Three economies of transcendence
American society has become a more gerardian society overall, probably from the last the Great Recession because of the tension, because of the anger and the conflicts that had not been carefully addressed.
Michael Lewis:I tend to flinch when I see the word neoliberal invoked in philosophy as if it were an incontestable reading of our current situation.
Andrea Righi:Hello, everyone. My name is Andrea Rigi. I'm professor of, European studies and Italian at Monash University in Australia, Melbourne, Australia. I work mostly on critical theory, Italian thought, psychoanalysis and feminism. I published with Minnesota a couple of works already.
Andrea Righi:I co edited the volume with Professor Cesare Casarino on Italian feminism on diatima, the school of thought diatima, and then a monograph on what I call neoliberal digitality. And out of that monograph, I started to develop a series of talks, online talks and interventions that brought me to this shorter piece called Three Economies of Transcendence.
Michael Lewis:Thanks, Andrea. That was great. I'm Michael Lewis. I'm a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. It's in The United Kingdom.
Michael Lewis:I often think that it's the, northern outpost of the Roman empire because we're just next to Hadrian's Wall. And, I live just outside of that empire. But, I edit the Journal of Italian Philosophy, and this is how Andrea and I know each other, because he's written two essays, very important essays, particularly on the Italian philosopher, Emanuele Severino, among others, in the Journal of Italian Philosophy. I'm going to recommend the listeners look at those two essays as well, one from 2023 and one from just this last year, 2025, because they're very intimately related to the book that we're discussing. And indeed, at least the first essay is explicitly referred to by Andrea in the book.
Michael Lewis:But as for myself, I focus on phenomenology, Heidegger, Italian thought, particularly Giorgio Agamben, who's gonna come up a lot, I think.
Andrea Righi:Yeah. I think this is a great opportunity, this kind of format that 4Runner has. And it was in conversation actually with Lee Pennywork about, as I was developing these ideas, you know, the first essay on Severino came out in the Journal of Italian Studies. And this format allows you, I think, to do something in career of a writer that you want to do, that is to say, do not go for the full monograph right away and get bogged down into the massive weight that that involves. Even though you're a seasoned writer, you always hit the same kind of work and kind of obstacles.
Andrea Righi:And instead think in a kind of a long essay form, perhaps in a little more simplistic version, because you don't have to go into the grainy details of all the elements that that you want to that you have to discuss to come up with a with a general framework. And he said, present that framework. Present that framework in a legible and concise kind of way. It has great merit. I mean, at least for me, it allowed me to to to to write this piece in in a a much easier way and with with great pleasure as well.
Andrea Righi:And and that also produced, you know, further areas of research because I knew I couldn't go into the detail. But, but but by looking at that kind of idea, then, of course, I would go out and then perhaps write a shorter essay more dedicated to to that specific passage. And then and then perhaps that will come back as a part of the larger work. But but in general, so this is this was a the framework is is very simple. I was thinking about what it is what it is that we are doing today with the with the challenge of climate change.
Andrea Righi:What are the obstacles that are preventing us from really, embarking in a systemic, transformation of society? And, of course, as you can see, this question is already huge by itself. And if I had to write a full monography, it would have really been a multi year process. But here is the idea for me was to kind of give a simple version of three major elements that I see at place. They call them economies.
Andrea Righi:Three economies, three discursive symbolic dimensions, of beliefs, psychological almost mechanisms that prevents us from really stage this massive change. And the first, I call it an economy of rank, and we can go into the detail, but it's mostly study of Rene Girard. That was one of the sources of this project. I started to, from the previous book, was talking about the sacrificial economy in our digital approach to the digital world. You know, some people were noticing that I didn't write a single line about the hernias Girard, and so being a good student as a good professor is a good student.
Andrea Righi:So I went and did my my homework, and I found interesting interesting insight. So that's the economy of rank. The second is an economy, what I call an economy of infinite valorization, as a system that pushes us almost willingly to participate in the expansion of the economy that is mostly geared toward extractivist practices. And then finally, what I call a phallic economy of time, this is really my understanding of Emanuele Severino's philosophy reframed through the examples of some Italian and not only Italian feminists, feminists that belong to the thought of sexual difference or French Italian connection as well in there. And so, you know, three economies and basically three three major concepts.
Andrea Righi:One is a short theory of the subject, because the economy of rank is a theory of the subject and desire. The theory of, we can call it space too, because the economy of infinite valorization is weighing, you know, it's also a psycho geographic space that we inhabit. And then time, of course, as as as the other third element, very classical approach to philosophy of subject space and time. That's that those are the fundamentals you want to have in mind as you go about it.
Michael Lewis:Brilliant. Thanks, Andrea. That's a great introduction. So I should say, I forgot to say before the reason I was going on about being at the northern limits of the, Roman empire was because I I thought you were in Italy, Andrea. Is that is that where you are at the moment?
Andrea Righi:That is right. At the time at this time, yes.
Michael Lewis:You're not in Rome by any chance, are you?
Andrea Righi:No. No. We're not too far from Rome. Like, we are at the border, like, the, you know, Umbria was unmaxed by the the Romans, and they but they retained their identities to this day. So it's there's always an empire at periphery, and we are the Christian empire.
Michael Lewis:That's almost as good. It would have been perfect if you were in Rome, but that's almost as good. I I genuinely I wanted to say I genuinely don't ask these questions from a position of superiority. I don't think I've understood everything. Particularly, the material on money and a lot of the material on neoliberalism is is just something I genuinely don't understand.
