 | |
| Author | Roberto Calasso |
|---|---|
| Original title | L'innominabile attuale |
| Translator | Richard Dixon |
| Language | Italian |
| Published | 2017 |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux andPenguin Books |
| Publication place | Italy |
Published in English | 2019 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 193 pp. (hardcover edition) |
| ISBN | 0374279470 |
The Unnamable Present is a 2017 meditation byRoberto Calasso on the re-emergence of nationalism and totalitarianism in global politics and culture in the context of an artificially intelligent contemporary world-system.[1] The ninth volume of Calasso's nameless cycle of reflections which began with theRuin of Kasch, it is composed of two longer essays entitled "Tourists and Terrorists" and "The Vienna Gas Company" followed by a brief coda called "Sighting of the Towers."[2]
Calasso discusses the feedback relationship between the rise ofinternet pornography and the rise ofIslamic terrorism in the 21st century: how the unmanageable and inexorable spread of online porn's easy availability in culturally Muslim countries helped to fuel a radical (and ultimately violent) reaction against the West, how the consumerist model of "tourist" culture denudes the existential vapidity of the secular Enlightenment, and how all of these elements have contributed to a moment of cultural and geopolitical breakdown characterized byanomie,broken epistemology andexistential threat by the time we arrive at the book's present in the year immediately predating--and, in many passages, apparently anticipating-- the cascade of elections introducing a new generation of nationalist world-leaders includingDonald Trump,Duterte,Orban,Bolsonaro and others.
When combined with the context of the book's second essay, Calasso's reflections on utilitarianism and the metaphysics of free-market economy in the first half of the book reveal thematic and structural affinities to theDialectic of the Enlightenment: the book comes to resemble an updated, condensed version ofAdorno andHorkheimer's magnum opus laced with narratives, anecdotes and biographical sketches from the period in which that work was written.[3][4][5]
The title of this essay recalls a line from a grim joke told byWalter Benjamin in one of hisWorld War II letters which presaged the nature and methods used to kill concentration camp victims in the (still ongoing and yet to be fully scaled in terms of its execution)Holocaust. The piece is an impressionistic evocation of the rise ofAdolf Hitler and the Third Reich, with special emphasis on the perspectives of a wide variety of European intellectuals observing these events as they unfolded.
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