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  But even more chilling, if possible, is for some the possibility that this process might succeed, and effectively stabilise, and so accomplish the biblical promise of at last restituting our species to its natural, perfectly static, animal (if not downright “physical-chemical”) dimension, which it should never have left had it not been for eating the fruit of the forbidden tree of hominisation.

  Thus the artificial environment created by man himself, while losing his last vestiges of “naturalness,” would finally gobble up its creator, turned into mere and provisory gears of undefined confines inside the context of a bio-socio-economical “mechanism” capable of wiping out any collective identity, destiny, belonging, self-determination of its own cultural and biological future; and in fact any temptation to this effect.

  No different, in fact, is the aspiration to a System that should deprive us for good of the “unbearable responsibility” of man’s mastery of man, of his being artificer of his own making, in favour of impersonal mechanisms, of pre-established material and individual interests thus subtracted from freedom and arbitrariness.

  Massimo Fini writes:

  Were it only a matter of multinationals, of a ‘brains trust’ that steers the chaos, of some Trilateral or “Spectre,” things would be simpler. But the fact is that modern man, born into liberalism, individualism, democracy, has become a hostage of the industrial, technological, productive and economical mechanisms of his own making, and these have slipped out of the hands of the very sorcerer’s apprentices who pretend to control them. A mechanism that self-regulates exclusively as a function of its own growth and self-perpetuation, indifferent to the human condition. It is not the national and international, political and economical oligarchies that give it direction: they are only the fleeting profiteers and the lame bigheads at the rudder of a ship that goes its own way.[431]

  In any case, the para-biological cycles of the great Spenglerian cultures of the Second Man are gone; so too is the possibility for the races that expressed them and that they shaped to remain suited for a life inside the framework they have known for the last ten or fifteen thousand years.

  Indeed, it is Spengler, author, with the Decline of the West, of what he defines as the “Outline of a Morphology of World History,”[432] and analyst of the great cycles of so-called higher cultures, who admits that “time cannot come to a halt. There are neither wise reversions, nor cautious sacrifices. Only dreamers hope to find a way to salvation. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into these times and we must walk the road of our destiny all the way… This is greatness and what it means to be thoroughbred.”[433]

  Jünger adds: “Man, as Nietzsche had intuited, has arrived at the moment in history when he has no other alternatives than forgoing his own humanity or take ‘mastery over the world’.”[434]

  Yet, it is Nietzsche himself who shows us what this means: “What is ‘good for the individual’ is as illusory as what is ‘good for the species’. The former is not sacrificed for the latter. The species, seen from afar, is something just as insubstantial as the individual. The “conservation of the species” is only a consequence of the growth of the species, which is the same as a victory over the species, on the way to a stronger species. […] It is precisely by looking at every living being that one can best show that he does all he can not to conserve himself, but to become more than he is.”[435]

  Moreover, the overhumanist and postmodern tendency, from Nietzsche onward, in refusing the linear and providential vision of history that hallmarks religious and secular monotheism, with its promise of “peace” that would come from the end of the human adventure, substitutes the sphereto the circle,κύκλος, of pagan antiquity– a sphere whose surface is the present, which necessarily expands outwards but can rotate in any direction.[436]

  Of course, the “open” vision of history does not offer consoling certainties, and necessarily implies that history could end. It guarantees however that, until all is over, every point in time, every era can be taken as the moment of a new beginning, of a regeneration of history itself.

  The age of the transition to the “third man” and of the inevitable alterations of the biological foundations of life on the planet, an era in which our existence is destined to be lived in its historicity, and which for this reason is a primordial age where the confrontation once more will take place between, on the one hand, the paradisiacal aspiration for an end of history, diversity, conflicts, and “human presumption”; and, on the other, a new, possible dream of greatness on a previously unimagined scale, capable of projecting the freedom and will to power of the community of reference to “where no man has gone before.”

  The future will belong to whoever will express the strongest will, the deepest awareness.

  Stefano Vaj

  * * *

  [1] In the beginning was the deed.

  [2] The mechanism of repression, or refoulement, that Freud was not alone in describing explicitly, consists in the well-known human ability to ignore, forget and erase from one’s mind precisely the phenomenon that is “intolerable” for the individual or group it concerns. On the other hand it need not be remarked that it is by no means certain that removing a problem from one’s mind will cause it to go away…

  [3] See the site Clonaid, “the first human cloning company in the world,” at http//www.clonaid.com

  [4] Leon R. Kass, Human Cloning and Human Dignity. The Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Public Affairs/Perseus Books Group, New York 2002, p. XVII.

