EP: To begin with, whence your interest in political theology and what is its place in your philosophical development?
MC: I consider political theology to be an important aspect of European political philosophy. It is evident in ancient thought where there is a strong relation between the theological and the political dimension; suffice to recall that the Greeks used terms like nomizein theos, nomiza tous theous to say ‘belief in God’ and that nomizein has the same root as nomos, that is law. The link between the religious and political dimensions is constitutive of the ancient polis and would become fundamental for the Romans. When Cicero says that the Romans are the most religious people, what does he mean? He is referring to a link between the constitution of the Roman people, the political concept of the populus and the concept of religio, a typically Latin term for which there is no equivalent in other languages; Greek does not have any term equivalent to religio – it is an eminently Roman political term, for when one speaks of religio one means to say religio civilis or religio populi romani. It is impossible to avoid being interested in this link between theology and politics when working with Western European philosophy or with the politics and history of Western Europe.
EP: Political theology has existed since the thought of Paul of Tarsus (omnis potestas a Deo) and is very present in medieval political philosophy from Augustine to Dante as well as in modern thought. Your book, The Withholding Power promises to make an original contribution to current English language debates in political theology which have been largely influenced by the work of Carl Schmitt and its reception. What is the contemporary relevance of political theology and what is your main difference with Schmitt?
MC: The problem of political theology explicitly addressed in the philosophy of law and in twentieth-century political philosophy was shaped by Schmitt’s studies and provocations. As is known, Schmitt maintained that political categories were formed through the secularization of elements drawn from the theological tradition. This particular understanding of political theology was obviously absent in the classical period, in Greece, Rome and the medieval times, which lacked the idea of secularization. In contemporary debates in the field of political theology the question of how the secularization of theological ideas into political concepts takes place is of particular importance. This theme is central to understanding major contemporary ideologies according to which many authors, not only Schmitt, read theological, that is theological-eschatological, ideas in terms of secularization. In my view, from the French Revolution onwards the great ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can and must be read according to this political theological perspective. More precisely, the debate emerged around the relation between politics and the Judeo-Christian tradition – all too evident in the intense debate between Schmitt and Peterson on Eusebian political theology. It emerged from the confrontation between Eusebius of Caesarea – the ideologist of the Constantinian Age who supported a close relation of earthly and celestial monarchies – and Peterson who maintained that Christianity is not adaptable to this kind of monarchism, since the Christian God is not the simple One, but Deus Trinitas. The relation internal to this God makes Christianity unamenable to any form of political theology, of religio civilis – these are the terms of the polemic between Schmitt and Peterson. In my view, both positions are but two sides of the same coin since Western history can be characterized as a conflict, that is to say a conflict that unites, a cum-fligere between a political theological dimension that appeals, precisely, to a principle of authority and thus to the reduction of multiplicity to unity, and another that emphasizes mediation and exalts the moment of representation: you are not the absolute monarch, you are those who you represent: ‘Representation’ means to be in relation.
EP: Is the latter the more problematic side of the coin?
MC: Yes indeed, but above all because it is never distinguishable from the other side of the conflict. Thus my books such as The Withholding Power, The Geo-philosophy of Europe, The Archipelago and others, as well as my research devoted to political philosophy insist on the thesis that while contradiction and conflict are European and European ailments, its insanity (insania), their cure can only be fatal, since their very life consists in this insanity, or insecuritas. It is necessary to sustain, to bear or literally tolerate this contradiction. This is what led me to explore this theme in terms of political theology, and more specifically in terms of a ‘potere che frena’ that you translate as ‘withholding power’.
EP: I’d like to ask about the title of the book – Il potere che frena – and the two senses that you seem to give it. From the outset you insist that katechein, more than the act of restraining or holding back, means to ‘contain’ or to ‘include in itself’. In English, following Schmitt, the term katechon is understood almost exclusively in terms of restraining or imposing restrictions and limits. However, there is another term in English – ‘withholding’ – which, like the Greek katechein, can be understood in terms of both restraint and containment. Translating the title as The Withholding Power emphasizes your attempt in the book to show that the katechon does not only restrain but also contains within itself that which has to be restrained. It is this that inaugurates a new approach to political theology that takes a certain distance from Schmitt. Do you think this choice captures your understanding of the katechon, the specificity of your contribution to the debate?
