dedicate to thinking and reflection? Thinking is a means for keeping afloat in the void. It is like swimming or tightrope walking. An exercise needs to be learnt. A practice where one needs to begin (initiate) of course, but a practice in which one needs to become initiated above all. To be able to think, one must learn to stay afloat in the void. In other words, one must have been able to lean, at least once, on another person, who has already been afloat in the void, and who, in turn, had learnt from someone else. This is what our masters are – or should we use the past tense? – were for.2 Thinking is the equivalent of being able to stand firm in the world into which we have been thrown. However, if the new prevailing system flings us into a condition of spoilt little omnipotent narcissists intolerant of authority and masters, then, according to Lebrun, we become one of the “ordinary perverse”: “like the Robinsons on an island, which this time is not deserted, but inhabited by others who are nothing more than other Robinsons. This results in the absence of the Other, despite the presence of the Other and others, and consequently, creates an obstacle to the work of culture”.3

Animulae vagulae blandulae (“Little Souls, Gentle and Drifting”)

The second dystopia I would like to consider, The possibility of an island,4 describes a post-cloning world, in which the replicas of the people from whom they had been cloned preserve the memories of their human ancestors. The “neohumans” carry on the lives of their predecessors but are completely different from their ancestors because their feelings and emotions have evaporated. The neohumans live alone and communicate with their counterparts only through their screens, while outside, what remains of humanity has become barbarised, regressing into an almost animal state. Daniel 24, who is about to die, and Daniel 25 who will replace him, recall the life of Daniel 1 alternating the narration, and in reality, Daniel 1, telling his story, illustrates the life of humans during our current era. 2 Ibidem, p. 29. 3 Ibidem, p. 427. 4 Michel Houellebecq, La possibilité d’une île, Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2005, The Possibility of an Island, Vintage Books usa, 2007.

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Daniel 1 is a comic, and his first self-descriptions of his work and of himself are ruthless: In the end, the main advantage of being a humourist, and more generally, the humourist’s attitude in life, is to be able to behave like a jerk with complete impunity, and even to be able to make one’s abjectness extremely profitable in terms of sexual or economic success; and all this with the public’s approval.5 Daniel 1 marries a first time, but leaves his wife immediately when she becomes pregnant. However, there are no limits to his venom, and in fact, he writes: “the day my son committed suicide I made myself some scrambled eggs with tomato. […] I had never been fond of that son: he was as stupid as his mother and as despicable as his father”.6 In reality, as Peter Sloterdijk explained in his first important work,7 one must be cynical to read contemporaneity rather than Enlightenment, but by definition, the latter collides with any idea of utopia, and it is cynicism that pervades  the protagonist of Houellebecq’s masterpiece. We are a thousand miles from the resentment that shored up and fed the reaction of the masses in the first half of the twentieth century, when the population was still able to let itself be swept away by the hypnotic words of a Duce, who despite ruin, destruction, war and death, promised Palingenesis, redemption, and a common renaissance. Today, we are still seeing these mechanisms of nationalistic intolerance and cults of war, contrast, and closure, above all in Eastern European countries, especially in Orbàn’s Hungary, where dozens of young teenagers are sent by their parents at the end of their school term to train in para-military camps, woken before dawn to train with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades. Orbàn, whom my illustrious co-author opposes with all her strength, has even ­rehabilitated the dictator, Horthy, who, faithful ally of Hitler, governed the country from the end of the first World War almost until the end of the Second War. However a reaction of blind retraction has been triggered in other western nations as well, a cast-iron consolidation of “us” as opposed to all the ­others, as if in our g­ lobalised world the dinghy of a small nation would have any hope of salvation in a battle against a fleet of frigates in open sea. Returning to cynicism, Sloterdijk conveniently divides it into two versions: the first, the anti-philosophical (from necessity) cynicism of Diogenes, who, 5 Ibidem, p. 22 (Italian translation). 6 Ibidem, p. 26 (Italian translation). 7 Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Mein, Suhrkamp, 1983, Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota, 1985.

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following the death of Socrates could not support a philosophy which, emptied of all ethics, was no longer worthy of the name. The second is that unrooted and egoistic version that is predominant in the West today. In Daniel 1 we see a cruel exemplification, but at the same time, he is almost capable of self-criticism, of awareness, a situation that is hard to find among his similars who, most of the time, do not even need to question themselves, constantly self-absolving themselves and taking it for granted that their attitude is the only form that is not only feasible but also appropriate. In reality, Daniel 1 is a moralist, as is Houellebecq, and albeit, as he drifts, he observes with lucidity the world around him that is caving-in. He is aware of the almost anthropological transmutation of his fellows, under the spell of enduring youth, enjoyment, and the levity of a lifestyle that coincides more and more with the tendency to be swept along on the changing wave of latest trends, fads, blinding lights that suddenly flash on, only to be switched off almost silently at some stage, for no apparent reason. They are animulae vagulae blandulae; even when they live in relatively stable conditions, in a family or a group, they act as if they were living constantly in a hotel. Perhaps it is not incidental that the hotel as a contemporary myth has recently inspired the film by Maria Sole Tognazzi, I travel alone, in which Margherita Buy who is a professional hotel inspector, is perfectly at ease constantly wandering from place to place almost through force of inertia. The Hotel theme is also featured in the book by the multifaceted intellectual, Joanna Walsh,8 who was also a professional hotel inspector and who made certain observations that are truly interesting, such as the assonance between guest and ghost, that can be found in large standardized hotels like the Frankfurt airport Sheraton or in “boutique hotels” like the Accademia di Verona, decorated with wonderful paintings and unique antiques. Like ghosts, guests only reside “part-time”, staying there, but always slightly somewhere else at the same time. The very dangerous involvement with other people (very dangerous, because human relations can always be disappointing and make us suffer) is reduced to a minimum.

A Generation of Eternal Kids

Daniel 1 had a successful career, and after earning his first million euros, he suddenly fell in love: Isabelle, director of the magazine, Lolita, that targeted a thirty-year old public still obsessed with staying as young as their children, a cheap magazine that, the “psycho-rigid” Isabelle, accepted to run, despite her 8 Joanna Walsh, Hotel, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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considerable intelligence and very professional capacity, because she was not immune to the Zeitgeist and because of the extremely high salary. Her analysis of Daniel’s sexual success is interesting to note: “If girls are attracted to stage performers”, she goes on, “it is not only because they want a celebrity; it is mainly because they feel that someone who can get up on a stage takes a huge risk, because the public is a powerful and dangerous animal who can destroy their creature at any moment, get rid of him, force him to flee amidst sarcasm and insults. The reward they can offer their hero who risks his life each time he goes on stage, is to give him their body; it is just the same as a gladiator or a matador”.9 Isabelle is intelligent and smart, but when she turns forty she feels out of place in that world obsessed by adolescence, and she resigns. Despite her relentless classical ballet sessions, her splendid body begins to weaken, and surrenders to the stress of her age. Daniel marries her and he dreams of giving her a baby, but only for a moment because he feels the same aversion for children that Jonathan Swift felt for mankind in general: “I was the problem. In me, there was not only the legitimate disgust that any man of normal constitution feels at the sight of a brat; there was not only the deeply-rooted conviction that a child is some kind of depraved dwarf with innate cruelty, in whom can be immediately seen the worst traits of the species and from whom domestic animals wisely maintain a safe distance. There was also a deeper horror, an authentic horror when faced with the endless ordeal that is man’s existence”.10 And it is true that today, there are far more couples who decide to live without having children, and Houellebecq signals the appearance and proliferation of childfree zones, where children and adolescents are denied access. More couples are deciding to have a pet rather than a child. There are seven million dogs and seven and a half million cats in Italy, there are three million more (both cats and dogs) in France. The slight predominance of cats is due to their greater level of independence. A cat can take care of itself, while a dog needs to be walked three times a day. On the other hand, a dog represents and expresses unconditional love, and having a dog signifies being adored without perhaps having to return such generous feelings, except for some food and a little exercise. In any case, opting for a domestic animal places our eternal kids/fake adults in the position of being able to treat the pet like an object and not as a subject. This is something they may not be able to create in a love r­ elationship 9 10

Houellebecq, quoted, p. 31 (Italian translation). Ibidem, pp. 56–57 (Italian translation).

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in which each one expects to treat the other as an object, with inevitable break-ups and the desperate chase in search of the illusory perfect love story. In the United States, this can reach up to five marriages consistently destined for failure, while a true love story can be found with a pet who will never make a scene, impose his willpower, will never complain for no reason, and, unlike children, will never subject parents to the nightmare of teenage years. Perhaps, as Pope Francis has advised us, there truly is a need for “living love in chastity”. Not in the sense of abstinence, avoiding any sexual relations, but rather, as stated by Enzo Bianchi, by treating the other as a subject and not as an object: in fact chaste (castus) refers to those who do not practice incest (in-castus); incest is inherent to human nature, explained Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents; we come into the world naturally incestuous, after which civilisation dissuades us from a custom that, uprooted, opens up to the infinite stimulating encounters and exchanges available in the world. But, as Rilke recalls, “For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.” Daniel and Isabelle are very much in love and are also intelligent, but unfortunately, they are not “chaste” in the sense described by Enzo Bianchi: Daniel’s anxiety of fusion, of his total compenetration is subjected to a hard knock when one day he realises that while Isabelle does experience orgasms, she closes her eyes tightly, refusing the feral dimension, aflame in ecstatic abandon; on the other hand, Isabelle, who had always practised classical ballet as an Apollonian celebration, who had always appreciated the full round effect in the paintings of Raphael and Botticelli and who loved showing the perfection of her body, suddenly realises that her breasts and buttocks have begun to droop irretrievably: she begins to switch off the lights, then she loses her desire for him, the magic that made their intimacy so precious begins to evaporate, tenderness that is replaced by irritation because they are no longer able to take their union to a higher level: When physical love is over, everything is over; a melancholy irritation, without depth or intensity fills each day as it goes by. And I had no illusions about physical love. Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria of physical love are exactly the same as the criteria of Nazism.11 Daniel and Isabelle are the perfect example of the “enlightened false consci­ ousness” of the contemporary cynics described by Sloterdijk in his Critique 11

Ibidem, p. 63 (Italian translation).

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of C ­ ynical Reason: They are disenchanted, therefore able to act efficiently, ­however, without their awareness being able to give real meaning to their lives.

