The Passage West

Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State

Giacomo Marramao, Matteo Mandarini

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844678525
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689677
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

In this ambitious work, Giacomo Marramao proposes a radical reconceptualization of the world system in our era of declining state sovereignty. He argues that globalization cannot be reduced to mere economics or summarized by phrases such as 'the end of history' or the 'westernization of the world'. Instead, we find ourselves embarking on a passage to a new, post-nation state age destined to transform all civilizations - and to disrupt Western geopolitical dominance. To confront the challenges of this interregnum one must think in terms of a new and radical universalism, a universalism of difference able to revitalize politics and to demythologize identity.
Building on the great interwar discussion between Spengler, Junger, Schmitt and Heidegger, Marramao's new work engages with Habermas, Derrida and post-colonialism. Arguing against the classic Western pretension to universal norms of democracy and reason, he develops instead the idea of a 'universal politics of difference'.

1

NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT

At that precise moment to himself the man said:

What would I not give

to be with you in Iceland

under the grand immobile daytime

and share this now

like sharing music

or the taste of fruit.

At that precise moment

the man was together with her in Iceland.

(J. L. Borges)

Mundus and Globus

The political phenomena of our time are accompanied and complicated by an unprecedented change of scale, or rather by a change in the order of things. The world to which we are beginning to belong, both men and nations, is only similar to the world that was once familiar to us. The system of causes controlling the fate of every one of us, and now extending over the whole globe, makes it reverberate throughout every shock; there are no more questions that can be settled by being settled at one point.¹

These comments, which could have been written at the beginning of the twenty-first century by a philosopher of the global era in which we live, were in fact composed by Paul Valéry in 1928. They were then collated with his other remarkable thoughts on the great transformations of the interwar period in Reflections on the World Today. It is here that we must begin if we hope to shed any light on the complex of events, processes and experiences implicated in the term ‘globalisation’. This term is ubiquitous and its meanings extend beyond the economic and technological spheres, to those of society and politics, religion and culture. Since its beginnings, Western philosophy has taught us to be suspicious of the deceptive clarity of language and of the power contained in the deceitful transparency of words. The warning is all the more pertinent in our media-based society. Thanks to an arcane thaumaturgy, the recourse to an allusive and polysemic expression enables one to avoid the ‘effort of the Notion’ and its indispensable correlates: analysis and synthesis, decomposition and reconstruction, differentiation and comparison.

Those sentences of Valéry’s acquire today, in the near surgical precision of their vocabulary, a relevance that goes well beyond their character of historical testimony. Not only do they document the intensity achieved by reflection, within the ambit of the ‘culture of crisis’, in the interwar period, they also contain precious theoretical indications of the structural characteristics of the Global Age. The set of phenomena that we commonly gather under the term ‘globalisation’ (which commonly privileges the technological-financial aspects from which the new dimension of the world market is said to have emerged following the collapse of the bipolar system) are from Valéry’s perspective linked to the new terms of the relationship of technology to politics and, in this sense, is allied to the diagnosis-prognosis of the ‘global epoch’ (globale Zeit) elaborated by Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt in the same period. From this perspective, the trends of the transformation and crisis of the ‘political’ that are induced by the projection of technology on a planetary scale – under the pressure of massification and ‘total mobilisation’² – do not constitute a simple extension of the horizon (a mere ‘change of scale’) with respect to the preceding phases of colonial expansion and internationalisation, industrialisation and interdependency. They produce, instead, a ‘change in the order of things,’ a new structure and configuration of the world:

We must expect such transformations to become the rule. The further we go the less simple and predictable the effects will be, and the less any political operations and even interventions of force – in a word, obvious and direct action – will turn out as they were expected to do. The sizes, areas, and masses involved, their relations, the impossibility of localizing anything, the prompt repercussions, all will more and more impose a policy very different from the existing one.³

Valéry’s radioscopic gaze compels us to supplement our investigation so as to shed some light on the ubiquitous term ‘globalisation’, which has become an all-purpose label for disparate, cumulative and juxtaposed phenomena. It is an illusory keyword, a passepartout that serves to affirm the ‘new’ at the same time as it radically denies it. Following the tragedy of 11 September 2001, diligent ex post prophets of the ‘spiritual condition’ of our time have hastily announced the end of the long strike of events (in Jean Baudrillard’s suggestive phrase that he borrowed from the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández) or, according to a diametrically opposite standpoint, the end of globalisation itself. But it is also true to say that such multi-use categories are also ambiguous. Independently of the (positive or negative) evaluation given or the side taken (‘New Global’ or ‘No Global’), it is understood by some as a dynamic of unification of material conditions and integration of cultures – that is not at all new but of distant origin, and that ultimately coincides with the history of the world itself. Conversely, by others it is taken to mark a veritable epochal discontinuity or rupture.

In the first case, contemporary globalisation, despite its indisputable significance, is considered to be nothing but the latest (and provisional) chapter in a series of successive globalisations that characterise the process of civilisation:

Globalization is often seen as global Westernization. On this point, there is substantial agreement among many proponents and opponents. Those who take an upbeat view of globalization see it as a marvellous contribution of Western civilization to the world. From the opposite perspective, Western dominance – sometimes seen as a continuation of Western imperialism – is the devil of the piece…. But is globalization really a new Western curse? It is, in fact, neither new nor necessarily Western. And it is not a curse. Over thousands of years, globalization has contributed to the progress of the world through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding (including that of science and technology). These global interrelations have often been very productive in the advancement of different countries. They have not necessarily taken the form of increased Western influence. Indeed, the active agents of globalization have often been located far from the West. To illustrate, consider the world at the beginning of the last millennium rather than at its end. Around AD 1000, the global reach of science, technology and mathematics was changing the nature of the old world. But the dissemination then was, to a great extent, in the opposite direction from what we see today…. The agents of globalization are neither European nor exclusively Western, nor are they necessarily linked to Western dominance. Indeed, Europe would have been a lot poorer – economically, culturally and scientifically – had it resisted the globalization of mathematics, science and technology at that time. And today, the same principle applies, though in the reverse direction (from West to East).⁴

