We have been taken in by the hypnotic fable of the apocalypse. Public discourse, intoxicated by the spectacle of imminent ruin and by the narcissism of catastrophe, continues to tell us that we are living through the end of time. An end that drags on indefinitely, like a well-structured Netflix series in which the epilogue is always postponed to the next episode. In reality, the mass apocalyptic narrative is nothing more than a form of anaesthetic: it serves to mask the only true tragedy of the present, namely that nothing changes in the great continuum of the history of oppression and that things continue to slide, without the slightest disruption, along the tracks of their political and social collapse.
However, beneath the ashes of this spectacle of ruin, something profoundly new has taken root. What we must come to terms with today, in Italy and at the heart of Europe, is not merely the continuation of the ruthless violence of classical liberalism, nor even a straightforward reproduction of the historical fascisms of the twentieth century. We have entered the era of a new authoritarian and xenophobic mindset—the principle of authority and fear of the stranger, the unfamiliar, the alien—: a post-ideological mechanism that finds its most striking global embodiment in export-oriented Trumpism.
In the face of the entrenchment of this new authoritarianism, we are witnessing, as a counterpoint, a further metamorphosis of the “aestheticisation of politics” theorised by Walter Benjamin. Whilst in the 1930s this took the form of the imposing stage-set-like displays of mass rallies, designed to sublimate the masses into a mystical body, today it manifests itself in the digital aestheticisation of the world: an uninterrupted production of images and narratives saturated with a fictional and hallucinogenic excess in which the dividing line between reality and virtuality, between truth and falsehood, becomes blurred. The masses no longer need to take to the streets to feel part of the ritual; rather, they are incorporated into a continuous virtual flow, where reality blurs into fiction and anaesthetic seduction replaces the gathering of bodies. Social anaesthesia is complete, the alienation of bodies within an empty and, above all, paralysing hyper-signifying sphere.
This defensive, possessive and identity-based authoritarianism therefore has no need for the traditional ethical state. It thrives on fragmentation, exploits the loneliness of individuals, transforms resentment into a political agenda and the fear of the “other” into a social glue. It promises false protection by fortifying borders — not only physical ones, but also psychological and identity-based ones — whilst, on a material level, it dismantles the welfare state, employment and essential rights; it thus renounces any prospect of redemption or social regeneration and is content to govern the fear of an impoverished and precarious humanity.
Faced with this stranglehold, the Leninist question re-emerges with uncompromising ferocity: what is to be done?
The answer is dramatised by an inescapable historical fact: the political subject is missing. There exists no collective subject, no organisation, no class force on today’s political stage capable of taking the lead amongst the oppressed, of gathering the scattered suffering and transforming it into a project of rupture. The forces of the institutional left, now reduced to mere agencies for managing the status quo or to accounting guardians of the status quo, have lost even the basics of opposition, let alone revolutionary discourse, which is now a dead language incomprehensible to the majority.
When the subject is absent and history seems at a standstill, the greatest danger is to succumb to impotent protest, to a futile head-on collision with an adversary who draws strength precisely from direct conflict. The other danger, naturally, is a comforting retreat into the private sphere. Today, given the balance of power within society, it is not a question of opposing a blind force with a mirror-image reaction, but of understanding the need for a lateral shift: to defuse the logic of the clash endured through that austere stance which—as the late Tronti reminded us—is conveyed to us by the memory of monasticism and the philosophy of detachment, that is to say, xeniteia, peregrinatio.
To become strangers. This is not a flight from the world—fuga mundi—nor an ascetic or disdainful withdrawal. As Jacob Taubes demonstrated in his reinterpretation of Pauline political theology, the eschatological dimension is not a passive waiting for the end, but the introduction of a break in the present moment: a way of inhabiting the structures of the world “as if” they were not the ultimate horizon. The peregrinatio is a political and existential decision of the first order: it is the Johannine choice to situate oneself in the world, though not of the world, embracing the pathos of distance as the only possible response to the dominant homogenisation. When society becomes unliveable and its traditional political forms prove useless, becoming an outsider and offering no footholds to power is the only way to avoid assimilation, which subsequently amounts to servitude.
Early desert monasticism did not arise as an alibi for the vanquished, but as the foundation of a counter-power. Those monks who abandoned the cities of the crumbling Empire were not seeking peace of mind: they were seeking the strength to build a way of life that could not be assimilated. In that silence lay a concentration of forces, an active and militant waiting that refused to be dispersed by the chatter of the present.
To navigate this time of transition and oppression, it is necessary to forge a link between the individual’s ethical resolve and the practice of detachment, articulating it through three fundamental mechanisms: contemplation, struggle and strategic concession.