MC: The translation convinces me in that, as I say in the book, my interest in the katechon goes back a long way. Already in Dell Inizio (On Beginning) there is a section on the katechon. It also seems right in that it emphasizes the paradox, that contradiction again, that the power to restrain does not consist solely in restraining the enemy that comes to me from without. It is a more complex figure and your translation renders the idea – difficult to say in Italian – that a power that restrains must at the same time contain as much as restrain. Indeed, the only way truly to restrain something is to contain it. And this is certainly paradoxical because this power that restrains – restrains what? – the Adversary, the Antikeimenos, anomie, etc. – must also contain it within itself. Augustine’s political theology is perfectly aware of this; political power, law, the restrain of anomie, the nomos restrains anomie but it also contains it within itself. Paul insists that the law will never overcome sin because law and sin reciprocally contain one another. Where there is law there is sin, and sin contains the law and recreates the sin. In short, the translation ‘withholding’ is fine. There is for sure a restraining element in the katechon, one that impedes and blocks but the only way to really impede or block something it is to hold it within, to embrace and to encompass/understand it; only then can we think to truly restrain it.
EP: The initial thought was to render it as The Restraining Power …
MC: The ‘restraining power’ doesn’t work, it is too reductive. Withholding is fine, to hold there, to hold back, this is the idea of the katechon. In this book the ideas that we are talking about are developed with the intention of clarifying the mystery, the enigma of the katechon, the katechon of Paul, that Schmitt reintroduced into the twentieth century, and of which I speak in the book and which we shall return to.
EP: One of the problems I frequently encountered translating the book was finding a language adequate to the concepts issuing from the tradition of political theology. The translation had in a sense to follow the book’s reconstruction of the cultural context to which this language belongs. If I have understood correctly, you adopt the term Evo, which translates the Latin aevum and the Greek aion to signify a time for which messianic time, the irruption of the eternal in the here and now, in the hic et nunc, is an issue. For linear time, you use the words secolo and epoca. The real difficulty was above all with the term Evo, which at an early stage I tried to translate according to context as ‘eternity’, the ‘eternal’ or the ‘everlasting’, even as the ‘time of eternity’ or ‘everlasting time’, always aware that these were inadequate renditions. Can you further clarify these terms?
MC: ‘Age’ (Evo) derives in fact from the same root, is basically the same term as aion but I am not really offering a translation of this term here. ‘Age’, in the sense I use it in the book, signifies the way, as Heidegger would say, in which ‘being’ is seen, interpreted, hearkened to in the course of an entire epoch. ‘Age’ indicates a period characterized by a determinate concept of being, not by this or that political or social fact. From this point of view ‘Age’ is meant in a sense similar to Hegel’s when he speaks of the ‘Romantic’, he does not mean ‘Romanticism’ he means the way in which classical Greek and Roman culture pass over and are overcome by Christianity, that is what is meant by Age. Thus I distinguish ‘Age’ from epoch (epoca) because the idea of Age as opposed to epoch contains something of the eternal. Aion for Plato means exactly this, the confrontation between time (chronos) and the eternal. It did not originally refer to the eternal, but to life, a life that is full, complete – your aion is all your life, from beginning to end. This is the original meaning of the term; it became aion precisely because of the idea of completeness, of an accomplished form – and is adopted by philosophical language to mean the eternal, not in the sense of duration but of completion. It is for this reason that I imply or take Age to mean an accomplished epoch, emphasizing completion and not becoming. For all the reasons above, translating Evo as the ‘timeless’ will not do because it is a negative, privative term while ‘eternal’ and ‘everlasting’ give a sense of duration rather than completion, so it’s better to translate Evo as ‘Age’, that is a completed epoch understood by analogy with the life of a person that has assumed its form, and this achieved form is in some sense eternal, abiding.
EP: One of the main themes of your research is the concept of ‘secularization’ or the time or epoch in which human existence is reduced to an absolute immanence, to the point at which everything can be calculated and predicted in advance. But does ‘secularization’ really abolish every transcendence or does it conserve an idea of ‘transcendence’ given that humans, as you say, ‘ek-sist’ in so far as they can transcend themselves?
