Why it pays to read for acrostics in the Classics | Aeon Essays

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Ten years ago, one of the most disruptive events in my intellectual life occurred at a dinner party at my house. My friend Richard Thomas, who had just given a talk at Baylor University, mentioned that a student of his had discovered an ‘Isaiah acrostic’ in Vergil’s Georgics, a 1st-century BCE poem ostensibly about farming but really about life and the universe. This remark simultaneously opened the door to two phenomena in ancient Greek and Latin poetry that I had not really thought about, despite a lifelong career in Classics: acrostics and Judaism.

The relationship between the biblical and the classical traditions has always been fraught. As Tertullian testily asked in his screed against pagan writers: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Similarly, St Jerome felt compelled to abandon the classical authors he loved after a nightmare vision in which the judge accused him of being a Ciceronian, not a Christian. One of the many reasons Vergil is central to the Western tradition is that his Fourth Eclogue, which portrays the birth of a miraculous boy ‘sent down from heaven’ to inaugurate a new Golden Age, helped calm these fears: it was seen by readers from late antiquity until the 18th century as a pagan prophecy of the birth of Christ, thereby allowing Christianity to assimilate the Classics rather than merely rejecting them. Post-Enlightenment readers, however, tended to react against the Christian interpretation – they had no desire to view Athens through the prism of Jerusalem.

Whatever one may think about the supernatural dimension, there is abundant evidence for personal and intellectual contact between Jews and non-Jewish Greeks and Romans before and after the birth of Christ. Jews composed something like 10-20 per cent of the population of the Roman Empire; there are many overt references to Jews and Judaism in classical texts; and the Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures undertaken in the 3rd century BCE – would have been accessible to educated non-Jewish people throughout the Mediterranean world. Classicists and intellectual historians should be paying far more attention than they presently do to the impact of Jewish texts and culture on classical authors. In my paper ‘Was Vergil Reading the Bible?’ (2018), I argued that the answer to that question is probably ‘Yes’, and that at least some scholars are beginning to realise that Jewish themes are an important component of his meaning.

Scholars’ lack of attention to acrostics, on the other hand, may stem more from an intuitive sense that they are beneath the dignity of sophisticated authors. Indeed, acrostics are an art form simple enough for a child to create. The most basic kind is a word spelled vertically by the first letters of successive lines:

Catches mice,Adorable whiskers,Tail’s up – look out!

That such vertical words exist in the columns of long poems is undeniable; the difficulty consists in figuring out whether they are intentional. The vertical CAT above has such an obvious connection to the horizontal text that no one could reasonably deny its intentionality. But when acrostics are embedded in real poetry and no one is telling you to look for them, most are not so obvious.

As with any disruptive phenomenon, there are both enthusiasts, whose close-meshed nets catch some dubious fish, and deniers, who insist that even the big ones should be thrown back. For many years, insanity was a common metaphor employed for those who believe acrostics in ancient poetry are intentional. The most influential one-paragraph Classics article ever written, Don Fowler’s playful intervention about the acrostic MARS spanning Vergil’s description of the Gates of War, ends with the memorable sentence: ‘I await the men in white coats.’ What Fowler did not anticipate was that, four decades later, acrostics would begin to be recognised as not just an occasional jeu d’esprit in ancient poetry, but a widespread phenomenon and a major source of meaning.

Acrostics always have, in theory, plausible deniability

There are several reasons why believing that some acrostics in Greek and Latin poetry are intentional is both sane and rewarding. First, ancient writing and reading practices were more congenial than ours to letterplay and vertical ‘decoding’. Texts consisted of blocks of capital letters with no spaces in between, rather like our word-search puzzles. As one unrolled a scroll, the columns would appear before the rows, and sometimes the first letters of verses were even enlarged and separated by dots. Second, ancient authors such as Cicero actually talk about acrostics, especially in the context of the Sibylline Oracles. Third, the vertical axis allows for both permanently unresolvable ambiguities, which is a plus for learned writers conveying complex messages, and the addition of a ‘voice’ freed from the horizontal constraints of metre, authorial persona and decorum. Acrostics always have, in theory, plausible deniability – even if that deniability seems rather implausible sometimes, as in the modern example from Arnold Schwarzenegger to members of the California State Assembly. Fourth, they are delightful ‘Easter eggs’ for those hardy souls who read carefully, like the undergraduate student who published an article on an acrostic she had discovered during my class.

Finally, vertical texts can parallel and enhance the ‘Great Conversation’ among horizontal texts that lies at the heart of the humanities. Vergil’s ‘Isaiah acrostic’ – the great disruptive event of my intellectual life – participates in an intertextual conversation involving snakes, desire, and (im)mortality that ultimately traces back to the most consequential of biblical stories: the serpentine seduction of Eve.

One of the more fascinating parts of my journey has been getting to know the dipsas, a snake whose name comes from the Greek for ‘thirsty’ (as in ‘dipsomaniac’). This unsavoury critter, which appears frequently in ancient literature and material culture, was thought to experience unquenchable thirst itself and to induce that state in its victims. A Greek magical amulet, apparently intended to aid in human fertility by reducing excess uterine blood, pictures two snakes flanking an altar and bears the inscription ‘Dipsas-Tantalus, drink blood!’