  [5] The expression, which stands for the radical opposition to biotechnology and transhumanism, does obviously refer to the English terrorist anti-industrialist movement of 1811-1812 (named after an idiot called Ned Ludd, of whom it is said that he had mistakenly broken two looms), who used to threaten machine-owners, and throw stones at the machines or break them with hammers.

  [6] Leon R. Kass, Human Cloning and Human Dignity. The Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics op. cit.

  [7] Telling homonymy between the planet and the “titanic” Lord of the Rings in the trilogy by John R.R. Tolkien, brought to the screen in the film by Peter Jackson (New Zealand 2001-2003), and before that in the animation movie by Ralph Bakshi, The Lord of the Rings (USA 1978).

  [8] See also the anthology edited by Gardner Dozois, Supermen. Tales of the Posthuman Future, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York 2002.

  [9] On this story are based the mediocre film versions of Erle C. Kenton (USA 1933), of Don Taylor (USA 1977) and of John Frankheimer (USA 1997), the latter with the Italian title L’Isola Perduta.

  [10] See Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism and the New Era of Immortality, Basic Books/ Perseus Book Group, New York 2003, p. 49. Another recent presentation of this kind of idea, at once less journalistic, of greater scientific depth, and in a way from “inside” the movement, is that by Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans. Choosing Our Genes, Changing Our Future, Mariner Books, New York 2003. A recent expression of this tendency is embodied by the Immortality Institute, to whom we owe the anthology in which many eminent scholars took part, The Scientific Conquest of Death, Libros en Red, Buenos Aires 2004. See also the website Geniebusters, “For a Biocentric Transhumanism,” by Lyle Burkhead; and also Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Penguin, New York 2000, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Rodale Books, New York 2004, and The Singularity Is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology, Viking, New York 2005. On the overhumanist, postmodern and European side, Yves Christen has concerned himself with matters of human life extension in Les années Faust, ou la science face au vieillissement, Sand, Paris 1991, known to insiders primarily for his many and fundamental contributions in matters of biopolitics published by the French quarterly Nouvelle Ecole.

  [11] On the by the way entirely improbable character of this enrolment in a humanist and anti-eugenicistic sense of …Plato, see what he says in the chapter of the eugenic temptati
on, as well as Hans F.K. Günther, Platon als Hüter des Lebens, Begenburg 1966. Italian edition: Platone custode della vita, Edizioni di Ar, Padova 1974.

  [12] From the preface by Lissa to the minor and deeply reactionary work recently compiled by one Cristian Fuschetto, Fabbricare l’uomo. L’eugenetica tra biologia e ideologia, Armando Editore, Rome 2004, with the gracious sponsorship of the Regione Campania and of the Province of Benevento (!), p. 8.

  [13] The use of the term “paradigm” to refer to the substratal elements of the scientific and philosophical epistemology of a certain time, and more generally to its own perception of the world, has its origin in the work of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press, 1962, and has since become part of media and marketing language, to the point of being so inflated that, it would sometimes seem, even the launching of a new washing powder can become a paradigm shift.

  [14] Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism, Arktos Media Ltd, 2010 (Italian version: Archeofuturismo, Società Editrice Barbarossa, Milan 1999). The term was then taken up, mostly to quote the homonymous work of the French author, by various commentators, among whom Alessandro Giuli, “Il corpo si ribella all’anima e progetta l’immortalità,” in Il Giornale of February 4th 2003.

  [15] Exemplary in this respect, although in terms of an ultimately pessimistic analysis (but never primitivistic or traditionalistic) is the short work of 1931 by Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (ult. ed. C.H. Beck Verlag, Monaco 1991). English edition Man and Technics. A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, University Press of the Pacific, 2002. The book has been published in Italian, translated by Angelo Treves, with the title L’Uomo e la macchina (Edizioni Il Corbaccio, Milan 1931 and 1933), then after the war with the title Ascesa e decline della civiltà delle macchine (Edizione del Borghese 1970), and again with the title L’Uomo e la macchina (Settimo Sigillo, Rome 1989). A commentary by Giorgio Locchi was published in Nouvelle Ecole 13 autumn-winter 1970, on the occasion of a French translation which was then being published (with the title L’homme et la machine, Gallimard, Paris 1969). In reality Spengler fully recognises the meaning of the adventure of the “second man,” his greatness and his present exhaustion, but finds it hard to imagine a “new beginning” and subsequent qualitative leap, and sees in it rather the end of history and of technology itself, within a framework of dehumanisation he disapproves of all he can and which he considers it a duty to actively oppose.

