CULTURA CULTURA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy 2011 of Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed jour- 1 2011 Vol VIII No 1 nal devoted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to promote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are judged to make a novel and important contribution to understanding the values and cultural phenomena in the contemporary world. CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY CULTURE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY INTERNATIONAL

ISBN 978-3-89975-251-9 CULTURA CULTURA INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE CULTURA AND AXIOLOGY Founded in 2004, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy 2011 of Culture and Axiology is a semiannual peer-reviewed jour- 1 2011 Vol VIII No 1 nal devoted to philosophy of culture and the study of value. It aims to promote the exploration of different values and cultural phenomena in regional and international contexts. The editorial board encourages the submission of manuscripts based on original research that are judged to make a novel and important contribution to understanding the values and cultural phenomena in the contemporary world. CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY CULTURE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY INTERNATIONAL

CULTURA

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE AND AXIOLOGY

Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology E-ISSN (Online): 2065-5002 (Published online by Versita, Solipska 14A/1, 02-482 Warsaw, Poland) ISSN (Print): 1584-1057

Advisory Board Prof. dr. Mario Perniola, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy Prof. dr. Paul Cruysberghs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Prof. dr. Michael Jennings, Princeton University, USA Prof. Emeritus dr. Horst Baier, University of Konstanz, Germany Prof. dr. José María Paz Gago, University of Coruña, Spain Prof. dr. Maximiliano E. Korstanje, John F. Kennedy University, Buenos Aires, Argentina Prof. dr. Nic Gianan, University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines Prof. dr. Alexandru Boboc, Correspondent member of the Romanian Academy, Romania Prof. dr. Teresa Castelao-Lawless, Grand Valley State University, USA Prof. dr. Richard L. Lanigan, Southern Illinois University, USA Prof. dr. Fernando Cipriani, G.d’Annunzio University Chieti-Pescara, Italy Prof. dr. Elif Cirakman, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey Prof. dr. David Cornberg, University Ming Chuan, Taiwan Prof. dr. Carmen Cozma, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Nancy Billias, Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph College, Hartford, USA Prof. dr. Christian Möckel, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany Prof. dr. Leszek S. Pyra, Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland Prof. dr. A. L. Samian, National University of Malaysia Prof. dr. Dimitar Sashev, University of Sofia, Bulgaria Prof. dr. Kiymet Selvi, Anadolu University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. dr. Traian D. Stănciulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Iassy, Romania Prof. dr. Gloria Vergara, University of Colima, Mexico

Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief: Co-Editors: Prof. dr. Nicolae Râmbu Prof. dr. Aldo Marroni Faculty of Philosophy and Social- Facoltà di Scienze Sociali Political Sciences Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Via dei Vestini, 31, 66100 Chieti B-dul Carol I, nr. 11, 700506 Iasi, Romania Scalo, Italy [email protected] [email protected] Executive Editor: PD Dr. Till Kinzel Dr. Simona Mitroiu Englisches Seminar Human Sciences Research Department Technische Universität Braunschweig, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Bienroder Weg 80, Lascar Catargi, nr. 54, 700107 Iasi, Romania 38106 Braunschweig, Germany [email protected] [email protected]

Editorial Asssitants: Radu Vasile Chialda, Adina Romanescu, Marius Sidoriuc, Daniel Ungureanu Designer: Aritia Poenaru

Editorial Office Address: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, The Seminar of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, Carol I, nr. 11, 700506, Iasi, Romania, Tel.:0040/232/201054; Fax: 0040/232/201154; e-mail: [email protected]

Indexing and Abstracting: Thomson Reuters (ISI) – Arts & Humanities Citation Index; EBSCO Humanities International Index; EBSCO Humanities International Complete; SCOPUS (Elsevier); MLA International Bibliography; The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP); Summon by Serial Solutions; Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory

Cultura

International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology

Vol. 8, No. 1 (2011)

Editor-in-Chief Nicolae Râmbu

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

© 2011 Martin Meidenbauer Verlagsbuchhandlung, München

Umschlagabbildung: © Aritia Poenaru

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CONTENTS

DEBATES and DIRECTIONS. AFRICAN STUDIES

Anton CARPINSCHI, Bilakani TONYEME Cultural Minorities and Intercultural Dialogue in the Dynamics of Globalization. African Participation 7

Jacob Ale AIGBODIOH Stigmatization in African Communalistic Societies and Habermas’ Theory of Rationality 27

Justina O. EHIAKHAMEN The Practice of Inheritance in Esan: the Place of the Female Child 49

Nicolito A. GIANAN Delving into the Ethical Dimension of Ubuntu Philosophy 63

Uyi-Ekpen OGBEIDE, Lambert Uyi EDIGIN Military Establishments and The Stability Of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: Toward The Realization Of Vision 2020 83

Elvis IMAFIDON Rethinking the Individual’s Place in an African (Esan) Ontology 93

Francis Xavier GICHURU Creating a New Society, New Nation and New Leadership Quality in Kenya through African Traditional Education Principles 111

Solomon A. LALEYE Democracy in Conflict and Conflicts in Democracy: The Nigerian Experience 127

VIEWS upon ETHICS, TRUTH and LANGUAGE

Jim I. UNAH Self-discovery: Who am I? An Ontologized Ethics of Self-mastery 143

Seungbae PARK Defence of Cultural Relativism 159

Simona MODREANU A Different Approach to the “Theater of the Absurd”. With Special Reference to Eugene Ionesco 171

Mario PERNIOLA Impossible, yet real! 187

Simona MITROIU To collect in order to survive: Benjamin and the necessity of collecting 213

Radu Vasile CHIALDA Weak Barbarism 223

10.3726/975251_187 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 8(1)/2011: 187–212

Impossible, yet Real!1

Mario PERNIOLA Dipartimento di Ricerche Filosofiche Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” Via Columbia 1 00133 Roma, Italy [email protected] http://www.marioperniola.it/site/index.asp

Abstract. In order to properly understand the period which begins at the end of the '60s last century, this must not be described anymore using the traditional categories of culture and politics. Facing events like those in May '68 in France, the Italian revolution in 1979, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the attack against the Twin Towers from New York in September 2001, we are all tempted to say “impossible, yet real”. These events had immense consequences upon the individual and collective life, provoking radical upturns of traditional values and of the way people relate to these values. Thus, a new form of historicity was born, having as characteristics the perception of some phenomena both as miracles and traumas, because they seem impossible to explain rationally. In this text both the axiological mutations that occurred in the history of the last decades and the meanings of these mutations are presented in a personal way. Keywords: Cultural Studies, advertising imperialism, communication miracles and traumas, cultural memory, Georges Bataille

