After the Death of God

For myself, there are complementary meanings of the death of God. In terms of Nietzsche, the anthropological meaning to the death of God is most clear. It is the idea that mankind has killed God because they recognize he is no longer a necessity. God was born into human consciousness to provide some security against the dangers of natural life. In this sense Nietzsche is similar to Giambattista Vico, who describes the condition of primitive man as somebody who sought in everything and every natural event the work of a god. In many senses this is the same in Nietzsche. The origins of God, therefore, lie in the natural processes through which we pray to God in order to protect ourselves from natural forces. As such, this primitive state of consciousness must be deconstructed. In addition, because humanity started to believe in God, it also started to have rules. The rules organized a sort of rational society that became another source of our security in this world. Science and technology developed in this vein as well. And that is why at a certain point God was no longer a necessity. Nietzsche sometimes expresses this in these terms. Humanity also discovered that God was a lie. And if God had ordered them not to lie, God therefore negates himself. The idea is that in a civilized condition we no longer need such an extreme assurance, such a guarantee of our security.

This is the literal interpretation of the death of God, which I studied mainly in Nietzsche’s works and in Heidegger’s essay of 1943, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” and his lectures on Nietzsche published in two volumes. But the other, nonliteral, interpretation seems to me to be more convincing and not so strongly Nietzschean. I would say it this way: the death of God about which Nietzsche speaks is the death of Christ on the cross. Why? Because it is exactly after Christianity, or the event of Christianity, that it becomes possible to no longer believe in the classical, rational gods of the Greeks.

There is an important idea from Dilthey, Einfuehrung in die Geisteswissenshaften, that says, above all, metaphysics was killed by Christianity because Christianity turned the attention of man inward so that philosophy became subjective, more Cartesian. This, by the way, is very important for Heidegger: remember that Heidegger in Being and Time said that what he wanted to do was simply make more understandable and clear to the people of his time the teachings of Dilthey. That is the case even though Heidegger himself never developed a specific commentary on Dilthey.

Of course, Dilthey also asked the question why metaphysics lasted so long given the fact that Christianity began two thousand years ago. There are complementary processes that Dilthey sees between the one and the other. At the end of the Roman Empire the bishops were almost the only authorities still in existence around the ancient world. For example, Augustine was both a philosopher and a bishop. On the one hand, as a philosopher he calls the people to come back to themselves by inhabiting the mind within. On the other hand, as a bishop he had to organize a community, to take cover and protect the structures of the ancient world. This is more or less a popularized version of the idea from Dilthey—that is, the Church has the possibility to completely renew a community founded on the event of Christianity that puts an end to metaphysics. But they did not do that because they still were very strongly engaged in secular culture. So only after a lot of revolutions did Christianity realize that the core idea of Christianity was the negation of a necessarily objective rational (i.e., eternal) structure of the world. This takes time, of course, and it can occur only in a Protestant world. At any rate, the ethical Christianity under development involves the dissolution of the faith in the metaphysical structure of the world. This is historicism in many senses, which corresponds to the history of salvation and so on.

Now, when Nietzsche says that God is dead, as a matter of fact he is only developing this extreme point introduced to the world by Christianity of the historicity of history. In other words, no structure, no objective or eternal God, just as Christianity has always said. So I would say that this connection between my thought and Nietzsche and the idea of secularization, etc., is that Nietzsche realized the occurrence of the death of God that corresponds to the idea of the dissolution of metaphysics. We don’t believe in the Greek metaphysical God as the rational structure of the world. This God obviously has nothing to do with the Christian God.

I must confess that the theological movement of the death of God is not something I’ve studied intensely. While there are many important authors such as G. Vahanian, W. Hamilton, T. Altizer, J. Robinson, H. Cox, and V. Buren who have escaped the natural intentions of traditional theology and who have successfully articulated a theology without God, they could never have done this work without Luther or Nietzsche, for example. Also, my use of the death of God depends very much on the history of Being as connected to the problem of ontotheology. In this more philosophical context, the theology of the death of God has a great deal of current resonance and force. It becomes part of a much larger effort that speaks not only of the death of God but also of the end of metaphysics and the end of truth. So, in answer to your question, I would say that my notion of weak thought can actually help the death of God theologies better understand their origins in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophy and in the broader context of the end of metaphysics.

