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No Global: Nihilism, The Utopian Mentality and Political Antagonism

Translated by Pamela Ollerhead

di Fabrizio Gualco - 8 maggio 2003

Nihilism is the embodiment of various forms, all set, in one way or another, under the sign of reduction. Reductionism in all of its forms, according to Victor Frankl, is in any case the nihilism of today. Reduction implies a subtraction, or rather, an act of negotiation in the face of reality. Nihilistically, it denies the reality of truth and the truth of reality. FROM an anthropological point of view, the nihilistic reality reduces man to less than himself. It denies him the status that is owed to him as a human being. To these conditions, one triggers fatally, however tragically, a game of decline of which the stakes include the destiny of the political culture and of the social life. The subject is nothing less than the person in his physical and mental unity. The object is the world in which the person is called to live.

Nihilism as ideology failed in its intent to reduce man to a mechanism of a social body. It failed in its intent to reduce civil society to an ants nest. It is possible to think that the spread of the nihilistic mentality in its ways of thinking and living by a part of society is not a permanent status quo. More than a point of definitive landing, nihilism is a transitory condition. A condition marked by temporality.

The historical representation of the ideology, as regards the chronological period that could be their action in the world and on the world, is determined by transience: as recently written by Baget Bozzo (cfr. Profezia, Mondadori, Milano 2002), "also communism, in its known and recognisable historical forms, dies. If it does not die, it is only in virtue of its de-ideologization as in the case of China, Cuba and North Korea.

Nevertheless, and especially in Italy, the ideological mentality is still ballasted to the inside of the cultural panorama; above all, in the form of a utopia that crosses the phenomenon of the no global (or of the new global if one prefers) and determines itself as the theory and practice of political, social and cultural antagonism.

The scope of no global, varied and complex to the point of being confusing, is the utopian suit that dresses the ideological nudity of the left-wing culture. As Holderlin and Heidegger would say- but not in the meaning of Holderlin and Heidegger, the old gods have disappeared and the new ones still have to SHOW themselves. What remains is a sort of open space, distressing and distressed. A territory of frontiers that in the past the ideological history, under the patronage of guardian deities such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, had attempted to occupy and colonise through the creation of religions, idols and the divinity of everything mundane.

The nineteenth century was the century that recorded the damaging products of the utopian mentality as a form of nihilism and certified the dangerous uselessness of a political culture that developed itself on the cultural terrain of the ideological pseudorationalism. But if the ideological Pantheon demonstrated its impotence, to nihilism as utopia and to utopia as antagonism, it is no longer interested. The will passed down by hand, itself could not be evidence of nothing. The times and circumstances of history have changed. The techniques and perhaps also the tactics have changed. The shapes have changed but not the contents. The conscience of the total results has been removed FROM bankruptcy. The negative inheritance negatively delivered FROM history to memory does not have influence upon the taking of a stand induced to dogmatic presuppositions created mentally. One prefers the impersonal subjectivity of the multitude to the person. To personal intelligence, one prefers the so-called general intellect coined by Marx.

The antagonistic mentality tends to fill the mental, social and political emptiness caused by the collapse of the ideological systems. An emptiness that attracts the utopian temptation like a black hole attracts spatial matter. The forms of Nihilism expressed by utopian antagonism translate themselves in forms of subtle imitations of themselves and not too infrequently are put INTO effect across the practice of verbal and physical violence. A violence that mixes desperation and weakness, arrogance and presumption. A violence that speaks of peace but in the facts substitutes the dialogue for the debate, pretending to discuss, but in reality lashing out and attacking. The tirading and aggression are born FROM the conviction to have discovered the entire truth; born FROM the false ascertainment of the fundamental nonsense of life and of the world, of what one is and of what one does.

The invective and the aggression are not based on reason, but on the presumptions of absolute truth and incontrovertibility that makes FROM the shield an unmentionable desperate existence. A criteria is missing founded on which to base sayings and doings, the utopian antagonism is entrusted in a swing of psychological rhythms. No need to remind Sturzo that the soul of a person, also confronted with the question of the importance of capital, acts like the titles of the Stock exchange, in a day financially convulsive.