Michael Lewis:But I'm gonna start with some general questions about imminence and transcendence and this whole terminology. Well, I suppose the first thing I thought when I was reading this, was that you were going to pit infinity against finitude. So in other words, you're I thought you were going to be mainly putting infinity on the side of what you call neoliberalism. And what I thought was going to happen was that you were going to say, here you have, this idea of infinite growth, an infinitely long possibility for extracting and so on and so on. And on the other side, I thought I was going to see something like not infinite growth, but finite growth or even limits to growth or degrowth.
Michael Lewis:And I'm not entirely sure that really happens in the end because what's so curious about and so interesting about what you do is in some sense what ends up happening is you translate this opposition between neoliberalism and whatever you want to posit against it. You translate that opposition in terms of transcendence on the one hand and imminence on the other. And although there's lots of little details we'll have to go through and lots of little things I don't don't understand about Girard and so on and and all sorts of other people, Vernault and eventually Severino and Caballero and Arendt, I mean, maybe I'm jumping in too quickly with a really big question, but we have to focus on this notion of imminence. I study Agamben, so maybe this is coloring my initial attempt to understand this opposition. But is there some sense in which when you talk about imminence, you're talking about life?
Michael Lewis:And transcendence is every sort of sovereign power which would exceed life and come to somehow control or distort life. Mean, is there any just as a sort of starting position, I mean, maybe you can say why transcendence and imminence is a particularly good way, or or simply you can say why transcendence and imminence was the way you chose to translate the opposition that you're positing, if it is an opposition. But also, yeah, I mean, maybe is there anything in that way of describing transcendence versus imminence as imminence is life with all its potentiality, and transcendence is sovereign power and control that comes to diminish it in some way. Because you did talk about in the introduction about systems of control that emanate from transcendence. But is that is there anything in that way of putting the problem?
Andrea Righi:Mike, you absolutely nailed the point. It it I I would completely agree that my understanding of imminence is geared towards the notion of life, whereas transcendence is this is a point that Severino makes is is a kind of and others is a fear of of death and a fear of harm that produces institutions that wants to protect life, but instead they they end up undermining it, deport deportienciating it, and hurting it as we see today in, you know, with the multi crisis that we are living. So that is absolutely correct. I would also say the contrast between finitude and infinity, it is something that I I am elaborating a little bit more now as well. The most direct answer would be falling onto the the idea of that finitude limit is the right way to go.
Andrea Righi:And I'm not saying that in in when we when we are discussing the the climate impact, there there are some I know there there's a big argument for diminishing our consumption rates, for stopping fossil fuel, extraction and and so forth. And the paradigm of the growth is certainly one that can, be applied to that. However, from a larger kind of theoretical point, understanding, reality, substance, whatever you want to call it, as as a dimension that has limits, and that is somehow ordered, that is somehow harmonic, that historically, historically pushes us back into the trap of transcendence. We have the division between good and evil. We have the division between man and and woman.
Andrea Righi:That's that's kind of, I think that's kind of dangerous, and it does reactivate the mechanism of, transcendence. So the infinite dimension of life, I think, is the best way to we have to understand our current, you know, life in general. It is also a way to critique an understanding of neoliberalism as infinite growth, infinite extraction, infinite, you know, infinite expansion. Because this infinity of life has no direction, is not finalistic. It is completely unexpected.
Andrea Righi:It is nonlinear. However, it does carry enormous potential, even in the worst of time, the darkest hour. When everything seems to have been set and closed, we need to remember that there is an infinity in our social dimension, which comes probably from the natural world and the animals that we are as well, from our psychological psychoanalytic libidinal dimension that always allows for a breakthrough for innovation is good innovation. It's not the innovation. The innovation we see today, every single innovation we see today, starting from our job, where they ask us to improve, whatever measurement of, educational goal we have, or the next report we have or the next software we have to use so that everything is better coordinated, more efficient.
Andrea Righi:That's not real innovation. The innovation is the unexpected that breaks, that breaks the boundaries and reshapes life, hopefully in a more democratic, collective and collective way. So on the side of life, have infinity, you have a social infinity that has always been there, and that is, you know, it can engender a future. Again, this innovation does not produce future. If you if you look at the the big tech bros as they call them today, and but they are all very sad about the fact that we are we don't have a future anymore.
Andrea Righi:Like, is they keep asking this question. What is the future that we imagine in nineteen fifties and sixties, like the flying cars, whatever their differential future? They are at the forefront of the technological innovation, and they feel this lack of a future. Right? If they can't do it, that means that really, the logic that they're following is broken, is not producing the the the new that we need.
Michael Lewis:That's great. I mean, again, I don't know if this is tangential, but just to try to understand this notion of transcendence a bit more. When you talk about Paolo Verno, you talk about transcendent institutions as if institutions, which they certainly do, transcended life. Is the idea of an institution one way of understanding not just transcendence, but the way transcendence emerges from immanence or from life? Because this is another part of, I think, what you what you're saying in some places, which is that somehow all there is is immanence, and transcendence is always going to be something that erupts from within it.
Michael Lewis:Are institutions of any interest to you? I mean, or is that just a little aside?
Andrea Righi:It is a big topic. And again, I agree that, you know, all there is is immanence, and then transcendence bubbles up. And and and then we live in that kind of bubble for a while until it pops again. You know, I I come from a tradition that that sort of emphasizes the idea of self management and and collective organization. I I come from a not just a philosophical background, but even a social background.
Andrea Righi:I was born in in the near Regimilia, which is a city in a region that that has a long history of leftist communal engagement from a educational point of view too. The the the most advanced experiments in early childhood education happened in the town of Regimilla. And they started out around this kind of reflection of, you know, how can we liberate life, governing, however, the mechanisms that that we need to, not just to survive, but to prosper as a community, right? So I haven't dedicated much, you know, much time on the issue of institution as positive now as a new, I think a new book on institution, which now that I'm in Italy, I should probably buy and bring it back to Australia with me and think it and think about it. So far, I've been interested in the negative transcendent institution, mostly and how they and how they perpetrate not just a system of control, but a willing control of self-servitude, which is kind of remarkable, the way in which we kind of embrace it, and we farther it.