Tantalus (source of ‘tantalise’) is the sinner punished in the underworld with unending hunger and thirst, as fruit and water constantly recede just out of his reach. Though there is some scholarly disagreement about how to interpret dipsas here – it could be referring to the snake, or it could be describing Tantalus as ‘thirsting’ – literary evidence suggests that Tantalus and the dipsas are closely connected, and that both are associated with sexual desire and sexual morbidity.

This is certainly true of the dipsas in Roman poetry. My first encounter with the dipsas was actually in the bedroom of Ovid’s girlfriend in the Amores. Here, ‘Dipsas’ is the name given to one of the stock figures in Roman elegy, the aged, drunken procuress (or lena), who spends most of the elegy instructing her young charge in how to be a tease and squeeze more money out of her clients. Ovid ends the poem with a curse activating the etymology of her name:

May the gods give you no home and an impoverished old age,and long winters, and perpetual thirst.

The association of sexual desire with unquenchable thirst, and sometimes with snakes, is in fact an Ovidian leitmotif. In a hilarious dirge lamenting the poet’s impotence despite the proximity of his extremely desirable girlfriend, he compares himself to Tantalus, ‘thirsting in the middle of the waves’. Ovid’s masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, depicts a plague whose symptoms bear a suspicious resemblance to lovesickness – fever, blushing, insomnia, shortness of breath, and insatiable thirst – caused by snakes infecting springs and lakes.

This snake, so entwined in ancient literature and material culture, plays an essential role in the Vergilian acrostic

Later authors pick up on this connection as well. In Lucan’s Civil War epic, when Aulus, a soldier in the army of the Stoic hero Cato, is bitten by a dipsas in the Libyan desert, his symptoms again recall the imagery of lovesickness:

Look, the poison enters silently, and the devouring firegnaws his marrow and kindles his insides with wasting heat.

The Greek satirist Lucian, apparently drawing upon the Lucan passage, describes a Libyan statue of a dipsas victim:

For on [the monument] had been carved a man, as they depict Tantalus in paintings, standing in a lake and reaching out for the water to drink from it, and that wild beast – the dipsas – which had clung to him and twined around his foot.

Though the piece ends on a humorous note, likening these insatiable cravings to Lucian’s own wish to converse with his friends, it clearly establishes the association of the dipsas with various forms of human desire. This bizarre and terrifying snake, so entwined in ancient literature and material culture, will have an essential role to play in the Vergilian acrostic.

Nicander, a Greek poet of the 2nd century BCE, is not exactly a household name, and for good reason. His compendious didactic poems about snakes, other poisonous creatures and antidotes are hardly congenial to modern tastes. His older editors complained that he had little poetic talent, knew little about his subject matter, and brings little pleasure to his readers. Though scholars have recently begun to show the witty sophistication with which he transforms his literary predecessors, I must confess that I find reading him in Greek rather tedious: he’s short on story, and there are many lines where I have to look up every word, only to find I don’t know what half of them mean in English either. Nevertheless, I have lately come to realise that he is a crucial link in the chain connecting some of the Western tradition’s most important texts.

Of the many, many snakes he describes, along with the usually revolting effects their bites have on the human body, two stand out. One is the viper, from the Latin for ‘viviparous’ (live-young-bearing). This serpent has the amiable quality of biting off her mate’s head while he is impregnating her, but she gets her comeuppance when her young eat their way out of her womb. Human terms like ‘bedmate’ and ‘vengeance’ associate this phenomenon with the murderous family dysfunction of Greek tragedies. The other snake is our friend the dipsas. Nicander introduces these two species right after a snake simply called ‘The Female’, which gives a clue about what he is up to.

Nicander’s second and final dipsas passage tells us explicitly that it looks like the female viper. This episode is the poem’s most striking, both because it relates a highly significant story and because it contains an indisputably intentional acrostic of the poet’s own name. He begins by describing some graphic symptoms of a dipsas bite:

Above all, the form of the dipsas will always be similar to the viper,the smaller one [ie, the female], and the doom of death will come more swiftlyto those whom this fearful snake assails: indeed, its slender tail,always somewhat dark, gets black at the end;and at its bite, the heart is utterly enflamed, and all around with feverthe parched lips wither with scorching thirst;but he [the victim], like a bull bending over a river,with gaping mouth takes in measureless drink until his bellybursts his navel and pours out the too-heavy load.

He then relates a ‘primeval myth’ with universal consequences:

ὠγύγιος δ’ ἄρα μῦθος ἐν αἰζηοῖσι φορεῖται,ὡς, ὁπότ’ οὐρανὸν ἔσχε Κρόνου πρεσβίστατον αἷμα,Νειμάμενος κασίεσσιν ἑκὰς περικυδέας ἀρχάςΙδμοσύνῃ νεότητα γέρας πόρεν ἡμερίοισιΚυδαίνων· δὴ γάρ ῥα πυρὸς ληίστορ’ ἔνιπτον.Αφρονες, οὐ μὲν τῆς γε κακοφραδίῃσ’ ἀπόνηντο·Νωθεῖ γὰρ κάμνοντες ἀμορβεύοντο λεπάργῳΔῶρα· πολύσκαρθμος δὲ κεκαυμένος αὐχένα δίψῃΡώετο, γωλειοῖσι δ’ ἰδὼν ὁλκήρεα θῆραΟὐλοὸν ἐλλιτάνευε κακῇ ἐπαλαλκέμεν ἄτῃΣαίνων· αὐτὰρ ὁ βρῖθος ὃ δή ῥ’ ἀνεδέξατο νώτοιςᾔτεεν ἄφρονα δῶρον· ὁ δ’ οὐκ ἀπανήνατο χρειώ.

