Activist and Philosopher Srećko Horvat on the Apocalypse as Revelation and Transformation
Interview by David Steinrueck and Salvatore Laimo
Photo by Petar Marković
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
David Steinrueck: Hi, this is David with RIFT magazine. Today we have a very special returning guest, Srećko Horvat, who is a philosopher, activist and cofounder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM 25, where he is currently leading many activities as a member of the coordinating collective. So, we'll be chatting today about some of these efforts and also about Srećko’s latest book, After the Apocalypse which was recently released by Polity Press. Welcome, thanks so much for joining us here today.
Srećko Horvat: I'm really glad to be back and to be talking to you today.
DS: So, let's start with a few questions around your book, After the Apocalypse. In this book as you think through the apocalypse, or the post-apocalypse perhaps, you go into the concept of apocalyptic blindness borrowed from Gunther Anders. Can you talk a bit about Anders’ influence on your thinking going to this book and how he may have helped you understand or shape the concept of blindness that comes with commodification? Or maybe just the book more generally?
SH: Yeah. Great first question, because I think Gunther Anders deserves much more attention and exploring, probably because he wasn't so much published in English. That's a reason why his name probably isn't so much familiar to a broader audience, although I guess those interested in the work of Hannah Arendt, of whom he was a husband at some point after Heidegger, they might be familiar with his work, or Frankfurt school, of whom he was pretty critical, especially when it comes to Adorno. But I would say one of the reasons of course is that, unlike Hannah Arendt, who became much more famous all around the world, especially after the Eichmann trial and so on, Gunther Anders returned in 1950 to Europe and continued to write in German. So I think that's one of the reasons why he's not so much known.
Although I think he's one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century when it comes to the understanding of technology and the nuclear age, which was not really something that was of much interest, for instance, to the Frankfurt school, especially if we speak about nuclear politics.
It was happening at that time, in 1945, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anders claims that a new age started; an age of no return — something he called the “naked apocalypse”. Namely, unlike the kingdom without apocalypse, he turned it around and was speaking about the apocalypse without kingdom. So there is no kingdom to come. And then of course this term you just mentioned, “Apokalypse-Blindheit”, which probably would be best to translate as “apocalyptic blindness,” or “blindness towards the apocalypse”, is very important in this context because what Anders shows, and I think today this is becoming really true with the climate crisis, which is now colliding with the nuclear age, and then of course the age of the pandemics, this is becoming quite obvious, that we’re not really able to imagine the eschatological threat that we are facing. Of course we know about climate change. Of course we know about Chernobyl or Fukushima. Of course we know about COVID, and the Spanish Flu, and other pandemics. But it seems that history accelerated so much that we have a certain information overload, and our capability to construct different technologies - from the atomic bomb to the electric car or space travel - is much bigger than our capability to actually understand the consequences.
And this is what Anders was talking about: The Promethean Gap. The gap of Prometheus; the gap between our capability to construct such technology and between the consequences of these technologies. And I think that the atomic bomb is the best possible example because the effects…and not just the atomic bomb but nuclear politics, which means then also nuclear power plants, but also waste systems of radioactive materials, because these consequences will last for centuries, even thousands of years, and it's impossible from today's perspective to really understand what kind of consequences it will have. So, I think yeah, Gunther Anders is one of the biggest inspirations for my book, After the Apocalypse. But I also think that he should be recovered. And I can see some trends like Jean-Pierre Dupuy in France, or Franco Berardi in Italy, or Sabu Kohso who just wrote a brilliant book called Radiation Revolution — they’re all recovering parts from Gunther Anders work — even parts which are not translated into English yet. So I think we are still waiting for others to be kind of rediscovered in the twenty first century.
DS: So, diving more specifically into the word “apocalypse” can you describe how you think of this term in relation to extinction? Maybe the possibility of surviving the apocalypse? In particular, I'm interested in how we can think of this in the context of something like a necessary, or miserable minimum, wage in Marx. This seems particularly relevant because it seems that workers under capitalism have already been undergoing a kind of slow-burn apocalypse - maybe you could call it that - over the last 50 years, as wages have been stagnant, and workers are continuously told that the miserable minimum is getting even lower and lower, that the landscape is getting ever more charred you could say perhaps, and that this is the new normal. Within this context, can you talk about the word “apocalypse”, the temporal aspects of it? And if you have any comment on the temporal aspects of the event now versus what we’ve seen happening slowly over the last decades.