Andrea Righi:This is where psychoanalysis comes into play in the notion of the other as a kind of symbolic entity that pushes us to always, you know, participate, improve, that makes us feel guilty in debt to whatever institution that we are facing, and makes us, always pay more, work more and so forth. That's that's and that has ancient truth that I am a modernist, but I am studying, you know, medieval philosophy recently. I started to study medieval philosophy to understand really how this symbolic space is created and how it functions.
Michael Lewis:No. That's great. Think I'll come back to the question of institutions just because when we start talking about birth and this infinite metanomic series of births, which you use as a way to understand or to modify perhaps Severino's understanding of eternity. It just I mean, one of the things I think I had in the back of my mind there was that there is another way for life to endure beyond the individual lifespan. And the institution is a way that that's been thought.
Michael Lewis:And this has some relation to the notion of history as well, I think the endurance of memories in some sort of objective form. And I wonder if one could say more in the end about the notion of institution. It may be a more positive sense of institutions than the negative, more life denying ones that I think you were focusing on. Shall we move on to chapter one and talk about this is the economy of rank, and we're talking about subjectivity and desire and Rene Girard in particular. I want to hear more about this notion of neoliberalism.
Michael Lewis:I suppose as a philosopher, I always have some difficulty with the idea that I mean, this seems to be an empirical thesis or it's sort of an empirical I don't know. I I think I had the same reaction to this notion of climate change as well. I mean, I wonder what status all of these statements about climate change and about neoliberalism, about our present moment, about crisis and catastrophe. I wonder what status they have. I mean, in some case, they're meant to be, I suppose, in the case of climate change, say, natural scientific statements, which are inherently revisable and refutable.
Michael Lewis:At least they're subject to refutation. My concern is always that I mean, philosophy tries to deal with the apodictic, the absolutely certain, the necessary, the universal. And I I suppose I I'm always interested in and worried about the possibility of incorporating empirical data within philosophy or empirical statements or statements which are contestable. I tend to flinch when I see the word neoliberal invoked in philosophy as if it were an incontestable reading of our current situation. And I would say the same about crisis catastrophe, about climate change, and which could be taken to mean any number of things, but it seems to me, there are certain empirical natural scientific elements to it, which are always contestable.
Michael Lewis:I would find it difficult as a philosopher to speak with such certainty about either climate change or neoliberalism, as if they were just established certainties.
Andrea Righi:Yeah. Yeah. No. No. It's an excellent question.
Andrea Righi:I mean, the way I came to philosophy theory in general, and that the way I kind of felt freer to think, I started to read authors that legitimized a personal engagement with the problem that you are facing. That is to say, this is a lesson from the school of sexual difference, Giotima School, is very important for feminists and for women in general is to start from your own condition, to start from yourself. And so neoliberalism, if I want to trace the moment which I I I realized that I wanted to write, I wanted to teach and discuss these things, it was at the turn of the last century when I was involved in the climate struggles in Europe, the no global movement in Europe that was contesting the direction that our economies were going. And it's remarkable how the things as young kids were saying, can be certainly contested, but they're pretty pretty close in terms of the impact that our economies had today. That became relevant to me.
Andrea Righi:The idea that I can better understand, not just individually my condition, but the things that I see around me, the community I live in, the transformation of work. You know, we are from a generation that saw the transformation of work before our eyes because my father and mother, they already they still work in a kind of Fordist economy with a clear division, mostly clear division between working time and non working time. And I remember growing up, we were some of our teachers were telling us like this is not going to last, you're gonna have to be able to be flexible, you have to be able to change and and be versatile and creative. And so so the new economy that was coming up, the economy of that involved a mixing of working time, no working time, a full involvement of the intellectual, sensitive, physical capabilities that you had in the work that you do. This is, you know, this is true for us as professors, but it's true for our friends who are not professors, and they, you know, they're involved in works that long, that last very long, and they drain them, because they're using every single bit of their, of their body and their mind and so forth.
Andrea Righi:So the paradigm of neoliberalism for me, and you can discuss, is it post Fordism, is neoliberalism, but there's some concepts and some of them I point out that are really important for me to understand, you know, our life today, that that make it relevant as a concept, as not not so much as a economic only, economic concept, or not so much as a natural science concept, mostly as a lived experience, I think. To go back to your idea of life, the reason why we're doing this is because it's our life. We are involved in it. And it's consequential, at least at the cognitive level. I don't I'm not saying you have to go out and do a revolution.
Andrea Righi:But at least from a cognitive perspective, and the way which we relate to the world by understanding this is this is important. And that's why I base most of my work on on that. Yeah.
Michael Lewis:Thank you. That's great. Well, so let's talk about Rene Girard and how his work relates to neoliberalism. So, I mean, you draw an empirical connection between Peter Thiel and you say Rene Girard is a teacher of of his. There is some direct I mean, I always think it is quite interesting how there really are philosophers.
Michael Lewis:I didn't know Rene Girard was one of them, but I know there are philosophers, people like Leo Strauss and so on, and who have, you know, had this very direct impact on the way in which at least American politics, but yes, a lot of this politics we've described as neoliberal, actually unfolded. And so there is always philosophy in the background, or quite often there's philosophy in the background of actual politics. But I don't think you want to place that much weight on that particular empirical connection. So then so let's talk about Rene Girard's theory. I mean, you use it to illuminate something about the nature of neoliberalism, and I wonder if you could clarify a bit more what that is.
