through europe

 

Steering clear of absolutist atheism

 

Both in my latest book and in my recent writing, I have been working around the possibility of a strategy of radical atheism. Developing the seminal work of the German philosopher Max Stirner^[1], I defined radical atheism as a process of individual disentanglement from the web of injunctions and demands laid all around us by normative abstractions. I defined as ‘normative abstraction’ that particular position which abstract constructs typically occupy as soon as they cease to be docile tools in our hands and rear their head to the point of shaping, defining, and ultimately controlling our lives. Particularly, I focused on the most recent occupiers of this position, such as the burgeoning religions of work, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on.

 

My radically atheist attack against normative abstractions, however, was for the great part dissimilar from traditional atheism. While traditional atheism locates its critique on an ontological or epistemological level, deriding the belief in God on the grounds of its ‘falseness’ or non-demonstrability, my proposal for radical atheism disregarded such issues entirely. My project was – and it still is – concerned exclusively with ethics, that is, with the individual’s quest for the ‘good life’.

 

 

 

Beyond the Latin Empire

 

A few months ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a short article on the opportunity to rethink the EU along its cultural traditions, rather than its economic dogmas. Agamben based his article on the work of the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, who presented the case for the political union of France, Italy and Spain in a culturally homogeneous Latin Empire which was to be politically and economically lead by France, and opposed to the Anglo-German block.

 

Despite the violent public reaction that followed Agamben’s piece, I would claim that, if Agamben is to be judge guilty of something, it is not of having been too provocative, but not enough.