Rarely, and only in very recent times, has humanity asked itself the question of the sense of what it is to live individually and collectively: a vast majority of human beings in the past have been absorbed by the concern of being able to survive and possibly live with less effort and more available goods. The sense of individual and collective life was not a problem, because the answer was already provided by the social condition in which it was born, and from handed down knowledge and rituals. Still, in modern times, especially in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, in the West, especially by the classes that had reached well-being through the exercise of administrative, commercial and industrial, the tendency to look also at the unfolding of individual and social life of the existence of rational principles developed. In addition, the laws, similarly to what happened in the sciences, would have allowed not

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only to understand what was happening, but even to foresee what would have happened without resorting to divination and magic arts. The great flowering of literal fiction and historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth century responded to the pretension to grant a new and original sense to the lives of individuals and communities in order to insert them in a development plan that could identify, with relative reliability, the signs of progress or regress in the conduct of personal affairs, family, insti- tutional, economic, political, social and cultural rights in order to allow the possibility of a capable action that could intervene effectively on the course of events. All this immense work of private and collective rationalization of life, on which Western civilization is founded and that has ensured the world’s conquest, worked well enough until the end of the Second World War, finding its fulfilment in the victory over the Nazis and Fascism and in the enslavement of a great culture that was able to subtract itself from the Euro-American colonization, the Japanese one. Despite the countless horrors, murders, massacres, genocides and various disasters that punctuated this period of history, there are a number of explanations for these events, different and even opposed to each other, which provide a plausible key to the reading. The generations that grew up after the end of the Second World War did not inherit this idea of the world being based on the vital importance of individual and collective action and on the rational and progressive nature of history; such a conception has become more alien to them as their birth was at the end of the Second World War. They were witnesses to unpredictable events, whose significance is still opaque and indeci- pherable as long as it uses the concepts and notions that have dominated the first half of the 19th and 20th centuries. These generations are therefore now in the condition that they have not yet understood anything about the events they have lived through and in which, sometimes, they have even considered playing a leading role. Since the end of the Second World War, four unpredictable events have happened in the West that surprised even the most informed members of the public: the French protests in May 1968, the Iranian revolution of February 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001. In relation to these facts, the vast majority of people have made of their property a phrase by French writer Georges Bataille, impossible et pourtant là, “impossible, and yet here”. In fact, many had predicted that the revolt of

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the Parisian students would have led to the largest wildcat strike in history? That a monarchy supported by the strong Americans and a ruthless repressive system would be overthrown in a few months after a popular uprising led by clergy? That a regime built on a dense network of police informers and spies would dissipate so quickly? That nineteen suicide bombers would be able to successfully carry out a devastating attack on American soil? It is known that contemporaries are not the best experts of their present; most people do not live in actuality, and even the most informed can be wrong. The example of Lenin became proverbial, that a few weeks before the outbreak of the Russian revolution, he said to the Swiss workers that it would have died before it would take place. In principle, the sense of what was experienced individually and collectively was discovered at the end. It has always been difficult to predict the future; nevertheless, the subsequent events, up to the 1960s, have a more refractory aspect that make use of modern historical and ideological categories. These events appear to be more like miracles as fulfilment processes for which you know the performance or achievements of utopias; more like traumas than like tragedies or disasters of which it is possible to elaborate the mourning. Certainly, it is when human society seems to become more rational, thanks to extraordinary scientific technological inventions, burst into the individual experience and historical facts that seem to belong on the horizon, characterized by irrationality that belongs to the religious and scientific horizon more than to the scientific and philosophical, more to psychotic syndromes than the explosion of contradictions or to crises that can be overcome. If you look at the real truth of things, the four facts that have been discussed are less important than they seem at first sight. In 1968, after the wildcat strike, everyone went back to work. The Iranian revolution did not spread itself to all of Islam and remained confined to a single country. The socioeconomic status of East Germans is still much lower in respect to the West Germans. The damage caused by the attack to the Twin Towers were, from a military point of view, insignificant. These facts, taken one by one and isolated from their consequences, are ironic. About the French protests in May 1968, a philosopher said: le sang n'a pas coulè,, donc rien s'est passé (“blood has not poured, then nothing has happened”). In the Iranian case, a lot of blood poured, but the revolution did not achieve what was

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proposed. As to the fall of the Berlin Wall, a famous aphorism, made by Stanislaw Lec, is considered: “A better tomorrow does not give the certainty of an even better day after tomorrow.” As for the Twin Towers, it is still Lec that helps us: “Who knows? Perhaps the walls of Jericho collapsed because of too much trumpeting inside?” It is tempting to share the ironic attitude that the German historian Jakob Burckhardt had against the historical process. But yet, who can deny the imaginative and emotional impact that these four events have unleashed? We must deepen the notions of miracle and trauma to understand how much they are far from sensitive and philosophical, political and social categories, of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For Bataille, miracle defines the experience of sovereignty that appears when we can get away from the world of utility and access a full experience of the present. This occurs, according to Bataille, in a series of events that include art and the sacred, laughter and tears, sexuality and death. The meeting with these events generates a kind of exhilaration, a miraculous sensation, the entrance into an extraordinary condition that emancipates from the everyday life chains. Therefore, the end must not be considered with exclusive reference to transcendence. For Bataille, the words miracle and miraculeux are considered in a literal sense, from the Latin mirus, which means wonderful, amazing and surprising. The context to which Bataille refers to in the miracle is connected with the etymology of mirus that has affinities with the Indo- European root from the Greek ειδιώ, which means smile. Moreover, only human beings smile. If in other books Bataille was the founder of erotic anthropology, which saw precisely the distinctive character of human beings in eroticism, here the direction seems to go towards a smiling anthropology: in fact, the miraculous instant is when waiting ends in nothing! Bataille seems to repeat Kant’s famous definition, that laughter is a condition resulting from a tense expectation, which all of a sudden vanishes. The French expression impossible et pourtant là, shows a peculiarity of the French language which is very significant. It affects primarily the fact that the French là is equal to the Italian qui. For example, the expression Que faistulà? means “What are you doing here?”. Les faits sont là means “These are the facts”. Impossible et pourtant là! This French expression is untranslatable into other languages, but it expresses very well the strangeness of these four events. It implies a certain shift, a décalage, a shift compared to the real truth of things because in French you use là instead of ici. The French adverb there is ambivalent; it implicates both