MC: We are talking about a secularization that is not conscious of itself. In secularization the idea of self-transcendence appears as secularized for the secularized idea of self-transcendence is the idea of progress. What is the idea of progress if not the secularization of the idea of man as the power of self-transcendence? What is the difference? The traditional idea of transcendence has a vertical dimension, transcendence is not the movement from one point of the horizontal plane to another, nor is it the self-transcendence of continual progress, but it is the irruption of the eternal in the here and now (hic et nunc) that constitutes epochs and ages. This distinction is enormously significant and helps us understand that secularization indeed reduces human existence to an absolute immanence. And how did this secularization come about? Precisely, by aligning the dynamics of self-transcendence with the purely horizontal plane.
MC: Yes, and hence my drawing the image of the net in the play between the symbol of the net and the symbol of the cross. It is a critique of secularization but in the Kantian sense of establishing the conditions of its possibility, not in the sense of taking it to be false or mistaken. It is the case that the idea of progress is today understood increasingly in purely quantitative terms. Once, in the ideology of the nineteenth century, the idea of progress was progress towards an end or goal, still immanent, but a goal nevertheless. This idea of a goal and this sense of progress gradually faded away and became increasingly indifferent. Progress is today becoming not only something situated on the horizontal plane, in the secular, but even without meaning insofar as it involves a process without end or goal, infinite in the sense of an infinite procedure. A transcendence that by now is completely secularized, a self-transcendence in the saeculum, in the sense of the secular.
EP: One of the major terms in the edifice of the katechon for you is anomia. Contra Schmitt, who understands anomia as a species of anarchy, you see anomie (and not anarchy so much) as the main threat. In your thought, anomie is neither hostile to nor lacks organization; it is not some form of atheism and it does not seek to set up a new law. It has one single task: actively to destroy faith in Christ, faith in universal salvation. This destructive force is internally organized and ordered (the opposite of anarchy) and it seems to resemble the bureaucratic-administrative structures that organize our everyday life. Could you elaborate on the difference between your and Schmitt’s understanding of anomie?
MC: There is a significant difference. Schmitt tends to see the anomos, i.e., the coming or unfolding of the Antichrist, whom Schmitt tracks down to the beginning of the French Revolution, as the dissolution of the nomos of the earth, the dissolution of the European states; he looks upon all this without any reactionary nostalgia. Although Schmitt is not an old-fashioned philosopher of the Restoration, in the sense that he sought to promote the restoration of the ancien régime, nonetheless he understands the anomos in terms of anarchy, but that is not all. He always understands the bearers, the protagonists of this anarchy to be the people. This is the most disturbing element of his thought and one that brings him closer to the thought of Donoso Cortés and De Maistre, and to all the grand Restoration philosophies. Anarchy (anomie in Schmitt) has always mustered its popular troops (milites), its energies and forces; anomie is always born from below and storms the castle of the élite. The fate of this spirit that wells up from below and is guided by the anomos – the impersonal anomos – is doomed to overcome any élite, any aristocracy and any katechon. This view of Schmitt shows his proximity to the philosophy of Restoration, although he never dreamt of saying that the ancien régime could ever oppose anomie. That was his great blunder. The ancien régime had no part in the conservative revolution, and the conservative revolution was perfectly aware it had no weapons against anomie; perhaps, Schmitt muses, Hitler had them, but he too came from the people. Schmitt thought that the possibility of a real katechon might lie with the people, a katechon that will oppose the very same anomic energies that originate in the people. This was his great error. If power is only the power of an élite, of an aristocracy that can still possess catechontic energy then it would be no more, since anomie has already destroyed it or is still destroying it. This is basically Schmitt’s pessimistic vision. In order to place it in its historical context, it is necessary to take into account the relationship his thought has to some aspects of the conservative revolution but also to Spengler, to Jünger and, in short, all the Pre-Nazi German milieu that partly compromised with Nazism, but the majority of whom like Ernest Jünger, his brother, and Gottfried Benn retreated into an internal exile. The internal exile of those who remained in Germany but had no alternative to speak of, who mounted no opposition and who, unlike Schmitt or Heidegger, were certainly not involved with Nazism. And this is the problem with Schmitt, against whom my polemic is aimed, the anomos does not appear as anarchy, it is not anarchy. I must insist on this difference; anomos is not anarchy, nor is it anarchy in the thought of Paul or in John’s Book of Revelation, nor is it parsed like anarchy. It is a weak interpretation that does not do justice to the real problem which is to interpret anomie as a Gestell, a system. Here my view is closer to Heidegger’s, or Severino’s in Italy, than to Schmitt’s.