In the second case, globalisation is thought to represent a rupture so great as to render obsolete the classical categories of philosophical and political modernity (the state, the people, sovereignty, nation, centre/periphery, public/private, etc.). From this perspective, these categories are said to have become ‘zombie-words’ or, in Adorno’s peremptory definition, ‘conceptual corpses’ (Begriffsleichen) par excellence, mere survivals and inertial resistances of a paradigm now irrevocably past. For those who hold to this ‘discontinuity’ thesis – Martin Albrow heads the list – properly speaking one should no longer speak of a process of globalisation so much as the advent of a Global Age that is structurally and qualitatively different from the Modern Age. The Global Age has arrived: and, ‘Paradoxically … in the Global Age we jettison three centuries of assumptions about the direction of history’.⁵

It is difficult to forecast to what extent the arguments presented on one side and the other are able to give rise to truly distinct and competing theoretical paradigms. In their current state, they appear able only to express two half-truths. They leave open the possibility that an aspect of Sen’s ‘continuity’ thesis – i.e., the critique of the equation globalisation = Westernisation that is decisive – might interact with the need, advanced by Albrow’s ‘discontinuity’ thesis, of a differential characterisation of the ‘Global Age’. On this basis, I propose – as we shall see subsequently – my philosophical reading of globalisation as a passage to the Occident, where ‘passage’ draws together the continuous and the discontinuous, the process and the turning point. A preliminary question arises for those not prepared to welcome the presumed self-evidence of the idola fori that inundate the media. In what sense and on what conditions is the term ‘globalisation’ able effectively to comprehend the plethora of phenomena for which it undoubtedly, more or less effectively, accounts? Moreover, does not the ambivalence underlying the use of this term – as object of investigation (the ‘real’ dynamic of events) or as methodological criterion of interpretation – betray its nature as mere slogan, as a ‘word without a concept’?

We can usefully begin our discussion with some lexical analysis. What in Anglophone countries is called ‘globalisation’ and in German Globalisierung, becomes mondializzazione, mondialisation, mundialización and mundialização in the Romance languages. It is difficult to render these terms in English and German, beginning with the terms ‘world’ and ‘Welt’. In English, this is because of the evident cacophony of solutions such as ‘worldisation’ or ‘worldwidisation’. In German, because the term Verweltlichung (literally, ‘worldification’) is already used to denote – in works from the field of theology, philosophy of history and the social sciences over the last two centuries – the phenomena of ‘secularisation’.⁶ However, it so happens that the different roots of the terms ‘mondializzazione’ and ‘globalisation’ are central to the symbolic horizons each evokes. The reference to the concept ‘mundus’ is unavoidable for anyone using the former term; because – as Jacques Derrida has observed – ‘this notion of world … is charged with a great deal of semantic history, notably a Christian history’.⁷ Equally unavoidable, for those who adopt the latter, is the reference to the symbolism of the globe, of the sphere, to the idea of the totalisation and the planetary finitude of the processes at work. In short, whereas mondializzazione immediately evokes classical themes and queries of the philosophy of history, ‘globalisation’ appears above all to be the business of cartographers and navigators. Consequently, the lexical difference between these two presumed synonyms implies not only the reference to different disciplines but also differing choices of localisation and periodisation of the phenomenon. Let us try to clarify the distinction.

Mundus

If we adopt the term mondializzazione, the reference to the epochal change signalled by the emergence from the still descriptive and synoptic fabric of the Universalgeschichte of the concept of ‘World-History’ (Welt-Geschichte), of a history understood as a process that tends to the level of the world [si mondializza], becomes canonical. This is a crucial passage in Western universalism that begins with the Enlightenment modernity of Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant (and through Herder as the ‘Romantic’ counterpoint), and concludes with Hegel’s philosophy of history. However, there are no lack of genealogies that hark back still further in search of antecedents as illustrious as they are remote. For example, the Augustinian theology of history, with its idea of civitas peregrinans – just to mention two of the most celebrated interpretations, those of Karl Löwith and Étienne Gilson, for whom modern ideologies and utopias are nothing but secular transpositions of the Judeo-Christian éschaton and the metamorphosis of the City of God; or, looking even further back in time, the idea of the unity of the prágmata set down, with reference to the power of Rome, in Polybius’ Histories. In the latter case, Rome becomes the political-symbolic cipher for the plane of the worldwide interconnection of events, which we find at the basis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• Note to the Reader
• 1. Nostalgia for the Present
• 2. Identity and Contingency: Zones of Conflict
• 3. Dämmerung – The Twilight of Sovereignty: State, Subjects and Fundamental Rights
• 4. The Exile of the Nomos: Carl Schmitt and the Globale Zeit
• 5. Gift, Exchange, Obligation: Karl Polanyi and Social Philosophy
• 6. Universalism and Politics of Difference: Democracy as a Paradoxical Community
• 7. The Oriental Mirror: Voltaire and the Roots of Intolerance
• 8. Ciphers of Difference
• 9. Europe After the Leviathan: Technology, Politics, Constitution
• 10. After Babel: Towards a Cosmopolitanism of Difference
• Afterword: Conflicted Ties
• Bibliography
• Index