ἐξότε γηραλέον μὲν ἀεὶ φλόον ἑρπετὰ βάλλειὁλκήρη, θνητοὺς δὲ κακὸν περὶ γῆρας ὀπάζει·νοῦσον δ’ ἀζαλέην βρωμήτορος οὐλομένη θήρδέξατο, καί τε τυπῇσιν ἀμυδροτέρῃσιν ἰάπτει.

A primeval myth is told among people,that, when the eldest blood of Kronos [Zeus] held the sky,[acrostic begins] having allotted to his brothers glorious realms far apart,in his wisdom he gave Youth as a reward for mortals,honouring them: for indeed they told on the stealer of fire [Prometheus].Fools, they got no joy from it, because of their negligence:for out of weariness they entrusted their gift to a stupid ass to carry.Skipping along, his throat burning with thirst,and seeing in its hole the dragging beast,with terrible folly he begged that deadly one to help,[acrostic ends] fawning: but he [the snake] asked the witless one for the loadhe had taken on his back as a gift: and he [the ass] did not refuse the request.

From that time, the dragging serpent casts off its aged skin,but evil old age attends mortals: and the destructive beastreceived the parching thirst of the braying one, and imparts it with its feeble blows.

A section of Nicander’s Theriaca manuscript dating c11th century CE, illustrating his acrostic signature. Aeon/the BnF, Paris

Not only is Nicander marking his territory, so to speak, with his vertical signature, but he is also activating the meaning of his name: andros means ‘of man’, and nik- (as in ‘Nike’) means victory. Such Greek compounds are frequently ambiguous: nik-andros could signify either the victory of man or the victory over man. The latter is obviously more appropriate here, since the wily serpent has bamboozled humankind out of eternal youth.

Nicander associates it with the Genesis story: the implicit theme of the war between the sexes

Where did Nicander get this idea? The story was treated by a number of tragic, lyric and comic poets of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. The earliest source we know for a tale about a snake thwarting man’s immortality is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, predating Nicander by a millennium or more, in which the hero, while taking a dip in a pool, has a plant called ‘Man Becomes Young in Old Age’ stolen from him by a snake. There was plenty of cross-fertilisation among the cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Levant; the Bible itself, especially the stories about the early world, contains much recycled material. So it would be claiming too much to say that Nicander could only have derived his deceitful talking snake directly or exclusively from the Jews.

Nevertheless, one feature of Nicander’s version associates it more particularly with the Genesis story: the implicit theme of the war between the sexes. Since Greek andros means not just human but male human, as opposed to the unisex anthropos, NIKANDROS may also suggest the victory of woman over man. In Genesis 3, God pronounces judgment upon the serpent and the Woman who caused Man to fall:

The LORD God said to the serpent,

‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’

To the woman he said,

‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’

Nicander’s dipsas is strongly associated with the female viper, who represents both pain (death, in fact) in childbearing and a dysfunctional relationship with her husband, in which she is the dominatrix. Furthermore, the symptoms of the dipsas’s bite – fever, parching thirst, and drinking until the fluid explodes out of one’s navel – sound suspiciously similar to those of the lovesickness depicted by Roman authors.

The coupling of viper and dipsas, especially right after the snake called ‘The Female’, suggests that Nicander was alert to the relationship between the Fall of Man and the war between the sexes. Though there are obviously some differences, it is plausible to suppose a genetic connection with the Genesis episode. The supremely learned poet would surely have been interested in – and eager to show off his knowledge of – this memorable Jewish story, available in his day in Greek translation, in which a talking snake plays a leading role.

In my article on Original Sin and Vergil’s Orpheus and Eurydice episode in the Georgics, my starting point was the acrostic ISAIA AIT, ‘Isaiah says’, in the context of a woman dying by snakebite. Orpheus’s new bride Eurydice, fleeing from her would-be rapist Aristaeus (to whom the Isaiah-like prophet Proteus is recounting the tale), encounters a huge water-snake. Several cue words point to the ‘huge’ acrostic, which lies ‘before the [metrical] feet’ of the hexameter and along the ‘banks’ of the poem:

illa quidem, dum te fugeret per flumina praeceps,Immanem ante pedes hydrum moritura puellaSeruantem ripas alta non uidit in herba.At chorus aequalis Dryadum clamore supremosImplerunt montis; flerunt Rhodopeiae arcesAltaque Pangaea et Rhesi Mauortia tellusAtque Getae atque Hebrus et Actias Orithyia.Ipse caua solans aegrum testudine amoremTe, dulcis coniunx, te solo in litore secum,te ueniente die, te decedente canebat.

She, indeed, while she was fleeing you headlong by the stream,a girl destined to die, did not see a [acrostic begins] huge water-snakebefore her feet guarding the banks in the high grass.But her sister-chorus of Dryads filled the high mountainswith a wail; the peaks of Rhodope wept,and high Pangaea [‘All-Earth’] and the martial land of Rhesus,and the Getae, and the Hebrus, and Attic Orithyia.Orpheus himself, solacing his miserable love on a hollow lyre,kept singing you [acrostic ends], sweet wife, you to himself on the lonely shore,you with the coming, you with the departing day.