The Utopia of the Future of Utopia

This expression by Bauman implies that in a world that has forgotten Aidos, or the bond we have with others that is not imposed by judicial restrictions, but that emanates from the “natural” human inclination to make and construct together, utopia no longer plays a role. It has emptied, contracted, mortified itself, in the dream of the own personal survival of each one, irrespective not only of other important aspects but also the concern for those who are to come. Sloterdijk himself states this at the beginning of his Critique:12 After the decades of the Reconstruction and the period of the utopias and “alternatives”, it seems as if a certain ingenuous enthusiasm has suddenly disappeared. We are worried about catastrophes here and there; favourable circumstances for the sale of new values (and all painkillers in general). Times are cynical, and they know well that the new values will not go far. Sensibility, family homes, peacekeeping, quality of life, conscience and responsibility, ecological awareness: none of these sound the way they should. It was to be expected. Cynicism is becoming more conservative behind the scenes. The prattle will move on, and everything will return to normal… Even more so than thirty years ago when the Critique was published, today we are still missing the capacity and the inclination to give. Bronisław Malinowski, an anthropologist and “champion” in giving, dear to Bauman, whom he had mentioned in On Education,13 was commemorated by Marino Niola14 on the centenary of his birth. At the outbreak of the first World War, Malinovski, this Pole who taught at the London School of Economics, found himself blocked in Australia (in principle, as a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was an enemy who should have been in a prison camp) but he was permitted to continue his research in the Trobriand Islands. There he discovered a system of coexistence based on the gift: the inhabitants defied the treacherous 12 13 14

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 5 (Italian translation). Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo, On Education, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2012. Marino Niola, “Quando il dono diventò la base dell’economia”, Repubblica, 17 December 2015.

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s­ hark-infested ocean to take objects, that in themselves were of little use, but charged with relational significance. After enjoying the delight of these gifts, those who received them, in turn, risked their lives to put the gifts back in circulation in a virtuous circle that spread friendship and gratitude in these peoples who would otherwise have waged war on one another. As Niola wrote: “a gift is the most subtly unselfish form of profit, because it is the very origin of social bonding: the primary gesture, unconditional and free, that leads the individual out of himself and attaches him to others in a network that ensures exchange, protection, and solidarity. And as a consequence, profit as well”. Every trace of this concept has been lost in The Possibility of an Island: Isabelle goes through her long farewell to life, far away from Daniel, first with compulsive eating, followed by elimination of pain with morphine, permitted in B ­ iarritz, her only comfort is watching her little dog Fox run and play. At the same time, Daniel comes across a sect that promises a select few, nothing less than immortality. A private immortality, an exclusive eternity, truly cynical, since it excludes everything else. A cloning that signifies après moi le déluge, while the rest of the world can crash and disintegrate, a private ­indifferent, withdrawn salvation and self-preservation.

Chapter 7

2084: the End of the World Thanks to its counterfactual form, faith gives those who practice it the chance to grasp hold of a redeeming ghost.1 It is possible to sustain that modern totalitarianism is part of the consensus of the stadium. […] If placed in comparison with these circumstances, G ­ abriel Tarde’s theory, according to which man’s social condition is in either a hypnotic or sleepwalking state, seems more than justified. The shouting of the stadium crowd retroacts directly on crowd because camouflaged excitement is provoked by the involvement caused by the event, the excitement provokes noisy gesticulation and – from the intensified echo in the ear – the commotion that approaches persuasion.2

∵

The Hypnotic Suspension of Abistan

This book by Boualem Sansal produces an effect that is truly dystopic, alienating, and unstable: not so much for the ferocious execution of the dissidents or the culprits who are carried to the “stadium” to be impaled, dismembered, or burnt alive. The ferocity also belongs to non-Islamic totalitarian regimes; the most disturbing aspect of this book is the hypnotic suspension, the rehashing of empty senseless slogans that penetrate peoples’ customs until they become an integral part of their way of life. It forms the most absolute cancellation of any possibilities and alternatives, the capacity to think, imagine, conjecting something that sits outside the bubble of annihilation that our world has become. The main character, Ati, is a naïve young boy suffering from tuberculosis, living in a sanatorium located on a mountaintop, with other patients who systematically die one after the other. Ati is a member of the new Islamized phenomenon, Abistan, which was created perhaps following a great “holy” war, or some other upheaval, but that nobody remembers. The deserted empire 1 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären iii. Schäume, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2004, p. 188 (Italian translation). 2 Ibidem, p. 595 (Italian translation).

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in which he lives takes its name from Abi, the prophet “delegated” by Yölah, the one unique god. Like his compatriots, Ati has always been obedient to the orders of the empire, reporting suspicious activities and strictly adhering to the regulations established in a world whose unique recurring date is 2084. A vague date: perhaps a reference to the beginning of the empire, or some other event. What is certain is that the population lives suspended in time, in a context that is always identical. From time to time, pilgrims visit the sanatorium; except for agents and people charged with special missions, pilgrims are the only people authorised to travel around the empire. However, this is permitted only according to pre-established schedules and following routes determined by others: “The reasons for these restrictions are unknown. They go far back in time. In reality, nobody has ever thought to question the fact, harmony has reigned for so long that there has never been any reason to be at all apprehensive. Even illness and death has no effect on the morale of the population”.3 There had been a Great War with hundreds of millions of deaths, but then, although the country is still often at war, nobody speaks about wars because the war has been definitively won. The enemy, had been called “The Enemy” with a capital letter, then suddenly this word disappeared and people spoke of the Great Unbelief / Miscreance and makoufs, “invisible and omnipresent traitors”, to create an internal rather than external enemy. Finally, after adopting the horrendous word “Chitan”, a more appropriate term was designated: Balis. Its adepts were renamed Balisiani. The hut where Abi had been born was represented in a reproduction, from the most sumptuous to the most humble, according to the census, but nobody was ever aware that the area was given a different geographical location every eleven years as a sign of respect to all the sixty provinces of Abistan. Nobody has ever been disturbed by these contradictions, changes of direction, or constantly renewed versions. The population exists as if they live permanently in a haze of opium, everything is fine, everything is as it should be. The pilgrimages, whose true role is to empty the overcrowded towns from time to time, making a good number die in their search for sanctity. Under the same guise as the Holy War, they pay homage to the families of the selected martyrs, as happens today with the suicide bombers in strongly asymmetrical wars like that between Palestine and Israel. In this novel by Sansal, there is a strong echo of manipulation on the choice of martyrs by the governing authorities, with the selection of individuals who do not intend to dedicate their lives to martyrdom. The film director, Hany Abu-Assad showed this aspect very strikingly 3 Boualem Sansal, 2084. La fin du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 2015, p. 17.

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in his film in 2005, Paradise Now, in which two young Palestinians Khaled and Said, selected to be blown up in Israel, are manipulated like puppets by the organisers. On the other hand, the pilgrims also recall the ceremonies performed by Muslims at the Mecca, with ritual acts, such as throwing stones at Satan and the sacrifice of a slaughtered sheep. Sansal was very explicit on this subject: In Islam, initiation into adult life begins with the slitting of a sheep’s throat. In Islamism, it is the slitting of a man’s throat. In Algeria, during the civil war, these were things that happened every day. When a Police officer was captured. The Islamist would call his ten or eleven year old son, and tell him to slit the man’s throat. The mothers applauded, crying, because he had become a man.4 The ardour with which Muslims hope to be among the “selected” for a pilgrimage is similar to the characters in this book: for access to the holy places, Saudi Arabia has established quotas for each country. The pilgrims are chosen through a kind of lottery and everybody quivers with excitement, hoping to be able to wash away their sins and rise to a form of sacralisation.

Ati’s Sudden Awakening

His stay in the sanatorium, and his miraculous healing, moves something within Ati, under the crust of inertia that imprisons the mind of all the population. He begins to ask himself questions, he is scared, but then his doubts and perplexities return to torment him. A pile of corpses is found at the bottom of a tunnel in the sanatorium: “Horror: as well as the injuries caused by the vertiginous drop, it is discovered that the soldiers have been atrociously massacred. Ears, tongues and noses are missing, their sex stuck down their throats, crushed testicles, eyes dug out. […] This discovery triggers an insidious process in Ati that will lead him towards revolt”.5 However, he finds the immobility of that world destabilising and it is hard to establish with whom he should feel angry, he finds everything confusing, concealed, and incomprehensible. However, the conditions offered by the sanatorium allow Ati something that is not accessible to those living in the crowded world of every-day life: ­reflection, doubt, imagination. For example, the rumours about the story of a border. The concept of the reigning world is that of the monosphere described 4 Boualem Sansal, L’apocalisse islamista e l’autunno dell’Europa. Intervista con Gloria Origgi, Micromega, 8/2015, p. 20. 5 Boualem Sansal, 2084, quoted, p. 38.

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in ­Sloterdijk’s Bubbles (Sphären) trilogy. It is something infinite and complete that revolves on its own axis, with paradise above, perfect and joyous, with hell below, with its monstrosities, and a world populated with the faithful in between: How is it possible to imagine a border? Therefore, Ati has the intuition that the part of the world in which he was born is that of the defeated, the people who were chased away from that border.

There Is No Room for Beauty

Ati’s universe is interwoven with death. Apart from the embalmed towns that seem to be under hypnosis, the rest of the empire is an immense desert, a kind of negation of the cosmos: “If ever Acosmism had a place of origin, it is in that town without a town, in that world without a world that is the desert, in which wordly shadow one meets those that do not want to interpreted or transform the world, but simply leave it aside”.6 Beauty, grace, joy, must be mortified. He, who is already old at thirty, was and in a certain way, is still a handsome man, and as a boy, he had despaired and been ashamed of his beauty because it was considered a stain and a magnet for the lower instincts of other men. In the sanatorium, he suffered at night hearing or seeing young boys who were raped regularly. Women were shielded from temptation because they bound their breasts, wrapped themselves up and covered themselves with veils; men grew horrible prickly beards; but the boys, or smooth-skinned men like Ati, were always the target of male libido. In his interview at Micromega,7 Sansal spoke clearly about the unpopularity of at least two of the three great monotheistic faiths, Islam and Catholicism, because they are apocalyptic religions, focused on the pursuit, through humiliation and death, of the only true life which is located in the afterlife. In Sansal’s novel, all are dressed in long robes burni, a kind of habit like those worn by priests and monks. Žižek wrote that the Catholic Church was constitutionally paedophilic, because the priests wear female clothing, are not permitted sexual relations with women, and surround themselves with children, who, hairless and delicate, are the closest to the female image. Ati begins to ask himself how so much depravation can be possible in a world that is described and praised as perfect. At the same time, he is t­ errified

6 Bruno Accarino, Peter Sloterdijk filosofo dell’estasi, in Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I. Blasen, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, trad. it. Sfere. Volume I. Microsferologia. Bolle, Roma, Meltemi, 2009, p. 14. 7 Sansal, L’apocalisse islamista, quoted.

