The Occidental Antinomy: An Interview with Roberto Esposito (EN)
The Occidental Antinomy: An Interview with Roberto Esposito (EN)
by Giovanbattista Tusa
Editorial: Lisbon based philosopher Giovanbattista Tusa interviewed Roberto Esposito on the seemingly contradictory verdict on the realization and the decline of the Occident. Did the 20th Century show its decline or rather its global triumph? What might be the future institutionalization look like and what might be the future of philosophy in view of the historical event of occidentalization?
Giovanbattista Tusa: At the heart of 20th-century philosophy, there exists a conflict that cannot be easily circumvented, and it bears the name “Occident.” If, on one hand, the 20th century is enchanted by Heidegger’s formula, which states that the Occident realizes itself as the end of metaphysics—“realize” in the sense of exhaustion but also of fulfilment—on the other hand, the Occident seems to embody, in the eyes of many influential thinkers, its own etymological sense of sunset, of decline, because it has not, in reality, succeeded in fulfilling itself: it has not realized its founding values and has thus betrayed its own destiny.
In both scenarios—whether that of the end as fulfilment and realization, or that of the irremediable crisis tormenting an Occident not up to its own standards—the diagnosis of the present time is the same; the Occident has rendered its own foundation unreal and thus corrupted its essence. Perhaps the problem remains so unsettling precisely because “Occident,” more than a principle to be realized or a guiding idea to be betrayed, has, as its reason, a movement that cannot be realized, which empties of meaning every idea of birth, of East, just as it simultaneously renders its own founding idea of a final destination—because it is inscribed in its very name—unrealizable.
And yet, the Occident, instead of ending, seems to extend everywhere, in the sense you expressed of a “Occidentalization of the entire earth,” according to which “Occident” is nothing other than the moving boundary that differentiates it from what the Occident “is not yet or is not entirely.”[1] An occidentalization that, if I understand correctly, no longer qualifies as any value exportation, nor any movement from West to East, or from North to South, the so-called “progress” front. Rather, at the moment when the Occident coincides with the entire planet, it condemns itself to being nothing—that is, nothing determinable in terms of time or space, or even in terms of “world.”
Roberto Esposito: More than thirty years ago, I proposed a similar analysis on the “Occident,” which I believe still has something to tell us. It identified an antinomy of the Occident that, in some ways, is still present—the antinomy of being simultaneously a part of the Earth and wanting to position itself as the whole. Although today there is a strong form of self-criticism of the Occident, a remorse for the violent history that has characterized it, some, particularly in what is called “cancel culture,” imagine that, since it is impossible to go back, that its violent history should be culturally erased. However, there is a further contradiction inherent to this way of thinking: if this erasure were to happen, it would mean erasing, along with the Occidental identity, the political and cultural difference that the Occident has signified when compared to the rest of the world. This would lead to a sort of “empty” globalization, opposed and complementary to the “full” globalization that the Occident previously imagined as its own irresistible expansion. In this case, the Occident, which wanted to be both part and whole, would end up being neither one nor the other. It would become nothing, thus completing that theme of decline to which you yourself referred. The contradiction that has characterized the history of the Occident would cease to exist, but through the suppression of its very subject.
Regarding this double scenario of completion and disappearance, the last thirty years have produced a series of developments that have profoundly transformed it. Taken together, they can be attributed to the challenges that globalization has experienced since the beginning of the new century and the new millennium. If, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea spread that the Occident could extend to cover the entire world, driven by the economic force of capitalism and the political force of democracy, it soon became clear that this was not the case. History was far from over, as Fukuyama, following Kojève, had imprudently predicted, and instead, the idea of a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington had described, gained traction. My impression is that this second diagnosis was also wrong: conflict of values and geopolitical interests does not necessarily mean a “clash of civilizations.” However, it remains a fact that after the 9/11 attack in 2001, with all that followed, it is difficult to imagine a “smooth” globalization, without contrasts. With the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the others—up to the current one in Ukraine—the project of exporting democracy, whether through peaceful means or war, has proven to be completely wrong.