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presence and distance. It is a very important nuance. In fact, it refers to another that does not end with the fact itself, but involves a vastly wider variety of memories and expectations, illusions and interests. So it is not wrong to attribute to these facts a paradigmatic meaning that transforms and divides the four different epochs: the age of communication, of deregulation, of challenge and finally of assessment. As known, for Bataille, the sovereign moments for excellence, in which an unexpected thing occurs, hitherto considered impossible, those are the ones in which death and sexuality approach until they merge with each other. But here we are dealing with facts that regard, not only private experiences but also collective ones, “the story” so to say. Certainly, also for Bataille, the story was the subject of a constant and persistent reflection; yet he thought of sovereignty almost always with reference to ancient times in space or time. It’s the anthropology and antiquity that provide references and examples of public sovereignty, not the world of his time: the potlatch, the pyramids, the sacrifices, the great art of the past. Capitalism and communism, the two models of society that were opposed in his time, for him remain submissive to the slavish logic of labour and of utility, and therefore an inaccessible raid of the impossible et pourtant là. Bataille died in 1962 and a few months later, the world’s order of the victorious powers of the Second World War seemed to show some signs of abating. Because of the installation of missile bases in Cuba, where Castro had established a communist regime, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of irreparable rupture. A third world war seemed imminent, but it did not occur! However, instead of the logic of economy and work, which was the subject of criticism of Bataille, on the horizon appears the aesthetics of consumerism and entertainment. The homo ludens, who had been placed into the corner by the homo laborans from 19th century rationalism, makes his big return, and expects his well-being from the goddess Fortuna: miracle takes the place of the programmatic plan, the expectation takes the place of the unexpected, and the wonderful takes that place of the interesting. Surrealism no longer has any reason to exist because it is fulfilled: what is wonderful is available to all. Western society slowly began to be pervaded by a miraculous mindset, which spread to a vital contribution and was, by the development of a techno-science, seen as a science fiction about to take place, significantly accompanied by a decline in the main part of the population of elemen-

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tary scientific and technical knowledge. A more important contribution to the advent of a miraculous mindset was given by the means of mass communication that since the early 1960s had played a much greater role than in the past, for the spread of television and the feedback effect exerted on those that acted. It is impossible et pourtant là to say there are not only spectators but also actors in the events, who are the first to be amazed at the emphasis placed by the media on their performance the and interest with which they follow the developments. Their words and their communications immediately become an essential part of the event, influencing in a very relevant way its development, the real effectual truth of what is submerged and disappeared under a huge amount of words and images broadcasted all around the world. This “mediatic miraculousism” generates in everyone an absolute out- of-proportion excitement with respect to the effective weight of the events that occur and that are often actually unheard of, but hides a historical situation that stopped at the end of the Second World War. There are, however, the winners of the Second World War, who firmly keep in their hands the destiny of the world through the polling station votes, with the right of veto that the occupy at ONU, and a dense financial, economic and military network that are not so transparent. When this balance seems to be endangered, it is more or less promptly recovered. For example, in 1971, in a period of great financial uncertainty because of the collapse of the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods in 1944, the United Nations polling station votes with the right of veto occupied by Taiwan was given as an American initiative to China. Similarly, in the years after 1991 it was in the interest of the other four great powers to avoid the collapse of the Soviet Union, as it could have led to a civil war and permitted Russia to return to be a great nation. Considering all, even in that way it went wrong! The Cold War never became hot, the conflicts remained local, the successes of Islamist terrorism, soaking America and Europe into a climate of fear, have so far prevented that the alternative globalization movement (Seattle in December 1999, Genoa in July 2001, London and hundreds of other cities in the world in February 2003) achieving a real political significance, creating uncontrollable scenarios and letting other countries and conti- nents into the game. Also on the horizons and prospects of individual lives, it is worth asking whether what happened was really important: the life of the

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individual was worth very little in the past, and it is worth much less today. The great ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries gave to those who made it theirs a heroic aura, those that refused would have received from this refusal a surplus of grandeur. Mediatic miraculousism has instead made futile and empty the individual lives and relationships of kinship; they are no longer the subject of novels, but no more than little stories. The so- called “sexual revolution” has turned out to be a hoax. Social and economic mobility is much lower today than it was in the years following the end of the Second World War. The disintegration of educational institutions makes recognition for merit and excellence impossible. But, all in all, it did not end up badly! We love and hate a lot less; the place for passions has been taken by small attractions that do not have the power to bind people for life and death and small envies which have not the strength to kill. You live dangerously just for fun or for money. The law of survival of the fittest does so that he has the taste of miraculous self- destruction without undesirable external interference. Certainly, understanding, feeling and acting, have suffered as has the possibility of human experience as a whole. Not that there have not been great thinkers, mostly French and German, that have opened up new essential horizons for the understanding of the actual world, but their transformation into stars of the show and the impossibility of them having a real influence over their followers has meant their personal lives ended up existential failures: who went in conflict with their own supporter and was so disturbed from it as to die for it? Who killed his wife? Who was the victim of a fatal addiction? Who threw himself out of the window? Who ended up as a caricature of himself? Who, having written and talked incessantly for decades all over the world, died with the impression of having been totally misunderstood? What is surprising is the huge disparity between world notoriety and the lack of real influence that can affect the lives of listeners and readers. The artists have rapidly understood the futility of mediatic miraculousism and have driven it well, especially the Americans. Some religious leaders and personalities of the jet set have have done the same. The other side of the miracle is the trauma that, in its collective dimension, has been reserved for the states of Latin America, Asia, Africa and Balkans. The Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s, the Red Khmer regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the many African civil wars after decolonization, the massacres in the Balkans in the 1990s,