There is an Italian saying that I sometimes make reference to: “Thank God I’m an atheist.” Of course, this is referring to the God of the philosophers. God can only be propped up or demonstrated by reason or rational argument for so long. Yet this effort to demonstrate the rationality of belief is still something the Catholic Church feels very strongly about. Why? Partly, it is a matter of remaining faithful to the medieval tradition. After all, it is only natural that the Church assumes that the real, true human culture was the period when the Church had the most power. So in many senses there is a sort of historical imprinting in the Church, like they would like to go back to the Middle Ages if they could. But there is also the matter of power. As long as the Church can depend on some natural, rational ethical structure, they can try to enforce this ethics not only on the believers but on everybody. The examples in Italy are many. For instance, they have tried to keep the law against divorce in Italy. In addition, more recently, under the strong leadership of Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar in Rome and president of the Italian bishops’ conference, and with the explicit support of Pope Benedict, the Church mobilized at all levels to persuade Italians to stay away from the ballot box, with the goal of keeping turnout lower than 50 percent and thereby invalidating the referendum on medically assisted procreation. They do this not on the basis that it is an aspect of Christian law but rather that it is an aspect of natural law. Now they are arguing the same thing with regard to various facets of bioethics.

This corresponds very well to my idea of metaphysics, which I define as the violent imposition of an order that is declared objective and natural and therefore cannot be violated and is no longer an object of discussion. By the way, this is also why we can believe that Heidegger was against metaphysics for exactly the same reason. If you admit there is a first principle that can be grasped and known in a definite way, you prevent anybody from ever asking again. So, on this basis, I have developed the following theory with regard to violence. As I have explained in Nihilism and Emancipation,² violence is the fact of shutting down, silencing, breaking off the dialogue of questions and answers. This is what ultimate foundations do; they impose themselves as impervious to further questions as objects of contemplation and amor dei intellectualis.

When I say that, it seems as though it is exaggerated. Why? Think about war, for example,: as Pascal observed, if you kill someone on this side of the river, you are declared a hero, but on the other side you are an assassin. What about euthanasia? Once more, the reason the Church doesn’t want to speak about this is because they believe there is an objective violence in killing. Yes, but what about God? If there is an objective violence to killing somebody, then it would follow that God is the biggest murderer of all. Violence, then, is the fact of no longer permitting the other to ask questions. Now, the Church, on one side, pretends that they very much respect human nature, human reason, and things like that, but, on the other side, the very core of this is that they want to impose their view of the natural essence of man, reason, etc., which involves a certain authoritarian posture.

Building on this comment you made about violence being the fact of shutting down, silencing, or breaking off the dialogue, this violent imposition of power is quite apparent throughout the city of Rome. Being here in Rome, one cannot help but notice the contrast between the ruins of imperial Rome and the Church triumphant. This cityscape seems to me to be an apt visual for your idea about the dissolution of metaphysics.

Yes, we grew up with the idea that the magnificence of the Church continues without any interruption from the history of the Roman times. In many senses, this idea is more natural for us than for you Americans. But, of course, somebody might also wonder about the signs indicating that the Church is no longer so alive. Even when the Church insists on doctrinal conformity and engages in various inquisitions—this reveals a certain confessional weakness because it promotes in a conceptual way the idea of the Church as an army. An army regiments your sexual life, for instance, enforcing rigid conformity and discipline. In many senses, the insistence of the Catholic Church on these points is a way of training an army that is supposed to be ready for a new war, a new world. Otherwise it makes no sense to insist so much on their position on prophylactics. When I try to understand why Pope John Paul II was so strongly engaged in reproduction politics, I wonder whether he was afraid of social change, such as the reduction of the birthrate or the influx of immigration of other religions. Does the Pope wish to increase the number of immigrants who are notoriously more prolific? It seems to me that the most reactionary part of the Catholic Church can count upon the development of the third world churches. These churches are much worse than ours from a theological view. For one, many are part of minority communities, so they are strongly communitarian, going back to primitive Christianity. They are also dogmatic; they believe in wonders, etc. If that is the case, then we secular Europeans are faced with some very difficult days ahead.

I want to talk about that a bit, specifically about the future of the Church, because your book with Jacques Derrida, On Religion, is credited by many with bringing the return of religion to the attention of philosophers. But when we talk about the return of religion—at least in your work—we are also talking about the process of secularization. So can you explain the connection between the return of religion, which is often violent and as you say in the third world often primitive, with the simultaneous process of secularization, which is associated with modernity and the West?

