Not Fear but Hope in the Apocalypse
Matteo Mandarini, University of Leicester
‘I confess that, at this point, in face of the way the world is going, I am more interested in the prophecy of the end than in the utopia of the beginning’
(Mario Tronti)
In this presentation, I would like to reflect on the notion of ‘decisionism’ in modern political thought by focussing on some recent texts by Mario Tronti. The question with which I shall be concerned is that of the relation between politics and fate. In contrast to the pervasive thinking on the state of exception today, Tronti argues that the danger is precisely in the objectivity of the present as a fate which subsumes the future, and excludes politics, decision and exception. When we decry the substitution of politics with management, is it not the crushing of Machiavellian virtù by the implacable power of fortuna that we condemn? In such a condition, Tronti argues, we should be driven not by ‘fear but hope in the apocalypse’.