Not only has the Occidentalization of the world appeared to be a failed project—though a way of life with Occidental roots has spread everywhere, particularly through the electronic revolution—but the Occident itself has begun to perceive itself as divided within. With Brexit, two “Occident” were born, one Atlantic and one Continental, not always united in their strategies and vision of foreign policy. And in Europe, not all states seem to be moving in the same direction. In reality, what has happened in these years—the difficulty of globalization and the advent of a world constructed not on the East/West bipolarity but on a multipolarity of hegemonic blocs—had already been anticipated by some intellectuals after the end of World War II.
In this sense, the distant confrontation between Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt is quite instructive.[2] On one side, Jünger, who initially opposed the West and the East according to the value of freedom, imagined that the outcome of the “total mobilization,” determined by the advent of technology, could be a world state, in which the differences of civilizations would eventually disappear. For him, only this world state could be the worthy heir of the great cosmopolitan design conceived by Alexander the Great, through the dissolution of nation-states and the unification of the world into a single global organism. Conversely, Schmitt believed that the world could not take the form of a universe, of a single global organism, but should instead take the form of a multiverse or pluriverse—the only one capable of allowing an effective political dynamic.
Naturally, Schmitt did not overlook the fact that the old system of sovereign states, organized for several centuries by the jus publicum europaeum, was exhausted and could not be resurrected. But this order could not be replaced by the Weltstaat, the world state that Jünger envisioned. Not only because it is impossible, but also because it would bring nothing good. It would precisely mark the culmination of that nihilistic drift that has destabilized the modern order without being able to replace it with another order. Moreover, it would mark the definitive disappearance of the “political,” understood as a relationship of enmity defined by specific spatial boundaries. For Schmitt, globalization, which has dissolved the boundaries between states, already undermined internally by the blurring of the lines between enemy, partisan, and criminal, cannot by itself produce a political system. The only order that can be imagined today is the balance between large spaces, gathered around the hegemony of the strongest states—according to Schmitt in the 1950s, Germany in Europe, the United States in America, Russia in Asia, and Japan in the Far East (with China, at that stage, still out of play).
This does not mean that the lines of division in which the world is articulated will disappear. But it can no longer be represented by the classic East/West bipolarity, which multiplies into the “large spaces” into which the contemporary world is divided. Naturally, we know how much Schmitt’s discourse was oriented by a German-centric logic that is entirely distant from us. However, some of his theses remain valid and are confirmed by what is happening. World powers are now composed of states of continental dimensions—the United States, China, Russia, India, Brazil—each with its own interests and values. It remains to be seen whether Europe can ever become one of them or if it will remain a conglomerate of many small states, incapable, as such, of playing a significant role in the new world order.
GT: As the anthropologist Philippe Descola points out, although the word in Greek that designates “nature”—physis—appears already in the Homeric verses of the Odyssey to refer to the properties of a plant, it was Aristotle who systematized a progressive objectification of the natural domain and related its principles of functioning to political organization and the laws that govern it. Since then, “physis and nomos have become inseparable; the multiplicity of things is articulated into a whole subjected to knowable laws, just as the collective of citizens is ordered according to rules of public action free from particular intents.”[3] The difference between these two domains is fundamentally dynamic in nature, in the sense that nature and its laws are condemned to the timelessness of what does not change, while the world of humans is capable of continuous and progressive change.
In your latest writing, you revisited a Latin phrase of uncertain origin: Vitam Instituere. This enigmatic expression challenges our logical capacity, involving, as you write, “the possibility of thinking together life and law without abandoning one of the two terms to the domain of the other.”[4] Instituere here seems to denote an active practice that cannot sever its relationship with a “natural” ground of human existence, because otherwise every institution risks being reduced to a self-sufficient procedure, a device that, rather than being biopolitical, we could define as thanatopolitical—in the sense that instead of preserving life by holding together its natural and historical dimensions, it would end up making it impossible. In the framework you reconstruct, what seems to play an unexpected role is the imaginary—that is, the power to create new worlds, which shatters the unique world that protects itself against everything and everyone—and its institutions, also gripped by an obsession with immunity and identity.