I argued that Eurydice, the ‘girl destined to die’, is a kind of Eve figure, killed by a snake and mourned by universal nature. What I did not know then – but came to realise thanks to another chance conversation, this time with Michael Reeve about his article ‘A Rejuvenated Snake’ (1996-7) – is that Vergil’s biblical acrostic alludes to Nicander’s. That is, Vergil was not only recalling the Genesis episode that brought death into the world, but recalling it through the lens of a Greek author who did the same – and expecting at least some of his learned readers to get both allusions. While this sort of ‘window reference’ is common for highly literate classical authors, the fact that the Bible is involved sheds new light on the highway between Athens and Jerusalem, suggesting that ancient non-Jewish readers’ access to and interest in the Septuagint may have been far greater than is commonly supposed.

A characteristic feature of window references is the ‘correction’ of one’s predecessors, and Vergil’s is no exception. For instance, he adds the water that the Greek poet strangely omits: why else would the ass have asked the dipsas to help him with his thirst unless the snake were, as Vergil has it, ‘guarding the banks’? Vergil corrects the name as well, calling his water-guarding snake hydrus, from the Greek for ‘water’, the opposite of dipsas, ‘thirsty’. Like Nicander and the Bible, Vergil implicitly depicts a battle of the sexes, but he inverts the roles and assigns the blame to men. Eurydice dies once fleeing from a rapist, and again when Orpheus makes the fatal mistake of looking back as he is leading her out of the underworld.

Vergil and Nicander show both similarities and differences in their divine rewards and punishments. In Nicander’s story, the god of the sky gives humankind a chance at eternal youth as a reward for our tattling on Prometheus, stealer of fire. In Vergil’s, the god of the underworld gives a human a chance to escape from his realm temporarily as a reward for Orpheus’ transcendently beautiful song. The stories diverge in that Nicander’s Man, weary from carrying the precious gift, entrusts it to the back of a foolish ass, who becomes a potent symbol of appetite in conflict with rational intelligence. Yet there is a certain similarity to Orpheus nonetheless: emotionally wearied by having Eurydice at his back, he foolishly and irrationally gratifies his desire to see her rather than delaying his gratification so as to save her.

I have argued that the story spanned by Nicander’s signature serpent alludes to the biblical Fall, and that Vergil in his Orpheus and Eurydice episode incorporates both Nicander and the Bible, signalling the allusion with a biblical acrostic of his own: ISAIA AIT. But that leaves a final question. Why is the dipsas, in particular, the star of Nicander’s Fall story, since all snakes renew their youth by shedding their skin?

Nicander’s association of the Fall with unslakable thirst, which we attempt to satisfy in ways that lead to our destruction, shows his insight into both the biblical narrative and the nature of evil. In the Jewish and Christian understanding, the constant result of our primordial separation from God – brought about by a malicious serpent – is an insatiable yearning for that lost communion, which the psalms and prophets frequently describe as thirsting for God: ‘As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God.’ God promises that this thirst will be quenched: ‘Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.’ But there’s one exception. In the Edenic vision of God’s holy mountain, ‘The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent’s food.’ The serpent is the only animal left out of the party – just as God had promised in Genesis, ‘dust shall you eat, all the days of your life.’

Classical texts are enmeshed in a web of relationships that can surprise and invigorate, even after thousands of years

The perpetual thirst of Nicander’s dipsas is a logical consequence of that unsatisfying diet. The dipsas may be functionally immortal, but only at the price of eternal misery; imparting torturous thirst to others does not actually bring the beast any relief. Like the biblical serpent, its motivation is pure malice. As St Ambrose declared: ‘No one ever healed himself by hurting another.’ In the present age of electronic venom, absorbing that lesson from Nicander’s etiological tale could help us all.

Another reward of the humanities’ Great Conversation is the joy of seeing familiar words borrow the serpent’s power to ‘become young in old age’. It had simply never occurred to me that reading vertically might enhance my understanding of the horizontal narrative. Discovering this new dimension in Vergil and other ancient poets has both increased my appreciation of their genius and emphasised the benefit of learning the original languages, since acrostics vanish completely in translation. On the other hand, the potential importance of Jewish texts for classical authors is something that should be receiving more attention from all readers, scholars and students alike.

As Italo Calvino observed: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’ Vergil was not only reading the Bible, but reading it through the eyes of a Greek author who used the biblical story to enrich his own – and both authors left vertical clues whose significance is only now coming to light. In tracing the biblical serpent’s acrostic tail, we see how classical texts are enmeshed in a dense web of relationships that can surprise and invigorate us, even after thousands of years. The eternally thirsty snake may symbolise evil’s contagion and ‘victory over man’. But it can also symbolise the contagious, unquenchable thirst of the humanities – and humans – for the truth and beauty ever ancient, ever new.

Politics at Sunset: Theses on Benjamin

Illustration of the first Labor Day parade in the US, held in New York City on September 5, 1882. The image appeared in the September 16, 1882 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. License: Public domain.