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and his confusion becomes so obvious that he is considered an unbeliever. But he continues his reflections and suddenly he understands how the Single Thought of the System works: it is affirmed, not because of solicitation to believe, but through the nine prayers (instead of the five traditional prayers of Islam) recited every day, through a truth taken for granted that nobody had ever even considered to question or discuss: “it was hypocrisy that created the perfect believer, not the faith which because of its oppressive nature brought doubt along in its wake, and even revolt and madness […] true religion could be nothing more than well-ordered sanctimony, built as a monopoly, and maintained by ever-present terror. ‘Detail was the essential aspect of the practice’, everything had been coded, from birth to death, sunrise to sunset. The life of the perfect believer was an uninterrupted series of gestures and words that were to be constantly repeated, leaving no room for dreaming, hesitation, reflection, possible disbelief, and perhaps, belief”.8 In this way, atrocities, which are commonplace, not only in Sansal’s dystopia, but also in an Islam eroded by corruption, and a Catholic church in which a cardinal can (or rather, could, before Pope Francis) take donations for poor children and assign them to build himself a penthouse. These aspects become secondary, part of a landscape in which the only invariable figure is personal perpetuation.

Flash: an Illumination of Freedom

In a constantly revolving, suspended world that seems to be crystallised in time, Ati realises that if he wants to follow the dream of a freedom that has been banished from the universal horizon, he must begin with himself and from the awareness that, even at the cost of losing his life, it is worth fighting to gain freedom, … even if he is struck dead during his attempt to succeed. He observes the vacuity of existence when people are limited to simply survive rather than follow their personal yearnings; this almost seems to echo the words of Miguel Benasayag9 in a passage that describes his transformation: His heart was beating so strongly it was painful. Such a strange sensation: the stronger he felt the fear that twisted his gut, the stronger it became. Something crystallised in the depth of his heart, a grain of authentic courage, a diamond. Unable to describe it without using a paradox, he discovers that life is worth it only if you die for it, and without it, we are 8 Ibidem, p. 46. 9 Miguel Benasayag and Riccardo Mazzeo, C’è una vita prima della morte?, Trento, Erickson, 2015.

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all corpses who have never been anything other than corpses. Before he died, he wanted to live this life that had appeared out of the darkness, even if only for a dazzling instant.10 This is a miraculous awakening. Ati takes stock of the blend of good and bad that maintains an intimate relationship in the desert of negation of life in which he lives: they are both the unique prerogative of an implacable god who directs them according to his own pleasure, forcing subjects to perform horrific actions to oppose an even greater evil in the service of good, in this state of enchantment, of which Ati has also been a victim. On the other hand, leaving aside Abistan and current Islamic States, “populations, empires, churches and above all, modern nation States make conspicuously important attempts at a policy of space for reconstruction, through imagination, fantasy uteruses for infant masses”.11 However at this point, the picture has been recomposed, even though it is unfinished, and finally, when he is released from the sanatorium, Ati knows that nothing will be able to prevent him from seeking the truth, and the unknown territories that exist beyond the border, because the freedom that has opened up within him has given him irrepressible strength. It takes Ati a whole year to return home. The hundreds of millions of deaths caused by the war, force people to walk on an infinite series of corpses. The population is like the land… everything is bare, desolate, parched in a postapocalyptic landscape. However, it is obvious that some people are equipped with means, even immense means: planes and helicopters can be seen sweeping overhead, but the fortunate passengers are never seen and communication with the people is limited to screens attached to walls throughout every part of the country. Here, the author basically describes what already exists in Muslim countries where literalist Islam exists: all are slaves, not only the women, but the men as well. Life can be stripped away for the slightest demeanour, negligible infractions, while the select few enjoy unrestrained luxury, and travel in private jets and on billionaire ships. Before he reaches his native town of Qodsabat, Ati makes two discoveries: the fact that the war is still going on, although it is denied by the authorities, with scenes of a military convoy dragging an infinite stream of prisoners, with the women in the rear, forty feet behind, so that the men cannot see nor smell them. The second fact, above all, is the existence of an archaeological site 10 11

Sansal, quoted, p. 50. Peter Sloterdijk, quoted, p. 115 (Italian translation).

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d­ iscovered by Nas, a young public official, who reveals how this discovery can question the very symbolic bases of Abistan. But it also awakens his fears, since he has realised that he has found himself in the midst of contrasting interests of certain clans of the Just Fraternity. Ati, who had previously lived in a decaying cellar, infested with rats and bed bugs that had contributed to his tuberculosis, is assigned a tiny but decent residence on arrival and a respectable administrative job. Now he is able to look at the world around him with new eyes. In his administrative job, regular monthly inspections assign him a mark of merit or demerit: in the second case, if the verdict remains negative for six months, the reprobate simply disappears; nobody knows what happens to the person who has fallen into disgrace, and nobody can or will talk about it. On the 15th of the month, when Ati’s inspection arrives he manages to obtain a positive mark from the inspectors, but shows a moment of hesitation when he is asked if he would personally kill anyone who failed in his duties as a believer. He manages to save himself just in time by giving the excuse that, as a convalescent, he is not sure of his physical capacity. But then at night, he continues to lose sleep, turning it over in his mind: “It was the film of an authorised rape that he would have been subject to every month for the rest of his life. The same questions, the same answers, the same scenario of madness. […] Life in the municipal offices begins again the next day as if nothing has happened. Force of habit, what else? Everything that is repeated is integrated in the confusion of invisible routine and then forgotten. Breathing, blinking, thinking? Does authorised rape, repeated day after day, month after month, all life long, become a love story? Contented dependency. Or is it the beginning of the ignorance that is still at work and will carry on forever? What is there to complain about if we are not aware, if nothing belongs to us?”12 The same unsuspecting indifference of animals as they are sent to slaughter.

The Mystery of Language

At the municipality, Ati finally meets a kind cheerful character similar to his own: a colleague, Koa, with whom he discovers a strong affinity, and with whom he begins to study the mystery of the only language of the empire, abilang. This recalls the “newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984: and in fact, it is an extremely simplified language, but with a slight difference, because it is not limited to preferring verbs to nouns, and to stripping the flesh from a corpus inclined to induce 12

Sansal, quoted, p. 91.

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thought, but to submerge all the expressions used in the paralysing river of religion. People no longer “communicate” but petrify their existence in a series of repetitions, incantations, and mystic abductions that nail the population to an undeniable status quo. “Ati has a revelation that the sacred language has an electrochemical nature, with an unquestionable nuclear component. It does not interact with intelligence but disintegrates it, and with what remains (a viscous precipitate) it forms good amorphous believers or absurd nonentities”.13 Language has a very pervasive influence on a person’s approach. It sculpts them and severely narrows or widens their capacity to form critical opinions. It is by no means accidental that Boko Haram has always opposed education, particularly for women, from its very beginning and as ferociously as possible. Miguel Benasayag explains this aspect in his latest book14 where he distinguishes among the “organisms” like newly born children (which lose certain extensive parts, like molecules, as they modify, but maintain their intensive part that represents the breath of life). “Aggregates” like stones made exclusively of extensive parts, and “mixed” parts like macro economy, technology, and language, that function like organisms because they capture and transform extensive parts, but unlike organisms, depend on them for their existence. “A language possesses its ‘own life’, an internal order; however at the same time, if it is not spoken and does not expand, if its words and modisms do not change, if it is not transformed and does not adopt new extensive parts, it becomes a ‘dead language’, a language in a state of final balance”.15 This is exactly what happens in Abistan. It is what is happening today in prevalently literalistic Islamic countries where the total adhesion of regulatory aspects and the interdiction of all other generative, creative, artistic aspects cannot help but mummify the language and the life force of people flattened in the shadow of what they could otherwise become. Language reduced to a cemented skeleton used only for minute transactions and to recite prayers, will inevitably colonise whole populations. In these cases, it can be said that “rather than speaking a language, we humans are spoken by a language”.16 Something similar also occurs in the gradual illiteracy underway in the west. We are formed by our actions, our bodies are closely interwoven with our brains  and modify them constantly; the brain grows or decreases with the rest of the body, it possesses no autonomy, and the fact that we are ­doing 13 14 15 16

Ibidem, p. 96. Miguel Benasayag, El cerebro aumentado, el hombre disminuido, Buenos Aires, Paidos, 2015. Sansal, quoted, p. 104. Ibidem, p. 105.

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e­ verything in the easiest possible way with increasingly greater frequency thanks to technology, is making us disabled without our even realising it. Using a pen establishes an infinitely closer, more familiar and intimate contact with a text we are writing, compared to using a keyboard. Thought flows with greater density, even the breathing of the writer is different, the pauses, certain letters written with greater impetus, or at other times, almost with reluctance. Letters that are all different, drenched with internal juices, experienced with a sometimes paroxysmal intensity that is translated and can be tangibly seen in the traced markings. Naturally, today almost everybody uses a computer to write, but new generations who do everything at 100 miles an hour are less inclined to write complete words, preferring shortcuts, abbreviations, and amputations. They like the impact of emoticons, and their messages are always superficial. In this case, rather than being colonised by a language that celebrates immobility and withdrawal as anticipation of death, we are colonised by a technology that induces us to run on the spot, obeying ceremonial actions that in a stolid and vacuous representation of life speeded up to breaking point, it reduces us to the cancellation of everything that is consistent, enduring, flavoursome, and meaningful. In every case, the Abistan language, so pregnant with magical-religious resonance, has become just as limited as that of our adolescents: “Although some people felt that with time and progress in civilisation, languages would have expanded and increased in both meaning and syllables, what is happening is the opposite: words have been shortened, downsized, reduced to collections of onomatopoeic sounds and exclamations that sound like primitive grunts and screams, hardly conducive to developing complex thought processes or as a way to gain access to superior universes”.17 As there are two of them, this gives Ati and Koa courage and they descend into the depths of the earth to visit the ghetto of Abistan. Perhaps the Renegades and their ghetto were created by the Authorities themselves, something like the American Secret Services who created IS to counter other enemies, or like the strategy of tension that provoked the exploding of bombs killing so many civilian victims in Italy in the Sixties and Seventies to fuel the needs of a strong State without restriction. The ghetto is a world in reverse: here the people speak unknown dialects, they live in disgusting filth, but there is an atmosphere of constant good humour, they fill the walls with graffiti ridiculing the believers, and most of all, women dress as women: they do not wear veils or burniqab, they do not bind their breasts to hide them from view, they move in absolute freedom, talking and flirting. Ati and Koa are petrified (in the book there is not a single sexual 17

Sansal, quoted, p. 103.

