through europe

I’m not a fan of Nanni Moretti and I don’t like all his movies, but when I watched Habemus papam I fell on my knees recognizing the greatness of this film. Despite being set against the Barroque background of the Church of Rome – mundane manifestation of otherworldly power, – the movie in fact focuses on contemporary depression: the world built by men has gone beyond human reach, entering the orbit of a technical divinity who has escaped human control. The world that technical power has subtracted from divine will is too complex, too fast. It is so cruel that it cannot be elaborated according to the categories of human thought. The category of divinity itself is only the frail projection of human illusion, and God is useless when we can finally understand the ultimate truth: that there is no truth in our history, no hope – only the pleasure of senses and poetry, and the pleasure of collective construction, which is collective illusion, a sensuous bridge over the abyss of the inexistence of meaning. Caminante no hay camino, el camino se hace al andar.

When we know that there is no path and no arrival point, walking demands an exceeding amount of energy. And energy gets exhausted when entropy gets hold of the brain.

Non sono un accanito tifoso di Nanni Moretti, non tutti i suoi film mi piacciono e lui mi è abbastanza antipatico. Ma alcune delle sue prove (Bianca forse più di ogni altra) denunciano il genio. E quando vidi Habemus papam mi inginocchiai davanti alla grandezza di questo regista.

Sullo sfondo della splendore barocco della Chiesa di Roma, incarnazione terrena di una potenza ultraterrena, quel film parla della depressione contemporanea: il mondo che gli uomini hanno costruito è  uscito dall’orbita dell’umano per entrare nell’orbita di una divinità tecnica che l’uomo ha creato e di cui ha perduto il controllo. Troppo complesso, troppo veloce, il mondo che la potenza tecnica ha sottratto alla volontà divina. Troppo crudele per poter essere elaborato secondo le categorie di cui l’umano dispone. E il divino è null’altro che la proiezione fragile di un’illusione umana, e a nulla serve dio, quando siamo finalmente capaci di comprendere l’ultima verità: che non vi è alcuna verità nella nostra storia, non vi è alcuna speranza, solo vi è il piacere dei sensi e della poesia, e la gioia della costruzione collettiva, che è illusione collettiva, costruzione di un ponte di sensi sull’abisso del non essere del senso. Caminante no hay camino, el camino se hace al andar.

Ma quanta energia occorre per camminare quando sappiamo che non vi è alcun percorso e alcun punto di arrivo, quanta energia occorre perché quel ponte possa sorreggere il nostro cammino, quanta energia occorre perché l’illusione possa produrre edifici eventi scoperte. Quell’energia si esaurisce quando l’entropia si impadronisce del cervello.

I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother, although much younger than me.

I cannot interpret his suicide. Suicide is never the effect of a single cause, and it is always impossible to “explain” death.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless I know something about the causes that pushed Aaron to do what he did.

He was a computer programmer, creator and developer of the web feed format RSS, and a writer, an activist and also a Harvard researcher. Recently he played a prominent role in the SOPA campaign (Stop online piracy act) which had a successful outcome.

Aaron was known – by his friends and by FBI as well - for a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls.

In 2008, Swartz downloaded, and released, approximately 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

According to federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz, having a JSTOR personal account as a research fellow at Harvard University, downloaded a large number of academic journal articles via JSTOR.

 

 

These opening words are part of the literary legacy of a man that never existed, the Baron of Teive. One of the several lifetime incarnations of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the Baron of Teive is possibly his most dangerous heteronym. In his book The Education of the Stoic, the fictional Baron of Teive collects the last thoughts of a life that has come to an end, crashing against the willful edge of suicide.

 

 

Stuff

 

The supposed invasion of the being by the having has been a recurrent theme throughout the history of Western civilization. Long before the advent of capitalism, one’s material possessions and social status in the community were already deeply intertwined. It was not by accident that the mention of a king in the pages of the Iliad was often followed by the endless list of his possessions, as if the number of sheep and pigs one possessed helped in some way to express the personality of the individual.

 

As time went by, the crass simplicity of the lists of the Iliad, turned into a more sophisticated catalogue of belongings. As already noted by Suetonius, first, and by Sallust later, at the time of the Roman empire fashion had already entered the equation of material wealth and social subjectivity. Above a certain threshold of wealth, It wasn’t just the sheer amount of stuff that one owned that was used to define his (rarely her) social status, but it was what he owned. His possessions did not simply have to be opulent and abundant – they also had to be filtered by the whims of fashion.

 

This trend proved unstoppable even during the so-called dark ages, and when private wealth could not keep pace with a minimum level of sophistication, the Church stepped in by prodigally investing in the assertion of its hegemony over fashion. If, out of laziness, we did not want to look back to those remote times for proof, we would simply have to look at the obsession for fashionable opulence of the current Pope, Benedictus XVI, rightly considered by many as the reincarnation of a medieval Pope in present times.