through europe

At the end of the 1970s, Italy was going through a traumatic yet extremely creative phase of its history. Those were the heydays of the Autonomia movement: radical extra-parliamentary groups (composed by students, unionists, workers, unemployed) were fiercely confronting the austerity politics imposed by the bigot, mafia ridden Christian-Democrats (DC) with the complicity of the Communist Party (PCI). While society was increasingly subjected to militarization, corruption was rampant; the decaying political establishment was more arrogant than ever. The party founded by Antonio Gramsci was seen as a Stalinist oppressor by the movement, the big unions as its partners in crime. Not a single day passed without a major demonstration or a few Molotov bombs thrown at the police.

 

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’.

 

The world is already apocalyptic. Just not all at the same time.

To be overcome: the notion of apocalypse as evental, the ground-clearing revelatory trauma that immediately founds a new nomos of the earth. In its place combined and uneven apocalypse.

--Evan Calder Williams[1]

 

I am not referring here to the microapocalypse of death: everybody dies, and even if everybody dies at the same time (I mean everybody), what is the problem? The earth becomes a cleared tape and why the angels grieve?

--George Caffentzis[2]

 

There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

--Gilles Deleuze[3]

 

1. Catastrophic Events Articulating Apocalyptic Process

 

Due to the magnitude of calamity, there have been many discourses seeking to make sense of the Fukushima disaster and its aftermath: on the worsening dread of the crippled reactors; on radiation spread via distribution of irradiated food products and imposition of disaster debris by the central government; on the renewal of pro-nuclear, re-armament and market-centrist policies of the present Liberal Democratic Party administration; and finally, various types of voluntary actions of the people beginning from radiation monitoring of food and environment to information exchanges via internet to legal battles to street actions.

The integration of an athletic discipline into daily life in the Soviet Union is no undocumented phenomenon, it is acknowledged rather as a fundamental facet of its outward facing image. The body of the worker was symbolised in the athlete as the pinnacle of production, a subject perfected in use value. No less was this true of fascism, epitomised by Leni Riefenstahl's formally groundbreaking documentary of the 1936 Olympics, Olympia. The establishing of a link with the classical Olympian, a tacit recollection of a classical conception of the body prior to a Cartesian body-mind split. The body, of the athlete, of the Aryan, as historically determined, as perfectly suited to its goal. Olympia found its post-war place in the history of film but does it present the body as object of history and object of perfection or an aesthetically somatic concern? Let's not forget that Riefenstahl was a dancer, but we'll return to this later.

 

Alexis Tsipras represents the resistance of Greek society against the financial aggression, and for me this would be enough to declare my support to the political list which will have him as their candidate for the next European elections, and to vote for him.

But what are the aims of Tsipras' list? If the outcome of these elections will be merely the expression of an elderly and late-lefty minority (to which I belong) in support of the only young and not yet morally corrupt European politician, it won’t be a great result. Thus, as we take upon ourselves the task of creating the conditions for a success of Tsipras' list, we have to think both about the new horizons which could be opened by a campaign in favour of Tsipras, and about the effects of cultural and social recomposition to which we can aspire.

 

I don’t have any faith in representative democracy. The void left within democratic institutions by the automatisms of financial capital is now a matter of fact and of common sense. And the European Union is fundamentally a financial autocracy, since the decisions of the European Central Bank are removed from the sphere of influence of the Parliament.

European society is depressed, fragmented, rabidly aggressive. The process of disintegration of the European Union is now too advanced to be arrested. The identitarian egoisms which have been aroused by financial violence are destined to produce their devastating effects. We should have no illusions.

So, what is the point of getting involved, of voting at all?