SH: Yeah, I basically return to the original Greek meaning of the apocalypse: ἀποκάλυψις (apokálypsis), or however it is pronounced, which basically means revelation, which means unveiling, which is not the same as when today you read mass media and they usually speak about another apocalypse. They usually equate the term with the end of the world. So, I was returning to this original meaning and then was attempting to apply it to our current situation, you know, to try to understand what are the apocalypses of our contemporary moment which can serve as a sort of revelation in order to change radically the preconditions of our own reality, and in order to actually preserve a future, which perhaps maybe it's not even possible to preserve. Again, returning back to Anders; his main claim, which I fully agree with, is that it's impossible to unlearn once you have learned this technological capability (for instance the nuclear bomb, geoengineering, terraforming). Once you have learned all these capabilities it's very difficult to unlearn it.
And we are in something what Anders calls “the end time”, which means that as long as it will last, you know 10 years, 20 years, 200 years, it is still the last epoch because after this epoch there won't be any polity anymore, you know? There won't even be the archive in the Derridean sense, because if we reach extinction, and that seems to be our only horizon because of climate crisis and the collision of the nuclear age, and the ongoing expansion and extraction of late capitalism, there might not be even an archive. There might not be a semiosphere. There might not be signs anymore.
And speaking about this temporal aspect, again you're coming back to the Apokalypse-Blindheit, because we are constantly living in this, especially with the creation of the internet and the way the internet in the last decade became not just an overall window into the world, but a window into our own intimate sphere, which you can see now is special with Covid-19, which accelerated the digitalization of social bonds, friendship, love. Now you even have remote dating, remote learning, all this kind of never-ending zoomification of life. And once we are stuck in this never-ending zoomification of life, you're also at the same time stuck in this kind of never-ending presentism; something everyone who uses social media has felt probably. You know, you are a bit tired and you go into your bed, and you try to sleep but something keeps forcing you to scroll on your screen, and then again and again you get input from the world about the constant news.
And again, I would say even further the Covid-19 crisis made it impossible, at least for individuals or families, to have a more long-term perspective, and especially for the working class, since you mentioned them. Because of course the rich can have a long-term perspective. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk…you know Bezos can build his big clocks somewhere in the United States and Musk can send Space X using public money and dream about multi-planetary life, not really giving a damn what will happen to life on Earth. But the working class doesn't even have this kind of long-term perspective because when you are forced to, you know, bring the bread on your table the next day you are constantly in this kind of short time frame.
And I think what we should do today in order to get outside of this trap is precisely to come back and recreate some sort of long-term thinking; long-term thinking even in the sense of speculative fiction, or speculative critical theory, to go beyond the next ten years, or even hundred years, or even thousands of years. And it's really interesting to see that, for instance, Chinese science fiction is doing this, mainly compared to other science fiction. They're imagining futures which are taking place in millions of years, like the Three Body Problem for instance. Or even this movie which was on Netflix, “Wandering Earth”. So the West unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know, doesn't have this long-term perspective anymore, and you can see a sort of implosion, especially in Europe. If you take Europe with this vaccine debacle and so on, you can see that we are all kind of stuck in this presentism, short-term thinking, and I think that poses a serious problem.
DS: Maybe just a quick elaboration on that. You call for us to go back to the future. Can you just describe what that term means to you? How does this kind of returning to what is revealed through the apocalypse, perhaps under the veil, even if, and we were talking briefly about Lacan before this recording, we don’t simply find what we want there, how can this open up new directions or possibilities for us?
SH: Yeah, I mean my hope is…maybe it's kind of connected to Lacan. I'm not sure. But it would be interesting to apply Lacan to the apocalypse. Maybe in 100 years or 500 years there is really nothing, definitely not the symbolic order, but maybe also, you know, there's simply nothing but just the continuation of a planet which will face a new species, perhaps maybe even new evolution and so on. Of course we will leave a big trace on the planet. I mean that's what the Anthropocene is about. Although I'm more inclined to the term of “capitalocene”, in the sense that it’s not the humans. As such, it is not the working class, for instance, who can be blamed for extracting fossil fuels, or for driving the polluting cars; we didn't really have a choice because since the twentieth century we lived in the century of the car. And what's interesting now is that we are again returning to the car, which will just be an electric car, and instead of extracting fossil fuels we will be extracting lithium. So of course this will leave traces in the geology of the planet. It will leave disastrous traces in the biosphere itself. Species are already going extinct. You’ll never see them again. Although Silicon Valley, of course, dreams about engineering gene manipulation or even singularity, and so on. I’m not that hopeful in that sense.
