Autonomies

Why are we able to describe and analyse the old that is fading away, but we are unable to imagine the new? Perhaps because we believe, more or less unconsciously, that the new is something that arrives – we don’t know from where – after the end of the old. The inability to think the new is thus revealed in the imprudent use of the prefix ‘post’: the new is the post-modern, the post-human, in any case, something that comes after. The truth is precisely the opposite: the only way for us to think the new is to read it and decipher its hidden features in the forms of the old that passes away and dissolves. This is what Hölderlin clearly states in the extraordinary fragment on The Declining Fatherland, where the perception of the new is inseparable from the memory of the old that is sinking and whose figure, in fact, we must lovingly assume in some way. That which has served its time and which seems to dissolve loses its actuality, is emptied of its meaning and somehow becomes possible again. Benjamin suggests something similar when he writes that, in the instant of remembrance, the past, which seemed completed, shows itself to be incomplete and thus offers us the most precious gift: possibility. Truly new is only the possible: if it were already actual and effective, it would inevitably be destined to age and decay. And the possible does not come from the future, but is, in the past, that which was not, which perhaps will never be, but which could have been and which therefore concerns us. We perceive the new only when we are able to grasp the possibility that the past – that is, the only thing we have – offers us for an instant, before it disappears forever. It is in this way that we should refer to the Western culture that today, all around us, is unravelling and dissolving.

Quodlibet, April 7, 2025