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Isolario
Maps of visible and invisibles islands and archipelagos
with Graziano Martignoni
Isolario
Maps of visible and invisibles islands and archipelagos
Hi,
I realize that the more I go ahed,
the more I find many technical answers,
but the basic questions are avoided
as if they were a taboo!
The result is fascinating
but also a sensation of getting lost.
What do you think?
We had been talking
about navigation.
In navigation maps are fundamental,
a sort of guide
or of polar star which,
also in the darkest nights,
prevents us to get lost.
And again we have a metaphor
which tells a something,
I repeat, it tells us something,
because it's true that
we can't tell everything anymore;
Gottfried Benn,
the great German poet,
used to that say we can tell
men only with episodes,
not anymore like a complete talk,
the same way which has been passed over
to us by the great 18th century tradition
where we could see man in his books,
men recounted in his linear biography.
Today we all are,
in fragmented conditions,
in conditions, somehow, episodic.
Inside this episodicity,
to get lost becomes
a risk
or a state of excitement.
Let's think at Walter Benjamin,
who in his "Berlinese infancy",
we are in the first part of the century,
writes how fascinating it's,
how dangerous, scary,
but in the mean time fascinating,
to get lost in a city.
Going astray.
Now, this get lost,
which has the double function of being,
somehow,
an element of fear,
an element of excitement,
of stimulus,
the past century has shown it
to us on more levels,
because we have lost,
if we want to express it with one word,
and don't take this only in a religious way,
but we have lost faith.
Faith, that dimension of man
which is also connected to hope.
There were those who had
only faith in the future,
those who only had faith in religious traditions,
there were those who had faith in science,
those who had faith in man,
those who had faith in reason.
Faith as a safe island,
the landing place.
Faith which,
from this point of view,
becomes the twin brother of reason,
becomes that condition
which allows to open the doors
of a reason able to light the time
of the life of man.
Now all this shattered,
shattered for many reasons.
We know very well how the science,
even in its extraordinary successes,
has somehow, sometimes,
how to say, it has not been followed
by an equal faith.
Today we are more and more unbelievers,
as if we had towards this big talk
of Western man a cautious
and suspicious relationship.
But the same thing we have towards religions,
we have it towards political discussions,
we have it towards the idea of nation,
towards all those things
which were our reference points
during the navigation of man,
we have it in education,
we will talk again about
how to educate a kid,
a son, educate a student.
When somehow all these reference points
have been so strongly lost,
and in this loss we have the feeling
of getting lost.
But there is something more,
there is more.
The century that we just passed
was an extraordinarily tragic century
and we know it well.
I was really impressed
of how much a famous literature critic,
Georges Steiner who was a professor
in Geneva for many years,
in a "Lectio Magistralis" of sometimes ago
at the University of Bologna hits me with the phrase,
when he wrote, when he said
"the distance between
the garden of Goethe
and the doors of Buchenwald
is only 200 meters".
This, besides the geographical metaphor
that Steiner is referring to,
this sadly illuminates what has been
what has been
the destiny of European reason
inside those black holes
which are for all of us
those places of terror,
how to say,
of deletion of humanity which
were Auschwitz and also
we add Hiroshima.
200 meters which separate
the gardens of Goethe
where Western man has built his wonderful,
extraordinary, beautiful reason,
has built the hope in a man
capable of governing his own impulses,
of governing itself enough to keep
away barbarism,
which were forced back in the previous centuries,
now this great and splendid reason,
this great and splendid rationality,
think about what
the German world meant,
its great philosophy,
its great literature,
the great authors,
now all this, all this gets consumed
in those 200 meters.
Not only it gets consumed,
but that door of Buchenwald is built,
managed, led,
as history has shown us,
with the same reason,
with the same rationality,
with the same mathematical capacity,
if you like,
to address,
to be like guardians or rather
than guardians to be
like soldiers of evil.
Evil which has taken possession,
evil with capital "E",
evil which has taken possession of reason.
Then this evil which obviously
has become government,
has let disappear,
has deeply,
radically erased us
from our faith,
our faith in a dimension of man
capable of governing barbarisms.
The 20th century hasn't only been this
but has been also this
and it would be terrible today,
in this landing place,
in this landing island
which wants to tell something about man,
it would be terrible to forget it.
Isolario
Maps of visible and invisibles islands and archipelagos