EP: Indeed, anomie is an organized system.
MC: Yes, it appears as such, if not it could not be a katechon, the figure of the katechon would make no sense. The katechon does not primarily oppose the mere unfolding of evil but the one who wants to be worshipped, and to be worshipped as God. However, worship means religio: organization, and religio civilis means the ordering of worship, as the Romans came to recognize well. There is no worship without organization, without ordering. Anarchy is not a worship, it does not have a cult. For this reason the spirit of anarchy has nothing to do with the anomos or with anomie. This is where the greatest misunderstanding originates, the misunderstanding of all conservative revolutions, and of Jünger even. In his On the Marble Cliffs, for example, the anomos is clearly understood as anarchy but that cannot be so.
EP: You frequently insist that anomos is the one who rejects the law of the Gospel.
MC: Yes, anomos is not the one who rejects the law tout court but the law of the Gospel, the law of ‘glad tidings’. Schmitt commits a philological error in the interpretation of the play between the katechon and anomie.
EP: Your book examines various candidates for the katechon: Empire, Church and the Grand Inquisitor. The first two preserve, through the aporetic and contradictory discharge of catechontic functions, the commerce between transcendence and immanence. The third, though, stands for a different kind of difficulty. The Grand Inquisitor, ‘one of us’, a dignitary of the Church devoted to the language, ideas and practices of the eschatological horizon, views Christ himself and the freedom he represents as the great threat. For a katechon in the form of the Grand Inquisitor, it is Christ who should be the ‘target’ of catechontic restraint. Do you think that in our age all catechontic function is like the Grand Inquisitor, that is to say, at the service of anomie?
MC: The katechon is a complex figure and so is the figure of the Antichrist. The Antichrist too contains many elements and persons, and the Christian tradition clearly spells that out. When Augustine asked himself ‘could it be that I am the Antichrist?’ he meant to say that the Antichrist sometimes could take on the appearance of Augustine. That is, they are complex figures. They are like the figures of Giuseppe Arcimboldo that are composed of many faces, of many masques, never simplex et unum, with none of these figures being more prominent than the other. For that reason these figures are of great political significance. In politics there is nothing of the geometric-mathematic simplicity of Spinoza’s ethics. And Spinoza is very well aware of that in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Politics is a passionate field, a field where passion and reason entwine and that is the case for the katechon, for the anomos and for all those figures that one encounters in the theological political register. Thus there are a variety of candidates and there’s no dominant candidate. The katechon is necessarily a complex figure because he/it must face the anomos. Anomie is an equally complex figure that, unlike confused anarchy, has its own dimensions, cultural, political dimensions; it does not only clearly contrast with the katechon and catechontic powers but it also contrasts with worshipping the true God; it has as many dimensions as the Antichrist, commercial and economic ones but also a religious dimension, as is written in the Book of Revelation. It is therefore a Gestell, a system. Moreover, the katechon must necessarily resemble anomie to the degree it restrains and contains it. In the book I try to convey the idea of such complexity unlike the way it sometimes appears in Schmitt and in the debates following his contributions. Clearly, the most disturbing figure, at least the figure that disturbs me the most, is the Grand Inquisitor. That empire has a catechontic function can in a certain way be intuitively understood, and this is how it was understood by the majority of interpretations in the Christian tradition for whom empire was political power par excellence because it evidently opposed anomie. More difficult to understand is the Church. The Church holds the form of the Age in expectation of the parousia, yet if the withholding function were to be true, it must also contain … and how can the Church contain the Antichrist, provided that in order to restrain it must also contain? The issue of attributing a catechontic function to the Church is already highly problematic but the interpreters of the Christian tradition, quoted in the book, have done so. Because the Church has an interest in maintaining the form of the Age while waiting for the parousia, this expectant waiting implies restraint, implies containing … waiting for what? Waiting for the conversion of the people, the ‘stubborn people’ Israel?
