Curiosity, rumor and equivocation have not ceased to constitute the fundamental elements of the Heideggerian “inauthentic existence” (uneigentliche Existenz) of the alienated world promoted by the deceitful performances of the culture industry. The curiosity of public opinion, i.e., the “inability to dwell on that which is presented,” is fed by the continuous diversion of attention to new objects placed ad hoc in the foreground through organized manipulation, in order to tame minds and mold them according to the ideological order. In this regard, emblematic examples remain those of the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and the equally non-existent “chemical weapons,” ideological stratagems with which public opinion was induced, in the first case, to passively accept the aggression on Saddam’s Iraq in 2003 and, in the second, to prepare for the invasion of Assad’s Syria in 2013. As soon as it became clear that these were mere entia imaginationis, the curiosity of the masses was redirected elsewhere.
One understands then in what sense, as Heidegger suggests, curiosity is always accompanied by distraction. The curious person “is everywhere and nowhere,” manipulated by the anonymous and impersonal mechanisms of the “that which is said” of the media circus, so that his attention fluctuates permanently between irrelevant questions presented as decisive, without ever being able to dwell on the systemic contradiction that is constantly concealed. Curiosity, moreover, is a strategic ally of chatter, that is, of the “possibility of understanding everything without any preliminary appropriation of what one wants to understand.” Gossip corresponds, in fact, to the apparently anonymous resource (in reality ideologically connoted) of “that which is said,” by means of which language, rather than revealing being, conceals it and renders it indecipherable in the very act by which it makes it appear easily accessible and within everyone’s reach.
In the world of organized consensus, in which the tyranny of publicity—as Being and Time (§ 27) reminds us—obscures everything, distorting it in order to present it as known and accessible to all, we chatter about everything without understanding anything, that is, always remaining on the distorted surface of the planetary society of the spectacle. Finally, equivocation coincides with the realm in which gossip and curiosity proliferate, constantly generating a web of misunderstandings that make real contradictions invisible, diverting the gaze of public opinion towards those that no longer exist or have never existed.
By virtue of the misunderstanding, it is never entirely clear what the Man sagt, the “that which is said” of organized manipulation and institutionalized violence, really is. The media reality, artfully produced by the omni-invasive system of consensus production, imposes itself as the only possible one. In this work of shaping the imaginary, as Heidegger knew, the numerous “isms” that populate the “market of public opinion” and which, managed by the media system, continue to play an essential role, generating that technicalization of reflection whose objective is the annihilation of free thought, so that ideas punctually follow the circuits of the controlled “that which is said” and the automatism of commonplaces.
In this panorama of organized falsehood, which produces that “situation of great totalitarian social hypocrisy” denounced by Gramsci (Prison Notebooks, I, § 158), support must be unconditional for the States that resist the universal monarchy and that are regularly the object of imperialist aggressions (or alternatively, of embargoes), always legitimized through the preventive generalized demonization carried out by the official propaganda of the media circus. If the universal monarchy that dominates the globe commits aggressions and, moreover, aims at the conquest of the whole world, it always does so in the name of Democracy and Human Rights, and also because it wishes to provide the planet with the Freedom it still largely lacks. The universal monarchy has a special mission, according to the above-mentioned semantema (of course, it is pleonastic to remember that such a “mission” has not been entrusted to it by anyone).
We must not, then, make concessions of any kind to the politically correct “that which is said,” a realm of inauthenticity in which we are suspended. In Heidegger’s words, “the essential thing remains to continue, as here, to walk along the same path, without worrying about the public opinion, whatever it may be, that surrounds us.” Even if the Nation States that resist the new imperialisms and the dynamics of imposition of the commodity form as the only horizon are far from being free of often fatal contradictions (from Iran to Venezuela, from Cuba to Syria), they play a revolutionary role in the geopolitical framework, but also on the symbolic level: at the geopolitical level, because they heroically resist the universal monarchy—the Universalmonarchie stigmatized by Kant—and its dynamics of subjugation of any force that does not submit to its domination, immediately demonized as rogue State, (the Ministry of Truth also holds the monopoly of definitions); at the symbolic level, because they allow even those who, like us, are completely subjected to the domination of the universal monarchy and completely infected by the pathologies of the commodity form, to keep alive the possibility of thinking of being otherwise, understanding the importance of state power for the re-dialectication of the speculative.
The resistant Nation States teach us not only that resistance is possible, but also that in the time of the Fourth World War and the fanaticism of the economy of capitalismus sive natura, the Nation State is the force from which it is necessary to light the fuse to reopen the conflict against Capital. It is therefore plausible to maintain with respect to the resistant States what Fenoglio affirmed with respect to the partisans: “the important thing is that there should always be one left.” It is an argument that, in itself, should be enough to constitute a new “Guide for the Perplexed” of globalized time.
Nation States that resist the civilization of the dollar and the ghostly custodians of Law and Democracy are revealed as the functional equivalent of the meaning-making performances of the defunct communism. Just as the ambiguous and contradictory presence of the latter in the course of the Cold War, so today the very presence of the so-called “rogue states” (global version of the brutal proscriptions of Sulla conducted by humanitarian imperialism), whose often very deep limits should certainly not be underestimated, continues to point out the non-unique and non-targeted character of the Nomos of the economy; and, for this very reason, it makes it possible to think of an alterity—be it with respect to Capital, be it with respect to the “rogue states” themselves—in whose name to orient action and the programming of alternative futures.
From a non-superficial consideration of the diagram of global power relations, the main function of the resistant Nation States consists in keeping alive the thinkability of conflict and anti-capitalist action, rejecting Westernist homologation and still keeping open the door to an alternative future, mediated by the re-politicization of the economy, by the re-enchantment of the world and by the reopening of the horizon of the future. To avoid misinterpretations, we repeat that the so-called “rogue states” almost invariably present an internal structure full of contradictions and worthy of being fought (in any case always from within, without resorting to foreign ethical bombardments). But their very existence reminds us of the possibility and the meaning of resistance, and allows us to hope for a reorganization of oppositional energies and political dreams. Such a reorganization is essential if humanity and the planet are not to enter the “great night that has no tomorrow.”
Putin’s Russia—despite all its contradictions—but also China itself, which even at the level of domestic politics makes the worst faces of capitalism and communism coexist—play, as geopolitical powers, a role of primary importance on the international scene.
This is the explosive panorama of our present time and of the crisis that is feverishly going through it in every aspect. A crisis caused, not least, by the implosion of Russian-American bipolarism and the emergence of a new imperial-based monopolarism, to which a multipolarism in fieri, the results of which are still difficult to predict, is only just beginning to be counterposed.
The shameful collapse of the Soviet Union was, as we have said on other occasions, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, since it handed over the monopoly to the American messianic empire, a planetary exporter of absolute capitalism, of which we Europeans are also beginning to suffer the effects with the creation of the economic military junta of the European Union, the supreme phase of neoliberalism.
Unfortunately, Putin is not Lenin; nevertheless, he has strategic autonomy and weapons of mass deterrence. Therefore, Russia has a duty today to support as much as possible the nation states resistant to the American empire, positioning itself as a resisting state. With the Russian power, it would be as if the stylized portrait of the American President Obama accompanied by the slogan “Yes, we can,” were opposed by an analogous image of Putin, in turn associated with the phrase, “No, you can’t.” For this reason, a geopolitically and militarily solid and independent Russia is needed, which will be able to stop—in the time of the death of the historical noucentisque communism—the delirium of the unlimited extension of the fanaticism of the economy under American guidance.
his article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.
