These reflections are apposite now, as, on the one hand, the trial of Moro’s presumed assassins is in progress and, on the other hand, we witness the grotesque ritual of the Anglo-
Argentine war.
What is so frightening about the war over the Falklands? Not the fact that General Galtieri sought an external enemy in order to allay internal tensions; that is normal dictatorial technique, and everybody must do his job, however filthy it may be. Nor the feet that Britain should react in a manner closer to Francis Drake than to postmodern, because noblesse oblige, and each is prisoner of his own history and his own national myths.
What is frightening is the fact that the Montoneros, Firmenich, the revolutionary Peronistas, all those who moved European democratic public opinion when they were languishing in the generals’ prisons and who were actually excused when they engaged in small-scale terrorism (of course, people said, they live under a dictatorship), all these full-time revolutionaries are today enthusiastically on the side of the government, dazzled by the nationalistic invitation to die for the sacred borders of the fatherland.
It sounds exactly like my story: If the Argentinian generals had invented a nice war ten years ago, these heroes would never have committed acts of terrorism, but would have got themselves killed, dagger clenched in their teeth, hurling hand grenades against the white rajah James Brooke—perhaps crying out “Mompracem!”—new tiger-cubs of the pampas. Chile refuses to fall in line behind Argentina, because Pinochet is smart and needs American support, but look: Cuba agrees at once. Castro must be more familiar with Errol Flynn than with Marx.
I see many analogies between the Red Brigades snickering during the Moro trial and the Montoneros now crying “Viva Galtieri!”
Just as I see many analogies with what has happened in a country as allergic to ideologies as the United States, where violence, in order to erupt, needs other pretexts, like the worship of Satan. I understand the indignation and the horror of Giampaolo Pansa, who in yesterday’s Repubblica couldn’t understand how the Red Brigades could be so jolly, and how the thought of the murder victim did not weigh on them. But if we reread the reports of the investigation and trial of Charles Manson and his “family” after the stabbing of Sharon Tate, it is the same script, the same psychology, the same lack of remorse, the same sense of having done something that gave meaning to a life that, all things considered, was too boring and peaceful. And it is the same jollity of those hundreds of poor people who drank poison and administered it to their children, to follow the mystical suicide of a preacher who, not long before, had been ready to sacrifice himself for far more acceptable causes.
This also explains the “repentant” terrorists. How is it possible to repent after arrest, and repent profoundly, turning in your companions, whereas you didn’t repent at the moment when you were firing a couple of bullets into the nape of a helpless man? Why, because there was the impulse to kill and, once that was satisfied, the game was over; so why not repent? Ideology has nothing to do with it: It was a pretext.
I am fully aware that this kind of talk risks sounding reactionary. The problem is to know, to understand, that not all sacrifices, not all bloodshed, is carried out for fun. But it is a difficult matter of rational discriminations; and to articulate them, you must first of all be unrelentingly suspicious of the mystique of sacrifice and blood. I don’t mean to suggest that there is no difference between those whom society recognizes as heroes and those whom society recognizes as bloodthirsty madmen, even if the difference is much less than our schoolbooks would have us believe. I don’t want to suggest that all ideologies and all ideals are transitory pretexts for impulses of violence that spring from the depths of the species. Perhaps there is a distinction, a very simple one.
Real heroes, those who sacrifice themselves for the collective good, and whom society recognizes as such (maybe some time later, whereas at the time they are branded as irresponsible outlaws), are always people who act reluctantly. They die, but they would rather not die; they kill, but they would rather not kill; and in fact afterwards they refuse to boast of having killed in a condition of necessity.
Real heroes are always impelled by circumstances; they never choose because, if they could, they would choose not to be heroes. For example—Salvo D’Acquisto, or one of the many partisans who fled to the mountains, was captured and tortured, and never talked, in order to lessen the tribute of blood, not to encourage it.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. If it had been possible, he would have settled the matter otherwise, and without bloodshed. He doesn’t boast of his own death or of others’. But he doesn’t repent. He suffers and keeps his mouth shut; if anything, others then exploit him, making him a myth, while he, the man worthy of esteem, was only a poor creature who reacted with dignity and courage in an event bigger than he was.
But we know at once and without hesitation that we must be wary of those who set out, fired (and firing), moved by an ideal of purification through blood, their own and others’, but more often, others’. We must not let it amaze us, or shock us too much. But we mustn’t ignore the existence of these phenomena, either.
If we don’t accept and recognize, bravely, the inevitability of this behavior (studying techniques to confine it, prevent it, offering other, less bloody safety valves), we run the risk of being idealists and moralists as much as those whose bloodthirsty madness we so reprove. To recognize violence as a biological force is true materialism (historical or dialectical, it matters little) and the Left has been wrong not to study biology and ethology sufficiently.
1982
On the Crisis of the Crisis of Reason
In a weekly magazine recently I happened to read an interview with a famous novelist (I won’t mention his name because, on the one hand, the phrase was only attributed to him, and on the other I am reconstructing it from memory, and I don’t want to attribute to someone a thing he may not have said; but if he didn’t say it, others are saying the same thing); he declared that reason can no longer explain the world in which we live and we now have to rely on other instruments.
Unfortunately, the interview failed to specify what those other instruments are, leaving the reader free to imagine: feeling, delirium, poetry, mystical silence, a sardine can opener, the high jump, sex, intravenous injections of sympathetic ink. Even more unfortunately, each of these imagined instruments could, indeed, be the opposite of reason, but each opposition would imply a different definition of reason.
For example, the book that originated this debate* seems to speak of a crisis in what is called a “classical” model of reason, as Aldo Gargani explains with great clarity in the introduction. But the alternatives that Gargani proposes in other philosophical contexts go under the name of reason or rational activity or at least reasonable activity, as he admits. Among the other essays in the book (to mention only a few), Ginzburg’s opposes deductive reasoning with a hypothetical conjectural reasoning, judged valid by Hippocrates, by Aristotle, and by Peirce; Veca’s essay offers a persuasive series of rules for reasonable conjecture; Viano proposes a prudent definition of rationality as justification of special beliefs, to make them understood by all.
Here are some good definitions of the nonclassical rational position, which allows us to remain within reality and not delegate the job of reason to delirium or track and field events.
The problem is not to kill reason, but to render bad reasons harmless, and to dissociate the notion of reason from that of truth. But the name for this honorable job is not “hymn to crisis.” It has been called, since the time of Kant, “critique.”
The recognition of limits.
Confronted by a shibboleth like that of the crisis of reason, we feel that, to start with, we must define not so much reason as the concept of crisis. And the indiscriminate use of that concept is a case of editorial cramps. Crisis sells well. During the last few decades we have witnessed the sale (on newsstands, in bookshops, by subscription, door-to-door) of the crisis of religion, of Marxism, of representation, the sign, philosophy, ethics, Freudianism, presence, the subject (I omit other crises that I don’t understand professionally even if I endure them, such as that of the lira, of housing, the family, institutions, oil).
Whence the well-known quip: “God is dead, Marxism is undergoing a crisis, and I don’t feel so hot myself.” Let us consider something pleasant, like the crisis of representation. Even assuming that whoever speaks of it has a definition of representation (which is
