''The Unnamable Present'' is a 2017 meditation by

Roberto Calasso Roberto Calasso (30 May 1941 – 28 July 2021) was an Italian writer and publisher. Apart from his mother tongue, Calasso was fluent in French, English, Spanish, German, Latin and ancient Greek. He also studied Sanskrit. He has been called "a l ...

on the re-emergence of nationalism and totalitarianism in global politics and culture in the context of an artificially intelligent contemporary world-system. The ninth volume of Calasso's nameless cycle of reflections which began with the ''Ruin of Kasch'', it is composed of two longer essays entitled "Tourists and Terrorists" and "The Vienna Gas Company" followed by a brief coda called "Sighting of the Towers."

Essays

;Tourists and Terrorists Calasso discusses the feedback relationship between the rise of

internet pornography Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the internet, primarily via websites, FTP servers peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The availability of widespread public access to the World Wide Web in late 1990s ...

and the rise of Islamic terrorism in the 21st century: how the unmanageable and inexorable spread of pornography in culturally Muslim countries helped to fuel a radical (and ultimately violent) reaction against the West, how the consumerist model of "tourist" culture denudes the existential vapidity of the secular Enlightenment, and how all of these elements have contributed to a moment of cultural and geopolitical breakdown characterized by

anomie In sociology, anomie () is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow. Anomie is believed to possibly evolve from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown ...

, broken epistemology and

existential threat A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction or permanen ...

by the time we arrive at the book's present in the immediate aftermath of the elections of a string of nationalist world-leaders including

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pe ...

, Duterte,

Orban Orban, also known as Urban ( hu, Orbán; died 1453), was an iron founder and engineer from Brassó, Transylvania, in the Kingdom of Hungary (today Brașov, Romania), who cast large-calibre artillery for the Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. ...

, Bolsinaro and others. When combined with the context of the book's second essay, Calasso's reflections on utilitarianism and the metaphysics of free-market economy in this chapter reveal thematic and structural affinities to the ''Dialectic of the Enlightenment'': the book comes to resemble an updated, condensed version of

Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( , ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critica ...

and Horkheimer's magnum opus laced with narratives, anecdotes and biographical sketches from the period in which that work was written. ;The Vienna Gas Company The title of this essay recalls a line from a grim joke told by

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...

in one of his

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

letters which presaged the nature and methods used to kill concentration camp victims in the (still ongoing and yet to be fully scaled in terms of its execution)

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

. The essay is an impressionistic evocation of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, with special emphasis on the perspectives of a wide variety of European intellectuals observing these events as they unfolded.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Unnamable Present 2017 non-fiction books Cultural globalization