Let there always be me – Weekend – Kommersant
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The RIPOL Classic publishing house has published a book by the Italian philosopher Costantino Esposito Modern Nihilism, a collection of essays written in the midst of the coronavirus epidemic that has an unexpectedly therapeutic effect.
Costantino Esposito is a fairly well-known Italian philosopher, author of several monographs on Heidegger, and translator of Kant. (Just in case, it’s worth clarifying: in a Russian book that seems to have been published a little in a hurry, his name is misspelled on the cover – Constantino; inside the book everything is correct – Costantino.) However, his last book is not a fundamental work, not an essay on the history of thought, not even manifesto, and exercises in philosophical journalism. Approximately half of the essays that make up “Modern Nihilism” are written as columns for the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. But the rest of the texts also retain the same newspaper note – a little enlightening, but in places turning into a smol-talk. The thinker steps down from the pulpit and discards some of the formalities. He still talks about Augustine and Adorno, but he’s ready to chat about student morals, the hardships of lockdown, and, with particular gusto, popular culture. Esposito illustrates his ideas with the help of novels by Cormac McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq, Joker, True Detective and Pixar cartoons. In all this there is a slight optionality, a feeling of pleasant chatter. At the same time, the book deals with the most important questions – literally, the meaning of life.
The nihilism that Esposito brings to the title of the collection is not a specific phenomenon of European culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, but the hidden basis of all modern civilization. It’s about the feeling that reality has no meaning, life has no purpose, a person has no true values. What in the era of Nietzsche—the author, of course, constantly mentioned in the book—was a monstrous revelation, a world-shaking catastrophe, has become a dull routine for us. Instead of a goal, we look for opportunities for self-realization, instead of truth, we are content with mechanistic explanations of cause and effect in the spirit of biological determinism or ruthless operations of deconstruction – depending on tastes. We wallow in melancholy, but we try not to face non-existence, we avoid fear, and we are powerless in the face of it (the era of the coronavirus, signs of which are scattered throughout Esposito’s book, made this powerlessness obvious). Esposito considers modern views on love, reason, duty – the basic concepts of European philosophy – and everywhere he sees the corrosion of nihilism.
What can be done in this horrendous situation? Esposito’s answer is: first of all, to rehabilitate the subject – I. I am European nihilism, I am after the death of God, at the same time powerful, accountable to no one, free to want and do what he pleases, and powerless, neurotic, not measuring anything, not quite sure of his own existence, fading (he wittily calls this is “asthenia of the subject”). The self that Esposito offers in return is the self that is born in meeting, openness to the other, the world, death, God (the Christian subtext of his thought is obvious, but Esposito never brings him to the fore, remaining within the bounds of philosophy and not moving on to theology) . Thus, the truth, ridiculed by nihilism, is again called to life: this is not absolute knowledge, not a metaphysical measure, but our ability to recognize and recognize something as truth. In the same way, through an act of awareness and recognition, duty, choice, happiness, mystery and other things necessary for a person return from exile.
Reading Modern Nihilism, it is hard to brush aside the surprise at how this book falls out of the Western intellectual mainstream in all its versions – posthumanist new realisms, gender or decolonial criticism, heirs of deconstruction, including postmodernist theologians. The common stake of all these very different branches of thought is the firm belief in the need to destroy the modern European subject: if not to bury it as deeply as possible, then to radically rebuild it. The fact that a serious thinker can take and offer to return this Cartesian subject back, to see in the old-fashioned self not a construct, but a living and life-giving essence, is impressive. At the same time, Esposito does not at all look like a mossy traditionalist (he dislikes the latter no less than reductionists like Dawkins). “Modern Nihilism” is written without the easily expected resentment, without melancholy. Is it possible to say that Esposito is an extremely original thinker? Perhaps not (although there are really deep passages in his book). You can’t call him a person of fine taste or an excellent stylist either. But this is a really smart author, writing with a joy rarely characteristic of philosophers, and this is worth a lot.
quote
Only the knowledge of the fact that our being in the world can be asked the question “why?” allows us not to suffocate from meaninglessness, but to breathe deeply. Realizing that our existence is not in vain, free will can choose the most important “object” for itself: and we decide not only what we want or what we want to do, but also who we should be. We can want it because we get it, and we get it to the extent that we want it: the same thing happens in love.
Costantino Esposito. modern nihilism. M.: RIPOL classic, 2022. Translation: Yana Bogdanova
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