Father, why have you abandoned me?

Photo: Ernesto Timor
Source: http://www.ernestotimor.com/pages/_01_unfixed00.html



Father, why have you abandoned me?
Trauma, Loss of Transcendence and
The Role of Heritage in Modern and Post-Modern Europe

Probably one of the biggest traumas of mankind has occurred in the modern West, with the “loss (death, to speak in Nietzschean terms) of God”, from the crisis of modern reason, symbolically inaugurated by the “Cartesian revolution”. The centrality of man, not of god, a logic of immanence, not of transcendence, are the “regimes” under which we live some centuries ago. These regimes have opened the way to science, to knowledge through experience and experiment, to the individual - and ultimately to the modern individualistic and solitary - being, to expressive art, etc. Modernity, as Foucault has stressed, has created the human sciences, the “normal man” as the rule, as long as has invented the madness (of those to be kept in the asylum), the complementary/opposite face of reason. So, human sciences are correlative of the “death of man” (humanism being the remain of the idea of man created at the image of god).
Thus Foucault has used the metaphor “archaeology” to this research into the “deep structures” of modernity that allowed the death of man and its emergence as an object of observation and discipline. Human sciences (archaeology – now in its common sense - included) are correlative of a disciplined, modernized, totalizing knowledge which is the counterpart of an expansion of capitalism and its vocation to colonize all the planet through an ideology and practice of “exploration”, “exploitation”, or (to put it more softly) collaboration and aid. Visuality, visitability are now the main goals of any parcel of the planet, to exist and to attract visitors, tourists, travellers. Mobility has become the greatest industry/activity of our times. By the same token, heritage – that plus-value that gives any region, anything its identity and therefore its attractiveness – and the cult of the past as nostalgia are massif symptoms of a “fundamental lack”. The same with the return of rituals, informal religions, new tribalisms, violence and terrorism. Our look at things is As Warhol has previewed, the world become a museum/commercial centre, and the museum/commercial centre has transformed into a world. Modern consumers circulate like infants or even loonies from place to place, from experience to experience, in an eternal quest for fulfilment. Modern reason has unfolded a sort of monstrosity: the “normalized person”, the active “citizen” has over his/her shoulders the weight of a enormous pressure. But apocalypses have still much to wait. As long as a minority keeps in control of legal systems of inclusion/exclusion and a “dark side” of the general system maintains the rest of the world “functioning”. So that a happy few may aspire to the sublime.