So, I think, “how do we then construct a sort of hopeful politics, or politics without optimism?” I use this term by Terry Eagleton, “hope without optimism”. I think it comes precisely from this awareness that this is the end time and there is nothing coming after; there's no kingdom coming. Perhaps maybe it'll be a slow burn, a slow dissolution, a kind of return to premodern societies, maybe even tribes. Of course now at this moment you can see the return of the nation-state, you can see vaccine nationalism, you can see vaccine imperialism and so on. But I think perhaps in 100 years we will look back to the nation state with nostalgia, as much as I am opposed to the nation states and even to the state, but compared to what will be coming. But at the same time I think this kind of perspective is liberating. Frank Ruda for instance speaks about fatalism and in which sense this kind of fatalism — or what Jean-Pierre Dupuy would call “enlightened doomsaying” — can actually help to construct a better world, instead of waiting for the day after, instead of waiting for a future which is yet to come. I think it's our duty and responsibility to build this future here and now. You know, not shying away from the history, of course, but also not shying away from fundamental radical changes in the way the economy functions, society functions, or human relations, or relations of humans towards other species, towards other forms of life, towards the planet itself.
DS: One of the striking and frustrating things, at least here in the US and I think also in Europe, is that what we've seen here, and something we've seen historically around the world, is that there might be what we could call a cooption of the revelation of the apocalypse by fascist groups or members on the right more generally. What we see is that many people across the political spectrum actually agree on some of the problems, like corporate media, our corporate politicians, but they point to different causes. So my question is, it seems like the veil has been lifted but everyone is staring kind of cross-eyed at a completely different thing underneath. Can you can talk about the way that leftists might be able to build solidarity with others who are also recognizing the apocalypse, but are pointing to the wrong problem? And how we might interfere and bring these people away from these types of fascist tendencies towards more solutions that have to do more with solidarity and building a collective kind of response.
SH: Yeah. I would say as frightening as it is today, when it comes to the co-optation of the apocalypse by the far-right or by the various conspiracy theories, I don't think it's particularly new. You know, you had it already in various millenarist movements. But then especially if you look at the twentieth century before Hitler came to power, it is precisely this kind of apocalyptic thinking that was fueling the rise of the nazi ideology. You know there is an interesting moment in Albert Speer’s biography where he mentions that at one moment he had just before the outbreak of the second World War watched Aurora Borealis, you know, the northern lights, which were covering all of Europe, and he saw an apocalypse in it. He saw a slaughter in it. He read this sign. And that's always the case with the apocalypse, you know, it depends on who reads the revelation and in which way he reads the revelation. Of course, today tourists go to Tromsø or to other cities in Norway to look at the northern lights as a very interesting phenomenon of physics, of our universe, of nature, and so on, but Hitler had a different interpretation because it served his purpose. Fast forward, it's interesting that already in his inauguration speech Donald Trump just as he became president was actually framing it as a very apocalyptic speech, you know? He was describing in which apocalyptic direction the United States went before he came to power. Although of course the truth is completely opposite; it actually became even more apocalyptic with him in power.
But I think this is not particularly new. The different far-right groups, but also leaders or conspiracy theories are using the apocalypse in order to put through their own interpretation of a revelation. Or sometimes it even serves as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; they see a sign and interpret it in a way that suits them, and then actually create the reality out of this sign. And what you can see today is that this catastrophe, as every catastrophe, because I think that apocalypse in the sense of a revelation is not just a revelation about what has happened, but it always points into a certain future, what will have happened. And whenever there was a big planetary catastrophe, for instance Mount Tambora — this volcano in Indonesia which caused the Year Without Summer in 1816 — the consequences were, again, different groups were kind of fighting over the meaning of this catastrophe, even though in the United States or in Europe they didn't even know yet because there wasn't the internet. They didn’t know that this darkness, what Lord Byron beautifully described in his poem under the same title, “Darkness”, was caused by an eruption of a volcano.
Today of course we don't know yet what caused Covid-19. There are various theories. For me it doesn't even matter in the end, but what matters is what is happening now and what kind of consequences it provokes. Like in the same way with 9/11, for instance, Giorgio Agamben was really criticized because of some of his texts, most recently on Covid-19, but if I get him right his point is that if you make a comparison with 9/11, for whatever reason 9/11 happened, whether it was an insider job, whether it's a conspiracy theory, whatever, what we have to face now is the kind of measures that were introduced in airports — the surveillance system, surveillance capitalism, foreign interventions of United States and so on. So, I think these conspiracy theories are missing the point, which should be touched on, and this is to try to navigate ourselves in this new normal, in this new reality which is definitely more surveillance, more biopolitics. And it's definitely unprecedented because during previous catastrophes, whether it was an eruption of a volcano, earthquake, or even the Spanish Flu, the technological advancements were not at the stage at which they are today. Not just the internet but geolocation tracking, automation, artificial intelligence — everything that is now used to kind of extinguish the fire of Covid-19 and different catastrophes. But it actually accelerates a new catastrophe, and I think that that's the problem.
