Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Why the Future Ain’t What It Used to Be
Every step forward· is also a step backward.Progress always exists in only one particular sense.And since there’s no sense in our life as a whole,neither is there such a thing as progress as a whole.Robert Musil There’s no doubt about it. The question we need to start from is, in its radical formulation, quite simple: […]
An unsuccessful exorcism
The Dystopias of the 20th Century Are Mere Shadows of what Has Been Constructed in the 21st
In George Orwell’s 1984, the lead character Winston Smith’s job consists of correcting and rewriting the past to make its image conform to the demands of Oceania’s totalitarian government. This operation evidently reiterates the procedures of damnatio memoriae and executio in effigie enacted by the so-called “actually existing socialist” regimes. The history of these practices […]
A future after the future
The Power of the Event, against the Nostalgia Trap
When in 1977 the punk movement cried out to the world “no future!”,it really seemed that an era was coming to an end. From that moment onward, indeed, the future would cease to be a horizon full of expectations and of individual and collective liberation. Over the decades that followed, it instead increasingly became a […]
