The journal Genealogies of Modernity has recently published my essay The Occupation That Never Ended, exploring the thematic and philosophical relationship between Augusto Del Noce’s The Crisis of Modernity and Francesco Rosi’s film Salvatore Giuliano. Here’s an excerpt:

Rosi’s film was released in 1962, nearly a decade before the Italian philosopher and political theorist Augusto Del Noce first published his scathing critique of the modern approach to power politics. Like Rosi, Del Noce is also investigating a corpse, but not that of a single man or mere individual. The body which fascinated the philosopher is the political community, slowly dissected by a new, “scientific” approach to politics.  He saw in this approach the danger of a subtler form of totalitarianism, in which “the individual is extinguished and the idea of politics is subsumed within the idea of war, even in peacetime.” This war is not aimed, as were older forms of totalitarianism, at founding or reshaping the world order. Rather, it is directed at the perfect control of a single society, a society without the divisions caused by loyalties to family, to faith, and to traditional forms of morality. Any resistance to the regime’s absolute centralization of control is characterized as a revolt against science and progress.

Read the whole essay here: https://genealogiesofmodernity.org/journal/2023/5/23/the-occupation-that-never-ended