Michael Lewis:And I have a nice a beautiful you have a beautiful summary at the end. I think it's quite near the end of the chapter. I'm quoting you. In the economy of rank, transcendence operates both as an imperative to dominate others via the possession of the desired object. So this is the mimetic theory of desire of jiroir.
Michael Lewis:And so transcendence operates both as an imperative to dominate others via the possession of the desired object and as an injunction to preserve the group via the othering of a sacrificial victim. This is the scapegoat in Girard's theory, and this is, yeah, and this is fascinating. I suppose in terms of the I mean, I'd love you to say something about the the the mimetic notion of desire and how that illuminates the nature of neoliberalism. But, also, I can't remember where the scapegoat comes in there into the neoliberal mindset.
Andrea Righi:Perfect. Thank you. It's it's yeah. So Renjira is a fascinating author, very powerful in a way to examine, certain mechanisms that that are all about rivalry, though. And this idea that my mises, he turns mimesis as a powerhouse for rivalry.
Andrea Righi:So Stanford is the connection, because he was teaching at Stanford, and then he brought up a series of intellectuals, some of them who then went into other areas such as, you know, financial capital or or the digital world. My means is, in the way to explain it very easy, and that's how I use it to my students is Gerard is a great author to use to study literature so that you, you get something spicy about literature without getting, you know, all the general theoretical and historical background, and then you can introduce that. But anyway, it's it's a great author to study, mafia films, for instance, and, all sorts of epic, like, Ariosto like, narrative, literature. Why? Because Girard begins by saying, we live in sameness.
Andrea Righi:As human groups, we are all mixed up into this sameness, which naturally we despise. We don't want to be the same as others. So we select at a certain point, either nature does it for us or we do, we do it. We select an object that is going to work as a status symbol, that is going to elevate us, from the rest of the group. And the more this object, draws some, attention and is collected by the others, the more we feel that we have made the right decision.
Andrea Righi:That produces the push to imitate each other. In this imitation, we start to have a conflict because, obviously, this object has to be singular object. But, again, it it loses the status of an object. It's simply a symbolic position because, it is an element, an entity that is selected, and then it becomes the same for everybody. So it's not singular in any case.
Andrea Righi:If everybody wants the same thing, it's it's the same thing for everybody. It's just this position of distinction. If we occupy this position of distinction, we dominate the rest of the group. Now, Girard also says that in this process, there is violence, there's conflict, and the community starts to break apart, and you start to have this kind of internal struggle and civil war. When that happens, you have stress in the group, and you have a feeling system.
Andrea Righi:Similarly, to the object of desire, now you select a scapegoat, you select somebody, something that carries the blame, everybody agrees again, so it's not singular, it's not really, in fact, the scapegoat is not really, guilty of anything. The important thing is that the group decides that it's guilty. And that becomes susceptible of the anger and tension. And then you go through sacrificial mechanisms that have to be institutionalized, they have to be, kind of ritualized. And and that purges the group from the evil that the group itself have brought on themselves, right?
Andrea Righi:So some scholars, not only I've said that Donald Trump presidency is a particular Girardian presidency. But I would argue that American society has become a more Girardian society overall, probably, you know, from the last the great recession because of the tension, because of the anger and the conflicts that are not being carefully addressed. You have this bad energy revolving around, and and Trump is very good at one thing. He catalyzed the energy and directed towards a meaningful target, let's say. And in what sense is it neoliberal?
Andrea Righi:Well, I think here, Peter Thiel is is really, a good example because when he like, Peter Thiel is somebody who understands the the science behind climate change, and he's is is concerned about that. Not gonna go, however, into a systemic transformation of society to address the causes. The point he makes is that if we group think, he says, if we kind of reuse this original sameness, then we are bound to make mistakes more than if we start we are we we produce an economy of rank, where somebody, an individual, a free spirit has an intuition that is the silver bullet that will solve our problems. The other issue is that the rank economy because it pushes us on to always raise the bar is really a neoliberal economy where you want you you're constantly trying to work harder, you're constantly trying to improve your portfolio, cultural portfolio, whatever you want to call your visibility, your marketability. And so if you are in a struggle in a competition with others, but mostly with yourself.
Michael Lewis:Yeah. No. That's great. Because there's another and there's another line I wanted to quote where you you talk about the neoliberal elite. So when you talk about the economy of rank, we're talking about what you describe here as the healthy competition of the so called free market.
Michael Lewis:So this is what the neoliberal wants. He wants there to be unregulated. In the extreme forms of neoliberalism, the market is not to be regulated. The market always tells the truth, as Foucault put it when he was analyzing neoliberalism. The market has to be free.
Michael Lewis:And so this is neoliberalism. You have a lovely line here. So because it's all about sameness and difference. So in other words, the neoliberal elite equates the condition of sameness to any form of social intervention, so I suppose state intervention maybe, while it magnifies the true difference produced by the healthy competition of the so called free market. So this rivalry and the economy of rank is all about competing on the free market.
Michael Lewis:And then sameness then is equated to the equalizing effects of state intervention.
Andrea Righi:Right. The redistribution. I mean, this this is redistribution is is a is a scandal. You know, it's it's like a taboo war. You can't say, like, it is in this cult, in this religion, redistribution and sort of collective organization is what must be condemned because it is liable of a crime, basically, of religious, you know, vice or a sin.
Andrea Righi:It's a sin. That's what it is. It's a sin, because that's what we want to depart from. Javi is very good at highlighting the system from the beginning. Sameness is our original condition.
Andrea Righi:We we struggle to move away from it. We don't want to go back to that sameness, which is bad.
Michael Lewis:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk let's say something else about this sameness because this was interesting because there is a footnote you have on Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst. And it's almost as if it's quite early on in chapter one. And it's almost as if you you sort of say that Girard's account of desire is going to be reductive.