We live in a world where the concept of “renewable energy” seems to be the only possibility for imagining a future: the ability to infinitely renew what was destined for destruction. A renewability that, however, does nothing but quantitatively reproduce resources that allow the continuation of the same life, recycling it over and over again. “The true life is absent. But we are in the world,”[5] as Lévinas wrote in Totality and Infinity, echoing Rimbaud’s memorable formula. An economically calculated, “sustainable” future seems to do nothing but repeat with other means our present obsession with production and reproduction. And yet, life, more than being produced or reproduced, is it not rather something to be reinvented today?
RE: Let’s start with a basic definition. How should we understand the term “institute,” which is referenced in the challenging expression vitam instituere? What is, or what can be, an institution? To answer this, let’s begin with the etymology, even though we shouldn’t let it restrict us. “Institution” derives from the Latin in-statuere, which encapsulates two seemingly contradictory polarities: movement and stability. An institution, on one hand, refers to a process—the instituting process—that brings something into existence that wasn’t there before. It’s a creative, foundational, generative activity. On the other hand, it’s the result of this process: a relatively stable apparatus, an organized reality that serves to channel, guarantee, and facilitate our individual and collective experience. In this second sense, institutions include empires, states, parties, parliaments, unions, but also the Church, schools, universities, prisons, hospitals, and barracks. In an even broader sense, if we understand “institution” as the system of rules that governs our activities or a certain life practice, then institutions also include games, marriage, exchange, and gift-giving—everything that binds people in a common and repeated practice. In short, institutions are structures intended to fulfil public and private functions that address specific interests, the foremost of which is the preservation of life, but also its innovation.
Of course, preservation and innovation are not the same thing. They are needs present in different proportions in every institution. In this sense, there are institutions that are conservative of something—even of pre-existing powers—and innovative institutions that, in turn, produce transformation. But to grasp the full meaning of the concept, rather than opposing the two sides of preservation and innovation, we must think of them together, with all the aporia that that entails. To institute means to create something that wasn’t there before, to introduce a radical novelty into the previous framework. But then, for the institution to take shape and consolidate, this novelty must be made durable, permanent over time. Thus, the outcome of instituting, of initiating, of generating, is more than a becoming; it is a state, an entity destined to “stand,” resisting dissolution. Hence, its apparently contradictory character. To institute is a movement that tends to negate itself, to create stasis. It inaugurates, raises, elevates something that must remain firm on its foundation. The result of the instituting movement is the stability of the instituted. Hence, a sort of internal gap, a tension that makes the institution exterior to the instituting movement that generates it. At the centre of every institution lies this internal fault, like a point of negative resistance around which the institution revolves.
That said, in modern political philosophy, the idea of institution has been developed in quite different ways. And this diversity ties into what you observe about nature. Over a debate that can be traced back a long way, even to Roman law, on one side, the institution has been thought of in contrast with nature. On the other side, it has been articulated with it. At the head of the first line is Hobbes’ philosophy, especially his idea that the birth of the political institution—which for Hobbes was primarily the Leviathan State—presupposes an exit from the state of nature, which Hobbes associates with the conflictual condition that makes human life dangerous. This line includes, directly or indirectly, the authors who have addressed the Hobbesian “problem” of order, from Weber to Parsons, to Luhmann, and even Freud. For all of them, with different nuances, the institution is something artificial that requires the abandonment or at least the reduction of natural instincts. Opposed to this line, or sometimes intertwining with it, is another perspective that instead roots the instituting process within the natural given. This includes, in various ways, Spinoza, Hegel, and even, in the 20th century, Deleuze, who dedicated an early work precisely to the relationship between instincts and institutions. Deleuze’s thesis is that, while instincts and institutions are not equivalent, they cannot be separated, much less opposed, so as not to deprive institutions of vital energy and not to deprive life of form. If this were to happen, if life no longer flowed within institutions, they would tend to dry up. Then, as has already happened in European history, biopolitics could turn into thanatopolitics. As you also conclude, referring to Levinas, it is not enough to reproduce life, to merely survive. It is necessary to reinvent ourselves—but this is possible when the fulfilment of needs is combined with the vitality of desire. Vitam instituere also refers to this need to give a comprehensive meaning to one’s life.