The connection has many meanings in my mind. In one sense, it is exactly because of the loss of a unified religious authority that there is a sort of rebirth of religiosity. Real religiosity relies on secularization because religion is no longer single or uniform and there is no longer a central religious authority. On the other hand, secularization and the new religiosity are also related by a sort of therapeutic connection because if I am ready to accept literally the return of religion in Italy, I would say that this religiosity tends again to be a sort of resecularized religiosity—that is, a religiosity that lives only as a consequence of secularization. For example, Pope John Paul II made great use of the media, his message was communicated via television, and, as his death showed so well, he was a legitimate global media star. There is a sort of false universalism promoted by the media, which is very contradictory. People are more interested in the religious show than they are in religious engagement.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from the Roman Catholic Church’s celebration of the Year of the Jubilee in 2000. Many young people came to Rome to see and hear from the pope. This was perceived by many as an example of the rise in religiosity among today’s youth. But, after they had left and when it came time to clean up the area where the youth had spent the night, they found three hundred thousand condoms.

No, there were more. Of course, there is difficulty in the counting. Maybe many were thrown away out of respect for the pope. [Laughter] The point is that there are many contradictions. The threat is that, with the means of the mythologies created by television, we reconstruct a sort of primitive religiosity, a form of superstition—a religious show in contrast to devotion. Now with the new pope we seem to have a new situation, although it’s too soon to come to any conclusions. Benedict XVI seems, for the moment, to be more interested in philosophical questions such as “relativism” rather than prophylactics. I think this is a good thing because he is leaving people freer to live their faith without restrictions. Now it is quite possible that this is a decision the Vatican has taken in order to begin to attract all those people who left the Church because of the dogmatic preaching of Pope John Paul II. And although I still haven’t heard about the number of condoms left after World Youth Day in Cologne, I did read about a controversy that arose over plans for police to distribute condoms at World Youth Day. The church tried to halt plans to distribute them, according to the spokeswoman of the German police unions (the union commonly distributes them at large public gatherings to protect the public).

I met Ratzinger in Paris at the Sorbonne many years ago for a debate and I must confess he is distinguished as a theologian. But, then again, let’s see what will happen now that he is inside the metaphysical structure of the Church. Not much has changed as of yet. What I would like from Benedict XVI is silence! I would like a pope who talked less, because Wojtyla talked about everything everywhere. People want to hear the pope preach about the gospels, not about the “right” or “natural” constitution of the family. This is also the thesis I put forward with Richard Rorty and Santiago Zabala in The Future of Religion. In that book we tried to “save the church from itself” by demonstrating that the future of religion depends on the future of the Church.

In this sense philosophy is important for secularization. It is important because it helps again and again to repeat new possibilities for religion, which depend exactly on secularization. For instance, it is precisely because the God of Greek philosophy is dead that it is possible to listen to the Bible again. There are no longer strong, rational reasons for being an atheist. This is a consequence of secularization, not the consequence of desecularization. This is also very important philosophically. I would say that religion can have a religious meaning only with the help of philosophy—that is, with the help of a theory of secularization that recognizes in many traits of the modern world the basic features of Christianity. When we think of the Enlightenment period, we could say that Voltaire was more religious than the Jesuits were religious because the Jesuits were becoming the guardians of the traditional order of society, while Voltaire was leading the case for the society of man. In many senses, then, what seemed to be “less Christian” was actually “more Christian.”

I don’t know what a desecularized world would be. As for the postsecular, it is a definition that takes into account the mass phenomenon of religiosity, like the great attention for the pope. But these are not so characteristic, because if Pope John Paul II, who died in Rome some months ago, had not been such a pop star, promoted so strongly by TV, then things would have been very different. After all, many people watch TV, but not so many attend church. If you go to a church in Italy on Sunday morning, you don’t see an enormous crowd.

So, yes, I would say there is a sort of religious content in the humanitarian interests we have, but that, again, is negated by the media. After all, does the media portray the poor children in Rwanda on a daily basis? In many senses, this widespread interest in religion is the positive meaning of secularization. It has infused Christianity with a sense of trying to accept the problems of the world, but this is an ambiguous problem. I believe that the truth of Christianity is not the pope but democratic society. The consequences of Christianity are the modernization of society, less violent relationships within society, and so on. And the problem is that this is precisely what the Church tends to deny. This is real secularization, a sort of desacralization of the Christian message in the sense of ethics, less violent politics, shared power, and so on. On the other hand, this is still ambiguous because if real Christianity is revealed in modern democracy, then what about the Church’s teachings on things such as eternal life, life after death, the authority of the Church, etc.? I would say that real Christianity is the secularized theory that belongs to charity. On the other hand, I would say that there is a sort of discord that is preserved.

