Italy – (Ever Further) Towards the Abyss [01]. The Example of Alessandro Giuli, the New Appointed Minister of Culture

Soon after his nomination of the new Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, who was appointed on 6 September 2024 to replace the resigning Gennaro Sangiuliano (after an affair with a young woman), set out his ministry's policy guidelines during a hearing before the Culture Committees of the House and Senate, in the Sala del Mappamondo at the House.

The speech was much in the public commented on because of its extreme crypticity: Giuli abounded in the use of philosophical, literary and lofty quotations, and several people on social networks compared his words to the famous “supercazzola”, the nonsense speech made famous by the character played by Ugo Tognazzi in the film “Amici miei”.

Giuli began his speech with a paraphrase of the German philosopher Hegel: “Knowledge is one's own time learned through thought: Those who set out to imagine an orientation for national cultural action cannot but start from taking measures from a world that has entered the accomplished dimension of technology and its accelerations. The movement of things is so whirling, so sudden, so radical in its implications and applications that even the system of cognitive processes of people and not only of the last generations has begun to change with it.”

Then the speech of Giuli got darker and darker, and after all he had anticipated that “a slightly more theoretical part” was about to begin: “In the face of this paradigm shift, the fourth epochal revolution in history outlining an ontology in tune with the permanent revolution of the global infosphere, the risk one runs is twofold and specular. Passive enthusiasm, which removes the dangers of hyper-technologisation, and conversely the defensive apocalypticism that regrets a bygone image of the world, wielding an ideology of the crisis that is perceived as a trial of technology and the future understood as a threat.”

After this passage, Giuli asked: “Have we therefore fallen into the age of sad passions?” He immediately answered himself: “No.”

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