From this point of view it is exemplary, it is the descending parabola that FROM Enlightenment brings the so-called post-modernism. As I've written elsewhere, the experience of post-modern thought, namely the contemporary thought worthy of a successor of worse rationalistic Enlightenment, is the tragedy of life that questions itself looking for in this activity not concrete answers but fictitious pauses, good to soften the fundamental anguish that surrounds it.

Really, the antagonistic thought does not exist. Only antagonism exists as a stamp of thought and tone of action. This is carried over to the character intrinsically reactionary to the form and practice of nihilism. Even with its styles, tones, and different expressions, it reacts always against someone. The reality is negative, unliveable: therefore: the world doesn't become changed, but overthrown. In as much as this action is effective, it can not be constructive, but only destructive. The reaction is the descent in the field of resentment. Against something or someone of whom one expects to have accumulated knowledge. It is uncivil disobedience. And it is as ambiguous as could be a mixture of good intentions and bad proposals.

Nihilism in its reactionary and utopian form does not take account of the fact that the more the world becomes globalized, the more the human conscience becomes protagonist. The more that everyone seems to tend to the uniform, the more the individual conscience emerges in its inclination to the constructive, to the freedom to judge, to choose, to do. As already noted, one can not construct nothing on nothing. Contracting the nihilistic virus, the critical thought renounces branding itself to the experience of freedom. Its "soul" migrates to somewhere else and the corpse that stays looks to embellish itself as fine literature does, stories, delirious plots to whom is owed the paradoxical homework to build a population and an identity of which FROM the beginning is perceived to be the fundamental absence. Eloquent Gilles Deleuze, the inventor of a good part of the language used in the no global circuit, in the pages of the Critica e clinica writes »the world is the ensemble of the symptoms of a sickness that coincides with man". The literature seems then as a health venture (...) the health as literature, as writing, consists of the invention of a population that is missing». It is the tragic conclusion, but in itself coherent, of the nihilistic mentality.

Today, through the practice of intelligence, liberty and responsibility that ascribes itself to the conscience of one's own limits and of one's own potential, the person is called to live and to work in the present. And, in the present, to project the actual future without removing the past FROM the conscience.

The more that one lives the present, the more the conscience of the past and the trust in the future should be vast. Considering that, the present neither rejects the past nor the future, but on the contrary, in a certain way wants to be both of them. One reads the past through the memory of the present. In the memory, the past makes itself contemporaneous and provides that measure of clarity indispensable to the capacity to honestly discern between creation and destruction, good sense and nihilism, baggage and ballast.

The future receives its original strengths FROM the present, as a child FROM a father. Through the creativity, the ideation and the planning, the realist man bases himself on that which he is with the aim of building that which he will be. Who knows where he comes FROM and the present place in which he finds himself, he can reasonably think about where he is destined to arrive and so he is able to act on the consequences in view of his own well being and of the common good.

Aware of the past, deep-rooted to the present, confident in the future: this perspective predisposes man to realize that life and the world possess a positive meaning and significance, that continues also when, temporarily, life is not perceived as this. The life of the person and the world in which the person lives possess reality and truth, presence and not appearance. The person, every person, can live his own life in the world without getting bogged down in the pessimism and in the existential anguish that the prophets and the enticing mermaids pour out through the windiness of their words.

To support that life has sense and meaning is equivalent to saying that nihilism is not the destiny of the Occidental world, so that in one way or another this is affirmed by illustrious philosophies, those, for example, of Massimo Cacciari-Nietzsche, Gianni Vattimo-Heideggar or Emanuele Severino-Parmenide. FROM this point of view, destiny is not a pre-determined irremovable entity, stabilised once for always, but one of the vocations that belongs to every human being that knows and wants to call himself free and responsible. Destiny doesn't cancel liberty, but if anything provokes it, urging it to take shape, to give evidence of itself, to realise and to verify itself...the personal and social betterment and so also the political and civil, isn't, nor however has ever been, the fruits of the practical application of some pre-established intellectual recipes.

To be aware of the meaning of life and of the positivity of the world signifies, moreover, to ward off the illusion of the island that does not exist, and to walk step by step aware of the length of one's own legs. Without the pretence of jumping over one's own shadow.

Fabrizio Gualco