Between anathemas and depersonalization of the opponent, an infamous climate has been created: words are actions
Words are actions, Wittgenstein teaches. And one could almost imagine the frowning face of the Austrian philosopher shadowed by a language of darkness intent on giving a quick glimpse of communication in times of pandemic, especially the continuous, uninterrupted, torrential flows of social messages from experts, politicians and virologists. afflicted with undeniable narcissism and an obsessive tendency towards worldly tanning.
It is the total war of words, lined up without any care for what will be the final result: bestiality is said or written, souls are exacerbated, the premise of a pandemic civil war is generated in an absolute and messianic spirit steeped in dogmas , absolute, of tertium non datur .
Either you stay on one side or the other, without the possibility of intermediate positions, of mediations, of nuances. Facts disappear, icastic opinions advance.
The Prime Minister Mario Draghi, a calm and highly reflective person, for example, can say, in the generalized jubilation, that those who do not get vaccinated die. So simple, straightforward, brutal. And yet, at the same time, not true.
Experience and empirical evidence show us that not all infected and not all sick people die. On the other hand, the percentage estimates of Covid lethality are not equivalent to one hundred percent, which alone eliminates the veracity of that assertion that seemed more like a hard, and free, attack on the leader of the League, but which in public opinion it was seen and experienced as a message of call to arms.
But few people point out this fact. Many others are instead engaged in looking for justifications that seem to end up in the lemmas that form a sort of total anti-pandemic mobilization, a nationalization of the masses, to put it in Mosse, which inevitably passes for a black / white communication, without points. intermediate.
"We are at war against the virus", they say and repeat, "you can not go too far". True leitmotif of the pandemic time, a new civil religion that bends rationality and puts it back in the corner.
We are witnessing the most organic and capillary degradation of the intrinsic politicity of human action, flowing back to a frightened spectacle, in Grand Guignol capable only of producing terrible semantic puns that seem to draw on the space of the Schmittian absolute enmity: on the one hand, the no-vax logorrhea which attempts comparisons with Nazism, and brings out a succession of kapo , photomontages with Hitler's death squads, delusional assonances, and on the other hand no less delusional depersonalizations of those who do not share their own thought, reified, reduced to a biological element but devoid of political and civic relevance.
In the middle, in a sort of soundproofed desert, the few remaining to try to make reason go, to detect how the virus must be fought without giving up freedom and above all without ever losing sight of the moral imperative of recognizing human value. , without transforming humanity, which is always an individual attribute, into a senseless derivative of the collectivity.
“ The war of absolute enmity knows no limitations. It finds its meaning and its legitimacy precisely in the will to reach the extreme consequences. The only question is therefore this: does an absolute enemy exist, and who is he in practice? ”, Wrote Schmitt in “ Theory of the Partisan ” .
And the answer to that question seems to punctuate, dancing in spirit in the air, the public and political debate: now opposing fronts do nothing but look for an absolute, excruciating guilt, and attach it to entire categories, pointed to public execration, in a historic hairpin reminiscent of the Orwellians two minutes of hatred.
I don't know if the social virologist par excellence realizes the enormous, apocalyptic gravity of defining human beings as "mice" : there is a long historicized sequence, eternalized in the blood of history, which places us in dramatic sequence in front of our eyes and in the depths of memory the gloomy pages of the regimes which, for reasons of propaganda and the identification of an absolute enemy, used to depersonalize their adversaries, making extensive use of the animal kingdom and composing a bestiary of anti-politicality.
Mice. Worms. Spiders. Parasites. Beatles. Anyone who has not slept on the benches of history understands, should understand, where in the long run it ends when denying the humanity of the adversary.
And do not answer me that it is a question of provocations, of punishment , of the necessary but almost good-natured ferocity, to convince riotous masses, because then we could legitimize by doing so the same concept of "lives unworthy of being lived" ( Lebensunwertes Leben) given that was formulated by two very respectable scientists, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Karl Hoche, and for "public health" purposes, in accordance with the conceptual and cultural coordinates of the early decades of the 1900s, and which would then be borrowed from Hitler's Reich for his eugenic policies.
