SPAZIO TAVERNA
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
Futuro Antico. Interview with Carlo Galli
Nov 5, 2023
Marco Bassan
Never Alienate from the Struggle.Three Ideas for the Future and Advice for Young People on Their Future.Tradition and Political Thought According to Professor and Political Scientist Carlo Galli, Interviewed for "Futuro Antico"
What are your inspirational references in art?
My work as a scholar of political thought is also a profession, with its own rules that require a certain skill set—if not artistic, at least artisanal. It demands historical, philosophical, political, and linguistic competencies, as well as a scientific method, but also a kind of productive imagination. At a certain point in your studies, you must be able to "see" a context, a civilization's situation; to enter into a specific way of thinking and acting, to give existence and agency to the objects you are elaborating.
What is politics?
Politics is concrete life, intensely lived and conflictual. The political scholar deals with a subject that must be brought back to life. This requires scientific rigor and expressive strength, aiming to shed light on the epochal energies that move within various historical contingencies. It is this existential aspect of political thought that I have investigated through the history of concepts, with theoretical radicalism and philological scrupulousness, intertwining different traditions of thought: the dialectical tradition, from Plato to Hegel and up to Adorno; the realistic tradition, from Machiavelli to Hobbes; and the tradition of negative thought from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Schmitt.
Which project represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
Two works are particularly dear to me. The first is Genealogia della politica, a substantial book published in 1996 and reissued several times since. To understand a complex and "cursed" author like Carl Schmitt, I had to reconstruct the trajectory of modern political thought as a whole and the political and intellectual history of Germany in the first half of the 20th century. It was a direct engagement with contemporary history and its tragedies.
The second?
It is my recent editorship of the first complete Italian edition of a classic of modern thought, Il diritto di pace e di guerraby Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist of the 17th century who is considered the father of international law. This is a renowned, substantial, and genuinely complicated book in which the reasons and issues of its time converge, and where one can glimpse in germinal form some of the questions that still challenge us today. It represents a direct engagement with the most unsettling aspects of modernity. In these two endeavors, my effort to think about politics in its epochal and existential concreteness is most clearly manifested.
How important is the concept of Genius Loci within your work?
It is of enormous importance. Politics and political thought are rooted in a specific space and time. This includes the long duration of an era and the contracted, syncopated time of a conflictual emergency. I have studied modernity and its internal dynamics, with only a few forays into ancient thought. Regarding space, there is no doubt that my research is entirely European. The Genius Loci is this plural unity, this entity that is internally divided and combative, which is Europe. What happens occurs concretely, and the same applies to thought, which is always situated. The thought that reflects today must restore this past concreteness.
How important is the past in imagining and building the future?
We cannot escape the past. Our reasons have roots in a past that is always present to us. History is always contemporary history and must be studied carefully. At the same time, the past conditions us but does not totally determine us. History is not smooth; it consists of ripples and fractures, of continuity and discontinuity.
Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
Every generation wants to transcend its past and design a hope, a future that is not a received destiny but a new creation in which it can recognize itself. This tension towards the future manifests itself as a critique of tradition, with which we inevitably engage; without the past, we would lack the stimuli for actions aimed at the future. Critique and hope go hand in hand; presentism, the illusion of living in an eternal present without roots, stifles the future. It is conservative.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to follow in your footsteps?
My profession has been that of a scholar and educator. Today, the conditions under which this work takes place have changed significantly from when I practiced it for many years. The bureaucratization of knowledge today stifles the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, the philological care of the past, and the critique aimed at the future, reducing the scholar—deprived of imagination—to a tedious specialist. A young person who wishes to revive what has been lived in history, to engage in philology and critique, and to transmit what they study with passion and competence must be aware that they will have to fight hard. But if they are genuinely motivated, the very prospect of struggle will encourage them to continue in their vocation.
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still hold significance and power?
No era can do without the sacred; no one can live without belief. It all depends on what is considered "sacred": whether it serves to transcend this world and thus critique it, or if it is instead a form of uncritical adherence to this world. In other words, whether the sacred is divine or merely an idol. The sacred could be a God, an intellectual or artistic impulse, or an empathic openness to the world and others; or it could be an absolute that reaffirms some worldly myth as incontrovertible, some particular interest disguised as universal, or some form of power.
Please explain further...
It is a question of whether the sacred liberates, at least potentially, or chains us in conformity or hatred, reinforcing the dominance of the present over the future. I would frame the relationship between truth and post-truth as one between freedom (truth sets us free) and conformist submission (post-truth is the realm of indifference, the hypnotic dimension of induced and accepted passivity, and thus of inaction). To stay within the concept of the "sacred," in earlier times, this was discussed in terms of the conflict between Christ and the Antichrist.
How do you envision the future? Can you provide three ideas that you believe will guide the coming years?
The first is crisis. We are undergoing a phase of painful and conflictual reconfiguration of both internal and international political orders. This crisis can plunge us into an abyss of violence and apathy (these two concepts can coexist). And this brings us to the second idea.
What about the third?
The third is the turning point—once it would have been called a "revolt"—a new awareness, primarily mediated by intellectuals (if they wish to reclaim a public role), of the right and duty of all to live a dignified life. To live, not merely to let oneself be lived, to not allow oneself to be dispossessed of life. Technical solutions alone will not suffice; once again, a committed and participatory political energy will be indispensable.