Events

Abstract

The collapse of civilisations into recurring dark ages, Vico says, is always characterised by ‘two great maladies’  … ‘the perfect tyranny of anarchy and the unbridled liberty of free peoples’ [in our time we see the anarchy of de-regulation and the unbridled liberty of hyper-individualized ‘freedom’]. These great maladies become manifest in three forms (i) the return of monarchy, by authoritarian demagogues who would impose order by violence; (ii) the declining civilization becomes subject to conquest [we have already entered a post-Western world order, and the ‘democratic age of men’ is eclipsed by techno feudalist plutocracy] (iii) we become bestial again –solitary, competitive, un-cooperative, ‘living like beasts, crowded together but divided amongst ourselves.’ Today, everywhere, institutions of law and justice, treaties and social contracts are under siege, usurped and transgressed, and our apotheosis is the subject envisaged by the Marquis de Sade: the model of Man embodied by Musk, Theil and the billionaire techno-feudalists is the ‘libertine isolist’ with narcissistic-psychotic tendencies, who lives in ‘the Beyond’, outside all limits, ‘where transgression itself is the only law.’

Today we see Vico's historical ricorso to barbarism. But, as we also learn from Vico (echoing Plato and anticipating Yeats) we have been through this moment of liminal collapse and the return of barbarism already -indeed many times! and myth, poetry, literature and art can help us to remember how to imagine how we might endure and survive our dangerous times. In emergency conditions that seem to demand entirely new 'disruptive' thinking we need the presence of mind to know that ‘imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered, and ingenuity is simply the elaboration of things remembered’ (Vico);  ‘imagination is memory’ (Joyce) and ‘thinking is remembering and rearranging what we have known all along ... like tidying a room’ (Wittgenstein). The forms that we are in need for a metanoia are already available to us, for ‘The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us. That is why thinking holds to the coming of what has been, and is remembrance’ (Heidegger). I will explore these themes of memory and imagination, law, limit and the renewal of social contracts with  Ancient, Medieval, and Modern illustrations.  

Bios

Kieran Keohane k.keohane@ucc.ie is a professor with the Department of Sociology & Criminology, UCC. PhD York Canada (1994) founding member of the international research network on the Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization, with publications in social theory, cultural analysis, cities and public health.

Ray Griffin RGRIFFIN@wit.ie  is a senior lecturer in South East Technological University (SETU) Dept. of Management & Organisation, working at the interface of business and society, specializing in strategic management, experiences and organisation of unemployment, the labour market and contemporary forms of work.

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