Michael Lewis:I mean, it's always it's not as if it's entirely wrong, but what you want to say is that it only applies to certain arenas in human life. Now there's there is a footnote pointed towards Lacan who has, I mean, something in common with Gerard. I mean, I don't know I don't even know how well what their relation was. But in any case, I suppose I wanted to say one thing that really struck me was that you were saying that if you have a purely mimetic theory of desire, that my desire is the desire of the other. So I only desire something because you desire What you inferred from that is that think this is how you mean it, but you'll have to tell me if I've got this right.
Michael Lewis:Prior to this rivalry, our desire is something like some sort of homogeneous mass. It doesn't have any individuality. My thought when I was reading this was if you were a Lacanian rather than a Girardian, you'd probably say something like before the stage of desire, which is dialectical, in the sense that it's all bound up with my perception of what you desire. Before that, you don't just have a kind of homogeneous libido or a kind of, anything homogeneous. I mean, if you were a Lacanian, you'd probably say you had need and you had demand.
Michael Lewis:Maybe drive would be in there as well. In other words, you'd have something differentiated. I don't know at all where I'm going with this, except to say that I'd like to hear more about what you meant when you were talking about Girard's, notion of desire as having a very homogenising effect. But also whether what's the role of Lacan here, if he has any? And does he provide a better account of what you go on to call the human invariance that we're going to talk about in a minute?
Andrea Righi:Yeah. I think Lacan and the feminists of the eighties, they already had posed some of the reductive element of Shirar. In simple terms, we we can say that there is a way to read Lakhan, particularly seminar twentieth, the the seminar entitled encore on a sexuation. It's not standard, you know, Lacanian approaches that, you know, I belong to a kind of current that looks at that and says, yes, there is the the desire of the other, which is the father on a position of exceptionality. The small object a, not it's not fulfillable.
Andrea Righi:So you keep on desiring, you pick on them. At this level, I think you have a slightly better version of of Girard, but not something substantially better. And and I there is but then, however, when he talks about feminine sexuation, Lacan seems to be saying that because of the particular positionality of the feminine, it doesn't have to be this is not gender specific. It's the position you inhabit with respect to reality. Okay?
Andrea Righi:You can swing between a masculine and a feminine. There's a feminine position or positionality where you are not completely under the spell of this other big other who's always telling you what you need to desire. And you are then allowed instead to meet the other as not capital O, but the other as the individual entity, the individual person, the individual animal, the thing that stands before you as a singularity. So you meet and you encounter that in that shocking moment, as somebody who is detached from yourself, who is surprising you in because it's not something that you have desired beforehand, who could elicit desire, could elicit other feelings as well. And that's a much better understanding of mimesis.
Andrea Righi:Because how did you know, here we go into, you know, what animal studies have now clearly kind of articulated. Did we learn to be human? And what is human? Like, if human is not animal, this is a little bit the point that the government makes. If human is not animal, how did men and women produce humanity?
Andrea Righi:Is they would, of course, that there was a genius one day, Leonardo da Vinci of the time who had the idea of language over so, of course, you don't have scientists who who who are that simplistic. But if you have a gradualist option, I think, you know, you're born to go down that route of discovery or some sort of discovery, sort of mutation. Instead, you have other people in the animal studies, field who are who are talking about amineses, where animals imitate each other. And they produce a hybrid dimension where they contaminate each other. And then upon that hybridization, then of course, you have evolution, and you have random chances, and you know, you have consequences and other future evolution that perhaps produce what, whatever you want to call humanity, today, right?
Andrea Righi:So there's a different mimesis, a different imitation at stake, the imitation that Girard plays, and he applies it to the whole of Western civilization going probably earlier than that as well. So he actually wants to present a theory of harmonization, right, through rivalry. That's only a partial mechanism that works very well for mafia films. If you wanna understand mafia films, you have two guys who want one girl, and then they start shooting each other in this rivalry. So, when I was teaching Italian mafia films, good introduction of Girard, and then the students had enough theory to enjoy the film in a different way than simply the shooting and the blood and the, you know, the frill of, of the the moment in which something surprising happens.
Andrea Righi:So that's that's a little bit what I was trying to point in the book. And, of course, you know, it's going to need more more time and work to articulate better.
Michael Lewis:That's great. So I think that brings us on to the next figure, Paolo Viano, in his essay on negation, which comes in here. So he referred to the notion of mirror neurons as a kind of primordial natural type of mimesis that's involved in the human relation to the other. The only thing I wanted to just talk about I mean, Viano is, I think what you think is that he's quite anthropocentric, or at least he he doesn't quite recognize this process that you call zoo mimesis. So in other words, I don't know if you if you say this explicitly, but when Vernaud talks about the mirror neurons, does he just say they're in only in humans?
Andrea Righi:Yes. Yes. So and and I think Alessitu, in an essay where he's talking to about Gerard, and he's acknowledging Gerard, but saying, yes. You're right. But mirror neurons also help us, being a collectivity, a eccentric place.
Andrea Righi:You know, they have this blind spot. Leon has this blind spot. Yes.
Michael Lewis:Yeah. Yeah. And you say so he what he relies on, Helmut Plessner. I mean, I'm I'm not quite I don't quite remember him coming up, but I know exactly what you mean. The human being is the only eccentric animal.
Michael Lewis:And what you've shown is that eccentricity is common in the animal kingdom as well as the human. The only question I had is whether that has much effect in the end because there's still a kind of, and I think rightful, human exceptionalism here because we end up in this position where because of the human I don't know you have to tell me whether you think this is a specifically human capacity, which is the next so the next stage in Vienna's argument is to do with negation, which is largely premised upon the ability to speak. So again, I'm not quite sure I remember this very well, but let's say negation is a linguistic linguistic capacity for Vienna. You can only negate if you have language and can append the perfect you you can say not or non. So there are two levels of this negation.
