A meeting, Tuesday 13 September, with the philosopher Michael Marder at the French Institute in Naples, an opportunity to reflect on the energy and nuclear issue
Tuesday 13 September, at 6 pm, at the French Institute of Naplesa meeting will be held with philosopher Michael Marder and French visual artist Anas Tondeurstarting with their book Chernobyl Herbariumtranslated into Italian by Donatella Caristina for Mimesis in 2021 (pp. 200, e 16), and an exhibition of works by Tondeur, which made up the series of images in the book, exhibited at the Spot Home Gallery in Naples until 14 October next.
The right opportunity for reflect on a series of issues that the war between Russia and Ukraine has made even more relevant: the energy problem, the environmental one, also and above all linked to the management, during this war event, of the nuclear power plants present on the Ukrainian territory, and, connected to these, the most theoretical ones of the problem of the role of man in the cosmos and of the connected anthropocentrism. All these questions, investigated on a purely philosophical level, have been constituting for decades the subject matter of Marder’s research. In the book cited above, however, on the basis of the evocation of a personal experience, he resolutely returns to measure himself also with the aesthetic dimension, which cannot but be connected with those mentioned above. Indeed, both Marder’s reflections and Tondeur’s images, as the title immediately evokes, refer to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
In those days in late April 1986, in which one of the reactors of the then Soviet Union nuclear power plant exploded, Michael Marder, who lived with his parents near Moscow, was six years old and was in a Ukrainian town on the Black Sea, on a vacation offered by Soviet health care as a remedy for a form of allergy he suffered from, which affected the respiratory tract . The memory of the biographical circumstance is intertwined with objective considerations, regarding the disturbing nature of the catastrophic event. Because the anguish that accompanies an event such as that of the radiation escape is made even more uncontrollable by the fact that it is the effect of a danger the more subtle the more invisible. Just like a virus outbreak.
Homer had it very clear, who starts there‘Iliad just with the manifestation of a pestilence that afflicts the Achaean field. The disease that strikes from afar, that is to say in an unexpected and unpredictable way, just like the god, Apollo, who causes it. And not by chance, in describing the race of the god who descends, full of anger, from the peaks of Olympus, to go near the camp of the Achaeans who besiege Troy, where then they will hurl against his silver arrows that carry the plague, hence the slow, deferred death, Homer evokes a brilliant comparison: Apollo falls like night. And in fact, the experience we have of the appearance of the night is particularly peculiar to the fact that, like any event, it is not identifiable. When we realize that it has arrived, it is already too late. It is already there, manifesting its effects, without us being able to notice its arrival.
This resistance in perception, this impossibility in and of vision has to do with the aesthetic fact, which has, in its forms of manifestation, something in common with the world of the extra-human and, perhaps, also of the extra-animal, with the vegetable universe, for example. Try, then, to think and, therefore, looking at the world from plantsin a rethinking, too, of the issues related to energy accumulation and decay, one of the lessons that this herbarium of the third millennium communicates to us, also inviting us to a rethinking of the economic-political categories that have characterized the modern project until today.
September 12, 2022 (change September 12, 2022 | 12:56)
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