Finkielkraut
and Giussani
Event as Encounter
The Battle Against Utopia
What Fr Giussani said in 1976 emerges as very timely now in
the thought of
the
French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut: “Our temptation is utopia. What is
new is presence.”
By Luigi Amicone
Silvio Guerra and Alessandra Rustici, our friends in Paris,
may remember the first time we met the Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut.
It happened
about ten years ago. He told us to come to a brasserie across from Radio France,
and he gave us a long interview, I believe the first that was published in Traces.
The question at the time centered around, among other things, his impassioned
rediscovery of Charles Péguy, whom in effect he had “pulled out
of the ghetto” (cf 30Giorni, June 1992) and whom he indicated as “one
of the greatest thinkers in the modern world” (cf Le mé contemporain,
1992). Well, we are also indebted to Finkielkraut for a certain definition of “event” as
method of knowledge because, he says, “if we do not save the event, this
something that bursts in from outside, we completely lose contact with reality” (Tracce,
December 1994). Finkielkraut himself told us how he arrived at this “skeleton
key,” which is not only a philosophical one: “An amorous encounter,
first of all. And then, reading–Lévinas, Arendt, Péguy.”
So, “event,” “encounter”–aren’t these the
very same words that make up the charism and historical experience of our Movement?
There is more. As our association over the years became the opportunity for interchange
(see the interviews in Traces and the notes on the recent meeting with the philosopher
organized by the Cultural Center of Milan, published in this issue), we discovered
that a certain observation Finkielkraut offers us about the times we live in
surprisingly corresponds with a judgment that marked and marks a formidable chance
for an always-new beginning for our Movement.
Return to reality
How can we not sense the kinship between the “battle” in which Fr
Giussani involved us starting in 1976 and the one that Finkielkraut today identifies
and combats as the “triumphant utopia” whose violent claim is to
free us “from reality as given” and, above all, from “the given
as present”? Finkielkraut told Traces, “An existential conversion
is needed.” We are still there, in that moment in 1976 when Fr Giussani
erupted in the midst of a group of university students, without any sort of calculation
on his part (the Movement at that time was in any case a mature reality and incisive
in Italian society, and he could very easily have confirmed and kept up with
it as happens in all associations, Catholic and non-Catholic, headed by a good
chaplain or an able social organizer), he offered his own companionship as a
man who lives and judges his own life against the touchstone of “the triumphant
utopia.” The utopian challenge is also among us, today. Paolo Mieli noted
it well, and presents it again today precisely as it was, even if he uses different
words: “Liberation then, peace now.” In 1976, on the eve of the worst
years of civil terrorism in Italy, Fr Giussani said to the university students: “Our
temptation is utopia. What I mean by utopia is something–considered good
and right–to be brought into being in the future, whose image and scheme
of values are created by us.” He continued, “In 1954, we burst onto
the scene of the state schools,” and still “our purpose is presence.” In
his historical analysis, evaluating the action of those who left the Movement
in order to follow their own instinctive reaction to the stimuli emerging from
1968 on, Giussani observes, “What did they betray? The presence. The project
had taken the place of presence; utopia had knocked it away. What happened from
1963-1964 up to the explosion of 1968 was a process of adaptation and giving
in to the environment; a reactive presence was brought into being, thus no longer
a true, original presence.”
What is new is presence
The charism saved us, yet again, Giancarlo Cesana told us. And it literally saved
our lives. Because this is the way it is: utopia is a boundless presumptuousness
and a grand ball on the Titanic, while “What is new is presence as awareness
of carrying something…. What is new is the presence of this event of new
affection and new humanity…. What is new is not the avant-garde, but the
Remnant of Israel…. What is new is not a future to be pursued; it is not
a cultural, social, and political project. What is new is presence….”
“
Presence, only presence,” the early French protesters chanted as their
slogan in the turmoil of 1968 that Finkielkraut and our Movement went through.
From then on, that beginning ended up first pushed aside and then immediately
occupied by the “triumphant utopia.” “La mort a saisi le vif”?
Does death get the upper hand over life? No, it doesn’t. In fact, after
due consideration, we can say that, even though we are not morally superior to
any of our fellow men, this beginning of truth and freedom was literally and
totally saved in our history. And it endures, in history, thanks to the Movement’s
charism and to “events” of people like Alain Finkielkraut.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
said, “I hate tyranny; I consider it the source
of all the evils of humankind.” This is a way to give evil an origin
that is no longer natural, but historical and social. Evil was no longer in
man but in society. He thus opened up a boundless career in politics, because
his purpose at this point became that of eliminating evil from the face of
the earth by radically changing the conditions of human social life. But above
all, Rousseau located the origin of all perversions, of all human crimes in
domination, oppression. We are greatly subjected to this thought today. To
be Rousseau’s followers means always being able to go back to the original
crime… We can see things also from another point of view. The spontaneous
tendency of ideology is to distribute human beings into two categories: on
one side are those who act and thus are responsible for their actions, and
therefore can be accused; on the other are those who react, and the cause of
their actions remains outside themselves, thus they are innocent. They enjoy
the immunity of the prefix “re-”: reaction, resistance, rebellion,
revolt. The sociology prevailing today is inscribed in the framework of this
…
At the base of modernity is a sort of resentment toward the world as it has
been given to us, a resentment toward the given. Hannah Arendt made birth the
ontological paradigm of the event. She recalls, in this estrangement of the
condition of modern man, the Bible formula “unto us a child is born,” giving
it a sort of secular, worldly translation: the baby is a miracle. Today, however,
we sense that the hypermodern utopia is winning out over miracles by a long
stretch. Is man fated to live in the midst of what he himself produces, or
should we not properly side with the given?
(From the meeting with Alain Finkielkraut at the Centro Culturale di Milano
on January 20, 2003)
What
is new is presence as awareness of carrying something definitive–a
definitive judgment on the world, the truth of the world and the human–that
is expressed in our unity. What is new is presence as awareness that our unity
is the instrument for the rebirth and liberation of the world.
What is new is the presence of this event of new affection and new humanity;
it is the presence of this beginning of the new world that we are. What is
new is not the avant-garde, but the Remnant of Israel, the unity of those for
whom what happened is everything and who await only the manifestation of the
promise, the realization of what is inside what happened.
What is new is not, then, a future to be pursued; it is not a cultural, social,
and political project. What is new is presence. And being a presence does not
mean not expressing oneself. Presence, too, is expression.
Utopia uses as its method of expression speech, projects, and the anxious search
for instruments and organizational forms. Presence has as its method of expression
an operative friendship, gestures revealing a different way of being a protagonist,
one that enters everything, making use of everything (school desks, studies,
the attempt at university reform, etc)–gestures that are, above all,
gestures of real humanity, ie, of charity. A new reality is not built by speeches
or organizational projects, but by living gestures of new humanity in the present
(to be sure, a gesture like the attempt to elect to the Faculty Administrative
Councils people who help everyone in a human way, not political adventurers
or incompetents, for example, must become a gesture of charity).
In short, if we yield to the temptation of utopia, we compete with the others,
on their same level and ultimately with their same methods; in being a presence,
conversely, we develop a critical capacity, the capacity to bring everything
into the experience of communion that we are living, into the sense of the
Mystery that has burst into our life, the sense of the liberating Reality that
we have encountered.
(Luigi Giussani, “From Utopia to Presence,” Traces, n. 11,
2002, pp VIII-IX)