EP: It is because the Church structurally contains the Antichrist that its catechontic function is so problematic?
MC: Precisely; while attributing catechontic functions to empire is fairly uncomplicated it is much more complex with regard to the Church. It becomes more complex still when we consider the Grand Inquisitor who grounds the necessity of his catechontic function, planning to resist at all costs, on a thoroughly Antichristic perspective. This is why the figure of the Grand Inquisitor is so disturbing. For his catechontic function, clearly one that opposes evil, pretends it will last for all eternity, as if it could, grounded as it is on an explicitly Antichristic import; that is to say, ‘no, you, Christ, must not return, it were better you had never come, never existed, because you seduce, you deceive’. The role of seduction traditionally attributed to the Antichrist is attributed by the Grand Inquisitor himself to Christ. Christ is charged with deceiving men with the idea that they could be free. The Grand Inquisitor attacks head on the central message of the Gospel, which is that ‘you are free’; for the basic meaning of the Gospel, which is that of our being the children of God made in His likeness and in His image, should be translated as ‘you are as free as the Heavenly Father’. The Grand Inquisitor says, if there is to be a catechontic function, if we are to restrain evil that spills out from all sides but mainly from below (the demand for bread) then we must renounce Christ, renounce his role. The Antichrist does not deny the existence of Christ, let alone the existence of God, he denies the Messianic role, the redemptive character of Christ. It is the first appearance of a catechontic figure whose catechontic function is based on radically opposing the message of the Gospel; one who is katechon only to the degree that he completely contains within himself the Antichrist. A tragic figure who having encountered Christ in his life experienced the encounter as a ruin. He is a figure of the end of Christianity. It is in fact remarkable that it is Dostoyevsky who represents the encounter in this manner, Dostoyevsky the believer par excellence among the great European literatures and cultures of the past two centuries. Moreover, it is not clear who in the Brothers Karamazov, or elsewhere in Dostoyevsky, can really oppose the Grand Inquisitor; where is the logico-philosophical opposition, there is none. There is the act of Dostoyevsky, the believer who believes in what? In the impossible. The believer is one who thinks the impossible is possible. The Grand Inquisitor’s declaration is logical, philosophical, rigorous whereas the believer thinks the impossible to be possible. What is this impossible-possible belief? That the human is free. This is what faith is.
EP: In its troubled confrontation with secularization, can the Church still play a role today?
MC: The Church is going through times of considerable internal reform but the most striking feature of our times is the decline of Europe. Christianity, and if one cares to look will one see it in the gestures and actions of the present Pope, is geared to the disenchanted acknowledgement of the decline of the Christian world, and not so much in its adopted homelands as in Europe itself. The eye of the Church is now cast elsewhere, the task of carrying the message of the Gospel has migrated elsewhere, and this is a prodigious sign. It is a sign of our times, since the last Popes Wojtyla, Ratzinger, were still European Popes who lived through European dramas. At present, the vision of the current Pope and his Church strikes one as odd with regard to the problems we have been discussing, but I do not know … everything can admit of a double reading; from a certain point of view, all this can be understood as the overcoming of Eurocentrism, as a true global evangelizing mission, but on the other hand how can you not see it as a sign of disenchanted decline, as recognition of the twilight of Europe? Undoubtedly, Europe has been the sacred centre of Christendom; however, it is likewise clear that this Pope’s focus has shifted from it, Europe is no longer the centre of the great cultural, social, ethical, political problems even those of this very continent, of the West in general. No longer the centre. Of that there is no doubt.
EP: What of the Franciscan message of the present Pope?