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as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been enormous traumas, different from the massacres and genocides of the past. They are configured as events over which it applies the same expression that we use in relation to miracles: “impossible, but real!” For many of these terrible events, which fall outside the view of the dramatical rationality of history, many kinds of explanation can be adopted. What is striking, however, is not so much that they have taken place, but that their perpetrators have had impunity and above all they have not been chased with a thirst for justice by the survivors, as for example occurred for the Shoah. It is n enough that the selflessness of major world powers, which have been largely complicit in these killings, have not demonstrated interest towards them or the occult protections enjoyed by the killers to explain the ease with which they have largely managed to escape unharmed from the consequences of the massacres of which they were the authors, in spite of so many journalistic investigations that have shown to the whole world the atrocities and supplied evident proof of them. It remains something incomprehensible in the absence of effective reactions by those who have suffered them. Not only in respect of what happened, but also what has not happened, the expression returns: “Impossible, but real!” It seems that some journalistic reports and judicial actions, without efficiency, have been considered sufficient to rescue and redeem the horrors that occurred. There is the so-called “goodism” and “forgiveness” – something that belongs intimately to the world of communication and futility in which the real truth of things, even more atrocious, has sunk. The concept of trauma, seen as a psychic wound caused by external violence, which cannot be psychically elaborated and therefore then passed over through an analytical work, seems the most suitable way of describing the condition that, together with the miracle, has characterized the ways of feeling from the 1960s onwards. The trauma remains in the psyche as a foreign body for which you cannot find a logical and convincing explanation, or an explanation for exactly how it occurs in the case of the miracle, generating a state of powerlessness and frustration that you cannot overcome. It is something not interpretable and that cannot be assimilated as long as you remain in a purely subjective horizon. The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who dedicated great attention to trauma, introduced a very interesting concept regarding im- plantation, i.e. invasion of the unconscious in another person. The

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unconscious is therefore not a motivated autonomous subject, but something that comes from outside. In fact, according to Laplanche, children do not have an unconscious. Obviously, this does not mean that there is an occult complicity between persecutors and victims, but that both are part of the same world that is held by the “impossible, but real”. In other words, the traumatized are not only those who suffer from violence, but even those who practice it. The fact is that the major collective traumas referred to occurred during the period of the end of the Second World War, only marginal countries respect to the so-called “first world”, these happenings to not have to fool us. The media of traumatism shows solidarity with the media of miracles. The media feed themselves with miracles and trauma. The spectators of the television news broadcasts are always waiting for a traumatic event that does not affect them personally. This distant place, a site of unimagi- nable atrocities, plays the same role that Australia has played for the English from 1787 to 1868 – the last date the prisoners were sent over. However, after September 11, 2001 in New York, March 11, 2004 in Madrid, July 7, 2005 in London and December 11, 2007 in Algiers, danger has approached the Euro-American spectators, making them shout out: “Impossible, but real!” The specific feature of trauma is similar to a miracle; they have in common the fact that they have come away from a rational explanation. So much into the miracle, as into the trauma, we find ourselves not only in front of a fact that is difficult to understand, but in front of a message that calls us up for an explanation. They contain a message that cannot be said in words, which therefore remains essentially enigmatic; miracles and trauma are clearly intended to transfer something to us personally, but we do not know what. They are like a letter that is addressed to us, but which is impossible to open. The rational tales of a private or collective story have at their centre an individual subject or a historic one (the nation, the class, the people ...); instead, trauma throws back into the game the way the subject has been constituted. According to Laplanche, what happened had occurred from the beginning through the installation of the other’s unconscious, then the new traumatic event destroys an identity that was built up with difficulty abinitio through an external intervention. In traditional societies these problems do not exist because the repetition of the past patterns was obvious: the new era was a remake of the old and, in any case, innovation was never opposed to conservation.

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Whilst the decay of the modern world is caused by the fact that the place of individual action has been taken by communication, whose motto is just the exclamation: “impossible, but real!” This deep change, which occurred during the 1960s, was already felt in the 1950s by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, for which the consumer society marks the end of active life. This was articulated in three different dimensions: working, which is subordinated to satisfying the needs of life; making, which creates a world of objects the most prominent of which are works of art; and finally acting, regarding political life understood as a public domain that relates human beings from an equality point of view. These three dimensions of active life are impossible in a society of consumers, that is, of workers without jobs, which is defined by Arendt as a “fool’s paradise”. Moreover, how can you describe it other- wise: a way of being in which miracles and trauma are alternated up to the point of being indistinguishable amongst themselves? An impressive testimony to the futility of action was in fact already provided by André Malraux, the French writer, who, much in life as in his works, attributed to action the maximum importance. The three dimensions of excellence, politics, the seductive and the artistic–literary, were prosecuted by him with all his energy, since he was young in the 1920s, whilst aware of their uselessness. “A time that does no longer find its sense in men’s soul finds it in their action. We are,” he said, “a civilization subject to the proof of the action, and therefore promised to the most bloody fate.” The actions of his characters are therefore directed not from the rationality of history, but from its absurdity. Not sur- prisingly, at the end of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Francois Lyotard occupied the last years of his life writing two books on Malraux; he would have understood, much earlier than others, that the ideal modern man of action had been abandoned the West. What remains are the works. But the works are deaf rooms; in the noise that was created from miracles and from trauma they are unable to let their voices be heard. It seems that the huge enterprise of modernity, which consists of giving to private and collective life a rational mentality and behaviour based on a clear perception of the relationship between cause and effect, even if only a parenthesis of several centuries. However, for the miracles and traumas that characterize our time, there is something very different from superstition and fear, which constitute normal aspects of the pre-modern