Human life is not merely a natural given, a simple biological event. It needs to be instituted on a social, political, and symbolic level in a way that transcends the individual sphere, entering into a network of relationships capable of protecting and intensifying it. In this sense, the first institution is constituted by language which, precisely because of its instituting capacity, can be said to configure a second birth, after the biological one. After all, what else is our life if not the continuous institution of new relationships and new meanings? Hannah Arendt, drawing on Augustine of Hippo, wrote that human beings themselves are a beginning because their first act is to come into the world, giving life to something that wasn’t there before. Therefore, it is impossible to cease instituting life. Even in the darkest moments, the human tendency to start anew, to set out on a journey that concerns each and every one, never disappears. It is this instituting impulse that has allowed us, in each of the profound crises that have marked these years, to always lift our heads again.
GT: Life, moreover, is always elsewhere, in the sense that it is never truly our own. “Life” in this sense, rather than designating the biological condition that indicates an organism’s ability to temporarily protect itself against cosmic contingencies—by reaching a certain state of homeostatic equilibrium—is instead a force that does not allow the formal power of philosophy to conclude, to close, and fulfil itself within itself. This “life” is therefore the force of thought because thinking does not mean producing a consciousness, but rather unravelling the first-person singular and its properties.
Thought has nothing personal about it, if by “person” we mean the normative paradigm that identifies the zone of responsibility and authenticity, and thus also the mechanism that excludes those who never were or are not yet persons. If thought belongs to no one, and is not produced by anyone, then it must be for all and of all, that is, impersonal. Moreover, as you have incessantly highlighted in your writings, echoing Simone Weil, whoever penetrates the sphere of the impersonal encounters a responsibility toward all human beings[6]: because justice, like thought, has nothing personal about it and can only exist if it appeals to something that, far from being a personal prerogative, remains outside all property and exclusivity…
RE: I agree with what you said. Life is never exclusively “one’s own.” It escapes us from every direction, to the point that our projects almost never reach their predetermined outcome. This concerns the bodily sphere—due to its unavoidable limits—but also the psychological one. Life, even our own, does not belong to us entirely. And this is true in several senses. First, because it is always a life of relationships. Even a solitary life can only be defined as such if it is contrasted, negatively, with a life of relationships. Community is a transcendental condition, in the sense that we are always already within it, from the moment we are born from another person’s body. Personally, I have addressed this theme in my works on communitas and on immunitas, which constitutes its reverse. Today, our societies tend to increasingly augment mechanisms of immunization, which aim to limit communal life. However, there is a limit beyond which the immunization procedure risks slipping into a sort of autoimmune disease. This happens when the protection of the body, instead of defending it, turns against it, leading to its implosion. This means that we cannot isolate ourselves from the community beyond a certain point, as we do not have ontological consistency outside of it.
There is also a reflection more focused on the theme of the impersonal. First of all, it is important to remember that for the Arab Aristotelian school, the very agent intellect has a common dimension from which individual men can draw resources, without ever being able to make them definitively their own. According to a conception like this, echoes of which can also be found in Dante, the individual is always part of a whole that surpasses him and from which he can never fully emancipate himself. It should be noted that this conception—of Avicennian or Averroist origin—was contested from the beginning by the guardians of order because it seemed to make the concept of individual responsibility impossible and indeed undefinable. If even the thoughts we think do not entirely belong to us, if they come to us from elsewhere, this means that fundamentally we are not responsible for anything and that, therefore, on a legal level, our behaviours are not sanctionable. Some elements of this conception return in modern authors, mostly marginalized from the more traditional lines of thought, like Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, Bergson.
In the 20th century, the theme of the impersonal returns in different forms, such as in the works of Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. In Weil’s case, it is linked to a rejection of the category of “person,” specifically as the holder of legal responsibility and, above all, individual rights. The category of person, from its dual Roman and Christian origins, has an exclusionary effect. For someone to be defined as a person, it requires that others not be recognized as such—resulting in semi-persons or even non-persons who can be marginalized or even violated. Simone Weil notes that once the personality of a given individual is protected, what happens to their body no longer matters. For her, what counts is not the notion of rights, almost always upheld by force, but that of justice, which is impersonal because it includes everyone and anyone within it. As for Deleuze, in dialogue with Foucault, not only is the category of person deconstructed but also that of the subject. In its place, the notion of “becoming” implies not only the necessary communication with others but also contamination and alteration—becoming-woman, becoming-black, becoming-animal are all ways to exit the metaphysics of the person and the subject in favour of impersonal dynamics, in which nature and history, individual and community, human and animal find an articulation that philosophical tradition has often failed to recognize.
GT: If philosophy is, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, constantly searching for its own beginning, its own Orient, it is because History is always the history of its own interiority. But “becoming,” the authors of What is Philosophy? write, is more of a milieu than an origin. It cannot be the object of a history, but of a geography that “tears history from the cult of necessity to assert the irreducibility of contingency.”[7]
The era of globalization has, moreover, produced a specific political economy of space that generates and mobilizes flows of energy, raw materials, money, labour, signs, information, knowledge, symbols, and people. It coordinates and synchronizes these multiple flows into a suffocating single space. This space seems to have neither centre nor edges; and yet it is far from being pacified in a shared or common environment. Paradoxically, indeed, at the moment when the project of unifying terrestrial realities into the totalizing figure of the globe seems to be finally realized, we feel that the unification of the world market instead deprives us of the experience of something in common: it becomes increasingly clear that the conquest of the globe goes hand in hand with the progressive destruction of every possible “world.”[8] The paradox of our time is then that humanity becomes more and more integrated every day, but at the same time increasingly fragmented. Divergent and different values, times, and spaces coexist in permanent collision with each other.
So, to resume the reflection on becoming, could we say that today a philosophy of places, a situated philosophy, is necessary?
RE: Unlike the foundational stream of philosophy that, from Hegel to Heidegger, thinks of being in relation to time, Deleuze and Guattari focus on the link between philosophy and space, in a mode they themselves define as “geophilosophical.” Although decades later they give their book the same title as Heidegger’s essay What is Philosophy?, their distance from Heidegger could not be greater. Not because Deleuze and Guattari neglect the question of the Greek origin—on the contrary, they return to it forcefully—but because they place it, rather than on the vertical plane of temporality, as Heidegger does, on the horizontal plane of spatiality. The distance of Deleuze and Guattari’s text from Heidegger’s is marked by a notion of philosophy that is not external to the line of temporality but intersects it from the start with the spatial dialectic between territory and deterritorialization. Even from this angle, the distance from Heidegger appears insurmountable. For Heidegger, the earth is the place of identification with one’s immemorial origin, while for Deleuze, it is the place of its dispersion through a continuous transgression that overturns the inside into the outside. To the point that even so-called national philosophies—German, French, Italian—should be understood not in their identity but in their mutual contamination. What matters, in relation to the question of what philosophy is, is not its territorial rooting but, on the contrary, the antinomic tension between boundary and transgression—something quite different from Heidegger’s relation between earth and world.