Michael Lewis:You have this ability to say, yes, this is not a man, and then you have the double negation or the next stage, which is to say, This is not not a man. But the thing is that what struck me was that you still end up saying that there is something special about the human being and that the human being can be particularly destructive thanks to this capacity to negate, particularly brutal, particularly nasty, and this perhaps has particularly deleterious effects when it comes to the environment. But I wondered I mean, this a good question or not? I mean, does this question about the anthropocentric Plesnerian understanding of eccentricity, does that have much force here? Does it have many effects here?
Michael Lewis:Because I think in a way agree with Vernon so much. And and it all does come down to a certain human exceptionalism.
Andrea Righi:I agree. I think, you know, perhaps the only slight academic philosophical distinction could be made that is it's not a qualitative essence, but it's a quantitative mechanism. That is to say, the scale to which negation in humanity can be deployed is greater than other, probably any other animal species. Up until very recently, up until I started to, you know, inquire a little bit more into the issue of the animal, I was very much in that camp, where I just assumed that human language in a way is different, qualitatively different. But then I had a dog who I could, sometimes I could not trick him.
Andrea Righi:He would read my lie. And if you assume that animal language is solely primarily iconic, it's a direct message and a response. Lying and joking, they become a problem. Right? It it is kind of hard to explain it.
Andrea Righi:And also, go back to the issue of infinity. I think we still know very little about the human kingdom. So there is a variety of behaviors and abilities that perhaps we don't know, we don't keep in mind. Yes.
Michael Lewis:Yeah. Thank you. That's great. Let's move on to chapter two. I don't have that much to say about this.
Michael Lewis:So this is where you end up talking about Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Ministry for the Future. I mean, why this recourse to science fiction? I mean, I am very interested in the presence of science fiction and philosophy. I think this begins with Leibniz. This is my hypothesis anyway.
Michael Lewis:In other words, the postulation of possible worlds. And, you know, philosophers are interested in these, notions of possible worlds, and it's all to do with necessity and contingency and so on. And the only thing I had to say about this one was because I have a slight doubt about digital currency, or at least think that there are certain things one could say that would be critical, and not just of Bitcoin, which you're explicitly critical of. But I think every digital currency, it it does worry me a bit, or at least I think there there will be some questions about the loss of cash, the loss of physical money, and so on. What role is this particular fiction playing?
Michael Lewis:Because it's a very particular vision of the future, which you do seem to endorse, I think. I mean, up to a point at least, or at least you say I I think what you what you say is that it's it it offers a counter narrative to one which is currently dominant, and that's the value of it. But I suppose in general, my question is to what extent do you think it offers the best solution to the problem that the book's addressing? And could you say something about why you appeal to a science fiction or a fictional example rather than something else?
Andrea Righi:Yeah. Thank you, though. It's, look. I think money is is is really the way, and I'm not an expert too. I had to educate myself.
Andrea Righi:But but this is a philosophical concept as well. So I was very interested in it because it's a way to measure and to protect the social infinity that we have been talking about, which is weird because we we think about money as a private property as something you accumulate. You don't wanna give away, but this is not really what economists say regarding, money. Right? And it's science fiction.
Andrea Righi:Let me go back to the moment in which the turn of last century when I decided to do what I'm doing now. I was a master's student at UCSD, University of California, San Diego, And Frederick Jameson came to visit because one of my professor there, Massawa Miyoshi, both of them are not alive anymore, but because they were friends and he invited him over. And I was an avid reader of science fiction. And and also at that time, Michael Hart and and Tony Negri book Empire came out, which read like a science fiction book. I was studying philosophy already, but with a lot of it had quite a lot of work.
Andrea Righi:Instead, I encountered a philosophical book that was as pleasurable and readable as a as a as a science fiction novel. Right? So you have this this moment in time where the empire is on the rise. I I'm reading I'm meeting with Franklin Jameson who who tell us about his great love of of Philip K Dick. And King Stanley Robinson, was a student of Frankie Jameson at UCSD.
Andrea Righi:He was a PhD student who wanted to do literature, and Frankie Jameson told them write thesis on Philip K Dick, which he didn't even under knew. And then, not probably not like too much, but he wrote the dissertation, and then he became a science fiction writer. Okay. So there is this affinity, this weird affinity. We I've never we've never met him.
Andrea Righi:But we we our lives somehow are connected through that. And then when this book came out, it did present a kind of a fun and plausible positive narrative that goes against the grain of all the dystopic things we keep on seeing, like the, you know, TV series. We love to watch the next one, but but there's a there's a lack of instead of utopian of utopian, right, of utopian narratives. And so in it, I found some ways to clarify what I was thinking about through plot twist and characters. And this idea of the digital currency, which was created by Delton Chan, who's a who's a Australian environmental engineer, which I I I personally met then to talk about his his proposal, which solves one of the big problem that we have today.
Andrea Righi:Whenever you have to find money to make serious intervention into the society, into the environment, you have a tax problem. You have to raise taxes that that prevents prevent it from really achieving the escape, the the scale of the thing that needs to be done. Instead, if central banks, it's a big if, of course, but if but it's a science fiction book as well. If central banks produce, a digital currency that is backed by central banks, you would have a line you would have a quantitative easing of of the scale that would be a much larger than what we had before. It would enable to produce a cash flow that will help us to to move towards the new society that we need to to have.
Andrea Righi:It's digital currency only because of the blockchain technology. It seems to be a very strong and useful technology, piece of technology that that solves a lot of technical problems that you would have to with currency anyway, but it is disconnected with the crypto world that, you know, it doesn't have to be connected with that kind of work or because you also have the anarcho capitalist, like Peter Thiel and others who are who are well invested in the crypto world. So this would be a counter, you know, that's dystopian, this is utopian, it's a counter narrative that offers something that we very much need, in in the near future that I actually need today already.