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mentality and were considered essential conditions of human existence. We perceive the miraculous and traumatic experiences not as something that is unpredictable, the randomness and contingency of life, but as something that is abnormal and disturbing. However, for how long will this impression last? Until we shall say “impossible, but real (true)”? It is probable that we are addicted to wonders and horrors released progressively from 1968 until today in an impressive growth of intensity and destruction, which makes them feel like ordinary and trivial facts. In fact, their communicative impact is consumed quickly and in order to achieve the same effect requires a surplus of exceptionality and shock. If the work of historians in the years after the 1960s seem disappointing and inadequate, unable to go beyond a chronicle, afraid to give a new key for the understanding of unprecedented events, concerned with separating from philosophy, subordinated to data that is purely quantitative, sub- missive to worn ideological schemes, and thus deprived of self-criticism, it is because with the 1960s we entered into a new regime of historicity: communication has taken the place of action. Communication creates a product that occupies an intermediate space between truth and falsity; defined as an image, spectacle and simulacrum, it becomes more comprehensible through the categories of art, psychoanalysis and religion than through politics, economics and students of warfare. These have not ceased to dominate the world, as it naively seemed to those who are recognized under the banner of nihilism or even of pataphysics, but it has been withdrawn to a dark side and is inaccessible to outsiders as much as to scholars, constituting a kind of political, military and financial dome, formed by the victors of the Second World War and the global organizations emanating from these. Not so bad then, because today to run over the dome means throwing the world into chaos and spreading absolute barbarity. However, it remains to be seen until when this dome will support it: until when will they be able to make people believe that communication is “action?” Until the wars, massacres, genocides of the last forty years seem historic actions not very different from the real ones of which the dome was formed? The ancients used to distinguish three kinds of stories: as well as factual (praktikè), and the false (pseudè) they identified a third type of story that dealt with events considered as true and defined it with the term plasmata, which means things that are modelled, moulded, pictures and figures. At first glance the communication seems to belong in fact to this third kind

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of story, which is beyond what is true and what is false, because it produces real effects without belonging to the category of historical actions themselves, of the res gestae. To the ancients this third regime of historicity was reserved for the theatre, art and shows, which in ancient Greece used to have a deep and long-lasting influence on the audience. However, in the Roman Empire the plasmata used to leave the audience quite unhappy; they used to need something a bit stronger, something that was much more real, more facts that would permit them to be emotionally involved: the gladiatorial shows responded to this need, making the death scene explicit. In the Roman circus there is not a simulation of actors who pretend to die, as in the Greek tragedy, but true (real) deaths of men who fight for fun. We have passed from the art to communication, from a show to little stories, from porn to snuff. In other words, communication is something artificial that, in order to be believed, needs of an excess of reality. The communication, therefore, goes beyond the plasmata, and starts another regime of historicity; it is as if the stories of the gladiators take the place of the emperors’ actions, who were then forced to behave like gladiators! At this point the Roman emperors were not able to be poets and actors like Nero, limiting the plasmata. Communication sums itself up in the three previous types of history: let’s say that it is true, because it puts forward a fact, false, because it adopts techniques of exaggeration, manipulation and deception and fake, because the fantastic and imaginative aspects play an essential role. So if historians have not been able to tell the story of the 1960s to our present day in a plausible way, in order to give a comprehension account of what occurred, organizing under the form of a coherent whole, finding an internal connection among the facts, creating a hierarchy of meanings and identifying the culminating events that mark the beginning and end of each period, it is because they found themselves facing a completely new situation. A gap was created between historic materials (that Humboldt used to call Begebenheiten) and the history itself (Geschichte selbst), so great as to make the intelligibility of the present impossible. From the 19th century onwards there is no history without identification of the inner under- standing of the events and the conscious choice of a narrative model. But this possibility failed with the regime of historicity that was inaugurated by communication, built on the alternation between (and even the equiva- lence of) miracles and trauma.

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Of course, even in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century some expressed their doubts on the rationality of history. Already the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder in the second half of the 18th century had undersigned the non-identity of the historic era and the discontinuity of becoming. A century after, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had made of the criticism to historicism, his strong point, reproaching him for having transformed the naked admiration for the success of idolatry of the admired thing, opposing the outdated and untimely character of every real creative activity, which must act against its era in favour of a future time. A little later, another German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, charged the homogeneous conception of the historical process; in his view, the experience of the oppressed always aspires to break the continuum of time. He found it particularly significant that the rebels shot the clocks of the Paris Commune of 1871! Even the father of 19th century scientific historiography, Leopold von Ranke, recognized that the connection of universal things, achieved by the historian, could never be complete, recognizing that a part remained obscure and directly connected to the inscrutable intervention of God. The ultimate theoretician of war, Carl von Clausewitz, had in any case shown how some purely random factors had affected the outcome of battles. We know how much, up to the advent of a rational mind, human beings have been victims of the pretensions of future telling, omens and various sorceries. The faith in the intervention of the transcendent in the world was based on the fact that there was no clear perception of the difference between the possible and the impossible. Everyone’s daily experience shows how much – as the French artist Ben says – le hazard est partout: the disaster for everyone is always around the corner. In this extreme experience of uncertainty, which is an essential aspect of human existence, religions have tempted to give a remedy with the internalization of the contingency (as in Buddhism) or the concept of providence (as in the monotheistic religions). However, the historical regime introduced by communication, articled on the miracle and on trauma, is very different from this experience, let’s say natural and traditional, the instability and impermanence of all things. It introduces a surreptitious element of artificiality and artificialness and of counterfeiting, which subverts the rational conception of individual life and of historical process, without giving the possibility of turning back to

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the way of life of the past. In other words, the miracles and trauma of the world of communication has nothing to do with happy endings and tragedies of the past, in which the human being or historical subject – as favoured by luck or dogged by misfortune – remained always, in some measure, the author of his own destiny. The literature and philosophy of modern times, starting from the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, have explored the horizon of action, in all its dimensions and occurrences, with extreme finesse and perspicacity. There is no aspect of political, seductive and artistic–literary action that has not been studied and represented in all its developments and all its issues. Now we have the impression that all this knowledge is completely inadequate to understand the world of communication, started in the 1960s, which no longer work in terms of actions and reactions, but in terms of miracles and trauma; no longer by doing and sustaining, but as devices of which we are all hostages. As known, the so-called “historiographical revolution” of the 20th century, promoted primarily (but not only) by the French magazine Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, is constituted in order to reduce the importance of single historical facts, considering them superficial expressions a historical becoming that has its roots in long-term structural processes of economics, geography, demographics, culture, materiality and so on. From this perspective, the task of the historian is to overlook the events and focus their attention on ways of thinking and listening, everyday life, collective and anonymous entities, which are the real keys towards the understanding of human affairs. The finishing line of this research is a story with no facts and no names, finally free from the prejudices that have affected the historical work in the 19th century: the political, the individual and the timeline. In other words, it deals with finding the rationality of the historical process not in the actions of individual and collective subjects, but in the processes that run as deep karst currents beneath the surface of events. This conception of historiography, which has produced many fascinating works, has the limitation of not being able to take care of the present and consequently not being very able to be aware of the conditions that make it possible. If a historian is able to complete and publish a great work on a long-term process, which is the result of a work that has taken him ten years, it is because there are existing situations that regard the national, economic, social, academic, editorial, journalistic and

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cultural conditions that support it. These conditions are not at all obvious or stable; on the contrary, they are quite exceptional. As said in the 17th century by the Spaniard Baltasar Gracian, men are at the mercy of time and that also goes for historians! There is something ironic in the fact that historians, who have diminished the importance of the action in favour of a long term process, have been contradicted by the advent of commu- nication, which proceeds through events that are together miraculous and traumatic! An era founded on action, which created the conditions for the possibility of a long-term historiography, was followed by an era centred on events that do not have the character of the action, but the miracle and trauma! After 1968 the historians and philosophers of history therefore felt the need to introduce new research methodologies and disciplinary approaches. Hayden White’s great work, Metahistory: The Historical Imagina tion in Nineteenth Century of Europe (1973) reminds us that the story always remains a discourse which involves the adoption of a rhetoric of different formal and narrative choices, which are not at all innocent and neutral but involve theoretical and political assumptions, undergoing not a few publishing and communication constraints. The challenge that his methodological approach poses for today’s historians can be condensed into one question: who is able to describe present history with the philosophical acuteness and capacity of explanation of which they have clearly given proof of during the 19th century in completely different ways Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burchhardt? Now the question is all the more provocative as it insinuates the suspicion that it is impossible to write the story that way. Not differently, Hugh Silverman, commenting that Heidegger’s thought about history (Geschichte) being intended as a destination (Geschick), considers the historian’s activity as a textual activity with a practical nature. The moment in which it is stated that temporary history must be the guiding discipline of the humanity studies, it appears to be, in the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. This seems like a beautiful definition of com- munication, but it certainly does not go in the direction of history considered as science, or as art. And it would be a shame that the generations born after the Second World War should be destined to live and die without understanding anything about the time in which they lived.

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Marc Bloch, who in 1941 wrote an apology for history, observes that historical knowledge constantly has the need to combine the study of the dead and of the living. During the 1980s and 1990s in the magazine Annales a critical turning point occurred that called into question the theory of long duration, criticizing that the analysis of social change was disregarded. Pierre Nora rightly observes that the return of attention towards the single event is combined with the awareness of its media character, which makes it deeply different from the traditional political history events. According to Peter Burke, the historiography that came after the year 1968 is marked by a fragmentation of methods, objects of research and theoretical perspectives. New historicism and the orientation of historiography known as micro-history position themselves at opposite ends of the contemporary historiography map. The most important representative of the first one is the historian Stephen Greenblatt. New historicism drops the ambition of a great history and places its attention precisely on anecdotes and small stories, considering them not as documents that attest an objective historical truth, but as literary phenomena beyond truth and falsity, enigmatic areas that can be subject to a work of deconstruction. Now, not by chance, in the volume that has been dedicated to the movement and which is entitled The New Historicism, one of the most interesting contributions refers to the epistemological status of the anecdotal. It is Joel Fineman’s essay, entitled “The History of Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction”, in which Thucydides is considered together with the first writer of anecdotes and as the prototypical example of a methodology neo-historicist ante literam. Since Thucydides’ work is generally considered as the first manifestation of a scientific historiography, free from the fabulous and legendary aspects that are present in Herodotus, Fineman’s thesis is undoubtedly original and provocative. Without going into a discussion about its reliability, it seems important to observe that a theoretical approach is innovative as the implicit one in new historicism; it is determined with reference to classical antiquity from a perspective that is both postmodern and neo-antique. In absolute contrast to new historicism is the position of Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi and those who recognize themselves in their theoretical project, who refuse the combination of history and rhetoric, underlining the dangers of a sceptical drift, which ends up prescinding from the real facts and relies only on the interpretation and deconstruction of texts. Micro-history places in the centre of its method-

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ology the notions of spy and trace, proposing itself to reach an incontrovertible truth, through work similar to one who carries out an investigation. Its specificity consists of an explicit and militant assertion of cognitive character and not just of literary history. The main attention is, however, focused on individuals and small groups. What unites these two extreme positions is the renunciation of the macro-history of the present time, which now seems inaccessible to the large scale historical narrative , which is or less plausible and is abandoned to machinations, to misinformation and to distortions of communication and political struggle. This reserve in speaking out of respect to the present can be justified by the impossibility of having reliable documenta- tion on what is happening in the immediate time; however, it is unacceptable if it regards more than half a century! In other words, it appears that since 1945 nothing else that seemed important has occurred: the big story ends up with the discovery of the Nazi extermination camps and with the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, depending on the communication policy of the moment and whether it tends towards neo- warmongering or neo-pacifism. But the two terms are confused by the concept of preventative war. Beyond new historicism and micro-stories, many other historio- graphical guidelines were born and developed in the second half of the twentieth century, among Cultural Studies, virtual history and cultural me- mory seem most significant. The first had the merit of having enormously expanded the field of objects of study, extending it to all human activities and discursive practices. The strength of Cultural Studies is firstly in the fact that, in taking away the rigid separation between the major areas of humanities (history, philosophy and human sciences), they aim to bridge the gap existing between humanistic knowledge and contemporary society. What charac- terizes it is the meeting and mixing of codes belonging to different fields. It develops through a continuous interplay of signs and ceaseless shifting of meanings. To be inadequate respect to solicitation of modern society, are not the traditional knowledges, as much as the structures that govern their articulation: it is the closure of oneself to such knowledge that makes them look obsolete. Young people are orientated towards new pro- fessional profiles of entertainment, communication, tourism, journalism, publishing, organization of leisure time, public relations, associations, voluntary work … they certainly need to know political and social history,