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encounter, death has eliminated carnality completely) but they cannot help the strengthening desire that inspires them to continue to search for what their empire has buried under a blanket of devout fear, but that obviously exists and pulsates in some place.

Searching for Unsaid Truths

The two friends have committed so many crimes that they deserve execution at the stadium at least ten times over, but they continue to wander around their town until two unusual events occur. The first is the upheaval that provokes the incongruity of the archaeological site discovered by Nas, the person that Ati had met on his return from the sanatorium. The site reveals that a different language was spoken previously and a large amount of unequivocal evidence resoundingly contradicts the history of the empire as it had been presented. The Authorities circumvent the problem: an angel had appeared in a dream announcing the existence to one of God’s delegates, but, because of overwork and responsibilities, this had escaped his memory, but now, having been rediscovered, the site was to be proposed to the faithful as a mythical destination for pilgrimages and would welcome dozens of millions of believers. Meanwhile, all the witnesses of the true discovery mysteriously disappear, except Nas, who is supposedly in some remote place. Ati immediately understands that the Authorities have corrected the event to use it to their own advantage, and wants to talk to Nas, but he and Koa are strongly hesitant, until Koa is assigned to become the official accuser of a fifteen-year-old girl accused by her neighbour for blasphemy. The concluding speech, by Koa, grandson of a famous figure in Abistan, would have brought him new advantages, wealth and privileges, but Koa, who has always hated his grandfather for his cruelty, does not want to send the poor girl to her death, but does not know how to get out of the situation. So he decides on the only solution possible, already proposed by Ati: flee the town and go in search of Nas. With fake documents, the two set off on a long voyage to the City of God. They regularly attract the curiosity and suspicion shown by local populations when confronted by strangers because nobody “travels” except to go to war or on a pilgrimage, and at a certain point, to ensure these are true believers, a controller asks them to recite a specific verse of the holy Gkabul, exactly as happened recently during the slaughter committed by Islamic fundamentalists, who demanded that individuals recite a verse of the Koran, and spared or killed the unfortunate people according to their lack or knowledge of the verses. Finally they arrive at their destination, in the centre of power of ­Abistan:

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they manage to enter the city and in this complex and clamorous maze they witness a strange scene: There was a crowd on the other side, a pleasant crowd, and it was market day. Some public functionaries were buying a stock of fresh vegetables that stank of polluted soil and putrid water: wasted carrots, grey onions, withered potatoes and a rancid kind of mutant pumpkin […] the extremely pasty white skin of the functionaries and the absence of any controllers suggested something suspicious: the Authorities had organised or encouraged this market at the edge of town to allow the functionaries to take some air and improve their subsistence.18 In fact, the functionaries live in underground tunnels and the only meal supplied by the government consists of “a grey flour made from some unknown plant and an oily reddish drink that smelt of undergrowth and poisonous mushrooms”,19 familiar to Ati because he had been fed on them at the sanatorium served with bromide and narcotic, hallucogenic and sedative substances. They try to discover the whereabouts of Nas, but everybody avoids them, mumbling excuses, until one passer-by admits that he has disappeared. Shocked, they think about the boiling oil that awaits them at the stadium should they return home, until they are given instructions to reach a mockbi, a person who might be able to help them, called Toz. He welcomes them and they are amazed. He is a kind of Zelig, a true quickchange artist able to adapt perfectly to any type of interlocutor, but above all, at home he is dressed like a westerner from the present era: he is wearing a shirt, trousers, jacket, and closed shoes. Then to go out, he puts on the sandals worn by the population, rolls his trousers above his calves, and wraps himself in a burni to appear anonymous in the crowd. Dressed this way, to the two friends, he seems like a clown, but they are enchanted. Another surprise: he offers the two friends food from our era, white bread, cheese, and chocolate, he drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes. He has never actually experienced these things because they had disappeared long before, but he had found them in books and had brought them to life. At this point, it would not be fair to describe the second part of the novel, I prefer to let the reader have the pleasure of discovery, but I feel I have offered readers a slice of the dystopic drift of this world with its suspended form of life, like clotted blood, unexpressed because of its terror and numbing rituals, 18 19

Ibidem, p. 158. Ibidem.

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but where it is possible to find the seeds of potential rebirth. The fundamental instability of this world implicates that it could possibly disintegrate, or could give life to something far greater and of far more value. Stubborn preservation of inertia is one of the most fruitless concepts that exists. Death always prepares a new life. In the words of Sloterdijk: “What we call the end of the world, structurally, refers to the death of a sphere. On a small scale, its critical case is composed of the separation of two lovers, an empty house, and a torn-up photo. In its macroscopic form it appears like the death of culture, a burnt city, an extinct language.”20 And this is the reason why we must learn lessons from dystopias, while still being well aware that no Al Qaeda, no Daesh, no Boko Haram could ever create tabula rasa with people like Ati, overflowing with the curiosity and vitality that thrives in every one of us. 20

Peter Sloterdijk, quoted, p. 98 (Italian translation).

Chapter 8

The Beacon of Psychoanalysis on the Billowing Ocean of Utopia

Žižek and the Blinkers of the Politically Correct

Perhaps, in order to imagine that utopia is still possible, we need to go back to Hegel, as did Slavoj Žižek in his weighty book written in 2013, Less Than Nothing.1 The writer opposed postmodern historicist relativism with all his strength and remained linked to structuralism, especially that of Lacan, because while total philosophy is one thing, political totalitarism is something completely different. Naturally, Hegel was a Prussian to the nth degree, but at the same time, he was lucid and aware of the impossibility of overcoming, resolving, and taming the multiplicity, of not only man, but also of what composed the cosmos in which we live. Even though it was a scarcely accessible philosophical flow of knowledge, Hegel had foreseen the message that Miguel Benasayag was to send us later in his Éloge du conflit,2 because the reconciliation with Hegel is represented by antagonistic coexistence, with a dialectic which, because of its irreducible nature, is the condicio sine qua non of our way of life. Although two strong smokers and atheists like Žižek and Bauman disagree on almost every subject, they concur in the admiration they feel for the revolutionary message of Pope Francis; and I also suspect, from the sardonic smile reserved for the small pseudo-emancipatory battles of those who believe that ideologies are decrepit and that we simply need to become vegans to save the world. Ideology takes a look at all three dystopias that we have taken into consideration: from the new age technologies of the Circle,3 from the cynical hedonism of The Possibility of an Island,4 from the desertification of life and the mantras that replace the dialogical exchanges of 2084. The End of the World.5 The ideology that Žižek eviscerated in his following book, The Sublime Object of Ideology,6 is perhaps well hidden but is still present in the events about which we read, absentmindedly on the surface. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and The Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Verso, 2013. Miguel Benasayag and Angélique del Rey, Éloge du conflit, Paris, La Découverte, 2007. See Chapter 5. See Chapter 6. See Chapter 7. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004410275_009

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The Realpolitik, or in other words, the globality of the clamorously immoral decisions assumed to maintain the status quo or to be re-elected when one is in power, continues to produce disastrous consequences. The most serious distortion of multiculturalism lies precisely in the presumed respect that should be paid to the Leitkultur, or the dominant culture of another group. A long time ago, Žižek spoke about “today’s tolerant cultural multiculturalism which is nothing more than an experience of the Other deprived of his Alterity or Otherness (the Other who dances to fascinating rhythms and who is gifted with a holistic approach to a perfectly ecological reality, while other aspects – like the fact that he beats his wife – are systematically left aside)”.7 I live in Trento, one of the most tolerant, well-organised and cooperative cities in the West but even here we are witness to episodes of disconcerting Realpolitik: some poor guy, taking his dog out for a walk at night is attached, beaten and robbed by a foreigner, and the attacker is arrested and immediately released. Another foreigner close to Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore asks for free food from a kebab seller: he refuses, and the foreigner smashes in his window; he is arrested, but only a few hours later, he comes back smirking and sneering, because, of course, he has been released. A third foreigner spends time seriously annoying a Chinese barman, very popular in the local community, who sends him outside pretty sharply; a few minutes later the foreigner returns and throws a brick that misses the Chinese barman by a hair. There is no truly efficient position taken by the authorities to deal with petty crime, with the message in the watermark: we are not racists… but this is the best way to supply the Salvinis, the Le Pens, the Trumps, and the other hard and fast racists with a huge stockpile of ammunition for their artillery. A crime is a crime and it must not be punished less severely only because it is committed by an immigrant, the population needs to be protected… The most striking case perhaps was one that happened in England in 2014 in Rotherham, a small town in South Yorkshire. Between 1997 and 2013 at least 1400 little and young girls were raped, mostly by a gang of Pakistanis, without any intervention from the social services and the local authorities, because of fear of appearing racist. After an article appeared in the Times, the author of a report, Alexis Jay, said that certain girls “had been gang-raped, beaten, terrorised and abducted”; others “were threatened with weapons and forced to witness the raping”, others still were covered with petrol and threatened they would be burned”. A politically correct attitude cannot be separated from such a strong cultural and ritualistic influence in events of this kind, on the same level as other memories recalled by Žižek such as the serial killings of the 7 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso, 2002, p. 15 (Italian translation).