In the end, what is Christianity? Is it the belief that God is one in three persons? Take the credo in the mass: If I stopped at each proposition from the confession, there is not even one article I could literally believe. For instance, Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the father. Why the right? Why the father and not the mother? There are so many literalisms that are passing away. But, on the other hand, I still believe that the power and truth of Christianity is the event of an intervention of God in history. This need not be tied to the historical existence of Jesus. What I believe in is the Christ of the gospels. I still believe in the mystery of creation. Not the creationism that is taught in the schools of the American South. Rather, I am interested in a theologian like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who is friendlier to evolutionism and also to the idea that God need not be omnipotent now, though he may be omnipotent at the end.

Yes, of course, there is this shared concern with hermeneutics and the problem of biblical literalism. Literalism seems to me to wipe itself out or discredit itself by being beholden to an interpretation of the Bible that becomes only a sort of repository for stories of the type of The Da Vinci Code, for instance. If you take the Bible literally, then you find a lot of sources for conspiracies. Even the story of Job—this is a story of an absolute God who makes a bet with Satan. OK. But, along the way, people are killed. For what? Just for a bet against the devil. All that—whether the conspiracy theories or the co-opting of science by theology—is a product, or, better, the trash or refuse of the literal interpretation of the Bible.

Staying with this ambiguity some, I want to ask a more critical question—specifically about how you employ Christianity with regard to such things as democracy, secularization, modernization, and so on. You have written that modernity is “unthinkable” apart from the Christian heritage and, further, that the task of secularization is not only the message of the New Testament but also constitutes the very destiny of the West. Finally, you have said that it is not possible to have a non-Christian philosophy. My question is how this privileging of the Christian heritage does not lead us back to the very form of religious triumphalism you are trying to avoid.

Once again I would say that the problem of Christian triumphalism is based on a sort of literal reading of the Bible. I see modernity as a dissolution of the sacred distance between God and the world. So if I understand modernity in these terms, then I understand that I cannot think of modernity without this origin or basis in Christian incarnationalism. But also, as I mentioned before, I can also make the confession “Thank God I’m an atheist.” Only because of the event of Christianity can we be modern and no longer believe in a sacrificial God, as René Girard has said, or in a literal God. This is the path described by Joachim of Fiore—who, by the way, I have a great difficulty understanding—when he speaks of the age of the spirit. My view of the future of religion and of Christianity is based exactly on his idea of the intense spiritualization of the Holy Scriptures, which means no longer taking even the primacy of the pope literally. This relativization or spiritualization of religious authority can be seen in the dispute that exists among biblical scholars about which is the first of the gospels. Most scholars say Mark, but the Church prefers to say it was Matthew because that is where the statement about Peter being the rock upon which Christ will build the Church is found. So it is a matter of what I prefer the Church to be.

Getting back to this question about the Christian meaning of secularization and Christianity having a meaning today only through secularization, it raises the critical issue about the role of the Church in today’s world. What do we do with the Church? My answer is that we have to invent another meaning of the teaching of the Church, one that does not rest on the Church’s efforts at concentrating power in the Vatican. What I would say is that if the Church believes that it is best to go on concentrating its authority and insisting on certain literal readings of the Bible, how long can it last? This is not simply a hermeneutical or philosophical problem, it is practical as well. Take, for example, the question of women priests. We don’t have many priests as it is, so if a woman wants to become a priest, then OK. Same with the issue of condoms, as we’ve already discussed. These are all things that John Cornwell explained very well in his book, Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism. Of course, this touches on the matter of the authority of the Church itself. If the Church still preaches something that appears to be lacking in credibility, that is utterly absent in meaning, then the only way would be for the Church to gradually ease its doctrine bit by bit. Imagine if I were pope and tomorrow announced that everything was permissible—obviously that would spell the Church’s destruction. But, at the same time, in order to be preserved, the Church has to change.

Following your interpretation, then, couldn’t one just as easily talk about the idea that there can be no philosophy without its Islamic transmission through the Middle Ages? Or, as your friend Umberto Eco writes in his wonderfully imaginative novels, he is always picking up these alternative strands within the historic tradition to somehow question or unbalance the dominant or prevailing tradition. My question is whether you might be caught in a contradiction, since it is not only that there can be no philosophy apart from Christianity, because, first of all, Christianity itself is not a single or uniform tradition and, second of all, regardless of how Christian is the character of the Western philosophical tradition, it might very well have been lost or forgotten without the benefit of Islam.

