Campagna Federico - The Last Night-Anti-Work Atheism Adventure Rssl

by Franco Berardi Bifo

Vanishing Modernity

The modern age was a time when human beings, alone or together, could sculpt the marble of history with the hammer of will. Today, both the marble of history and the hammer of will seem to have vanished from sight. There is no longer anything resembling the monumental vigour of intentional, conscious, organised action. More importantly, there is no longer a progressive temporal dimension, nor the possibility of reducing countless micro-changes to a prevailing tendency or a unitary temporality. Time has fragmented into an endless mosaic of schizo-instants, devoid of any continuity. In our perception, narrations and production, time has become fractalised, shattering into compatible splinters of time constantly recombined and put to work by the universal linguistic machine. Communication is increasingly (and almost exclusively) a frantic connection mediated by electronic screens. Work is relentless shifting between the nodes of the metropolis or of the planet. Words have lost their carnal texture and the trajectories of work meet each other instantly only in order to diverge and reconnect, never meeting each other again.

A precarious culture is emerging from the horizon of our time, and this book is a presage of the tide to come.

I have lived through the tail end of the modern experience. I witnessed the vanishing of modernity, I underwent it and I tried to interpret it. Thus, I read Federico Campagnas work as a map of the shifts (often microscopic, barely perceptible) of sensibility from the sphere of modernity to that of precarity. Because, beware precarity is not a provisional, transient, resolvable juncture of social and productive relations. Precarity is the time that comes after modernity.

The Precarious Horizon

What is the precarious condition? It is not simply the condition of millions of people who work without a permanent contract or without any guarantee of what will happen to their salary the following day. It is the condition in which every night is the last night, awakening from which each one of us sinks into the carriage of an underground train in order to perform their solitary, hyper-connected journey.

The question we are asking ourselves today is: what stage of the night is it?

And somebody comes to warn us that this is the night that does not end. What stage of the night is this? Is this perhaps the point in which we realise that the night is not ending?

Modernity concerned itself with building shelters, protections, guarantees, so it could push back the spectre of death. But now that the tempest has blown away our shelters, we begin to realise that the weak secularism of the modern age has only managed to put death between brackets. We have not learnt how to talk about death, and now death looks at us, contemptuous and sneering, from every corner of the social life. The precarious condition is naked against the cold, winds, hunger, violence. Precarity is bare life as exposed to the truth of death. There is no return from the precarious condition, because it reveals a truth that for too long we have been hiding from ourselves, and of which we are now finally aware.

Death inscribes itself within the horizon of radical, autonomous, materialist thinking, because it is only by knowing the limit of our time and of our lives that we might be able to understand that which dialectic (idealist) communism has stopped us from seeing: that the winner wins nothing, and that the struggle for freedom is doomed to failure from the start. And that only in an aware state of autonomy from the awareness of the inevitable it is possible to live happily, and to die consciously, that is freely.

Radical atheism begins again from scratch, looking at existence from the point of view of death.

Is this the sign of a political defeat?

Or is it perhaps the beginning of a precarious humanism, looking for a happy harmony with chaos?

Us

The emerging precarious culture manifests itself in an existence, aesthetics, literary and artistic production that is marked by the quest for us.

I took part in the political movements of the past few decades, the huge gatherings of waving, raging and tender bodies, but I never thought that I was fighting for an idea. I was fighting for us.