Exaggerations? I would not say. As Elias Canetti argued, in "The province of man" , words in the dark weigh twice as much. And for about two years we have plunged into a blind and mute Lovecraftian abyss in which every aspect increases its emotional power, and in which words become a knife and a weapon for total war.
Tired, exhausted, exhausted, mentally and economically, politically and culturally, we should pay attention to the words we use because extreme sensitivity, polarized distinction, unscrupulous use of conspiratorial institutional communication produce a potential panorama of hell, monstrous and carnicino.
A word is never neutral. It is a sign capable of evoking a precise reality. Words do not communicate, they remember, Nicolàs Gòmez Dàvila rightly says. And it is true: there is a power of chaotic irradiation and refraction, as in a theater of the absurd, a theater of flesh and esotericism, of spirit and swoon, which leads us to mental associations invoked and built by a certain use of the language.
Behind the virologist- influencer who on television or on social media indulges in anathemas that he considers witty, the screaming masses advance, enthusiastic about the hatred shown, in an exponential growth of demonstrated hatred and depersonalization: they are no longer just metaphorical pats digital on the shoulders, but a continuous push the bar of hatred for the opponent higher and higher, getting used to anger, aggression, to believe that it is normal, socially healthy, to exclude, erect fences, barriers, walls, to say and say that others should be expelled from the social gathering, from the circle of our acquaintances.
And it becomes much easier to exclude someone if we depersonalize them, if we reduce them semantically to 'what', to 'beast', if we take off their civic garb and reduce them to bare biological life.
In the 1950s, the great Ionesco, by geographical origin and personal sensitivity well accustomed to what it means in concrete terms to experience the crawler mallet of dictatorship and depersonalization on his own skin, put pen to paper ' or words! What crimes are committed in your name '.
And it is a fact; whoever speaks out, then tries, when confronted with the abomination produced by the evidence that someone has taken him seriously, to escape by saying that he is simply the victim of a misunderstanding or, at least, that a word has never hurt anyone. Which, it is allowed to reveal it and detect it, is absolutely not true.
When we pontificate about the inevitable link between freedom and responsibility we tend, for convenience, to forget an element that cannot be revoked in doubt and that is that the primary responsibility is to take any element seriously, starting from what we say, from what we communicate .
All the more, and even more so, if it concerns those who have risen to champion competence and seriousness: if a scientist, an intellectual or a politician wants to build an immaculate image of an expert in his field, fighting and mocking improvisers, thus acquiring on the field chevrons and prophetic aura of the oracle, respected, feared for this, he must then know that all this has a price, an excess, a surplus of responsibility. With great powers comes great responsibilities, right?
And instead, after wearing the metaphorical digital armor of instinctive and compulsive communicators, here they are produced in a cascade of ferocious, dangerous, excluding, depersonalizing words.
And it is a dangerous slope. Very dangerous.
Because the abyss never presents itself as an abyss. It comes and manifests itself in changing forms, and like an avalanche it originates from a single fragment that, falling, enlarges and then becomes magnified, an explosion determined by something that nourishes the abyss, makes it shining, preserves it, heals it, feeds it. Piece by piece, word by word, hate upon hate.
" The unexpected catastrophes " Gadda wrote " are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single reason, of a singular cause: but they are like a vortex, a point of cyclonic depression in the consciousness of the world , towards which a whole multiplicity of converging causes conspired ”.
The post Between anathemas and depersonalization of the opponent, an infamous climate has been created: words are actions appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/tra-anatemi-e-spersonalizzazione-dellavversario-creato-un-clima-infame-le-parole-sono-azioni/ on Mon, 26 Jul 2021 03:49:00 +0000.