I. The workers movement wasn’t defeated by capitalism. The workers movement was defeated by democracy. This is the problem which the century puts to us. The matter in front of us, die Sache selbst, that we must now try to think through.1

II. The workers movement settled accounts, one to one, with capitalism. A historic confrontation between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. An alternation of phases. Reciprocal outcomes comprised of victories and defeats. But workers’ labor power, an integral part of capital, couldn’t escape its condition. The obscure basis of revolution’s defeat lies there. The attempts to change the world, whether rational or crazy, all failed. The reformist long march had no more success than the storming of heaven. But the workers did change capital. They forced it to change itself. No workers’ defeat in the social sphere. An emphatic defeat on the political terrain.

III. The twentieth century is not the century of social democracy. The twentieth century is the century of democracy. Traversing the era of wars, democracy imposed its hegemony. It was democracy that won the class struggle. In this century, authoritarian and totalitarian political solutions functioned finally as diabolical instruments of a democratic providentialism. Democracy, like the monarchism of yesteryear, is now absolute. More than the practice of totalitarian democracies, what stands out is a totalizing idea of democracy. At the same time, paradoxically, as the dissolution of the concept of “people” foreseen by Kelsen’s genius. After the defeat of nazifascism and after the defeat of socialism, twice over, it was elevated to the status of a choice of values. The workers movement did not elaborate, let alone practice, either in the East or the West, its idea of democracy. It didn’t grasp it, didn’t experience it, as a locus of conflict. The workers movement of the twentieth century could not help but be democratic. But the century of democracy killed it. This trauma is lodged, and obscurely acts, in the collective unconscious of the European left, in the activism, the leadership, the culture.

Published in Harper’s Weekly on May 15, 1886, this image depicts the events of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago, when a bomb was detonated as police officers attempted to disperse a labor protest. The events of the day are now commemorated each year on May 1. License: Public domain.

IV. Tocqueville had a prophetic glimpse of the anti-political future of modern democracies. The punctual arrival of political demoralization, and the completion—in this close of the twentieth century—of political atheism. That great liberal saw the end of modern politics realized in American democracy, a powerful indication of the world’s future. In the Tocquevillian distinction between the science of politics and the art of government, Umberto Coldagelli had the intelligence to grasp the “substantial dualism” between democracy and liberty. With this immediate consequence: “The preservation of liberty comes to depend solely on the ability of the art of government to oppose the spontaneous tendency of the ‘political state’ to merge with the ‘social state.’”2 And he reports this variant of La Démocratie which dates from 1840: “The ‘social state’ separates men; the political state must draw them together. The social state gives them a taste for well-being, the political state must give them great ideas and great emotions.” In bourgeois modernity there is, as its distinctive sign so to speak, a “natural” subjectivity favoring social action and an “unnatural” subjectivity favoring political action. “Consciousness and ideas do not renew themselves, the soul does not grow and the human mind does not develop, except through the reciprocal action of men upon one another. I have shown that this action is almost non-existent in the democratic countries, so it has to be created artificially.”

V. The artifice of the political relation as opposed to the natural character of the social relation is not a Jacobin invention, nor a Bolshevik imposition. It is the condition of the political in modernity. We can put this another way: political civilization versus natural society. Today it’s possible to translate this choice into the decision freedom or democracy. Contrary to what people think—Tocqueville informs us—the natural-animal element is democracy, the historical-political element is freedom. Now that political science describes the need for democracy, the task of the art of government consists in introducing freedom. A different political freedom: after the freedom of the moderns, without falling back into the freedom of the ancients. While the dictatorships rekindled the passion for freedom, it’s not so paradoxical that the democracies extinguished it. If The Philosopher Reading painted by Chardin were to peruse the book by Georges Steiner, and no longer his folio from back then, I think he would confirm Milton’s verse: “all passion spent.”3 The century of democracy which defeated the dictatorships in war, did not give freedom in peace. And in these last days of the twentieth century, this historic confrontation between dictatorship and freedom, which has seen the defeat of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, leaves on the battlefield, precisely without passions, something like a residue of a war that no one provoked, the political conflict between democracy and freedom. Deciphering that passage is a challenge for thought, but the practice it implies is no less puzzling. The victorious ideological apparatus, the accumulation of dominant consensus, and the “social power” that results from them are all conjoined now under the rubric of liberal democracy. Insert a wedge into this practical-conceptual liberal-democratic ensemble. Pull out the two potentially contradictory terms. It’s only on the battlefront of this good war that serious politics can return.

VI. An idea of liberty in contrast with the practice of Homo democraticus. An idea of democracy in contrast with the practice of Homo economicus. Pressing on these two keys with the fingers of thought, we must try to reactivate the search for new forms that could make political action meaningful again. On one hand “mores” and “beliefs,” on the other the “taste for material well-being” and “softheartedness.” Democracy ensures and promotes the latter, and liberty needs the former. This requires choosing. Because they are alternatives. A new spirit of scission is called for. Divide the neutral citizen into two different kinds. For each one, convert the modern individual into a human person. Reconnecting the past to the future can be accomplished only if both are divided in terms of the present. We can no longer consider, along with Benjamin, now-time (Jeztzeit) as the site of the Marxian revolutionary dialectical leap. We are still constrained, with Heidegger, to consider the “present time” (Jetzt-zeit) as Weltzeit, inauthentic world time. Here too, between time and the present time, between the epoch and the today, one must strike with the red wedge of living contradiction. The white circle is this world, dead hereafter.

VII. Not liberty from and liberty relative to, positive liberty or negative liberty, liberty and freedom, liberty of the ancients and liberty of the moderns. Nor even a political philosophy of liberty, which was provided by liberalism. But a philosophy of liberty, the one that Marxism wasn’t able to provide. The object of the first was external liberty, both juridical and social, the constitutional liberty of the market, the public guarantee for the private atom, rights, precious and paltry, precious for living with others, paltry for existing on one’s own. The object of the second is human liberty, the kind that Marx attributed to the “eternal dignity of the human race,” the preter-human liberty of Christianity, the mentis libertas beatitudo of Spinoza, the unsolitary solitude of the great spirit, to cite the expression of the philosopher of existence, Luporini. The error of the Marxist horizon is not in having critiqued the libertas minor, but in having done so without a contemporary, theoretical and practical, assumption of a libertas major. Hence the political disaster. It is only on behalf of a genuine human liberty that a critique of the bourgeois false liberties could be undertaken. A critique that is destructive of their apparent human generality and yet that inherits the positivity of their modern basis, while avoiding the latter. In Kantian terms: inadequacy of the Unabhängigkeit, of the independence of individuals, but at the same time its condition of possibility, its transcendentality, for establishing liberty as autonomy of the human being, carrying the moral law within oneself.

VIII. Homo democraticus, the isolated and massified individual, as globalized as he is “particularized,” guided from outside and from above even in the garden that he cultivates, an individual in the herd, the last man, described, before Nietzsche, by Goethe, as the subject of the times he saw arriving, “the era of commodities,” a “very anxious and questionable” expression, Thomas Mann will say. The era of commodities and of vulgarity. Mann will find this accent again, in fact, reaching dizzying and truly extraordinary peaks, in 1950. Meine Zeit, my time, “the age of technology, of progress, of the masses,” “while I did express it, I was rather opposed to it.” But he goes on to say: “It’s always risky to believe one is privileged owing to the special historical abundance of one’s epoch, because a more complicated time can always come, and because it always does come” (Doctor Faustus). Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century, it’s easy to see the realization of the tragedy of socialism, and harder to grasp the consummate drama of democracy. But that is when democracy definitively accepted the role of the public function of Homo economicus. A democracy of interests: this was its final name. During those fifty years democracy was corrupted, or completed, depending on whether one considers the problem from the viewpoint of the radical democrat or that of the critic of democracy. For my part I think it was completed. An unreformable democracy, like socialism was unreformable? This is the uncertainty of the defeated, I would like to say to Petro Ingrao. To dispel it, to try and dispel it, one must abandon intellectual games and take on the difficult complication that has come into politics.

IX. About Musil’s character, “who serves as a mirror to the world of his time,” Ingeborg Bachman has written: “Ulrich understood early on that the era he lived in, equipped with a knowledge superior to any other preceding era, an immense knowledge, seemed incapable of intervening in the course of history.”4 What was understood early on was forgotten early on. To the point that no one has realized that history is epochless. And in fact, nothing happens. There are no longer events. There is only news. Look at the figures standing atop empires. And reverse Spinoza’s phrase. Nothing to understand. Only things to lament, or laugh about. Athens and Jerusalem gaze in disbelief at what the end of a millennium, ancient and modern at once, has produced. The end of communism and a Christianity of the end, those two symbolic orders that remain to be interpreted in their entirety, obscure deposits in the folds of contemporary consciousness, bring time to a close: but—and this is what’s new—without apocalyptic tensions and in the silence of signs. The desperate cry of Father Turaldo: “Send more prophets, Lord / … to tell the poor ones to keep hoping / … to break the new chains / in the infinite Egypt of this world.” The real God that failed, the real defeat of God, in this century, is in the promise and in the human liberty unattained, for each man and woman, for all women and men. This is the where the discourse is headed: this liberty in interior homine, need or negation, to go take hold of it, unveil it, in the tragic history of the twentieth century. And set out again from there: not new beginnings, but interrupted paths.

X. Walter Benjamin to Stephan Lackner, May 5, 1940: “One wonders if by chance history was not in the process of forging a brilliant synthesis between two Nietzschean concepts, namely the good European and the last man. On might obtain the last European as a result. We are struggling not to become that last European.” A terribly up-to-date reflection, and a wonderful example of prophetic political thought. The embodiment of the last man in the good European is now taking place before our disenchanted eyes, programmed for completion according to a financial-economic calendar decided on democratically. Here everything just happens. The event becomes a fact in its purest form. Europe is born in the same manner as the century dies: without passion, from the exhaustion of states and in the interest of individuals. History becomes the synthesis of what is. What should be does not concern it. Politics was supposed to slay, not represent, the last man. But as I’ve said: the end of modern politics. And that suits everyone just fine. Everyone is fighting to become the last European. The competition is taking place on the market square: where one hears “the noise of big comedy” and at the same time “the buzzing of poisoned flies.” In the face of this epochless history we are only left with the choice between two anthropological perspectives. Bloch used to say: man is something that needs to be discovered. Nietzsche: man is something that must be overcome. Perspectives, the first being alternative, the second antagonistic. Until a short while ago, we would have said: politics is one thing, theory is another. Not any longer. It’s becoming clear that we must resolve each thing within our thought. If the decline of the West will be completed in a Spenglerian fashion “in the first centuries of the next millennium,” the decline of politics will play out in the first decades of the next century. Thought is assigned the task of fore-telling, while speaking on behalf of history’s vanquished. In the meantime, there is nothing to be discovered about man. The beyond-man is entirely to be thought.

XI. The ideal sequel to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, or, let’s say, its reformulation for the twentieth century, is the twelfth thesis by Benjamin in his “On the Concept of History” (but see also the lemmas “Future” and “Image”). Let’s read: “The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling oppressed class itself (die kämpfende, unterdrueckte Klasse). Marx presents it as the last enslaved class—the avenger class (die rächende Klasse) that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.”5 A given of consciousness that’s always been inadmissible for social democracy. The latter “always preferred to cast the working class in the role of a redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This indoctrination made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.” It’s rare than one can subscribe to every word of a thought. Yet this is the case. This is what it means to reverse a perspective in terms of the side one is on. The “avenger class,” the last to be enslaved but also the first to possess the necessary strength. A political rather than ethical motivation for being on that side. To avenge an eternal past of oppression endured. That past is the new subject of history, therefore, which alone can carry out a new political action. The future was grounded in this passion, sensed and preserved in the body of struggles of our own past. And this passion was extinguished by the dogmatic claim, typical of social democratic theory and practice, of an “unlimited,” “essentially continuous” progress of humanity, as if history advanced through a “homogeneous and empty time” (see Thesis XIII). Hatred unlearned, together with the will to sacrifice, two communist and Christian virtues. Severed, the sinews of strength, the kind that matters in the conflict. Overturned, the meaning of action, which is Image and not Ideal: an image of defeated comrades, and not an ideal of redeemed brothers. Redemption does in fact concern “the oppressed past,” it does not indicate the radiant future. What is great, or what is destined to be great, is only this historical movement, or this political object, capable of translating the contents of what was into the forms of what is to arrive, always, always, always against the present.

Velvet Revolution, Prague, November 17, 1989. Photo: Prague City Gallery.

XII. “In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing. It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an ‘ideal’ that the trouble began. The ideal was defined in Neo-Kantian doctrine as der unendliche Ausgabe (as an ‘infinite task’). And this doctrine was the school philosophy of the Social Democratic party” (Thesis XVIIa). Here homogeneous and empty time became an antechamber where it was a matter of waiting for the revolutionary occasion. “In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance.” What counts is a given political situation, but equally “the right of entry which the historical moment enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to that point had been closed and locked. The entrance into this chamber coincides in a strict sense with political action” (ibid.). It’s essential to be able to recognize “the sign of a messianic arrest of happening”—that is, be able to grasp the sign of “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Thesis XVII). And there as well, a good thing. But what about times without signs? When history sleeps, should politics wake it up, or go to sleep beside it, abandoning all vital activity? Even the Christian Dossetti told us that politics is contingency, chance, occasion: not from time to time, but again and again, day after day. So the revolutionary chance is not to be waited for, one seizes it; it doesn’t arrive, it’s already there, in heterogeneous and full time. Politics can regenerate itself. It can transcend its modern character, on the sole condition that it claims the “right of entry” in a different sense, contrary to that which made it function as a future-oriented project, implicit in the present and springing from it. It has to decide to modify the past, to change all that has been, to open the closed chamber of history, producing the moment in which what always occurs is interrupted. Not wait for the signs of the times, but create them. Because the signs don’t make the event visible, they are the event. Demonstrate in the contingency of quotidian action that whatever you bind on earth “shall be bound in heaven” and that whatever you loose on earth “shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19). The end of the politics of the moderns isn’t the end of politics, and isn’t the return of the politics of the ancients. It’s the occasion of that discontinuum in politics which the given situation doesn’t offer but the revolutionary chance can impose.

XIII. A revolution in the idea of politics: this is the first right of entry that’s consigned to us by the oppressed past and by generations of the vanquished. Because revolution as political praxis is what must be brought under the scrutiny of critique. There is no longer any distinction between revolutionary action and revolutionary process. No chance in either. The question is no longer whether the revolutionary subject is the class or the party. The arrest of happening is not the doing of a will to power. The very Marxian “dialectical leap … under the free sky of history” has crashed, wings broken, to the arid ground of politics. The point of difference is no longer between reformist gradualism and revolutionary rupture. It is between continuity and discontinuity. And since in continuity no reformist practice is possible henceforth, discontinuity is no longer identified with revolution. The revolutionary chance is not revolutionary action. It is a point of view, a political mode of being, a form of political action, the now, always, of political behavior. In the face of, against, the “reified continuity of history,” politics is exercised in nature through “intermittent units” of actuality, where “everything that is past … can attain a higher degree of actuality than at the moment of its existence” (see the lemma “Continuum”). Among the materials preparatory to the Theses, some piercing thought projectiles: “The history of the oppressed is a discontinuum,” which is to say, “history’s continuum is that of the oppressors.” The concept of the “tradition of the oppressed” is seen as the “discontinuum of the past versus history as the continuum of events.” But consider: Is the point of catastrophe to be placed in the continuity of history, as the late Benjamin seems to think, or should it be cultivated in the discontinuity of politics, as the end of this century seems to indicate? Here is the in-decision of research, which looks at the extreme aspects of the horizon of problems, no longer with the hope of finding solutions, but rather with the responsibility of escaping the affliction of the time, which consists in being subordinated to a present future.

Titian, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1560–70, oil on canvas. National Gallery, London. License: Public domain.

XIV. EX PRAETERITO / PRAESENS PRUDENTER AGIT / NE FUTURA ACTIONẼ DETURPET (“From the experience of the past / The present acts prudently / Lest it spoil future action”): this is the statement inscribed at the top, divided in three, next to a triad of heads of men and animals, of Allegory of Prudence, or Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence, which the aged Titian painted between 1560 and 1570. The wolf of the past, the lion of the present, the dog muzzle of the future. Panofsky says that the painting glorifies Prudence as a wise user of the three Forms of Time, associated with the three ages of Life. “Titian did not break away from a well-established tradition, apart from the fact that the magic of his brush gave a palpable appearance of reality to the two central heads (that of the man in the prime of life and that of the lion), whereas one could say that he dematerialized the profile heads of the two sides (those of the old man and the wolf on the left, and those of the young man and the dog on the right): Titian gave visible expression to the contrast between what is and what has been or has not begun to be.”6 Prudence, a major category of modern politics, has marked the chance and mischance of the twentieth century and, according to the cases, has produced the century’s conquests and tragedies. It is the “sad science” of the doctrine of the state in the time of the absent sovereign. The present must know from the past those things which above all must not arrive in the future. This is the variance [écart] that actuality compels us to maintain henceforth: defend ourselves from the form of the future which all the contents of the present are constructing. Actuality: Father Time in the Great Epoch, the “lion” without the “fox,” force without prudence, politics without politics—that is, history abandoned to itself, minor, cyclical history, eternal return of always the same, accelerated, modernized, for internal conservative revolutions. The old face of the wolf is the tiger’s leap into the past that Benjamin talks about. The mature face of the lion is the great twentieth century, which has faded into the current reified continuity of history. There results a virtual abstract domesticated form of future. Act now so that what comes after does not spoil the action. But does the standard of the political still stand a chance, revolutionary or not, in the current contingency of the historical event?

XV. Kultur und Zivilisation: take up the broken thread of a discourse, take it up at the end of this century starting from the place of its beginnings. In our own words, suited to today, the distinction being: Zivilisation is modernity, Kultur is civilization. One could say bourgeois modernity and human civilization. But that would introduce an excessive emphasis that’s no longer à l’ordre du jour. The bourgeois and the human are no longer inflected according to the rules of the nineteenth century. Today’s bourgeois is the “last man.” Just as today’s man no longer bears any resemblance to yesterday’s bourgeois. Just as the Bürger [citizens] of Thomas Mann, “our” Mann, pre-1918, are the contrary of the bourgeois, and just as the Arbeiter [workers], not that of Jünger, but precisely that of Marx, are the contrary of the citizen. Our dream: the coarse pagan race with, in its own right, the culture of the grand-bourgeois, “that grand and severe, deeply moving bourgeoisness of the soul” which Claudio Magris speaks of in reference to Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Contrariwise, between these two things, modernity/civilization, an eternal absolute historical conflict, next to a temporary political consensus. In the different passages of the twentieth century, consensus and conflict have been expressed in different forms. The age of wars radicalized the contradiction between Kultur and Zivilisation, but the peacetime that followed did not even pose the problem to itself. It’s a question of seeing if one can recover the civilizing function which the workers movement had before the war shoved it into the trenches. Twentieth-century war and peace have sequestered this legacy. To reclaim it there have to be heirs: a movement of ideas and forces capable of injecting the body of modernity with the spirit and the forms of a Kultur, a Zivilisation. It matters little whether it’s new, it can even be ancient; what is important is that it show the signs of a contrast to the current barbarization of the human social relation. Civilize modernization: this is the task in which everything consists, on which everything must be focused, struggles, organization, government, projects, tactics. Injecting Kultur into the irrepressible objective processes of globalization, digitalization, virtualization. The more the danger of this modern barbarism grows, the more the saving power can contribute to retaining and messianically arresting the event. I see more katechon than eschaton in our “What is to be done?” after the end of modern politics.

XVI. “Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät”—“But friend! We come too late” (Hölderlin, “Brot und Wein,” 1801). Such is the Stimmung [mood] that connects the figures and the motifs, the passages and the halts, the prestos and the adagios of reflection. The century of great opportunities transformed itself into the century of small occasions. In politics, possibility is always tragic. The comedy of probability leaves everything as is. One could have not done what was done. But one could also have done what was not done. With this binary schema in mind, research has several paths to follow. No longer in darkness. Even if: Isn’t it strange, this light that politics at its sunset casts on the history that has just passed? “Aber das Irrsal hilft”: we’re helped by “drifting,” errance, error.

Notes

1

This text was originally published in Mario Tronti’s La politica al tramonto (Einaudi, 1998). It appears in English here for the first time. In January 2024, a new edition of La politica al tramonto will be published by DeriveApprodi.

2

Umberto Coldagelli, introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Scritti, note e discorsi politici (1839–1852) (Bollati-Boringhieri, 1994), xvi.

3

Georges Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995 (Yale University Press, 1998).

4

Ingeborg Bachman, Il dicible e l’indicible (Adelphi, 1998), 21–22.

5

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2003), 394.

6

Erwin Panofsky, Tiziano (Marsilio, 1992), 105. Also see the Titian chapter in Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts (University of Chicago Press, 1983).