  [16] Thus, recently, Maria Teresa Pansera, L’uomo e i sentieri della tecnica: Heidegger, Gehlen, Marcuse, Armando Editore, Rome 1998.

  [17] Martin Heidegger, “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, ult. ed. Klein-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000. English translation: “Science and Reflection” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks 1982. Italian translation by G. Vattimo: “La questione della tecnica” in Saggi e Discorsi, Mursia, Milan 1967, p. 30.

  [18] Maria Paolo Fimiani, Umano, Post-Umano. Potere, sapere, etica nell’età globale, Editori Riuniti, Rome 2004.

  [19] See Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932), ult. ed. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1982. English translation: Worker: Dominion and Gestalt, State University of New York Press, 1992. Italian translation by Quirino Principe, L’Operaio. Dominio e forma, Guanda, Milan 2000. This translation retains the title that first made this work known in Italy by Julius Evola – in particular with L’Operaio nel pensiero di Ernst Jünger (1960), ult. ed. Edizione Mediterranee, Rome 2002 – certainly more evocative with its reference to “creative” work [opera], from the more literal “Lavoratore” (a word that in Italian is etymologically connected to its Latin root labor- that rather refers to the idea of prolonged suffering.) An important essay on this work, about which Heidegger had in 1934 organised a seminar that lasted almost a year, is also the one by Alain de Benoist, “Ernst Jünger: la Figure du Travailleur entre les dieux et les titans,” in Nouvelle Ecole no. 40, September-November 1983, p. 11-61. Italian translation: L’operaio tra gli dei e i titani. Ernst Jünger “sismografico” dell’era tecnica, Terzavia, Milan 2000. Of course Jünger, after the trauma of World War II, ended up adopting the substantially anti-technological and vaguely pastoral-nihilistic standpoint of his less known brother Friedrich Georg Jünger, a deviation already visible in On the Marble Cliffs; this however does not alter the interest of his work from the thirties; more problematic on the other hand is arguing, as does de Benoist, that there exists a fundamental consistency based on the fact that “he continued to ask the same questions, even though his own answer had changed over time”: if anything, a superior form of “consistency” would instead be the ability to continually ask oneself new questions. But de Benoist’s position on the evolution, or involution, of Jünger’s thought transparently gives away just how the French writer views his own gradual deflection from some of the positions he held in the seventies and eighties, not last with respect to technology and the great biopolitical issues. Besides, in his old age the selfsame Heidegger even praised Jünger’s alleged removal of the metaphysical representation underlying the aspect of the will to power “from the biological and anthropological domains that so mislead Nietzsche in his thinking” (! – see “The question of being” in Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Oltre la linea, Adelphi, Milan 1989 p. 119) It is difficult to assess today if Heidegger’s “jealousy” of Nietzsche played any part in such observations that would be due, in Giorgio Locchi’s hypothesis, to post-war “environmental impact” and to a “spontaneous weakening” of Heideggerian thinking in his old age.

  [20] Alain de Benoist, La Figure du travailleur entre les dieux et les titans, op. cit., p. 41.

  [21] See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ult.ed. Mondadori, Milano 1983.

  [22] From Wikipedia: Actual Idealism was a form of idealism, developed by Giovanni Gentile. To Gentile, his Actualism was the sole remedy to philosophically preserving free agency, by making the act of thinking self-creative and, therefore, without any contingency and not in the potency of any other fact.

  [23] On a purely political level, see the issues present in the first pages of Genesis and Structure of Society by Giovanni Gentile, University of Illinois Press, 1966. Original title: Genesi e struttura della società (for a recent edition, Le Lettere, Florence 2003), but even more so in The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, Forgotten Books, 2009. Original title Teoria generale dello spirit come atto puro (Le Lettere, Florence 2003, first published in 1916).

