Luca Di Blasi ^^ Seriousness without Enemy. Towards an Anthropocenic Concept of the Political
With his text “Note on War, Play, and the Enemy”, published last year, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben provided not only a sort of keystone of his own monumental homo sacer project, but also of a whole generational project which was motivated by the (serious) attempt to overcome the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. The emphasis on irony, relaxation, easiness, play (in pop-culture, post-histoire, post-modernity) seemed plausible, even messianic, if seen, as Agamben does, in the face of a gradual loss of the play through the polis as a “politicization of civic identity”, starting in the 6th, 5th century B.C. and finally leading to the homo sacer, the “production of a life that may be killed”.
However, the very same play appears as frivolity when it loses its own serious background, and much more ambiguous in the moment when we are confronted with both: a new seriousness resulting from ecological threats, and a carelessness with which these threats are ignored, downplayed, or denied. In my talk, I would like to question an affirmation of play and irony, prevalent for decades, in favor of another seriousness which is not based on the concept of the enemy, i.e. the danger of being killed by others, and not even on the confrontation of a collective human death as a consequence of irreversible anthropogenic changes to our natural conditions, but rather on the possibility of recovering or renewing a notion of human dignity in the face of and despite the human responsibility for the massive annihilation of non-human species.
Luca Di Blasi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bern in Switzerland and Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. He is currently leading the project “Disagreement Between Religions. Epistemology of Religious Conflicts”. His main theoretical interests include philosophy of religion, modern continental philosophy, and political theology. Main publications: Dezentrierungen. Beiträge zur Religion der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2018); Der Weiße Mann. Ein Anti-Manifest (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Der Geist in der Revolte. Der Gnostizismus und seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Munich: Fink, 2002).