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­ omen of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, with horrific actions carried out by local w population, like cutting off nipples with scissors, or the rape and killing of native women in Western Canada, performed by white Canadians who captured girls from the reserves, then left the mutilated corpses in the vicinity so the blame was placed on the native Indians. In all these cases, where a mental structure, and a cultural injunction is directed at belittling and humiliating women, if already in the West women are victims of negative behaviour, far more so in many Muslim countries, women are in an undeniable state of inferiority, exclusion and slavery. It is far from racist to speak of these conditions, just as we cannot be branded “anticlerical” in denouncing the paedophile structure in the Catholic Church that Pope Francis is bringing to light and fighting very strenuously. The subconscious has surfaced, said Žižek in his first book translated in Italian.8 The incipit was devastating: why should we be scandalised by the paedophilia processes against Michael Jackson if his video clips expressed perversion beyond any reasonable doubt? Beat it, with actual Afro-American criminals paid and trained to perform these dances with knives drawn? Or Thriller, with zombies rising from tombs and a trusting little girl with truly no idea about the person assigned to protect and take care of her? Is there not a clear revelation of the actual nature of art that is created? In his book, Žižek offers another powerful example of the subconscious that is normally externalised: the enormous statue of Lenin set on a gigantic building, represents, of course, the emblem of Soviet socialist power, but always under the heel of its great dominator. Therefore, on one hand, the task of the intellectual today consists of picking up the subconscious which is before our eyes although protected under a mantle of confusing special effects, and he must not let himself be trapped by compromising strategies, but fight with true emancipation that does not ­retreat before antisemitism, before the disgrace of the colonisation and humiliation of Palestine, before the new religion of global finance or the discrimination and brutalisation of women. In the words of Miguel Benasayag: “There are those who complain and there are those who fight” and to give a certain sense to our lives, we cannot limit ourselves to simply complaining.

The Dark Side of Our Maps

If they do not want to be swallowed up in the infernal tornado of dystopia, the winds of utopia are strongly in need of the interpretative support of psychoanalysis. Žižek has revealed certain aspects of the subconscious which has 8 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, 2008.

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surfaced, and yet still remains concealed, like Poe’s “stolen letter” in the reading by Lacan, first among all the dematerialisations of the fetish: money, like the credit card becomes virtual, and in turn, wars evolve towards a form that is closer to the foams of Sloterdijk than battlefields with boots on the ground. When discussing the fall of the Twin Towers, Žižek said: Rather than indicate the new direction of the wars of the 21st century, the explosions and collapse of the Twin Towers at the World’s Trade Centre in September 2001 was the spectacular swan song of the 20th century method of waging war […] What awaits us is something far more mysterious: the spectre of an “immaterial” war where attacks are invisible (virus, poisons that can be spread everywhere and anywhere). At the level of visible material reality, nothing happens – there is no grand explosion. And yet we know that the universe has started to collapse and life has begun to disintegrate.9 The envisaged scenario compares deserted lands with incredibly powerful empires or states, which can however, be held to ransom with germs, gas, invisible poisons, and it is inevitable that we have recourse to psychoanalytic cipher: “It is hard to resist the temptation to invoke Freudian opposition between public legislation and its obscene superego double: according to this interpretation what else would the ‘international terrorist organisations’ be if not the obscene doubles of the huge multinationals, those perfect rhizomatic machines, that exist everywhere even though they have no defined territorial base? Is this not the form used by religious or nationalist ‘fundamentalism’ in adapting to global capitalism? ”.10 Today there is such a lot of talk about “war”, the West that is at war with IS, as Hollande declared after the massacres in Paris, but in reality, compared to unconventional means, such as suicide attempts, drones, or killings performed by pressing a remote controlled switch, there is a form of opposition that Žižek had grasped back then between the “passive” and “active” nihilism quoted by Nietzsche: we are the passive ones, we do not want to be distracted from our comfortable lives, while they throw their very lives in the balance. In terms of Hegelian dialectics they are the “masters” who challenge death, while we are the “slaves” of our comfort and we no longer have the courage to reason in terms of “all or nothing”. The “obscene superego double” of our democracy very obviously appears even in the support that the usa offers the more conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and 9 10

Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, quoted, p. 43 (Italian translation). Ibidem, p. 44 (Italian translation).

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in the choice of giving precedence to authoritarian governments that facilitate economic interests, than to truly democratic governments which are obviously anxious to exclude the West from their own internal affairs. In conclusion, if we want to be utopic, wanting to imagine and pursue the idea of a better world, we must necessarily take into account, the dark reverse side of the maps. We must turn them over and look at them closely with psychoanalysis and our sharpest scalpels to perform this task well. If we even only consider to a slight degree, the inauspicious premonition that Žižek made in 2004 commenting on Bush’s American invasion of Iraq and foreseeing the birth of IS: This is the first case of direct occupation of a widespread important Arab state: how could it not generate universal hate? It was already easy to imagine that thousands of young men would dream of becoming suicide bombers, and that the United States would be forced to impose a state of emergency and a state of constant alert. On the contrary, it was obvious that the American occupation would lead to the emerging of an authentic anti-American Islamic fundamentalist movement, directly connected to other movements in other Arab countries with a strong Islamic population: in other words, an ”International” Islam.11

The Return of the Pendulum

Zygmunt Bauman’s book The Return of the Pendulum,12 based on the Freudian influence on sociology and on the need to combine, weave and understand the mutual fecundity of the contributions made by psychoanalysis and sociology, is the bearer of a surprising message because we are used to considering these disciplines as separate, and even diametrically opposed. In fact, an analyst’s room is traditionally a place where, through transfer, a person tries to overcome/mitigate/reprocess his personal psychic suffering, to transform it from a pointed stone that is painful and prevents him from breathing, into friable matter that, while still composed of the irreducible suffering that permeates every life, can be reshaped into a new compatible geometry, 11 12

Slavoj Žižek, Irak, W.W. Norton & Co., 2004. Zygmunt Bauman and Gustavo Dessal, El retorno del péndulo. Sobre psicoanalisis y el ­futuro del mundo líquido, España y Argentina, Fondo de Cultura Económica de España, 2014 (The Return of the Pendulum).

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in new acceptable amalgamations, in new scenarios that can release energies and impulses, that permit the person to escape from stagnation and find a new sense in life. For its part, sociology focuses on problems shared by people and distinguishes between the “troubles” that arise in the context of an individual’s character and his relationships with others [and the] “issues” [that] on the other hand, refer to questions that transcend the specific environment of the individual and the boundaries of his inner life”.13 Taking up the legacy of Wright Mills, the task of sociology is to expand the sphere of individual awareness to help “normal people” understand that almost always, the limited viewpoint in which they focalise their personal “troubles”, is in reality, a far wider context that involves “issues” shared by many others, and that have little hope of being resolved unless together with other people.14 So it would seem that psychoanalysis and sociology, where the former is directed at saving single individuals from the labyrinth of his bonds, opening up paths able to spark his desire and élan vital, while the latter is more inclined to draw the person away from the sad rear-vision mirror of his own past family afflictions and tired sterile navel-gazing, to look further afield to shared social horizons, would have nothing in common. And yet… it was Bauman himself who stated in his first letter in answer to Gustavo Dessal on July 19, 2012: “my way of carrying out research/ thinking is a sociological variant of psychoanalysis or rather, the result of the application of Freud’s investigative strategy to study social issues”.15 Therefore, Bauman defines his sociological method as “hermeneutical sociology”, and the Freudian sounding method as “hermeneutical psychology”. Basically, Bauman bears witness to the debt of his “deconstruction” of human thought and behaviour, his very particular reading of social changes whose most famous result was the important “liquid” concept, compared to Freudian subversion, the reversal performed by the father of psychoanalysis compared to the presumption, until then, nourished by a “command” of the ego whose lack of consistency he had revealed. Freud had shown how much the human being was other-directed, ambivalent, fragile and constitutively divided, and it was by hoarding away his lesson that Bauman was able to investigate and identify the contradictions, the self-deceptions and the self-sabotage of a society analysed like a living

13 14 15

Charles Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959, 2000. Zygmunt Bauman, What Use Is Sociology? Conversations with Michael Hviid Jacobsen e Keith Tester, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013. Bauman and Dessal, quoted, p. 107.

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o­ rganism or instinctive body. For his part, Gustavo Dessal admitted that “without a clear perspective of the coordinates of the period, psychoanalysis could neglect the strong social transformations that touch the very foundations of civilisation, generating new symptoms to which diagnosis must provide an answer that is distinct from the controlling assumptions of bio politics”.16

Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose – and Yet, Something Has Changed

Despite the violent progress of technology or the terrible regression that we see at work in the obscene and tribalistic resurfacing of decapitation or people burnt alive by IS fundamentalists, there are some things in human nature that continue to endure and remain constant: the turmoil, the trembling and upheaval of falling in love, the deep, comforting consolation one feels in knowing you can count on a friend, and the aggressive resentment that, however much we would like to get rid of them, remain forever, living within the human soul, sentiments that led the great poet Heinrich Heine to write: “Mine is a most peaceable disposition. [but] if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.”17 (Gedanken und Einfälle, in Freud, 1929, p. 245). Certain elements that make up our lives never change, and in fact could never change: as shown by Luigi Zoja, not even with Hector’s heroic gesture,18 could we delude ourselves that with a couple of generation changes and the awareness of full dignity and equality for women would the male attitude change towards them, to then discover with horror that thousands of years of overlaid conditioning may have changed the surface coat of their behaviour, but the beast that has survived and slumbers in many of them is ready to rise up again when an abandon transforms them into machines of destruction and self-destruction, ready drown in blood, a shame that seems unacceptable. The great changes that entire societies are facing have an impact on all individuals whose psychic systems have far slower transformation times. Freud’s same analysis on the reasons behind our unhappiness, “the overpowering 16 17 18

Ibidem, p. 12. Sigmund Freud, Gedanken und Einfälle, in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1929, English translation Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, p. 245 (Italian translation). Luigi Zoja, Il gesto di Ettore, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2000, English translation The father: Historical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, London & New York: BrunnerRoutledge, 2001.

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strength of nature, the fragility of our bodies, and the inadequacy of the institutions that give men reciprocal relationships in the home, in the State and in society”19 is still valid today. However, if at that time the accent could be placed on a neurosis that stemmed from having “bartered a part of possible happiness for a little security”,20 it is true today that we notice a drastic change because the security of the past has been surrendered in exchange for almost unlimited freedom. “Civilisation” was made possible by single individuals delegating power to a community able to govern the destructive impulses of single persons even using force, and that demanded placing limits or restrictions on the libidinal expression of individuals. Moreover, an important relationship exists between the Super-ego, the individual instance that opposes and curbs the manifestation of impulsive strength, and group psychology:21 certain groups tend to identify themselves with a charismatic leader whose image becomes part of the Super-ego of each member of the group. For example, this aspect of group psychology explains how it was possible for Hitler to influence the moral principles of millions of Germans. As Bauman states, individuals were raised to become “workers” or “soldiers”, productive elements of society, and that would not have been possible without setting up a strong barrier on their sex lives. The “panic of masturbation” mentioned by Bauman, when summing up Foucault’s comments, was due to the fact that parents paid very close attention to crushing or squashing any sexual impulses in their children immediately, since this would have been preparation in diminishing any sexual manifestations once they reached adulthood. It was easy for Deleuze to denounce forms of middle-class oppression which, above all, triggered neuroses that conveyed the most affluent towards Freud’s couch, or that of his colleagues, but in reality, family members spent a great deal of time together and citizens surely felt themselves limited and even oppressed by the community and the State, but at the same time, they had a parachute and the certainty to be able to count on the help of what they may have needed. Bauman reveals that if we get a glimpse of what goes on in bathrooms and bedrooms today, we realise that they still resemble theatres of panic, but that now are “sexual abuse panic”. While previously, the accused or the guilty were the children, today the parents are sitting in the dock. The message is written clear and strong that it is better not to permit yourself to get too close to

19 20 21

Freud, 1929, quoted, p. 222 (Italian translation). Ibidem, p. 250 (Italian translation). Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, 1921, pp. 65–142 (Italian translation).