MC: The Franciscan message, a message of great reform, of poverty, is remarkable indeed. At the same time though, how can we forget that this is the first ever Jesuit Pope? It is an astonishing paradox that the first Jesuit Pope has taken the name of Francis. How can we not think that behind this arrangement there is a compromise typical of the Jesuit order? Compromise in the noblest, strongest, most momentous sense of the term? How can we not think of these things? Of the arrangement that allows one to keep everything as one must? Here too [with this Pope], we see the figure of the katechon that must retain and hold everything because contradictions ought not erupt; for that reason St Francis and Ignatius of Loyola are put together. Is the encounter between St Francis and Ignatius an eschatological sign or a historical compromise? How to tell? The message is Janus-faced and ambiguous and so is our state of being, in my view; this ambiguity can be fruitful and productive, while still ambiguous. The message of St Francis is not simply a message of charity and poverty: Francis was not so good nor so merciful; he had his own Christian doctrine that bordered on heresy, his own ideas about the relationship with the institutions of the Church and even his relationship with his own order. Francis did not only go about dispensing benedictions, it is certain that had he arrived in Assisi and seen an enormous church being built to contain his simple Porziuncula chapel he would have taken a hammer to it. To repeat, the Pope’s message is an eschatological sign, it is viewed as the eschatological sign of a new Church that somehow extraordinarily unifies all these traditions. What is the ground of this unification? A new doctrine of poverty, of mercy or a Jesuitical compromise in the noblest and most momentous sense of the term? We have to think on these matters because the Church cannot renounce its catechontic function. The structural contradiction of the Church is that it is a political form and as such it will be with us until the end.
EP: The Italian Catholic Church in particular?
MC: But there are no national religions anymore, there is only Catholicism and the rest is saeculum and that is that. American religion, for example, is a religio civilis, empires must have a religion and the American one is a mixture, an American religio, as Bloom calls it. Great states cannot exist without a cultural religious dimension, so the USA have made a religio civilis out of a Christian pastiche. The problem is the Catholic Church and in part the Orthodox Church too, now that Russia has been reborn into the shape of an empire, Orthodoxy being an essential and structural element of Russian politics, and for that reason the discourse of political theology still holds there. Orthodoxy: it is true that there is a competition with it that no Pope has managed to overcome, even when there’s good will on both sides, as with the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. So we should not speak of Orthodoxy tout court but of Russian Orthodoxy, of the Russian Autochephalous Church, the great Russian Church with its great tradition, its problems of a theological character, all these are big issues. There is a problem for political theology in the United States too, for empires must have a cult. To understand empires, you also have to contend with their – let’s call them – ‘theologies’ and this is definitely not the case for any European country, any European regime.
EP: Given the situation in Europe, as you have described it, what of the Italian political theology debate?
MC: In Italy unlike elsewhere the political theology debate has been broader and richer. The relationship between theology and philosophy is a theme much more mined here than elsewhere. For sure, in France there has been the work of Paul Ricoeur, particularly in the field of Judaic thought and its relation to political philosophy. In Italy the works of Vincenzo Vitiello, Piero Coda, Bruno Forte and many others devote much attention to this particular theme. However while the works of Giacomo Marramao, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben that expound on themes of political philosophy by emphasizing the theological aspect have been of particular interest, I don’t think that in the European cultural panorama political philosophy addresses the theological aspect in the way it does in Italy. An important aspect of this strand of Italian political philosophy, fairly known outside Italy, is to be found in Gramsci, arguably one of the better known Italian thinkers abroad. In his thoughts on hegemony and elsewhere, he devotes much attention to elements of religion. His brand of Marxism is interested in those elements that the old Marxists would have treated as mere superstructure. For Gramsci both political philosophy and political science have to achieve relevance by their own means and not be materialistically reduced to the relation between politics and social structure, class structure and economic relations or relations of production. Far from this classical Marxist view Gramsci paid attention to all these aspects, the ideological, the philosophical, the religious. All these are central to Gramsci. So there’s all this attention to theological political aspects in the tradition hailing from Gramsci and from Italian Marxism that one does not find in the liberal tradition, in Croce for example. Croce was truly deaf to these problems, unlike the Marxists. So the origin is Gramsci, the way the problem of hegemony is posed in his thought, and in a certain sense Giovanni Gentile too, since his Genesis and Structure of Society is very Gramscian, or maybe Gramsci is very Gentilian. In fact many, if not all, of Gentile’s followers became communists in the post-war years. Augusto Del Noce has, in my view, written some very interesting things on the link between Gramscianism and Actualism. And Gentile’s Genesis and Structure of Society is a wonderful book. He deserves to be more widely known.
EP: You often return to the idea of decline, of twilight, a famous Nietzschean theme; how can this twilight be lived?