Michael Lewis:Brilliant. Thanks so much. So chapter three, I mean, this is the one where I have the most unfortunately, I've messed left the most philosophical and perhaps the most difficult questions to the end. And this comes to bear on the pieces that you've written for my journal, The Journal of Italian Philosophy, to do with Immanueli Severino, and this idea of eternity. What's brilliant so the the basic move that I think you make here and that you made in the second, yes, the second article you published on Severino and feminist philosophy.
Michael Lewis:So the move is to take Severino's notion of eternity and to explicate it by means of feminist philosophy, particularly Adriana Cabrera, but also here Hannah Arendt. I suppose I just wanted to ask you first about the general strategy there. I mean, do you take it that there is something missing in Severino's account of eternity and time that needs to be supplemented by the feminist notion of birth, maternity, and so on. Or so this notion of an infinite chain of births, is that a concretization of what Severino says? And there could be other concretizations.
Michael Lewis:Or is it is this the best or the only way to understand what Severino is talking about here?
Andrea Righi:Yeah. No. You you framed perfectly the, you know, the the the issues that that you face when you when you read such a interesting writer and philosopher like Severino. And it's a great philosophical work, very, very deep. But it leaves you with a question that you cannot, I mean, myself, I cannot reconcile myself with, like this this idea of eternity, which somehow always slips into mortality.
Andrea Righi:Right? And and and, you you have you have interviews of Severino talking about, you know, the wife who recently passed away and not, you know, and saying that she's eternal. Right? Right? So it's it's quite striking.
Andrea Righi:And and then again, he says, you know, the important thing is that your notion of death is not death itself. How do you die? Do you die with this notion of eternity? You die and you're thinking that you go into nothingness, right? Or that you'd be resurrected and so forth, right?
Andrea Righi:So, but for me, as an atheist thinker, it's difficult. It's really difficult to do. So feminism, for me was a way to make it concrete and materialistic in a Marxian sense, through the notion of the infinite chain of birth, which, again, it is infinite or is eternal in what sense? Not eternal as all enduring, because of course, we know that our species is not eternal, will not be eternal, and and that it was not here many, many years ago. So it's a way of making it more concrete and viable for for using an important element that Cavarino discusses and explores very well, the idea of nihilism that we live in a very nihilistic time because we understand time as something disposable, destructible, and that we can possess.
Andrea Righi:So rescuing some sort of infinity, which is a social infinity we can call eternity if you just think about thousands and thousands of years ago already for for a human being. It is a form of eternity. It will be a lot better than the short term thinking that we have today. Right? It doesn't go beyond two weeks.
Andrea Righi:That's the deadline that we we we pose for ourselves.
Michael Lewis:One of my first responses to some of this was to think what's happening here? What is being urged? So sometimes you speak in quite an apocalyptic tone, you know, as you speak about a mass extinction that's being threatened. There is something really dreadful that's going to happen. And my sense was that and I don't know if that is past the reason why.
Michael Lewis:I got the sense that on a first reading, thought, what sort of life is being promised to us by this type of environmental discourse? Is it just a life of pure survival? So I thought that my first sense was a lot of them I a of the way you speak here seems to be in terms of we just need to survive. There is a catastrophe coming. All that matters is that we need to the human race at least, or life, perhaps nonhuman life, needs to endure.
Michael Lewis:And then I came to think, well, does the stress on feminist philosophy and birth because obviously my response as as sort of an Agambenian is to think, well, it's there's something much more important than survival. There's something much more important than bare life, bare survival. And it's it's it's some sort of good life or it's some sort of form of life. But then I thought, well, perhaps the point I'm missing the point, which is the feminist philosophy point to do with birth. And one of the reasons one might want to stress survival or mere life is partly because of this notion of birth.
Michael Lewis:Is there something to be said for that? Like, because what what sort of a life are we looking at in the future, you know, assuming we do take all the measures necessary to overcome or mitigate the the environmental problems?
Andrea Righi:Yes. Yes. No. I I know. In the best case scenario, we would have a much better life because this transformation would would would, you know, imply a radical change in all sectors of of it's not just about banning fossil fuel industry at this point.
Andrea Righi:It it won't, you know, it won't be enough. It's it we need to take this kind of vermin approach that you need to see the materiality we are the of the condition that you have before you understand where the transformation, the seed of the future are buried, you know, cultivate them, and that will change the whole system as well. You know, Agavan says the same thing too, he says a real revolution, to go forward with the real revolution, you have to negate yourself as a subject to you come out the other way, as something different. So that's, you know, that's the utopian, you know, the kind of utopian, a flatness push that I that I follow it, like, I do not develop it in the in the short book. And in a way, Kim Stanley Robinson, at the end of the novel, very long ending, he he, you know, he traces the contours of these new society, much more equal society, more in tune with the preservation of our life, which is the life of the other beings as well and the life of future beings too.
Andrea Righi:Because that's the key essence of, you know, concept the of that book is that the others that will come have equal rights to us today. So we need to take that into account. And the others that will come are not just the others, the future birth, they are not just future men, women, it's also animals, organic form of life, know, the point that inorganic kind of confirmation. So that would would be be the radical revolution that we that we need not mere not mere survival. Instead, what they are offering us today is survival.