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your children if you do not want to be accused of sexual abuse sooner or later. Therefore, something decisive has truly changed, because, partly through the enormous use made by new technologies, young boys and girls today discover sex in precocious and multiple ways, with metonymic use and abuse, like pinballs, in a constant reverse push towards “something else”, regularly unsatisfied and inhabited by the same sense of emptiness.

Sociology and Psychoanalysis as the Incarnations of Desire

Miguel Benasayag is far from gentle with psychoanalysts in general. In his penultimate book Clinique du mal-être,22 he tears to pieces his numerous colleagues who listen with one ear and carry on arduously useless analyses, more interested in their fees than in the possibility of kindling a spark of life into their patients; next, he takes a shot at cognitive behavioural psychotherapy, which remains on the surface and in the best of cases, replaces one symptom with another; he concludes by illustrating his particular way of conducting analysis, “situational therapy”, in which he accompanies patients, listening not only to their family histories, that emerge from the past, but also to actual situations, in the contexts and with all the problems the patient is facing at the present moment. What is certain is that Benasayag is permanently sparked by the passion he puts into his work and the relationships he cultivates; it is the same passion that pushes him to read like a “joyous madman”. It seems he has adopted the motto of Montaigne “Il ne faut rien faire sans joie” (Do not do anything without joy). The same creative joy and passion are also alive and well in Zygmunt Bauman and Gustavo Dessal. After the Second World War, Bauman stopped studying physics and threw himself heart and soul into sociology, considering that the bonds between human beings was a problem far more important and urgent than astronomy: he has pursued this path for almost seventy years with an intelligence, perspicacity, and open-mindedness towards other disciplines that is unequalled. Gustavo Dessal carries out his observations with a resourcefulness and depth that is amazing, as well as being a famous ­novelist. It is extremely important that these disciplines be revitalised by intellectuals such as these: otherwise, sociology will remain more entrenched, self-­referenced, and more prone to cultivating career advancement than opening up essential sociological imagination; and psychoanalysis runs a serious risk of ossification and aridity. In the words of one of the most distinguished Lacanian psychoanalysts in Italy: 22

Miguel Benasayag, Clinique du mal-être, Paris, La Découverte, 2015.

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Psychoanalysts seem to be frozen into the posture that their practice has assigned them: that of a corpse. They no longer know how to smile, or excite (do they still know how to desire? Do they still know how to enjoy life?) Most are subjugated by a spirit of gravity and resignation. In this, they have inherited the sacrificial sadness of the worst “priests” [except] the exception-Lacan, in relation to deadly and sacrificial representation of psychoanalysis that even Deleuze recognised: “only Lacan has maintained a certain sense of humour/laughter”.23 Recalcati paid homage to Lacan with a first book of over 600 pages, and a second that is currently being published which I will not attempt to summarise, but it is perhaps worth tracing and underlining those two or three more important aspects mentioned by Dessal relative to the caution that must be used when discussing utopia. Before he invented “liquid”, Bauman had identified other three important terms that exemplified the two previous periods in history and the current era: the Old Regime would have been represented by the gamekeeper, the jealous and careful custodian of the existing status quo, ready to neutralise any invader/danger/source of contagion. With the Enlightenment, a new cardinal figure emerged, the gardener, able to modify the world as we know it, making it different and better. With liquid modernity, a new figure has burst onto the scene, the hunter, ready to catch the largest number of prey possible here and now. He is will agree only to short-lived and strategic, or rather, tactical alliances, to be maintained exclusively for the shortest time necessary, in the style of “Big Brother” where only one person can succeed to the detriment of all the others. Those of us who consider ourselves “modern” are the heirs of the Enlightenment, and if we exclude the “digital natives” reared on milk and smartphones, we have all cultivated, idealised and pursued some form of utopia. We are all gardeners, great or small, who have placed their faith in some formula or project to better the world. I believe that not even Bauman, Freud or Dessal can deny their filiation from Enlightenment. The point is that before Freud and the Holocaust it was still possible to maintain some form of hope in the advance of wisdom and knowledge and world administration that would have been able to eradicate all the “weeds” and make the world a better place, a little closer to perfection. With Freudian subversion and the systematic extermination of millions of human beings eradicated just like weeds, the perspective of more informed minds could not fail to change. While, before Freud, it was possible to 23

Massimo Recalcati, Jacques Lacan: desiderio, godimento, soggettivazione, Milano, Raffaello Cortina, 2012, p. xvi.

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place absolute faith in the ego as a Cartesian author/creator/originator, aware of one’s personal path and destiny, and in Reason as the designated place for the construction of all that is Good, with Freud we realised the essential inadequacy of the ego and of Reason. With successive adaptations, the ego was initially identified as the consequence of a clamorous battle between instinctual anarchical impulses of the Id and the compensating/rebalancing action of the super-ego, and then discovered in its basic inadequacy, that with Lacan would become a hole, a void that would be impossible to fill, described by Dessal as a “beanza” or gaping chasm. This abyss is not constitutive of the human being, it is more “constituent” because it lights the spark of desire. So there is something in the individual that is not an ego “master of his own house” but rather a split, a division in which the desire for the desire of the Other appears, or, as Freud said,24 “[the] fear of losing love”. In later years, Lacan overcame the urgent structuralism according to which individuals would exist only in the constant returns of language, because there is always something that remains, some residue, something that resists and is specific to every human being. Our symptom that is the signifier of an effaced trace25 (Lacan, 1976, p. 274), our Wunsch, the vocation that is our personal path and that can give meaning to our lives. Research by the Lacanian analyst will be different from that of a typical post Freudian analyst which is limited to an interpretive sounding rarely able to give a new burst to a life that is perhaps more aware, but just as sad and unresponsive. I am quoting from memory an article that Pietro Citati published in 1978 concerning Ingeborg Bachmann, the great and bitter author of Three paths to the Lake and The thirtieth year stories, whose long analysis did not prevent her from committing suicide. The Lacanian patient is called “analysand” precisely because he is called to confront his own past naturally, but only in order to actively reorientate his own life. I feel that Recalcati summarises this very well: The truth of the subconscious remains in a Freudian manner in certain traces of which Lacan proposes a list: “monuments” (my body as a monument of my history, the somatic symptoms as a reminder of the effaced event), the “archived documents” (my memory, scenes of my childhood, just as I filed them in the archives), “semantic evolution” (how I speak, which signifiers have captured me, which ones repel me […]) and “the 24 25

Freud, 1929, quoted, p. 259 (Italian translation). Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 274.

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traditions” (family myths and legends, epic legends that moulded me). In all these traces there are echoes of the white chapter of the subconscious demanding more than the recovery of an “archi-trace”, of an original trace, a new script of the text of the subject that proceeds from the resubjectivation of what has already been. […] The subconscious is not a version of the past, nor its container, but something that must occur in the future…26 Bauman’s sociology shares with this psychoanalysis the study of the past, the great masters to whom we owe a great debt and who live in our way of working and existing in the world, but through imagination and curiosity in the life that surrounds us and that influences our trajectories as much as dusty sacred scriptures. Through literature, cinema, art and pop culture we are invited to share in a new writing of our society, to assume an active role in questions that concern us, since we share them.

The Dark Side of Reason and the Law

Firstly in his masterpiece, Modernity and the Holocaust, and then in the strong debate with Philip Zimbardo and Günther Anders, and his Natural History of Evil,27 Bauman showed the huge influence that others can have on the individual convincing them to commit any type of action, even the worst atrocities in deference to orders from outside. In the end, the human being is leaf in a storm, and it is a serious mistake to believe that Reason or the Law can keep a person or a whole community in line given that “the Super-ego of one period of civilisation has a similar origin to the Super-ego of an individual”.28 Moreover, the Super-ego is at least Two-faced (Janus) since, if on one hand it is essential to block the individual impulsions to an aggressive acephalous and uncontrolled pleasure, on the other it can become a mouse-trap and conceal a form of cruelty that is just as and even more devastating. “[I]n p ­ rinciple, moral conscience […] is the reason for instinctive restraint, but then the r­ atio/ relationship is reversed. Each instinctive renouncement then becomes a ­dynamic source of conscience, each new renouncement increases severity and intolerance”.29 It is the same with the Law, essential for human cohabitation, 26 27 28 29

Recalcati, 2012, quoted, p. 98. Zygmunt Bauman, A Natural History of Evil, South Korea, Indigo Press, 2012. Freud, 1929, quoted, p. 276 (Italian translation). Ibidem, p. 263.