DS: As a member of an independent media outlet, I'm particularly interested in your work with DiEM TV. Can you talk about everything that's been going on with the DiEM TV? The role of creating this over last year, how it's been going as far as creating the programming and growing that broadcast for DiEM.
SH: Yeah. Like many things in life, DiEMTV was created out of utter desperation and depression. I mean to be completely honest I was sitting in Vienna, I was supposed to return to Croatia but it was impossible at that moment. That was exactly one year ago — actually one year and 2 months. And there was a lockdown in Vienna. I couldn’t leave my apartment. But of course we have to continue all of the work we have been doing. And then suddenly the idea came to me, “well let's make an online…” I mean today that doesn’t sound really original anymore. Everyone is doing podcasts, everyone is zooming and so on, but at that time it wasn't like that, one year ago. And then the first idea was to just put together a good program with some members of our advisory panel, like Saskia Sassen, Brian Eno, Richard Sennett and so on, and bring these people together to reflect on how they feel in the pandemic, to make a kind of comparative analysis — what's happening in the UK, what's happening in India — and to also bring some comfort to other people who were in a similar fucked up situation at home and pretty depressed. That was still a time when you wanted to connect to other people because you were lonely; you were at home and the computer still kind of served this purpose of connecting with other people. But I would say many things changed between this year. Now, I think not everyone, at least not me, I don't know about you, is so enthusiastic anymore about after finishing his or her hard-working day to remain at the screen of the computer and then watch another program, another 5 or 6 speakers at the screen and so on. It's kind of exhausting because it's a repetition of our reality,
But at the beginning DiEMTV, I mean, to give also some hopeful message, it was quite successful. We reached like 2 million people in only 2 months. Two million views. The program was great. There was a book published by ORbooks in the States based on the conversations. And I think if you look at the beginning of DiEMTV and this book which was published, it really serves as a kind of Decameron of our own pandemic, you know? You can read it and it's already a historical artifact. But of course we are continuing DiEMTV, and we are also trying to invent new forms in this format of screens, because I think it's pretty boring to just watch two guys speaking for one hour on the screen. So, I think you should be much more dynamic and maybe this, what you're describing, is a very old media form compared to, I don't know, TikTok or to some other new social media which is being used by…I have to say now I appear old although I'm not that old…but which is being used by younger people. You know, very short attention span, no deep analyses, but everything is very dynamic, and everything has to keep moving so that your interest is here. And I think this is the biggest challenge we have to face: in which way can we communicate serious deeper analysis or even philosophical or, of course, political, in a way which we can reach people but at the same time avoid the trap of entertainment, because very often then it ends up in entertainment where it’s just entertainment and there is no message anymore.
So, I think we're kind of struggling with this. DiEM had the luck I would say — maybe that's useful for other people who are in similar projects reinventing media, independent media, and so on — we had the luck that we already built an infrastructure, that we haven't been a media outlet. We had more than 100,000 members last year. We had I think 80,000 subscribers on YouTube. So once the pandemic started, although we didn't know yet that we would create DiEMTV, we were already ready in a way. We already had an infrastructure where we can reach all the people and so on, and it's pretty difficult to start from scratch of course. So I think that kind of helps for DiEMTV to become a successful project.
But these challenges of the never-ending zoomification and how to keep people at the screen…I think all of us miss physical meetings, but I think these kinds of physical meetings won’t be reality anytime soon. They will probably remain hybrid. You know, there would be a few speakers on the stage, but the others will be on the computer. And that worries me a lot because then we go back to the working conditions, and in which way now everyone who is working at home…although of course they can be happy because some people…look at what’s happening now in India. They cannot even think of having the privilege of working from home. But those who are working from home, they will be further exploited, surveilled, and so on, and I think that this causes a really big shift in working conditions for a majority of the world's population.
DS: Perfect, thanks, and just to go out quickly into some of the things that DiEM is working on. I actually participated in the vote recently and I saw that we rolled out the post pandemic policy agenda; that's focusing on public health, shared prosperity, and this piece in green energy, “Mediterranean Summit” in addition to the Green New Deal for Europe. Can you comment on just some of these initiatives? Why has it kind of boiled down to these particular ones and why are those the most important at the forefront of what DiEM is working on?