What consequences do Deleuze and Guattari draw from such a spatialization of thought? What is philosophy for them? Let’s start with a negative definition—from what philosophy is not and should not be. It is not contemplation, reflection, or communication. It is not contemplation because contemplation presupposes a form of detachment between the one who contemplates and what is contemplated—the exact opposite of the radical involvement of the philosopher with their object. It is not reflection because anyone can reflect on the world or on oneself without necessarily being a philosopher. It is not, finally, communication because this, always working on already given contents, is incapable of creating a truly new concept. Instead, the creation of concepts is, for Deleuze and Guattari, the task of that form of knowledge which in the Occident has taken the name of philosophy. Doing philosophy is not about discussing, perhaps in an unlimited community of communication. It is not about recognizing oneself, caring, or consoling, as philosophical counsellors might think. None of these practices have to do with philosophy in its essential meaning. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is always and only the creation of concepts—the ability to wrest them from the chaos in which they are immersed, to place them on a plane of immanence that inaugurates the possibility of new becomings.
Does this definition satisfy us? Does it answer our question about what philosophy is? Is it up to the task of our becoming? Personally, I believe that Deleuze and Guattari’s answer, while necessary, is not enough. That something else and different should be added—an additional segment of reflection. What? What is missing from Deleuze’s definition? How could it be modified or integrated? One point on which we can certainly agree is the rejection of any form of negative philosophy. Under this rubric falls also what, in the same years as Deleuze was working, took the name of “deconstruction.” Of course, deconstruction, as it was developed and practiced primarily by Jacques Derrida, has played a role of strong renewal in continental thought, contributing to its revival even outside the European space. It has produced texts of extraordinary theoretical intensity and opened spaces of thought otherwise closed, radically renewing the Heideggerian paradigm from which it also originates. But today philosophy cannot limit itself to deconstructing a world that is already “in pieces”—and which perhaps urgently needs to be rebuilt.
The need to surpass deconstruction—obviously incorporating its still vital segments—arises not only from the sense of wear and exhaustion of its protocols but also from the fact that from its origins it shows a reactive profile and thus by definition negative. Both in the Heideggerian variant of Destruktion and in the Derridean variant of déconstruction, it always expresses itself in relation to something from which it implicitly distances itself. More than creating new paradigms, speaking for itself, building its own form of thought, deconstruction can only start from an external critical goal. This does not mean excluding criticism from the field of philosophy, which on the contrary naturally exercises an indispensable function, but inverting its cause-and-effect relationship with creation. It is not that a philosophy creates new concepts because it is criticizing another; rather, it criticizes it because it is creating new concepts. It is because it is already setting up a new plane of discourse that Spinoza criticizes Descartes or Hegel criticizes Kant, not vice versa. Here is the difference between an affirmative and a negative, reactive way of doing philosophy. Much of the Occidental tradition, with some significant exceptions, has produced a negative philosophy, practicing an activity that Nietzsche would have defined with the term “resentment.” In what sense? What does it mean that modern thought has predominantly thought in a negative form; and that it has been so caught up in the machinery of the negative as not to recognize it as such? It means that philosophical reflection, instead of affirmatively enunciating its concepts, has derived them from the negation of their opposite. Today, without losing the relationship with the negative, it is necessary to rethink it in light of affirmation, recognizing the affirmative modalities of negation. In the book Politics and Negation, I have tried to trace them in the three figures of difference, determination, and opposition.
* The editors would like to thank Andrea Zoppis for proof-reading the translation from Italian.
Read the original interview in Italian:
[1] Roberto Esposito, Dieci pensieri sulla politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 235.
[2] Ernst Jünger – Carl Schmitt, Briefe 1930–1983 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999).
[3] Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005): 126.
[4] Roberto Esposito, Vitam Instituere: Genealogia dell'istituzione (Torino: Einaudi, 2023): 3.
[5] Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini : Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1991 [1961]), 21.
[6] Simone Weil, La personne et le sacré (1943). Paris : Payot, 2017.
[7] Gilles Deleuze – Felix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. Paris, : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991, p. 90.
[8] Cf. Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica: Traces of Georealism. London and Bristol: Tenement Press, 2024, p. 85.