Yes, I understand, and I admit that maybe it was expressed a little too strongly. Let me say first that philosophy is a European product. This includes Greek, Jewish, and Islamic contributions, to be sure. But, at the same time, I do not want to reduce the Islamic tradition to a strictly instrumental role. Perhaps what I should say instead is that we could not have had philosophy and modern science without the Bible, without this relation to the book, which doesn’t mean any essential privilege for this tradition. There is no modern philosophy today that exists without any possible reference to the Bible or, more specifically, that is not born out of the struggles surrounding the meaning of the Bible. I’m thinking here of Martin Luther and his struggles with the Church authorities over the right of interpretation. So that when I say I believe in God, what I mean is that, without the Bible, I couldn’t think about myself. The terminology I use is inextricably beholden to the Bible.

That does not mean that this is the only way for religion. I would say that the event of Christianity does not deny mythologies, but has, in effect, authorized the different mythologies and religious traditions. Because if God has become a man, he could also have become a sacred cat or a sacred cow. So there is another way of seeing the incarnation. Incarnation is an event that doesn’t say that everything that came before is false or that any other mythology is false, only that we have another relation to this tradition.

This is my favorite example to explain this point. Imagine that, after the pope has had a meeting with the Dalai Lama, afterward he goes to his private chapel and prays for this poor man who is damned because he is not converted. What kind of fantasy this would be! Most probably the pope and the Dalai Lama agree on many things. They exchange spiritual experiences. And that is what should be done between religions.

Moving then from the dialogue between religions and religious leaders to the present exchange between you and John Caputo, the two of you the leading proponents of what he calls radical hermeneutics. You have also both become two of the leading voices defining the nature of postmodern religiosity. His radical hermeneutics is very much tied to Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy and rests on a certain epistemic undecidability. At the same time, Caputo is careful to distinguish this radical hermeneutics from nihilism—for him, the one does not and should not lead to the other. His talk of religion is also deeply influenced by Derrida, specifically what he has identified as the affirmative religious passion that drives Derrida’s work. This leads Caputo to his talk of “religion without religion,” wherein he affirms the desire for, and love of, God, but remains critical, if not suspicious, of the historic faiths. Finally, with regard to the nature of the postmodern condition, Caputo has identified postmodernism with the postsecular. Could you please comment on how you understand and would distinguish your work in hermeneutics and postmodern religiosity from his?

First, I would not identify myself too closely with the “radical” of his radical hermeneutics. Also, my use of hermeneutics is not so much bound to Derrida as his. It is true that the philosophers with whom I feel most affiliated are only Derrida and Rorty, but not because we share the same idea of hermeneutics but rather because we share the necessity to overcome metaphysics. Also, and this must be the greatest difference between Caputo and myself, regarding nihilism: I would say not only that hermeneutics leads to nihilism, but nihilism appears only thanks to the work of hermeneutics. This is the meaning of my book Nihilism and Emancipation, where hermeneutics corresponds politically to democracy, but only as long as they recognize their nihilistic vocation. I think that Caputo would not agree that in order to overcome metaphysics we would need to recognize the nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics. This is all explained in my Beyond Interpretation.

Changing directions a bit, I want to ask you about your impressions of faith and politics in the context of the United States. Two questions about this: First, to what extent do you see today’s global political conflict driven by religious interests? I’m thinking here about what you would say about the notion of the so-called clash of civilizations, specifically, the role religion might play in this conflict. Second, much attention has been paid to President Bush’s faith and the integral role the evangelical right played in his reelection campaign in 2004. My question here is to what extent do you think this apparent politicization of religion should be an item of concern or alarm.

For the first question, with this situation it becomes clearer and clearer that Marx was right about the ideological function of religion. The notion of the clash of civilizations was developed under the influence of general political ideology. It is true that even under Saddam Hussein there were clashes of religious groups within Iraq. Of course, this was aggravated by the fact that the West had created the conditions for the boundaries of the state. Iraq was a state in which people of different ethnic origins and religious traditions were put together only in order to create unstable conditions, thus necessitating the intervention of the West. But also, again paradoxically, the apparent clash of civilizations is powered by the proliferation of the media as we see when Al Qaeda uses Al Jazeera for communicating its message. There is a mixture between modern technology and real or pretended religious belongings.