MC: We are now living through the collapse of the West as the dominant power, as empire. I don’t mean the collapse of European empires since those collapsed at the end of World War One. We are living through a long twilight, whether it can have any golden hues nobody knows. We did not and cannot decide on this twilight but we may decide how to act and be placed in it. By resisting? By opposing it, by desperately trying to endure it? Hegel argued that the greatness of a civilization can only be seen in its twilight, only when it has come to an end can we say whether it was beautiful or not. That is one way of living in the twilight. But if you instead cling to the remnants of power, your revenues, then you will embarrass yourself. The European twilight should take sustenance from its load-bearing ideas, from its great saints from St Francis onwards, the themes of equality, of hospitality, etc., don’t you agree? This is how our wane should be. That is, set down the will to power for if you remain pitifully attached to its miserable remnants then your twilight will stink. I think this is how we have chosen to live our twilight, by clinging to such miserable remnants of power.
EP: In the last chapter of the book you speak of the ‘apparatus’ that incrementally confirms and reinforces the West’s will to power, but this will bring the apparatus, now at the far end of its decline, before the mouth of the abyss. Can we say that you are in search of the ‘hidden’ in Christian theology, in a way similar to Heidegger’s, who thought of Western metaphysics in terms of concealment and unconcealment? Heidegger too often speaks of Ge-stell, of apparatus.
MC: On this the philosopher remains silent; as you know, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. What is certain is that we are in a time of crisis for all catechontic powers, of the Church in its time of transition, I don’t see on the horizon figures like the Grand Inquisitor, even though many act like him maintaining that Christianity is finished, that Christ failed; they don’t say it explicitly but they act like it. There are no genuine empires, that is the present state of affairs. A state, as I say in the last chapter, of great crises, of the destruction of all traditional catechontic powers; what is going to succeed them? One can neither know nor say. Clearly the last twenty years have disenchanted any idea that future catechontic powers can be like the two victorious titans emerging after the last war, can be like those that shaped the world in the 50 years following World War Two. The two great catechontic forces, whose conflict kept the world in balance for 40–50 years, the USA and the USSR, are not now capable in any way to continue doing so. The USA delude themselves that after the collapse of the USSR they are the only empire, a democratic empire, empire in the sense of auctoritas that shows the way, maps a direction. In that they have tragically failed, piling disaster on disaster in chasing this utopia. I cannot think of any so-called imperial power that has as many disasters to its name as the USA in the last twenty years, randomly destabilizing the world, without any prospect, without any idea of what should come after, simply on the basis of ideology, utopias, of very short-term interests. Perhaps the USA, had they been well guided, could have become a worldly auctoritas but now they too have caved in. And what may the new catechontic powers be? How am I to know, perhaps China? By what means and through what future paths? Hic sunt leones.
EP: The very last line of your book reads like this, ‘Prometheus has withdrawn … Epimetheus is at large and in our world opening ever newer Pandora’s boxes’. How are we to understand Hope, the last gift left in Pandora’s box? As a poisoned gift, a pure illusion or a thrownness in the sense of being open to a future?
MC: Hope is an ambiguous term, on the one hand there is hope that can be the ultimate evil because it blinds and on the other there is hope that can be hope, that lives in your awareness of this disenchanted twilight and shows you how to be rid of your will to power; such is good hope. Being rid of the will to power must be shown, must be embodied as in St Francis who did not preach sermons but embodied his poverty and so the meaning of his poverty. Like him, you could embody and signify some elements of your culture or your civilization that are not connected to the will to power, or better still that manifest the overthrowing of the will to power. Are there any such elements in our culture? For sure, you see them in Schopenhauer, in Nietzsche, Heidegger, even in science, when it is not merely linked to technology and the latter’s will to power but when it is viewed as contemplation of nature. And this despite Emanuele Severino’s conviction that the latter is not possible, that it is a utopia, absolute enchantment. When scientists hunt down origins, are they not serving speculative ends? I don’t think such research can have immediate technological application. For certain, to build a 500 million kilometre accelerator is business but an absurd and paradoxical business, a single great machine to enable us to see the origin of the universe. Supposedly we come to see it at some point and then what? That would be all, as when we saw the moon?
EP: Science is a wonderment?
MC: Yes, wonderment is an essential element of science. Thaumazein, why not value it?