Читать книгу Futurability - Franco "Bifo" Berardi - Страница 8

In the first part of this book, I retrace the modern genealogy of the concept of potency, starting from the present condition of prevailing impotence of the action of men. I start from deciphering the meaning of Obama’s trajectory. With all his extraordinary intellectual and political capabilities (certainly superior to those of the average specimen of the US political class), he has attempted to demonstrate that reason and political skill have the potency to implement hope, and to heal the wounds of American society and of the world. The final lesson of this experience, however, is impotence. Impotence is the keyword of this book, because impotence is the shape that potency takes in the age of technical and geopolitical hyper-complexity.

The re-emerging cult of nation and ethnicity, as exposed by the ascent of Donald Trump and the proliferation of machofascist dictators worldwide, is the backlash of the perception of impotence. Violence is replacing political mediation because political reason is determined to be devoid of potency.

The white middle class is unable to understand and control the hyper-complexity of financial automatisms, and this fuels sentiments of social impotence.

At same time, the military systems of the West are unable to defeat or contain terrorism. The sense of impotence is expressed by a frightening rise in white supremacism, melded with frustrated supre-machism: ‘Make America Great Again’.

In this first part of the book, I retrace the philosophical genealogy of the present depression of the Western mind: after reading Schopenhauer and Heidegger from the point of view of white male decline, I try to situate the narrative imagination of Houellebecq in the same framework.

And finally, I try to elaborate on the senescence of the Western population, in which the energy-centred style of modernity is replaced by impotence and a sense of inadequacy.