Abdelwahab Meddeb wrote an insightful book on the relation between modern technology and religious fundamentalism, The Malady of Islam, in which he starts by explaining that if fanaticism was the sickness in Catholicism and Nazism was the sickness in Germany, then surely fundamentalism is the sickness in Islam. Meddeb believes that if the politicians who govern our world had intervened to save the Buddhas from the destruction of the colossi of Bamiyan on March 9, 2001 (the Taliban did announce they were going to destroy them a few days earlier), New York would have escaped the loss of its twin towers: they are after all two acts of destructions that belong to one single tragedy. Through his erudite and historical analysis Meddeb shows how the rise of fundamentalism has its roots in European colonization and American neocolonial domination of the Islamic world. Until the baroque and classical periods, Islamic civilization kept pace with European cultures and their developments in science and art. This progress was suddenly disrupted because of the progressive loss of international commerce. Islam had established its greatness at the very moment when Europe had fallen into lethargy (from the eighth to the eleventh century). One of the effects of the Crusades—which lasted two centuries, from 1099 to 1270—was the reestablishment of the dynamism of the Italian city-states (Genoa, Pisa, Venice), which broke the Islamic monopoly on Mediterranean commerce. This is also why, for example, in the Middle Ages we had the Crusades. The Crusades were clearly preached in religious terms and encouraged by religious authorities, but they were also about the redistribution of power and the conquering of new markets. The Italian Middle Ages were developed precisely by these means. The primitive bourgeoisie were those who reaped the advantages from these expanded markets and travels.

So I would say beware of discounting a Marxian analysis too quickly. After all, concerning Bush’s war in Iraq, Marx is absolutely right. It is just a matter of ideological masking. The logic is as follows—we are in this war first because we are believers. As believers, we want to expand democracy. If they will not accept our democracy, then we will bomb them. Then, at the end of the journey, there is, of course, oil. But, after all, Americans such as Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore have marvelously explained this dynamic, which has become increasingly apparent to everyone.

With that in mind, clearly there would be a great advantage to demythologizing the religious component in this struggle because many of the factors are not religious in nature but ideological. On the other hand, if there are some who still believe we are struggling in Iraq against the devil, this would be a way to educate them, to show them otherwise. It is like modernization; modernization is in many senses desacralizing. What Christianity should do in our world is to be a little more materialistic, to show that God is not involved in our struggles; rather, our struggles are about oil, domination, power, and so on.

It is also a matter of conversion. Only through conversion can people start to understand Marx. As a good Christian, I have to understand that God is not on my side in a war or somehow aligned with one side in the so-called clash of civilizations. This is exactly what a Marxist would say. If someone still believes that God is on his side in war, then he has to be demythologized. Even President Bush. But with Bush—does he believe or not? When I think that he truly believes, I imagine that his conversion was an absolute misfortune for the world. But then, this is not a question about Bush but a matter of a certain logic of the military-industrial complex instead.

Philosophy has to be a modernity discourse, that is, a secularizing discourse. For instance, today, in France, when they say there is a struggle about the integration of Muslims into French culture, it is also a matter about the material conditions of life. This is obviously the case with many of our problems today. If a rich Saudi buys an apartment in my neighborhood, do I feel like I am in a clash of civilizations? No, because he is rich. The only thing is that it leads to an increased property value in my neighborhood. But if I have a thousand Moroccan immigrants around my home justifiably begging every morning for food and money since the Italian government doesn’t do anything to help them, then I would probably become a sort of anti-Arab. Is this a matter of religion? No, it is just a matter of material conditions of existence. Even the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is like this. What I see today is that if you visit a refugee camp in the Middle East or in Africa, then you see that this is an impossible existence. These refugees have nothing to lose. If they are led to believe that their sacrifice might serve the liberation of their people, then they would do that. It is very easy to understand. But one can only understand this if the media would show us these camps, but this, of course, never happens.

All this then is the responsibility of the chiefs of the great religions—Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant. Religion can become a way of understanding one another instead of exacerbating our differences. When you think that even Catholics and Anglicans are still divided, which was just a matter of Henry VIII wanting a divorce, it is horrible. That is also why, when it comes to religion, I say that truth does not matter. It is morals, ethics, and charity that count.