  [24] Maria Teresa Pansero, L’uomo e i sentieri della tecnica: Heidegger, Gehlen, Marcuse, op. cit., p.31. See also Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral, AULA-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1986. Italian translation by Ubaldo Fadini, Morale e Ipermorale. Un’Etica Pluralista, Ombre Corte, Verona 2001.

  [25] Arnold Gehlen, “Die Technik in die Sichtweise der philosophisher Anthropologie” in Anthropologische Forschung. Zur Selbstbegegnung und Selbstutdeckung des Menschen, Rohwolt, Hamburg 1961 (Italian translation “La tecnica vista dall’antropologia” in Prospettive Antropologiche, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1987, p. 127).

  [26] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, a Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, op. cit. Spengler’s anthropology specifically characterises man as an “inventive predator,” in whom the gaze that would describe the perception-of-the-world of the predating animal with respect to the dominating olfactory sense of herbivores, is made up of the thinking hand which handles the instrument, tool and weapon, and which transforms the theoretical domination of the carnivore over his territory into a practical domination of the world.

  [27] See Chiara Valentini, La Fecondazione proibita, Feltrinelli, Milan 2004. This journalist’s book, even though it is ideologically aligned with the mainstream, is nonetheless a mine of information and arguments about the hardly edifying history of the prohibitionist movement in matters of artificial insemination, and today of “assisted procreation”.

  [28] This for instance is well re
presented in ed. Giuseppe Garrone, Fecondazione extra-corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo? Gribaudi, Milan 2001. The book contains in substance the acts of the convention entitled “FIVET: pro o contro l’uomo?” organised in Turin in 2000 by the so-called Movimento per la Vita (“The Pro-Life Movement), better known for the signatures it collected on behalf of the abrogative referendum of Italian Law on abortion a few decades ago. FIVET (fecundation in vitro and embryo transfer) is synonymous, perhaps because it is viewed as vaguely pejorative, with IVF (in vitro fecundation), better known in Italian by the very “euphemism” (?) represented by the expression assisted procreation.

  [29] It should be remarked that here the Fundamentalism Prize, but perhaps also the Consistency Prize, go to Christian individualism, in particular the evangelical one but also the Catholics, when compared with the mostly communitarian leanings of Jewish and Islamic traditions, that tend to make a distinction between the position of the embryo and that of a member of society with full civic rights; this is stressed by Kass’ Italian homologue, that is Francesco Agostino, Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome and president of the Comitato Nazionale di Bioetica, in an interview published in Il Corriere della Sera of 15th January 2005, p. 5 (by Franca Porciani, “Il bioetico cattolico”). In reality, however, the official Catholic position only goes back to 1869, when Pius IX removed the traditional distinction between the “animated” foetus and the “non-animated” foetus and declared that God would infuse the soul into the ovule at the moment of its fertilisation (in the Jewish camp the opinion of the majority established instead this “moment” at one month after conception, and in the Islamic camp in the period between one and three months). For this reason the contributors to Giuseppe Garrone’s (ed.) Fecondazione extra-corporea. Pro o contro l’uomo?, op. cit., might be right to consider the hypothesis of some Catholics on the practice of artificial fecundation hypocritical, because of its problematic supposition of a “pre-embryonic” stage in the two weeks following conception. In any case this debate sounds absolutely “Talmudic” to whoever does not situate himself inside this same framework. For example, the “totipotent” status of embryonic cells in the first gestational period, so that a provoked scission of the embryo merely generates…. two monozygotic twins, creates a paradox as to the “moral meaning” of this kind of cloning. Indeed, when performed, what has happened? Has the soul also been cut in half? The original individual has been “killed,” and out of this two have been “born” in his place (a conclusion that would seem to be implied by Italian law since it punishes such a modest interference with twenty years’ imprisonment)? Moreover, it is certainly the case that the “program” contained in the DNA of the individual is, in a sense, “put in place” in the act of fecundation, but the individual will also be equally modulated by epigenetic mechanisms and by the environment, to begin with that of the uterus, a fact that it should not be necessary to remind anyone who is busy condemning “innatism”; and anyhow the same DNA preexists in its entirety in the individual gametes that will compose it. In a way, this kind of logic should lead to the conclusion found in Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life (United Kingdom 1983), in which a choir of nuns sings: “Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is a saint”.