Andrea Righi:So I think, you know, it's cool, perhaps to also to go to the last point of this book is that then and the next step for how to to to to write something expanded is to think about how these economies, they also project a kind of end times philosophy based either on survival of the few or a kind of more liberal techno optimist version that don't worry, don't worry today, we'll come up with a technology in ten years, fifteen years, don't worry. Or you have the true apocalyptic millenarist approach that says, we have to perish because we will ascend to the next kingdom. And that's really the the the full apocalyptic version, which, you there's there's part of society minority that is not, you know, is not ashamed to to proclaim it. In a way, it is a psychological response to that. You have so much harm and stress that you sometimes you just think about just do away with this.
Andrea Righi:Let's end this. It's the moment in which you will get liberated from this endless pain that we suffer.
Michael Lewis:Maybe I could end with two questions. I think they both revolve around the question of why Severino might need to be supplemented by feminism. It's a fascinating vision he presents about this notion of appearing. The problem I had was Severino's vision struck me as very presocratic in some ways. I mean, obviously, he's, at some level an Eliatic philosopher, a student of Parmenides.
Michael Lewis:It also struck me that his philosophy had some resemblance to Empedocles as well, as if you have a universe with a finite number of elements, they enter into configurations, they fall apart, and everything eventually repeats itself. And I don't know if this was me. I think there was someone who wrote an article in the journal called, I think it was, Damiano Sacco, or was that who writes about Severino. I think I stole this image from him, but maybe it's a new one. Severino's vision of the universe feels to me like a kaleidoscope, where in other words, you have just a set of, I don't know what they are, crystals or little elements in there.
Michael Lewis:You turn the tube and these elements form a different configuration. And it's not as if anything new has come into existence. It's just revealed itself. It's just appeared. And it passes away, and maybe it will come back one day, and maybe you'll have the eternal return, and so on.
Michael Lewis:The question that that brought to mind was, is anything like novelty possible on Severino's picture? I mean, anything like a genuine historic event or just novelty in the sense of creative evolution or something. And I suppose that's what got me thinking, is that what feminism adds? I mean, if you have because the problem is if you can't have creatio ex nihilo, do you lose novelty? And so maybe that's a question I'd have.
Michael Lewis:Is birth a creation of novelty even if it's not a creation from nothing?
Andrea Righi:You know, that's a wonderful way to put it. I mean, I would say it would it would actually help correct or improve Severino's notion of destiny, because that kaleidoscope is destiny. Somehow, there's a mechanism that moves the new, the emergence of the new phases, and it's fixed. It's infinite, but it's it cannot really go beyond itself. But birth, it's an imminent mechanism where the new word will appear.
Andrea Righi:Then and that's what Anna Ahern says about birth. It it is not just the individual. It's the new birth that will appear through the birth and the relationship of the gazes between the mother, the, you know, the family we can add, we could be a little more inclusive. Whoever is the mother, as the Italian family say, whoever takes place of the mother, and, and the newborn and the newborns in general, right? So that that would be a great way to put it like a correction of the kind of almost mechanic notion of destiny through the to the more lively, unexpected, eventful dimension of birth.
Andrea Righi:Yes.
Michael Lewis:That's great. I wish I'd ended on that question because that'd be a nice way to end. But I have to say my second thing, which is, again, it's more it worries about the whole strategy now, not just Severino, but even feminism, because how literally are we to take this birth? Is it literally the mother giving birth to the child or can we expand it? Can we generalize it?
Michael Lewis:Because if we are evolutionists in some sense, and we don't have to be, of course, but let's assume that we are. Life did not always exist. And again, maybe the question is, does Severino think this or does he have any evolutionist bent or any evolutionist tendency at all? Because if you were just a normal evolutionist, you would say life has not always existed. It emerged from the non living.
Michael Lewis:And that was also an event of novelty. Life is new, some might say. But the trouble is if we just think of the event of novelty in terms of a mother giving birth to a child, are we vitalizing the whole of being? In other words, are we trying to think the whole of what is in terms of life? Because it seems to me that if we take birth literally, only living things can give birth.
Michael Lewis:What about non living things? What about what came before life? Do we want to talk about that? Do we have to develop another conceptual scheme in order to think about that that wouldn't be derived from feminism or even from Severino? So maybe I'll just leave it there.
Michael Lewis:But you see the problem I don't know how you'd want can we say anything about the nonliving if we use birth as a paradigm here?
Andrea Righi:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there again, Cabrera, but also, Anarit can help with the notion of appearingness or appearing. That is to say, this what I call the imminent scene. That is to say the need for a scene to emerge, and the scene is is not controlled by the the main actor, which in this case would be the newborn.
Andrea Righi:The scene is the spectators, the props. It's a metaphor, of course, but all the entities and elements that come together in a form of relationship to that. There's also Cavallero makes the good point that the danger is to assign life and childbearing and and reproduction to the woman as a mission, as a destiny, another kind of destiny. But she says, the power, the great power that women have is to give birth or not to give birth. Okay?
Andrea Righi:So so in that case, you know, you have another another another scene that can can emerge, know, with with the birth no more proposition. So, of course, it is a big topic and politically, you know, it's very hard to elaborate an agenda behind it. But the feminist I'm referring to through this notion of practice and collective action through the user psyche analysis, they had developed over the years, ideas and notions that are very, you know, interesting and instrumental, I think that we and I keep going back to them to find some inspirations for next work.
Michael Lewis:Well, thanks, Andrea. Yes, I have no more questions. Well, I have many more, but I'll I'll we've run out of time, I think. Thank you so much for for being so patient and and for answering so generously.
Andrea Righi:Mike, thank you for for your question. I it was very stimulating for me as well that this is a little bit what I was trying to say the scene, it produces novelty through the encounter. Now, you know, in this conversation, you already pushed me into different direction, I believe that perhaps will, you know, come up as a new article for the Journal of Italian Studies or something like that. But it's through the encounter that the glory as the glory of the scene as Serena Coors appears.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota press production. The book Three Economies of Transcendence by Andrea Riege is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.