Staying with this notion that religion becomes an ideological cloak hiding the actual material conditions of our lives together, I want to read to you a quote from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt from Empire in which they criticize postmodern discourses like your own that emphasize oscillation and plurality: “Simplifying a great deal, one could argue that postmodernist discourses appeal primarily to the winners in the process of globalization and fundamentalist discourses to the losers. In other words, the current global tendencies toward increased mobility, indeterminacy, and hybridity are experienced by some as a kind of liberation, but for others as an exacerbation of their suffering.” How do you respond to this analysis of postmodernist discourse?

This is my suspicion too. It is true that postmodernism involves this idea of mobility and hybridity—imagine the picture of a yuppie. But I am not sure that I could describe what the poor in this situation would actually desire. Negri, like many post-Marxist-Leninists, believes that he represents these people. But, after all, he is a yuppie. He knows personally all the members of the establishment. As a matter of fact, this is a mistake that many revolutionaries make. The mistake they make is that they always believe that they represent the people without a voice. It is like the Church pretending to represent the rights of the embryo.

But, to answer the question, I realize that the problem of postmodernism is a sort of a privileged position. But the university education in past centuries was a privileged position as well. This was not a reason to reject the efforts to provide a university education for everybody. Now it is possible that in the postmodern world this problem is compounded by its easing of communications, making populism more and more attractive as the ambiguous identification with the rich by the poor. After all, many poor people in Italy voted for Berlusconi. But, again, I have to ask the poor. If the poor voted for Berlusconi, how can I decide that I speak in their real interests? I do try to persuade them not to vote for Berlusconi, but surely not by saying that I know their real interests.

Finally, then, I would say that this is an indication of the ideological rigidity of Tony Negri. Regarding Hardt and Negri’s entire project, I have the same objection Noam Chomsky had of it—namely, why did they need to say in a complicated way what you can say in an easier way? I have the feeling that not only do they not represent the so-called multitude but neither do they want to be understood by them if they make their book so complicated. This is an old game that intellectuals play to gain prestige and power. In contrast to this approach, Santiago Zabala and I are currently at work on a book on politics, to be entitled From Within, in which we hope to show how socialism is what you get when one starts to criticize the inequalities of capitalism. In the meantime, I would recommend Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America as the best instrument for progressives in America who are interested in changing the direction of their country. This is a book that can promote serious democratic initiatives instead of Negri’s intellectual discussions on metaphysical essences such as “empire” or “multitude” that are quite useless for political activism.

As Zabala describes in his introduction to your philosophy in Weakening Philosophy, the origins of your concern with “weak ontology” and “weak thought” was your effort to speak to the new democratic left and your concern with how many young, radical, revolutionary Leninists on the left were still beholden to strong metaphysical assumptions. In this way your political philosophy has always been concerned with the connection between violence and metaphysics and, further, the permanent potential of terrorism. How, if at all, has your thinking on these matters changed or developed through the years?

Yes, what Zabala explained in the introduction is a very important factor in explaining the meaning and origin of weak thought. With my teacher, Luigi Pareyson, the most important philosopher since Croce in Italy, we were always telling each other that we were much more revolutionary than the student revolution of ’68. That is because we were reading Heidegger, hence reading a philosopher who tried to overcome objective metaphysics, which so often gives rise to violence. Weak thought became not only a response to the violence of terrorism but also an unveiling—to the extent that I was even threatened by many of the revolutionaries. Of course, today the situation is a little different, but I do still believe that weak thought is the best response we can give to violence and discrimination.

In my conversation with John Caputo, he discusses the promise of a democracy to come. Caputo states that the promise of democracy is that it is self-correcting or auto-deconstructing. And, when talking about the democracy to come, he borrows from a comment first made by Derrida, in which Derrida stated, “Maybe in the expression ‘the democracy to come’ the ‘to come’ is more important than the ‘democracy.’” One reason for this is that there are no “existing democracies” but only the “dream” of democracy. How would you respond to this statement that Caputo draws from Derrida? Specifically, do you think this futural, almost messianic tone is appropriate for political philosophy, and does it provide an adequate philosophical base for political activism?

This is a difficult question because I cannot understand why Caputo put more emphasis on the “to come” rather than “democracy.” Perhaps it is because of his Heideggerian background, indicating the fact that he remains very much conditioned by him.