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literary and artistic philosophy and the humanities, but these particular knowledges are fruitful only if they contain within themselves the possibility of being related to the scope of an epistemological horizon characterized by flexibility. After all, at the base of the methodology of Cultural Studies is the baroque principle of ingenuity, which consists of getting near to things that at first sight seem far and getting distant things that are at first sight very near. Such a principle is even more important if applied to research, which is generally much more original and innovative as it explores the more marginal areas and the boundaries of canonical knowledge. The second important characteristic of Cultural Studies is the attention to the relationship between knowledge and power. The fact that the articulation of the humanities does not meet at all the needs of knowledge, but the power structures of academia, which usually aim only to reproduce themselves, constitutes already by itself a sufficient reason to explain the ostracism in which Cultural Studies are held in continental Europe. Much more serious is, however, the scandal of knowledge without power and power without knowledge, which is closely linked to the decline of the scientific and professional system of the eighteenth- nineteenth century, in which science and profession formed a structure whose parts were inseparable one from another. Science was the knowledge of a reality that was already rational and scientific and therefore its possession ensured the possibility of working within such reality; and, vice versa, the profession was a doing that could be shown, at any moment, to know what he was doing, and for such a reason produced effects in the measure with which it was founded on knowledge. This wonderful mutual communality between science and profession, on which the modern university was held, is now in pieces. However, the need remains, which it tries to satisfy. Cultural Studies tries to give a different answer from the one given by the 19th century, regardless of any organic and all-encompassing relationship between science and profession. Obviously, this does not involve a consideration of the conceptual categories in their abstraction and pure ideal, but on the contrary seeks to consider them as cultural practices and power devices. Thirdly, Cultural Studies should emancipate the new players of knowledge – the women, the young, the intellectual non-Westerners – from the traps of naivety and ideology. Feminism, youth and multi-

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culturalism have played an important role in focusing the relationship between knowledge and sex, generations and cultures, but often remain mired in assertion of identity rather than allowing the experiences of differences. In other words, there have been more manifestations of a resentment rather than an alternative feeling. Western humanistic knowledge has reached such a degree of speculative finesse that any direct effort to go beyond does not have to fall back into a vitality that confuses everything with everything. This historiographical orientation began in Great Britain with the school in Birmingham in the 1960s and flourished in the United States in the 1980s. It had the merit to have greatly expanded the horizons of historical research, but today it suffers from bulimia and from a lack of discernment in the choice of its objects of study, which has made it inadequate for discovering the intelligibility of what happened. It has not even supplied a small interpretive key that distinguishes the important and significant from the ephemeral and trivial. The moment in which the communication strategies are decisively towards the establishment of hierarchical categories, implicit in the adoption of classifications, of ranking and evaluations not merely quantitative, Cultural Studies ends up being displaced from its relationship with the press of directly criticising the news from which they drew their strength. In the communication strategies the notions of reputation appear, the pertinence, the authority, the rank and similar; you start from inside a battle of the digital society on the determination of evaluation criteria. This perspective is, however, unfamiliar to the mentality of Cultural Studies, which is anti-hierarchical and tends to give equal dignity and respect to any manifestation of human activity. If everything can be a subject of historical research, it means that nothing deserves to be passed on to future generations, everything is considered as destined to exhaust in an event without effectiveness. Those who appreciate everything do not really appreciate anything. In the 18th and 19th centuries the story was conceived as the victory of the human spirit over obscurantism; the historiographical practice of Cultural Studies runs the risk of leading to a new form of obscurantism, which consists of the impossibility of distinguishing what is worth telling from what can be thrown away without remorse dans la poubelle d’histoire. Starting from a project of radical criticism against contemporary society, they have finished with being victims of a great naivety: to confuse the history of social and political defeat of the

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vanquished with the history of the manifestations of their subordination to capitalism. So often Cultural Studies forget that to criticize means to choose and distribute a heap of froth and nonsense for expressions of creativity. The criteria, which are merely quantitative, cancel all the other parameters of evaluation. In this way, Cultural Studies finishes up being sympathetic to the phenomenon of dumbing down (brutalization, stupidity and muting) of society as a whole, from the refusal it started. Such phenomenon involves the daily life, media, culture, administration, schools, universities and, not least, the politics for which the neologism dumbocracy has been created (a term that has nothing to do with Dumbo, the famous Walt Disney animated cartoon, but comes from the adjective dumb that means “dumb/unable to speak” and, by extension, “stupid”. A further step towards the dissolution of the historical narrative of philosophical commitment a large breath was taken involuntarily from so-called virtual history. The starting point of this approach, which has been theorized by Niall Ferguson, is a critique of 19th century historio- graphical determinism. In the thinkers of effectual reality (Hegel, Marx, etc.) there is something which is too reductive, but in fact also what could be and did not occur has its historical status, is real. As Lec says, “in history also the facts that have not occurred have their importance”. In general, it was the 19th century novel that filled this horizon, telling not only the private affairs of individuals, but also their hopes and expectations, and underlining the importance of the intervention of chance and of contingency in the course of events. Such intervention has been relevantly as much important in public history. The ancient historians, pagans as well as Christians, were well aware of it. In modern times, the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, writing during the 16th century, attributes to luck an essential role in the determination of the effectual truth of things, whilst the French bishop Jacques Benign Bossuet in the 17th century explains many unforeseeable events with the intervention of divine providence. Before the advent of so-called scientific history, the search for the meaning of events leaves something to the unexpected and to freedom of action of individuals, attributing in this way to counterfactual elements an essential historical value. In other words, there are no historical laws that are similar to those of the physical and natural sciences. Victory and defeat do not always contain inside themselves an intrinsic rationality for the simple fact that they

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have occurred. It is not said that who has won has been predestined to win due to some kind of hard and fast logic of evolutionary or economic character. The eruption of events “impossible, but true” from the year 1968 onwards has lost faith in progress and has brought the attention back to the counterfactual aspects. However, questions like “if Khomeini had been killed by a killer of the Shah’s secret service before taking the plane that would have taken him back to Iran, what would have happened?” or “if some of the hijackers of the planes of September 11th had betrayed the others a few days before what would have happened ?” would do nothing more than enormously extend the scope of the historiographical investigation, making the elaboration and construction of the coherent historical discourse matter completely impossible. Virtual history is, however, a very significant indication of the dissolution not only of the rationality of the story but also its credibility: the fact dissolves in the news, the event becomes a simulacrum beyond true and false, the action liquefies in communication. It not only takes away the possibility of anyone interpreting and narrating the past in an authoritative way, merging what is important and what is trivial, but it thins the distance between what really happened and what could have happened. The virtual history on one side shows the contingent nature of events, moving in the opposite direction not only to 19th century determinism but also the story that emphasizes the phenomena of long duration, and on the other side it affects the real truth of the event. As long as the past becomes the subject of different interpretations from those so far accepted, as occurs with so-called historical revisionism, nothing really serious happens. Historical revisionism is nothing new: every era has re-handled and even reversed, often on the basis of new research and documentations, the opinions of the ages that preceded it. Things change radically when something is in doubt, not the interpretation, but the real existence of the fact, as in the so-called historical denial, which is a form of pathological pursuit of suspect, when it is not openly a form of functional imposture to politics battles. However, it is difficult to deny that denial – even if it is itself an aberrant manifestation of the age of communication, which tends to discredit the knowledge by reducing it to mere opinion, thus corroborating the principle that an opinion is worth the same as another one, communication cancels completely the power and authority of one who is a depository of knowledge. Moreover, a