Contemplation is not a narcissistic cure for introspection, but a free and unsparing gaze upon reality. To contemplate means keeping one’s faculty of judgement clear, unmasking the ideologies of the new authoritarianism and being able to recognise the transience of its seemingly impregnable constructs. It is an exercise in desaturating perception that allows us to extract the real from the uninterrupted flow of distorted communication, freeing ourselves from a distracted consumption of the world.
The struggle is the translation of this strangeness into everyday practice. It is the construction of communities out of step with the times, of strongholds of conceptual and ethical resistance where the welcoming of the stranger, solidarity amongst fragments, and the rejection of market logic become the rule of a new way of living. But it is also the struggle—daily and steadfast—within institutions, with the State and against the State. In a nutshell: it is about being, always and everywhere, mit und gegen [with and against].
Strategic concession: withdrawing from the obsession with immediate victory does not mean turning defeat into a virtue — in politics, defeat is never a merit — but rather refusing to let oneself be worn down by the rules of the game established by the enemy. It means learning the art of withdrawal: not allowing oneself to be crushed by the logic of dominant power, knowing how to loosen one’s grip where a head-on clash is a trap, and repositioning oneself to preserve one’s own autonomy. Rather than expending energy on passive resistance or lost battles, one goes along with the adversary’s onslaught to throw them off balance and reduce its impact, whilst keeping one’s own freedom of manoeuvre intact.
We cannot expect a new political subject to emerge as if by magic, though we must not cease to believe in the impossible. Rather, we must practise that form of attentiveness taught by Simone Weil: a patient gaze capable of discerning the slightest signs of change—even the most insignificant and hidden ones—in order to grasp the emergence of new symbols around which a social and political subject may finally coalesce. Meanwhile, the individual regains their coherence through the discipline of strangeness, through the ability to bring solitudes together around a shared rigour, through the steadfastness of those who reject the war between the poor promoted by the new authoritarian right. If society is xenophobic, we consciously position ourselves as the object of its fear; we become its very strangeness: a foreign body within the social body, an intruding body.
It is a matter of aiming, realistically and rationally, towards achievable goals whilst never ceasing to turn our gaze towards the unattainable.
The peregrinatio is not a surrender: it is the training of strength. It is the act by which we declare ourselves strangers to this present in order to safeguard our immeasurable freedom and to be, when the breach opens, the beginning of another world.
Peregrination: Foreignness/Strangeness/Otherness as a counterpower
from Ficcíon de la rázon, 10/09/2026
Peregrinatio. La extrañeza como contrapoder
Federico Ferrari
We have been taken in by the hypnotic fable of the apocalypse. Public discourse, intoxicated by the spectacle of imminent ruin and by the narcissism of catastrophe, continues to tell us that we are living through the end of time. An end that drags on indefinitely, like a well-structured Netflix series in which the epilogue is always postponed to the next episode. In reality, the mass apocalyptic narrative is nothing more than a form of anaesthetic: it serves to mask the only true tragedy of the present, namely that nothing changes in the great continuum of the history of oppression and that things continue to slide, without the slightest disruption, along the tracks of their political and social collapse.
However, beneath the ashes of this spectacle of ruin, something profoundly new has taken root. What we must come to terms with today, in Italy and at the heart of Europe, is not merely the continuation of the ruthless violence of classical liberalism, nor even a straightforward reproduction of the historical fascisms of the twentieth century. We have entered the era of a new authoritarian and xenophobic mindset—the principle of authority and fear of the stranger, the unfamiliar, the alien—: a post-ideological mechanism that finds its most striking global embodiment in export-oriented Trumpism.
In the face of the entrenchment of this new authoritarianism, we are witnessing, as a counterpoint, a further metamorphosis of the “aestheticisation of politics” theorised by Walter Benjamin. Whilst in the 1930s this took the form of the imposing stage-set-like displays of mass rallies, designed to sublimate the masses into a mystical body, today it manifests itself in the digital aestheticisation of the world: an uninterrupted production of images and narratives saturated with a fictional and hallucinogenic excess in which the dividing line between reality and virtuality, between truth and falsehood, becomes blurred. The masses no longer need to take to the streets to feel part of the ritual; rather, they are incorporated into a continuous virtual flow, where reality blurs into fiction and anaesthetic seduction replaces the gathering of bodies. Social anaesthesia is complete, the alienation of bodies within an empty and, above all, paralysing hyper-signifying sphere.
This defensive, possessive and identity-based authoritarianism therefore has no need for the traditional ethical state. It thrives on fragmentation, exploits the loneliness of individuals, transforms resentment into a political agenda and the fear of the “other” into a social glue. It promises false protection by fortifying borders — not only physical ones, but also psychological and identity-based ones — whilst, on a material level, it dismantles the welfare state, employment and essential rights; it thus renounces any prospect of redemption or social regeneration and is content to govern the fear of an impoverished and precarious humanity.