SH: Yeah. I think all what you mentioned are pointing into the direction of what we at DiEM call post-capitalism, in the sense that this term which became quite used in the last few years, very often isn't really specific. Post-capitalism can be anything; post-capitalism can be even worse than capitalism itself. So what we tried to develop at DiEM is to show how concretely some aspects of post-capitalism might function.
Then, of course, there is the Green New Deal for Europe, which is not just about energy transition and the green transition, but it's also about a just transition. We think that merely speaking about energy is definitely not enough, because of course you have to tackle the exploitation and extraction which is still ongoing and which many Green New Deals have a problem with, because they very often stay trapped in this kind of Eurocentric perspective, you know?
And then of course, public health. I think it's quite obvious why this is one of the pillars of this post-pandemic proposal, because now we can see that without public health there is actually, I think, no chance that we’ll ever get out of this crisis. You've seen it these days in India which has around, at this moment, probably could be even higher when someone reads this interview or listens to it, 350,000 people infected per day. But at the same time, you can see that the rich are escaping India by private jets and so on, which sounds like a déjà vu of what we encountered also in some other parts of the world. I think we have to understand public health in the sense of commons, you know? That health itself should be understood as commons and not as a property in which you can invest, and then if you have money, of course, you will have better health.
A good example is the country where I come from, which is now called Croatia but was called Yugoslavia. At this moment, Croatia is the worst in the European Union when it comes to the vaccine rollout. Interestingly enough, two countries, one which exited the European Union and the other which didn't join the European Union yet, are the first in Europe; one is the U.K. and the other is Serbia. And although Croatia borders Serbia, it's divorced. But it's on the one hand because of our own incompetent politicians, and on the other hand because of the EU vaccine debacle and vaccine nationalism. But it's also interesting to put it into the perspective of socialist Yugoslavia. When the last biggest epidemic of smallpox happened, Variola Vera, in Yugoslavia in 1972, Yugoslavia succeeded to vaccinate 18 million people in a few weeks, which is like, from today's perspective, unimaginable. Yugoslavia was producing its own vaccine. And although there was also a Cold War happening and in Yugoslavia there was so-called real existing socialism, Yugoslavia was also importing vaccines from the United States, from China, and so on. So again, kind of proving how this global cooperation and solidarity is important. But I would say it wouldn’t have happened if Yugoslavia wasn't already creating a public health system before the pandemic. It was actually called Narod Zdravlje, People’s Health. And it was created even before the foundation of socialist Yugoslavia in the sense that the nation or the state is as healthy as each individual of the state, and I think we can see this precisely now with Covid-19. Even if you are happy enough to be vaccinated or to have, you know, an immune system already, it doesn't mean that in 3 months you will not pick it up or that in a half year we won't be faced by another mutant or whatever, you know? Because from today's perspective it seems like this is going to be here with us for a very long period and that's the reason why I think the public health pillar of DiEM’s program is so important.
And then, of course, the Mediterranean. I mean, we could have picked any other region, but I think the Mediterranean is a very important region in Europe because it’s much bigger than Europe, and some states who are part of the Mediterranean are part of the EU, like Italy, Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, and so on, but there are many other states who are officially, at least per definition, part of the Mediterranean: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey and so on. And there are many, many problems which are facing this region — from the ongoing refugee crisis and the atrocities which are committed over these refugees fleeing wars and then drowning in the Mediterranean, to further plans of extraction of fossil fuels from the Mediterranean, or big geoengineering projects like this new canal between Marmara Sea and through Istanbul. So, that's one of the reasons why the DiEM now wants to shed light on this, but also hopefully to construct better cooperation with other states which are not part of the EU but are facing the same problems. But this is just the start. We put this proposal through our memberships so they will come back with counter proposals, suggestions, other proposals, and so on, and then after this process of deliberation we will put through the final proposal for this problem.
DS: Perfect, thank you so much. So, in the interest of time here we will wrap it up. We encourage everyone to go check out what DiEM is doing, get involved and also, of course, go take a look at “After the Apocalypse” and take a read of that if you want to dive more into some of these issues with Srećko. Srećko, thank you so much for taking the time and diving into some these issues with us.
SH: Thanks a lot, David. I would be happy to stay longer but I’m rushing for this bloody zoom. That's life, you know? There's no drink after a good interview! Thanks. Thanks a lot.
DS: Perfect, thank you so much and we’re looking forward to chatting again in the future if that comes up.
SH: Me too, and one day we will meet who knows.
DS: Yeah. Perfect. Alright I'm looking forward to that. Alright, talk to you later.