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message today is much more communicative than it is controversial. The imperialism of advertising has worn at a certain point the prestige of knowledge to make obsolete a one-way message and imperative: no one believes it anymore! The only way to bring attention to it is therefore to present the idea or the product that you want to sell as something that is controversial; dialogue becomes the ideology of propaganda, but the comparison that it puts on stage is a pseudo-dialogue, functional media coverage, in which there is a contrast between one knowledge with another knowledge, but many times a knowledge with ignorance, and even more often an ignorance with another ignorance. This is not yet the worst! The denial begins when the subject of the dispute is not an opinion about a fact, but the real existence of the fact. The reasoning behind the denial is the other side of the medal of communication: at “impossible, yet real” the denial opposes an “impossible, so, impossible!” The real draws back in an inaccessible place to communication! Thus, the denial becomes the opposite of the virtual history: not to widen the scope of historical reality, but cancel what has actually happened! The theory of cultural memory is another historiographical trend that has raised the problem of how to deal with the problem of current history. This constitutes a reaction to the climate of miracle and of trauma that characterizes the eruption of the unexpected and unpredictable. Pierre Nora rightly observes that it is functional to the creation of a unique identity, ethnic, national or of group, and it is manifested in a commemorative mania, which nearly always betrays the true meaning of what it evokes. The result is a kind of mummification, monumental or fetishization of the past. The proliferation of museums, the passion for genealogies, the allocation of an exaggerated importance towards the testimonies of the survivors, the prevailing of the patrimony against the story, the obsession to preserve everything, are many aspects of renunciation in respect of the possibility to write history intended as an unitary story full of meaning for which the author takes full responsibility. According to the example set by Pierre Nora, the fact of commemorating the French Revolution becomes much more important than the commemorated event. The militancy of memory ends up with the exploitation of the past, confusing the historical opinion with the political and judicial one. Whilst the communication emphasizes and exasperates the exception- ality of the event, demanding to attribute the epochal meaning to things

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and secondary and irrelevant characters, the memory blocks the field of the past, precluding any horizon of expectation. In the end, one is com- plementary to the other: diffusing the recalling as an event with a self- communicative value prevented from understanding that the past had been the present for those who lived it. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes that people in the past had a future in front of them; if you want to understand the meaning of their choices and their actions, it is necessary that something of the challenge, of doubt and uncertainty on the outcome of their decisions, is present in the commemoration. The memory ends with the embalming what it takes for its subject matter: if, as Malraux wrote, “the future lasts long” it is not because the past is set in a motionless and eternal temporality, but because it remains in the game through the new stories which continue to be subjects. Althusser realized this in his autobiography published posthumously, which took its title from Malraux’s phrase. You always write starting from the present. There is another aspect that shows not only the complementarity but also the connivance between memory and communication. Memory, dif- ferently from reminding, is not selective and its place is not the conscious but the unconscious, which Freud teaches – the subconscious does not miss anything. This is formed by indelible traces of memory, inaccessible to consciousness, which remain in their original form completely unknown. The system preconscious–conscious does not at all have its past and cannot bear the learning; it is mainly removed, and can become conscious only in memories, as to say in memories characterized by a particular clearness together with the insignificance of their contents. Such memories are formations of compromises between the unconscious and consciousness; the compromise consists of the fact that what is presented is not the exact memory of the image, but another one with respect to the previous one, which is moved for about in a ring in the association. Those that have compared the mechanisms, with which communication works, to the honoured work described by Freud has not been mistaken. From the moment the communication has taken the place of action, we live in a dream, which sometimes is a wonder and sometimes a nightmare. The past of the historical narrative, on the contrary, is path dependent: the facts are irreversible, but the investigation on the path through which you have reached them has no end. In private life, as in public life, the

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question of why you reached the point where you are never finds an absolute and final reply. But these relatively provisional replies have to be there, because only through them does a new horizon of expectation open. François Hartog is among today’s critics who have reflected with greater acumen on these issues, elaborating the concept of the regime of historicity. Not all societies think about the relationship between the past, present and future in the same way. In the West, within three centuries various historical regimes have been outlined according to the weight assigned to different time dimensions. Until 1789 the hegemonic regime of historicity was of the backward-looking kind, in the sense that the intelligibility of present and of the future depended on the knowledge of the past. Thereafter, until the 1960s, a futuristic regime prevailed in the sense that the intelligibility of the past and present depended on the future, which was assumed to be better than whatever came before. This future can have different contents, including the nation, the people, the proletariat, the universal peace and the technology; it is assumed that it will be better than what preceded it, because this is the law of historical evolution. In this context, the past is no longer a role to be imitated (as in traditionalism), but his study is still a factor of primary importance because it permits the knowledge of the progressive dynamics that have permitted us to reach up to this present age. In the 1960s we entered another regime of historicity characterized by the hegemony of the present against the future. Hartog introduced the neologism “presentism” in order to characterize this regime, in which the imme- diacy and simultaneity understood in a global dimension take a leading role, also because of the media economy. This phenomenon, the appearance of which was achieved in the late 1970s by the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli as well as the author that is writing, was accompanied by the eruption of the pseudo-intellectual in the public debate, to add to the confusion between beliefs and knowledge and many other socio-cultural phenomena that have dissolved the legitimacy of scientific discourse in general and in particular the historical one. This book is based on the assumption that you can tell about the open period of the 1960s: it provides an outline of what should be a much more extensive and detailed discussion. As in a tailor’s, the essential thing is to cut at the right point and supply a fair and reasonable periodization. It will be for the reader to rectify, correct and expand it.

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Notes

1 The herewith presented text, edited by Aldo Marroni and translated by Giulia Borghese, constitutes the introduction of the volume, Contro la comunicazione (Einaudi, Torino 2004). We thank the author for giving authorization to translate and publish the text.

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