I ask my reader for forgiveness because I am a victim of my own outburst, which no longer allows me to keep myself lucid. Lucidity would allow me not to waste time on the issue I am about to address, so irrelevant, so unworthy to be dealt with in such dark times.
However, after yet another “Pandemic Decree”, which ultimately goes so far as to undermine the inviolable right of defence, my mind inveighs, in particular, against a very specific image: that of the “philosophical parlour” intellectual.
Preventing the easy comments, I state that no one expected to see the upright figure of an Antonio Gramsci rise from the ranks of the modern Resistance; nevertheless, the instability of the Italian-style “polisopher” (politician-philosopher) is capable, by itself, of making me yearn for exile.
I quote the quotes (not denied) that are heavily indigestible to me, underlining that I find the concept as irritating as it is intolerable:
“Philosophers obey the laws, even when they consider them totally insane”
“These are the laws and until you have the strength to change them you have to respect them” … “Or you go away” [1].
Both Henry David Thoreau and Ernst Jünger could be appropriately cited, but it would be of little use. Criticism of a philosopher who makes such claims – and one should ask why he does so – is less profitable than throwing salt on burning Carthage.
Net of the sterile criticism, however, I would like to focus on the underlying theme, which inevitably calls into question the role of the intellectual in the “Pandemic Society”.
Between the philosopher who invokes the crime of “not offering one’s arm to the country” [2] and the jurist who sees in the street demonstrations “the arrogance of those who want to do what they want” [3], passing through the historian who leaves quietly whipping for having signed an appeal against the use of the green pass in the University [4], one wonders if it is better for them to devote themselves to something else.
Woesome those times when the intellectual professes with conviction the knowledge dictated by the Authority!
I wander, melancholy, in my mental disturbances and instinctively unleash a poem by Bertolt Brecht… [5]
Get out of the shadows and walk
in front of us a little,
gentle, with a light step
of the woman resolved to everything, terrible
for the terrible.
I remember well who that woman is, resolute in everything. The tragedy of Antigone is studied in the first year of Law. The meaning of the work was taught in the philosophy of law courses, in the same classrooms where, now, students enter by showing a green pass.
Intellectuals like Brecht did not invite to conform to “crazy” laws and indeed celebrated the myth of the young woman who, in order to give her dead brother a worthy burial, had the courage to disobey the laws of Creon, tyrant of Thebes:
Forcibly averted, I know
how you feared death, but
even more horrified you
life unworthy.
On closer inspection, intellectuals like Brecht exalted, drawing from Antigone, the value of Justice, beyond any law. On these issues, philosophers and jurists have spent centuries, analysing well the ideological implications.
Today’s intellectuals overlook the same concepts with a disconcerting superficiality: they incessantly profess the DEM (i.e.: Democratic) myth of responsibility, exhort uncritical conformism, always and in any case tend towards moderation, preaching, in the end, voluntary servility.
In Sophocles’ tragedy this attitude is attributed to Ismene, Antigone’s compliant sister whose fearful deeds are completely vain.
Therefore, if today’s intellectuals have been deprived of the courage of uncomfortable ideas, we will derive little use from their words and their role will be reduced, as it should be, to parlour chatter, preferably on television.
In their place, we will feel esteem for other members of the Society, we will put our trust in simple people, we will listen to those who really fight this battle… Those who resist without compromising, who radically reject the pandemic narrative and who, perhaps, refuse to get a healing green pass (whatever that means) even at the cost of giving up a job, a salary and everything that makes them slaves to their true enemy.
And you weren’t indulgent
in nothing to the mighty, and you did not come down
to deal with the plotters, and not
you never forgot the injury and on theirs
misdeeds the grass never grew.
To my Antigone, wherever she hides.
[1] Statement by Massimo Cacciari:
[2] Statement by Umberto Galimberti:
[3] Statement by Gustavo Zagrebelsky:
[4] Statement by Alessandro Barbero:
https://www.ilgiorno.it/cronaca/barbero-obbligo-vaccinale-1.6782980
[5] Bertolt Brecht, Antigone, Poems and fragments, 1948.
[Translator’s note: the Italian reality in these never ending Covidian days is increasingly screwing into a dimension that would be simply surreal if it did not have tragic repercussions on the lives of all people, even of those who accept the vaccine dogma without questioning. Mrs. Ivana Suerra here painfully cries out for the paucity of intellectuals who first seem to oppose the “System” and its vaccine insanities and then re-enter the ranks, throwing away, with elaborate turns of words, all the democratic principles that, until recently, they filled their mouth with. The terrible image evoked by Orwell, a boot that falls mercilessly on the face of the man of the future, is day-by-day increasingly real.]
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Original column by Ivana Suerra:
https://comedonchisciotte.org/filosofi-da-salotto/
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo