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What seems to me to have changed radically in the Western world in the last few decades-increasingly accelerating-and which is outvoting all the principles of the Enlightenment, secular humanism and even Christian humanism, is the conception of “the other.”
It is like a crystallization of the alien, seen as a block of foreignness and danger and, evidently, considered less human than “us.”
I have always been interested in the theme of otherness, perhaps for autobiographical reasons, as well as that of the intruder, the one who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For the last two-three years I have been making paintings in which I represented sea monsters (those of Ulysses Aldrovandi) landing on the shores of the Mediterranean, and I would pose the question of who was more monstrous, these humanized-faced fish or amphibians, or those who left them agonizing on the beaches. I used to question the monstrous part in us Western humans.
Now, in early 2025, I get tired of always wanting to mitigate between the good and the bad, and I tell myself that the monsters are there and they are not nice, and they have taken over.
They are human, sure, but they don’t seem to speak the same language as me anymore.
I wrote to a friend, with whom I have shared struggles and political views, from 1970 to the present: I was trying to understand what Vittorini meant by ”Men and not Men.” Claudio Pavone, the great archivist and historian, thought he meant ”resistant men, fascists no,” but I’m not sure. Men would be those who carry all the contradictions and weaknesses of humanity, while fascists would not have these contradictions and weaknesses. But the very ending of Vittorini’s novel betrays this interpretation, when the protagonist fails to coldly kill the sad-eyed German in the streets of Milan.
Returning Fascism has its strength precisely in this return to “men and less men.” In the late 1960s, on the wave of Third Worldism and civil rights struggles, you could still sing “What color is God’s skin” in parish choirs and feel almost revolutionary.
Now you have to sing it again, because they take you back sixty years and you have to reaffirm the concept that there is “a common humanity” and there is no all-human and “subhuman.”
So they make you come back to Long Live the People and Martin Luther King. A little more and I go back to making posters for the lepers of Morulemin Kenya: “Why don’t you use Kaloderma?.”
From the Treccani, entry “Resistance”: Alongside the first glimmers of active resistance, the seeds of “passive resistance,” understood as the creation of a climate and environment favorable to the former, were largely sown in those days (Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile, Turin 1991).
I have never been interested in being a torch bearer or feeling clearer than others, but today we are brought back to the well-worn metaphor of light and darkness, to the need for glimmers of resistance, which save the honor of the human. The Nadezda Mandelstam who memorizes the poems of her husband who died in deportation and recites them to friends, the Walter Benjamin who tries to carry his twenty pages of typescript across the Pyrenees to safety, or the protagonist of Making a Fire, whose survival depends on a single match.
I cannot help but keep clinging to an illustrious example, that of a trio of unknown and isolated intellectuals, exiled by fascism to a small island in the Tyrrhenian Sea who, in 1941, in the midst of the rise of Nazism and the closing of all reasonable hope, wrote a manifesto for a united Europe which, clandestinely circulated by one of their companions, became something audible and almost achievable after the war.
I do not know whether going to live in a community in the Massif Central, raising sheep and warding off wolves with bonfires is a good solution. Since we cannot influence Europe’s eventual rapprochement with China, nor its alliance with the countries of the South, nor its very survival, should we retreat, where possible, to live in the countryside, but in a countryside located at least five meters above sea level and not subject to the torrential rains resulting from climate change?
Or attempting to do two things, when we used to do at most one?
The person who runs the Instagram profile Anonymousworksinc, which has always spread images of decommissioned or forgotten or marginal objects and artworks, interrupts his usual ”programming” to say calmly and without lividity how he reacts to the new political data: by continuing to address them (the rulers) and engaging in local social services.
For the last month, I’ve been struggling to find ways that I can affect change amidst the Trump/Musk assault on democracy and utter disdain for working class Americans.
Part of my solution is to continue to speak truth to power and stand up for what’s right, even if it doesn’t follow what others may expect as my curatorial premise.
The other part of my approach is to embrace volunteerism at a local level.
To that end, I’m stepping up my participation at my local YMCA which is creating a number of social service programs to help underprivileged communities.
For example, they are raising money to expand their Youth & Government program to underserved kids that haven’t been exposed to how government works.
And they are expanding their efforts of local food pantries where low income families can help supplement their monthly supplies.
These and so many other programs are helping to fill the void as our current administration is determined to gut vital services.
In the coming months, I’ll also be highlighting other nonprofits doing good in our communities.
If you enjoy my content, would you please consider donating $5 (or any other amount) via the link in my Bio? ANY amount would be greatly appreciated. 100% goes to my local YMCA in Los Angeles.
Thanks!
For my part, what can I do? Continue to make paintings and caricatures of Punchinello and Pinocchiella, since art (if it is art) brings vitality to others, as Elsa Morante said, and that is a lot. To continue to cook good things with good products and eat them in company, and that too is not little. And to pay in person, that is to give more of my earnings to relief and rescue programs, those of the United Nations in aid of refugees, those of the boats that search for migrants lost in the Mediterranean. Glimmers of resistance that is.
It’s a matter of getting – even more so if possible – on the side of the pariahs. Since we are old and tired humanist militants, let’s do it with what we have on hand, the colors, the photographs, some money left over.
Certainly, what I will not do is get together with friends to share each other’s consternation and sideration. With friends I will gather to drink and eat and look at caricatures of the powerful (it is remarkable the quality and semantic richness of the caricatures one sees these days: many equal those of Heartfield, witness to the rise of Nazism). *
Feb. 28. M., your idea of Noah’s ark is a good one, i.e. ”saving the salvageable,” the salvageable not being able to be, probably, the Pelobate frog of the Po river, although we would need a third arm to spring up: one for the Pelobate, one for manifestation, one for friendship, which seems to me at this point the last expession of a common humanity. I am thinking, however, of friendship à la Arendt, which stems from the joy of being together and not from compassion for the suffering of others, of the ”political” friendship that would allow a German and a Jew to maintain their relationship under Nazism (Arendt was certainly thinking of her intellectual and sentimental relationship with Heidegger).
Difference seems to be the condition for faithful friendship.
From Hannah Arendt’s lecture on the occasion of the award of the Lessing Prize, Humanity in Dark Times, Hamburg, September 28, 1959**: “History knows many periods in which the public space darkens and the world becomes so uncertain that people no longer ask politics except to pay due attention to their vital interests and their private freedom. You can call them ‘dark times’ (Brecht).”
[…] From the point of view of a humanity that has not lost the solid ground of reality, a humanity in the reality of persecution, they should have said to themselves: German, Jew, and friend. In all cases in which such a friendship existed at that time […]in all cases where it has been maintained in its purity, that is, without false complexes of guilt, on the one hand, and false complexes of superiority or inferiority, on the other, a spark of humanity has been produced in a world that has become inhuman.”
It is a thought born of the firsthand experience of the Jew as ”pariah.” There was a time when Arendt, as well as Scholem, believed in the possibility of a binational state in Palestine. Then that was not the case. And the pariahs are still there.
‘’Dans un essai de 1944, elle décrit le paria juif par une galerie de portraits, de Heinrich Heine à Bernard Lazare, de Charlie Chaplin à Franz Kafka. Les pages qu’elle consacre à l’humanité du paria sont parmi les plus belles de la littérature du 20 e siècle. Dépourvu d’un patrimoine personnel, le paria attribue une grande importance à l’amitié. Exclu de la sphère publique et privé de droits, il trouve un rayon de lumière dans la chaleur humaine de ses voisins. Exclu de toute forme de citoyenneté, il redécouvre l’humanité comme catégorie universelle, transcendant les lois et les frontières politiques. L’amour, la sensibilité, la générosité, le sens de la fraternité et de la solidarité, l’absence de préjugés, souligne Arendt, sont des qualités humaines qui, dans de sombres temps, trouvent un refuge parmi les parias, les proscrits et les ‘’sans droits’’. Par conséquent, les parias sont, depuis toujours, ennemis du pouvoir, anticonformistes, rebelles, créateurs, incarnations de l’esprit critique.’’
Enzo Traverso, ‘’Dark times, Judéité et politique chez Hannah Arendt’’, Revue française de science politique, 2009/5, vol. 59.
* ”Friend – Common joy, and not common sorrow, makes the friend.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Human Too Human, § 499, Milan, Adelphi, 1965.
** Published as a booklet by Raffaello Cortina in 2018.
*** A good bibliography on the question of intellectual friendship in Elena Laurenzi, ”Maria Zambrano and Elena Croce: when a friendship makes politics,” University of Barcelona (2016).
PS: some recent caricatures.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