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which can become the sadistic Law in Kafka’s books, and those who practise it gain enjoyment that, under the Aegis of a noble instance, is able to humiliate, crush, and massacre its presumed beneficiaries. Every dystopic totalitarism is soaked in sadistic pleasure. The opposing resistance and scepticism of Freud and Bauman to the Enlightenment of which they are issue, springs from the awareness of the incompatible multiplicity of the ego, the impossibility of the One, and the dystopia inextricably enclosed within every utopia. The problem of antisemitism that characterises all of German philosophy from Luther to Heidegger is implicit in the same effort to systematise the existing, to raise a cathedral of wisdom and knowledge without a single crack, fissure or inconsistency that cannot be destroyed by human nature. I believe it could be interesting to examine more closely the blacklisting of the figure of the Jew in the recent past, because today we are running the risk of the same attitude with the figure of the Muslim, in the same framework of utopic “gardening”. Because of their lack of conformity with the desired harmony and severe order of the philosophical constructions, Gypsies, the handicapped, and above all, the Jews, were perceived as a defect to be corrected, like a problem to be resolved, which Hannah Arendt had seen appear precisely in the Enlightenment: “The Jewish Question is raised when the Jews are considered both as a question, because Hebraism seems to escape definition, and as a problem to be resolved”,30 and later: “The Jews seem to represent a challenge for philosophers who are not able to integrate them in their conceptual schemes”.31 This is why Bauman reads the Holocaust, not as an incident or an error, or a transgression in history, however horrific, but as the logical consequence of that Laboratory of Reason that should have and for many people should still lead us to a better world. Luther considered the Jews “Great masters in lying” Kant advocated the “Euthanasia of Judaism”. Hegel considered the Jews — a people “born for slavery”, and even if “in the phenomenology he describes the servant-master relationship where for a necessary dialectic reversal, the servant becomes the master of the master [Hegel] condemns the Jewish people to a condition of perpetual slavery””.32 For his part, Nietzsche, was already dear to German hearts during the First World War thanks to his Zarathustra, and not only did he inspire National Socialism, but also, in the words of György Lukács, found his “testamentary executor “in Hitler. 30 31 32

Donatella Di Cesare (2014), Heidegger e gli ebrei. I “Quaderni neri”,  Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2014, p. 36. Ibidem, p. 38. Ibidem, p. 54.

Chapter 9

Some Reservations on Utopia

The Shadows of Thomas More’s Utopia

The fact that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” emerges with frequent naivety even in the book by Thomas More, the virtuous author who preferred decapitation by Henry the Eighth rather than compromise his ethical principles. [In his book, Utopia] the needs of social justice imposed that everyone work six hours a day and this would have abundantly guaranteed the needs of the whole population, but the strict rules of society imposed a series of constrictions which seem rather disconcerting to modern views. Here is an example: The fashion of their clothing is the same throughout the island, except that the sexes are distinguished by different styles, and also the unmarried from the married. It never varies by season, and is both attractive and adaptable to movements of the body; likewise, it is appropriate to both cold and warm weather. Each family makes its own clothes.1 How can this not bring to mind the burni worn by the people of Abistan in 2084. La fin du monde by Boualem Sansal? Or the uniforms worn by prisoners? Another aspect that recalls prison life is the “hour of fresh air” conceded to everybody after the evening meal. One hour, no more, no less. Time spent playing music, in conversation, or playing useful games such as chess or contests opposing vice and virtue. “No dice or other mischievous games” that might lead to undermining virtue. Leisure time is a calculated period because naturally, everybody must sleep eight hours, also because why would or could anybody suffer from insomnia in a perfect society? Without counting that “Both dinner and supper are begun with some lecture of morality that is read to them; but it is so short that it is not tedious nor uneasy to them to hear it”.2 At this point, the doubt could arise that some people might prefer a less ordered and pigeonholed life, and might decide to leave. You will remember that in 2084 the only authorised means of travelling was to undertake a pilgrimage with an itinerary and schedule established by the authorities. In More’s Utopia, 1 Thomas More, Utopia, a cura di Francesco Ghia, nuova edizione di Maria Lia Guardini, Trento, Il Margine, 2005, p. 117. 2 Ibidem, p. 129. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004410275_010

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authorisation to travel was given through written permission from the Chief Magistrate indicating the day of return. “…but if any man goes out of the city to which he belongs without leave, and is found rambling without a passport, he is severely treated, he is punished as a fugitive, and sent home disgracefully; and, if he falls again into the like fault, is condemned to slavery.”3 Just as we do today, they made extensive use of outsourcing, assigning to others any work that could be done externally. This ensured they did not dirty their hands in slaughtering or cleaning animals, preferring to leave this work to slaves, and, rather like the United States today, they used their huge gold resources to dislocate even their wars: […] they keep their gold and silver only for such an occasion, so, when that offers itself, they easily part with it; […] For besides the wealth that they have among them at home, they have a vast treasure abroad; many nations round about them being deep in their debt: so that they hire soldiers from all places for carrying on their wars; for the rewards that the Utopians offer are a recompense proportioned to the danger—not only a vast deal of gold, but great revenues in lands […] They very much approve of this way of corrupting their enemies…4 It almost seems the prefiguration of the Great Game carried out by the West. Using Sunnites against Shiites, we fund one terrorist group against some State that is creating problems for us. Or we create a Strategy of Tension with a series of devastating attacks in Italy so that order will triumph over chaos. However, we then find ourselves defenceless facing the tiger we have raised to protect us against the other wild animals: wars waged by the Roman Empire by proxy during its decline, the Black Shirts who performed their dirty work with the money of the rich, but who then marched on Rome, and Daesh that seemed and was very useful at first, but then brought death inside the gates… Then there is the problem of the excess of transparency, of the fact that “everything needs to be visible”. At the large Utopian tables, groups of older people were placed in alternation with younger groups so that the young were always within earshot. But then, just as occurred in The Circle by Dave Eggers, visibility invaded every single space: Thus, you see that there are no idle persons among them, nor pretences of excusing any from labour. There are no taverns, no ale-houses, nor stews among them, nor any other occasions of corrupting each other, of 3 p. 130. 4 Ibidem, p. 132.

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getting into corners, or forming themselves into parties; all men live in full view, so that all are obliged both to perform their ordinary task and to employ themselves well in their spare hours”.5 How could you not want to become a “carbonaro” in a place of this kind?

The Strong Points of the Work

However it would not be fair to emphasise the critical aspects of More’s work without celebrating the countless strong points in a book written five hundred years ago with an intelligence, force and moral strength that are lacking in the great majority of our contemporaries. I would like to list simply a few examples. In Book I, More raises the question of the death penalty reserved for thieves, identifying the reason for stealing as due to extreme poverty caused by unacceptable social injustice with comments that recall the recent “Occupy Wall Street” events: “Banish these plagues, and give orders that those who have dispeopled so much soil may either rebuild the villages they have pulled down or let out their grounds to such as will do it; restrain those engrossings of the rich, that are as bad almost as monopolies”. Or: They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; […] When that little money is at an end (for it will be soon spent), what is left for them to do but either to steal, and so to be hanged?”6 For More, society should be able to restructure itself so that through education and concrete opportunities, there would be far fewer reasons for those who are forced to steal food, to end on the gallows or beg in the streets, which is punished with prison. In his peroration against the death penalty, More is intelligent enough to calculate the damage that this can bring even to society as a whole, since, 5 pp. 130–131. 6 Ibidem, p. 73.

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i­ nstead of dissuading a person from stealing to avoid dying of hunger, it could give rise to the committing of far more serious crimes: […] for if a robber sees that his danger is the same if he is convicted of theft as if he were guilty of murder, this will naturally incite him to kill the person whom otherwise he would only have robbed; since, if the punishment is the same, there is more security, and less danger of discovery.7 In USA, five hundred years after the publishing of Utopia, a system has not yet been invented to improve the general situation in the country. Prisons are filled to overflowing in a percentage far higher than in countries where the death penalty has been abolished. On the other hand, arms lobbies are so powerful that until with the best intentions, Obama manages to pass his bill, there will be no restriction on buying firearms and in every house, there will be more arms than TV sets. Then there is the deep-rooted connection with the land. In the island of Utopia, ““Agriculture is that which is so universally understood among them that no person, either man or woman, is ignorant of it;”.8 Besides agriculture, which is so common to them all, every man has some peculiar trade to which he applies himself”.9 These are both certain requisites for “health”. Firstly, the Industrial Revolution distanced much of the population from its contact with the land, the tentacles of the cities spread further and disproportionately, with the rich in the town centres and residential areas, and the disadvantaged population in concentric circles on the outskirts filled with resentment and anxiety. [As described by Sansal] “The suburbs where you dare not venture are parts of the world ‘outside time’. I see suburbs in France that do not exist even in Algeria”.10 Today, to recover some contact with the land, the population has two main options: they can get a dog and take it for walks in fields where they would normally never set foot, armed with a bag to gather its excrement, or they can grow a vegetable patch in the garden, serving up these products, worth more than white truffles, to guests, announcing proudly that they are “home grown”. But above all, there is the possibility of choosing an additional trade or vocational “calling” following one’s own Wunsch without being conditioned by the injunction to construct one’s existence like a curriculum vitae

7 8 9 10

p. 78. Ibidem, p. 117. Ibidem, p. 117. Boualem Sansal, L’apocalisse islamista e l’autunno dell’Europa. Intervista con Gloria Origgi, Micromega, 8/2015, p. 21.

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with a view to future salaries or career, losing sight of one’s personal vocation, which is truly important, given that everything belongs to the community. There are no problems of health insurance like the United States, and not even a ticket system for hospitals because there are large efficient public hospitals for all. Gold and precious stones are used only to amuse small children and to stigmatize slaves who are forced to wear them. Therefore, at one time, when a group of foreigners came to Utopia, “the children who were grown big enough to despise their playthings, and who had thrown away their jewels, would call to their mothers, push them gently, and cry out, ‘See that great fool, that wears pearls and gems as if he were yet a child!’ while their mothers very innocently replied, ‘Hold your peace! This, I believe, is one of the ambassadors’ fools.”11 They are not influenced by horoscopes but observe the stars and lunar phases to foretell the weather. They do not like hunting and feel no pleasure in watching a dog slaughter a hare because of pity for the animal. They play music together; “they think it madness for a man to wear out the beauty of his face or the force of his natural strength, to corrupt the sprightliness of his body by sloth and laziness”.12 They are more lenient towards their slaves than their contemporaries in other countries, because they do not consider them prisoners of war or sons of slaves, and foresee euthanasia if it is requested by a person who is suffering. They have simplified the corpus of regulations and laws so that this does not benefit that most unacceptable professional category of our times, the lawyers, and every person is permitted to defend himself in justice. Above all, they are tolerant of other religions which are able to coexist in harmony, and the reciprocal respect between various religions is precisely one of the fundamental conditions that would help in the pacification between the Near and Middle East, where even in Muslim countries, Sunnites and Shiites are so strongly opposed that they are running the risk of provoking a third world war. Utopians do not weep, but sing at funerals, and respect prevails over suffering. Volunteer work is widespread, since “[t]here are many who are perpetually employed, believing that by the good things that a man does he secures to himself that happiness that comes after death. Some of these visit the sick; others mend highways, cleanse ditches, repair bridges, or dig turf, gravel, or stone. […] but by their stooping to such servile employments they are so far from being despised, that they are so much the more esteemed by the whole nation.13 Priests not only marry, but do so with the best of women, and women are also permitted to take holy orders on condition that they are widows of a 11 12 13

More, quoted, p. 136. Ibidem, p. 150. Ibidem, pp. 182–183.

