Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Interpretation of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

1 A philosophical interpretation of the twentieth century: what does such an expression refer to and what kind of weight do we want to give it? We could of course provide two different and in certain ways even opposing responses. The first is the one offered by the classic philosophical tradition of the twentieth century, which is to say the one supplied by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre (if we limit ourselves to only its most illustrious figures). For them the events of contemporary history are interpreted with a key supplied by philosophy itself, the only one available that might express what is essential for history. Whether the key is found in the crises of European sciences, in the unfolding of nihilism, or in the liberation of oppressed peoples—if we stick to the authors I’ve cited—in each case the twentieth century is understood according to the demands of a given philosophy whose task it is to make meaningful the events of the last century and to organize historical phenomena so that they move forward in an orderly fashion. A relation, therefore, is established between philosophy and history that is, so to speak, impositive. Only philosophy can impart an overarching sense to a series of facts that would otherwise be meaningless. The first response, which produced analyses of monumental importance, is answered by another, one that overturns its logic. Rather than subordinating the movement of history to the logic of a given philosophy it sees events as consisting of elements that are themselves philosophical. Meaning is no longer stamped on events from the outside, that is, from a point that coincides with the philosophical perspective of the person look-