Faced with this stranglehold, the Leninist question re-emerges with uncompromising ferocity: what is to be done?
The answer is dramatised by an inescapable historical fact: the political subject is missing. There exists no collective subject, no organisation, no class force on today’s political stage capable of taking the lead amongst the oppressed, of gathering the scattered suffering and transforming it into a project of rupture. The forces of the institutional left, now reduced to mere agencies for managing the status quo or to accounting guardians of the status quo, have lost even the basics of opposition, let alone revolutionary discourse, which is now a dead language incomprehensible to the majority.
When the subject is absent and history seems at a standstill, the greatest danger is to succumb to impotent protest, to a futile head-on collision with an adversary who draws strength precisely from direct conflict. The other danger, naturally, is a comforting retreat into the private sphere. Today, given the balance of power within society, it is not a question of opposing a blind force with a mirror-image reaction, but of understanding the need for a lateral shift: to defuse the logic of the clash endured through that austere stance which—as the late Tronti reminded us—is conveyed to us by the memory of monasticism and the philosophy of detachment, that is to say, xeniteia, peregrinatio.
To become strangers. This is not a flight from the world—fuga mundi—nor an ascetic or disdainful withdrawal. As Jacob Taubes demonstrated in his reinterpretation of Pauline political theology, the eschatological dimension is not a passive waiting for the end, but the introduction of a break in the present moment: a way of inhabiting the structures of the world “as if” they were not the ultimate horizon. The peregrinatio is a political and existential decision of the first order: it is the Johannine choice to situate oneself in the world, though not of the world, embracing the pathos of distance as the only possible response to the dominant homogenisation. When society becomes unliveable and its traditional political forms prove useless, becoming an outsider and offering no footholds to power is the only way to avoid assimilation, which subsequently amounts to servitude.
Early desert monasticism did not arise as an alibi for the vanquished, but as the foundation of a counter-power. Those monks who abandoned the cities of the crumbling Empire were not seeking peace of mind: they were seeking the strength to build a way of life that could not be assimilated. In that silence lay a concentration of forces, an active and militant waiting that refused to be dispersed by the chatter of the present.
To navigate this time of transition and oppression, it is necessary to forge a link between the individual’s ethical resolve and the practice of detachment, articulating it through three fundamental mechanisms: contemplation, struggle and strategic concession.
Contemplation is not a narcissistic cure for introspection, but a free and unsparing gaze upon reality. To contemplate means keeping one’s faculty of judgement clear, unmasking the ideologies of the new authoritarianism and being able to recognise the transience of its seemingly impregnable constructs. It is an exercise in desaturating perception that allows us to extract the real from the uninterrupted flow of distorted communication, freeing ourselves from a distracted consumption of the world.
The struggle is the translation of this strangeness into everyday practice. It is the construction of communities out of step with the times, of strongholds of conceptual and ethical resistance where the welcoming of the stranger, solidarity amongst fragments, and the rejection of market logic become the rule of a new way of living. But it is also the struggle—daily and steadfast—within institutions, with the State and against the State. In a nutshell: it is about being, always and everywhere, mit und gegen [with and against].
Strategic concession: withdrawing from the obsession with immediate victory does not mean turning defeat into a virtue — in politics, defeat is never a merit — but rather refusing to let oneself be worn down by the rules of the game established by the enemy. It means learning the art of withdrawal: not allowing oneself to be crushed by the logic of dominant power, knowing how to loosen one’s grip where a head-on clash is a trap, and repositioning oneself to preserve one’s own autonomy. Rather than expending energy on passive resistance or lost battles, one goes along with the adversary’s onslaught to throw them off balance and reduce its impact, whilst keeping one’s own freedom of manoeuvre intact.
We cannot expect a new political subject to emerge as if by magic, though we must not cease to believe in the impossible. Rather, we must practise that form of attentiveness taught by Simone Weil: a patient gaze capable of discerning the slightest signs of change—even the most insignificant and hidden ones—in order to grasp the emergence of new symbols around which a social and political subject may finally coalesce. Meanwhile, the individual regains their coherence through the discipline of strangeness, through the ability to bring solitudes together around a shared rigour, through the steadfastness of those who reject the war between the poor promoted by the new authoritarian right. If society is xenophobic, we consciously position ourselves as the object of its fear; we become its very strangeness: a foreign body within the social body, an intruding body.
It is a matter of aiming, realistically and rationally, towards achievable goals whilst never ceasing to turn our gaze towards the unattainable.
The peregrinatio is not a surrender: it is the training of strength. It is the act by which we declare ourselves strangers to this present in order to safeguard our immeasurable freedom and to be, when the breach opens, the beginning of another world.