Some Reservations on Utopia

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c­ ertain age. This recalls the words of Pope John Paul 1, speaking on the prevalently feminine nature of God, and those of Tariq Ramadan,14 who said we have an absolute and urgent need of all those talents and capacities that seem to be the prerogative of women. There is no doubt, a Utopia in every sense! In conclusion, I think that in order to store up such a fertile and fundamental utopian thrust, it is essential to always remember the importance of the structure, construction, and Cartesian grid that prevent us from liquefying in a flow of demented rivulets, and at the same time, to always keep in mind the unique, specific, and irreducible nature of each human being, within whom there is always something that escapes the great philosophical, religious and literary monuments that we have erected and that will continue to be constructed. Massimo Recalcati illustrated the coexistence of structuralism and of the Thing in the “real” in Lacan, of what escapes any form of systematization, and I personally see the coexistence of the admirable architecture of Proust’s Remembrance and the antithesis of every architecture of that small section entitled Place names: the name. The name for love is always in the singular, and it is anything but Cartesian; there is almost a parallel reality separate from any form of grid or reason. “Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us—of persons and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons—a confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer’s part, are blue or red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.”15 One does not need to be a Picasso to have a blue or pink period. One only needs to be human to see the work of an interior brush able to transform the reality around us so it resembles our personal interior landscape, and it is this anomaly, this poetic frenzy, this rhizomatic flower that utopias, although so essential, cannot respect but with which they must coexist so that human life can remain such.

14 15

Edgar Morin and Tariq Ramadan, Au péril des idées, Paris, Presses du Châtelet, 2014. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Gallimard, 1954, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, I, pp. 387–388.

Index A priori 5, 6 Abu-Assad, Hany 84 Accarino, Bruno 86 Adams, Samuel 24 Adorno, Theodor vii, 9, 33, 38, 66, 66n Aischylos 8 Ammaniti, Niccolò 75 Anders, Günther 106 Anthropological Turn 20, 24, 29, 31, 56 Arendt, Hannah 36, 75, 107 Aristotle 8, 55 Assman, Jan 36 Ati 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94 Attwood, Margaret 42, 44, 48 Bachmann, Ingeborg 105 Bacon, Francis 19 Banopticon 64 Barthes, Roland 68 Bauman, Zygmunt vii, 61, 63, 63n, 64n, 66n, 81, 95, 99, 99n, 100, 100n, 100n2, 102, 103, 104, 106, 106n, 107 Beckett, Samuel 37 Beliefs 4, 7, 9, 11 Benasayag, Miguel 87, 90, 90n, 95, 95n, 97, 103, 103n Benjamin, Walter 39 Besnier, Jean-Michel 67, 67n Bianchi, Enzo 80 Big Brother 44, 63 Bigo, Didier 64 Bloch, Ernst 40 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 11 Boétie, Étienne de la 63 Borkman, Gabriel 36 Bosch, Hieronymus 14, 15 Botticelli, Sandro 80 Bradbury, Ray 42, 44 Brodskij, Josif 74, 74n Brueghel, Pieter 14, 15 Bush, George W. 99 Buy, Margherita 78 Cabet, Etienne 27, 29 Campanella, Tommaso 19, 21, 25, 39 Cicero 17

Citati, Pietro 105 Cloning vii, 25, 60, 76, 82 Critical thinking 57 Croce, Benedetto 39 Cromwell, Oliver 17 Cynicism 77, 81 Daniel 1 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82 Daniel 24 76 Daniel 25 76 Daydreams 7, 8, 9, 15 del Rey, Angélique 95n Deleuze, Gilles 102, 104 Descartes, René 29 Dessal, Gustavo 99n, 100, 100n, 101, 103, 104, 105 Di Cesare, Donatella 107n Diogenes 77 Dostojevskij, Fjodor 36 Dystopia vii, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 23, 26, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 97 Dystopian Moment 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 41, 43, 56 Dystopian Fictions 41 Dystopian Thinking 41 Eggers, Dave vii, 59, 62n, 65n, 66n, 67n, 69n, 109 Emotional faculties 4 Emotions 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 Engels, Friedrich 27 Experience 5, 6, 7, 8, 23 Feuerbach, Ludwig 36 Fiction 9, 27 Flaubert, Gustave 32 Foucault, Michel 63, 63n, 102 Fourier, Charles 27, 29, 30, 31, 46, 49 Francis (Pope) 80, 87, 95 Franzen, Jonathan 74, 74n Freud, Sigmund 5, 34, 43, 80, 100, 101, 102n, 102n2, 104, 105, 105n, 107 Galeano, Eduardo 60 Genre 8, 9, 17, 51, 52, 55 Gentile, Giovanni 39

116

Index

God 6, 8, 13, 17, 20, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 92 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 6, 45 Golden Age 11, 12, 13, 14, 25, 26, 27, 30, 46, 56 Gonzales 15, 27 Gramsci, Antonio 40

Kennedy, Joseph 45 Kennedy, John 45 Kennedy, Robert 45 Kierkegaard, Søren 45 Kundera, Milan 61, 61n, 62, 62n

Habermas, Jürgen 22, 75 Hamilton, Alexander 24 Hamlet 3 Han, Byung-Chul vii Harris, Robert 42, 45 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 55, 95, 107 Heidegger, Martin 5, 13, 25, 33, 38, 107 Heine, Heinrich 36, 101 Heller, Ágnes vii, 59 Henry the Eighth 108 Hitler, Adolf 45, 53, 77, 107 Hobbes, Thomas 21, 52 Hollande, François 98 Horkheimer, Max 33 Horthy, Miklos 77 Houellebecq, Michel vii, 42, 53, 59, 76n, 77, 78, 79, 79n Huxley, Aldous 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50 Hviid Jacobsen, Michael 100n Hythloday, Raphael 17

Lacan, Jacques 62, 98, 104, 105, 105n, 113 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 54 Le Pen, Marine 96 Le Pen, Marine 96 Lebrun, Jean-Pierre 75, 75n, 76, 76n Lenin (Vladimir Ilic Uianov) 97 Leverkühn, Adrian 53 Limits 8, 9 Lukács, György 38, 39, 107 Luther, Martin 107 Lycurgos 11, 17, 28 Lyon, David 63, 63n, 64, 64n, 66n

Ibsen, Henrik 36 Imagination vii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 25, 27, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 55, 56, 76, 85, 88 Innate affects 3 Innate drives 3 Isabelle 78, 79, 80, 82 Isaiah 14 Ishiguro, Kazuo 42, 47, 48 Islamic fundamentalism vii Jackson, Michael 97 Jay, Alexis 96 John Paul i (Pope Albino Luciani) 113 Jonas, Hans 23 Just State 11, 16, 25 Kafka, Franz 107 Kant, Immanuel 4, 5, 21, 22, 29, 31, 107 Karamazov, Ivan 53

Mae 61, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 Malinowski, Bronisław 81 Mannheim, Karl 40 Marchionne, Sergio 64 Marx, Karl 15, 17, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 53 Mazzeo, Riccardo vii, 81n, 87n McCarthy, Cormac 42, 51 Mendelssohn, Moses 21 Mond, Mustapha 50 Montaigne, Michel de 103 More, Thomas (Morus) 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 30, 49, 61, 108, 108n, 110, 112n Moreau, Frédéric 32 Morin, Edgar 113 Napoleon 32 Neohumans 76 Nero 29 New Republicanism 20 Nietzsche, Friedrich 33, 36, 38, 53, 107 Niola, Marino 72, 72n, 81, 82 Obama, Barack 111 Orbàn, Viktor vii, 77 Orchestra 4, 5, 6, 7 Origgi, Gloria 85n Ortega y Gasset, José 35 Orwell, George 42, 59, 67, 68, 89

117

Index Ovid 13, 15, 17 Owen, Robert 27 Philosophical constructions 11, 18, 20 Philosophy 5, 8, 9 Picasso, Pablo 113 Psychoanalysis 95, 97, 100 Plato 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 30, 31, 32, 39, 46, 49, 56 Poe, Edgar Allan 98 Popper, Karl 16, 39 Proust, Marcel 113, 113n Ramadan, Tariq 113, 113n Recalcati, Massimo 104, 104n, 105, 106n, 113 Rediger 54 Rilke, Rainer Maria 80 Ronson, John 67, 67n Rosa, Hartmut vii Rosenberg, Alfred 40 Roth, Philip 45, 53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 21 Saint-Simon, Henri de 27, 28 Salvini, Matteo vii, 96 Sansal, Boualem vii, 59, 83, 84, 84n, 85, 85n, 85n, 2, 86, 86n, 87, 88n, 89n, 90n, 91n, 108, 111, 111n Sanzio, Raphael 80 Sartre, Jean-Paul 39 Schiller, Friedrich 36 Schopenhauer, Arthur 32 Self-immolation 60 Shakespeare, William 15, 27, 45, 49 Simmel, Georg vii Sismondi, Jean-Charles-Léonard de 24 Skinner, Burrhus 27 Sloterdijk, Peter 77, 77n, 80, 81, 83n, 86, 86n, 88n, 94, 94n, 98 Socrates 15, 21, 78 Sorel, Georges 32, 39 Sorel, Julien 32

Spengler, Oswald 34, 35 Spinoza, Baruch 4, 6 Stalin, Josif 53, 61 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 32 Swift, Jonathan 49, 79 Tarde, Gabriel 83 Tereza 62 Tester, Keith 100 Tognazzi, Maria Sole 78 Toynbee, Arnold J. 35, 54 Trocky, Lev 24 Trump, Donald vii, 96 Utopia vii, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 77, 81, 97, 104, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113 Utopian Moment 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 54, 56 Utopias of Desire 12, 13, 14 Utopias of a Just Society 12 Utopian thinking vii, 54 Verne, Jules 25, 34 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 55 Vonnegut, Kurt 47 Walsh, Joanna 78, 78n Weir, Peter 71 Wells (Herbert George) 34 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 36 Whirlwind 59 Wright Mills, Charles 100, 100n Zimbardo, Philip 106 Žižek, Slavoj 86, 95, 95n, 95n2, 96, 96n, 97, 97n, 98, 98n, 99 Zoja, Luigi 101, 101n