But there is also a sense in which I agree with the emphasis put on the “to come”—namely, the fact that democracy seem to me a permanent future more than a constitutional status. This is visible above all if we consider the existing democracies or so-called democracies. The frequently repeated question about whether or not democracy will prohibit antidemocratic parties—thus contradicting itself—shows that it can never be considered a given reality. It is always a program, a value. I feel in democracy an accent of Heideggerian “projectuality,” and it seems to me that the current crisis of democratic societies depends on the fact that citizens don’t accept this projectuality. We can never think that democracy is actual; hence the many implications for political participation. What Roberto Mangabeira Unger has called a “high potential democracy” looks far more similar to what had been planned to be the soviets—the popular counsels that had to determine the political decisions (and existed only for a while at the beginning of the Russian revolution), than to our formal electoral democracies (which are, by the way, full of corruption and strongly dependent on big money).

But, getting back to Derrida’s expression, I think both expressions must be read together, and neither of the two should be emphasized more than the other because they could fall into metaphysics too easily. If we only talk about the future, then we may never accomplish what we want and, on the other hand, if we only describe how democracy should be, then we might forget that it is something constituted in such a way as to be modified through time. In Nihilism and Emancipation I give a complete account of what I understand by democracy in chapters 7and 8.

Final question. Returning to Negri and Hardt, and adding Giorgio Agamben to the discussion, they have expressed grave concerns for the future of democracy. Hardt and Negri’s Multitude begins with a critical analysis of the permanent state of war that has become a standard feature of the current international order as dominated by the United States. Similarly, Agamben has written extensively about the “state of exception” that threatens to transform democracies into totalitarian states. Speaking from your dual expertise as a philosopher combined with your experience as an actual politician as a former member of the European Parliament, do you agree that this state of exception has become the new working paradigm of government? If so, then what can be done?

If I believed that this had become the paradigm, then the simple answer to the last question would be that there is nothing that can be done. On the basis of my experience in the European Parliament, I feel very strongly that the logic of war is becoming the logic of everyday life. We speak more and more explicitly in war terms. It is also the game of power. For example, while I would not say that Bush provoked 9/11, surely he has exploited it very, very well, to the point that books such as Before and After by Phyllis Bennis or documentaries such as Loose Change by Dylan Avery make us all wonder if such exploitation has any limits. The repercussions of this become tragically evident when his government proved too slow in responding to Hurricane Katrina, which utterly devastated the city of New Orleans, exposing the finite resources the government has in hand and the fragile balance of a society still haunted by its legacy of racism. Many criticized Bush for responding too late and devoting so much of the nation’s resources to the war of choice in Iraq when his own country remains in such grave need.

But, returning to Negri and Agamben, my problem, as I suggested earlier, is that they are both guilty of too much ideological rigidity. By interpreting the state of exception in absolute terms, everything fits together quite reasonably. The only possibility for democracy in our current situation is to exploit the holes, the margins, which was, by the way, the idea in the 1970s behind something Tony Negri called autonomie, the effort to construe or build autonomous communities—not try to take the power, but try to construe peripheral powers. If people around the world protest the war in Iraq, for example, it doesn’t mean taking control of Windsor Palace or the White House, but, nevertheless, it eases and slows down the wheels of power.

At the beginning of the nineteenth and twentieth century, philosophy was very suspicious of technology. This has changed. The only possibility today is not to categorically reject the machinery of power but to slow down the process of the reproduction of capital. How can this be done? There are the hackers and the saboteurs, of course. But imagine, for instance, how Italians could ruin Berlusconi if we all decided to boycott any merchant who advertised on his many television stations. But we don’t do it. Why? Because we are not yet so poor, so angry. But when that comes, we cannot oppose the logic of power with weapons because they would kill us. But we can try to extend the replication of autonomous centers. I believe in that. After all, there is nothing better to believe in. Isn’t this the very idea of the multitude? Having many communities working—not necessarily together in the sense of a coordinated effort—but simply working against.

That is why I sometimes call myself an anarchist. I have proposed in the conclusion to one of my recent papers that we take seriously the idea from a book by Reiner Schürmann on Heidegger (On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy). Schürmann emphasized how Heidegger had preached the end of the epoch dominated by an arché, by the principle, so that we now live in an anarchic age. But now I would say we have to interpret this a little more literally. We have to be outside. This is a postmodern idea. The idea is that I must subtract myself from the game of power. For instance, it was important for me to no longer be elected as a member of parliament. I discovered I could do something without too many engagements vis-à-vis a party. I discovered that when you get into power, it is not because you have conquered the power, but because the power has conquered you.