116 moves along different parameters. «If the post-capitalist society resists – added Caffo, veering towards the hyper-present issues – if it will manage not to destroy itself first for reasons such as environmental crisis, wars, viruses (which is the most probable thing), if, like we all hope, these things won't happen because we are incurable optimists, surely in these conditions philosophers will have to explain why human life transcends the contingencies given day by day in the various eras». Ed.'s note: we pronounced the word 'virus', therefore, before the interview resumes its pace, I have to make an addition dated May 2020: our meeting, as aforementioned, took place before the Covid-19 emergency in Italy blew up, before the lockdown and before that, as a dear friend wrote me a few days ago, we got distracted for a moment and the end of the world happened. I am convinced that the concepts expressed by Caffo remain regardless valid and, in some cases, even more strengthened, now that we live in the time of contagion and of Phase 2, whatever this expression really means. But I can't pretend that nothing happened, and in recent weeks Leonardo wrote an essay on this subject already become a pamphlet: Dopo il Covid-19 – Punti per una discussion (tr. After Covid-19 – Key points for a discussion). Here are some short excerpts: «Today humanity, fragile as never before – Caffo writes – can enter a new evolutionary phase»; «The novelty of Covid-19 is that it is the first real international and planetary revolution in history»; «The fact of not being superior to nature and being fragile, of not having at all a central place among the worldly things, are all elements, so to speak, acquired during a factual emergency. Now the challenge is to understand if, at least during the construction phase, we’re to try to act consciously 'generating' a potential species subsequent to us, the contemporary posthuman, deriving from an equally potential speciation». As you can see, the playing field remains the same and perhaps, as Caffo himself told me during an Instagram live right in the days of emergency, we can summarize everything through the formula «After all, we humans are the virus» against the planet. With these clarifications, we can go back to midFebruary, and pick up where we left off. Ideas, contingency, metaphorical: the conversation advances along reassuring, codified paths, I feel the well-known warmth of the culture spreading around us, as happens thanks to the electric mushrooms (and writing these two words gives me a shiver à la Philip K. Dick) radiating the tables of the outdoor cafes in the winter months. But then I remember that we are in mid-February, in a city in Northern Italy, it is late afternoon, we are amiably sitting outdoors and the weather is extraordinarily gentle and that all this, however very pleasant, is also a symptom of a problem that I can only define "colossal". And, adding one contradiction to another, in the face of a hyperobject such as climate change, the road proposed by Leonardo Caffo (obviously not only for this issue, but this, moreover, represents the issue) is that of a return to animality as a form of presence to ourselves: «All the great apparatus of Eastern philosophy, which we cannot handle with the ease with which we normally handle it – that is, the prêt-à-porter meditation with a background cozy mood incense – is all built around the possibility that man can live in the here-and-now, like the animal, that is, that it cannot be swallowed by the anguish of the past or by the anxiety of the future. We have this great limit and resource: that we are never in the place where we are, we are always in the before or in the after; in my philosophical proposal, animality stands as a virtualization of instances that in Eastern philosophy we cannot understand, while in our reality we can try to». «Not being able to spatialize the moment, which is a quality we have lost – added Caffo – is actually an aberrant condition of existence of Homo Sapiens. This way of postponing, this way of saying: 'I'll do it later, I'll talk to my father later', then maybe your father dies and you haven't told him the things you wanted to say, because you have always postponed... The here-and-now means not to delay and in my philosophy, simplifying, this has a lot to do with the big crises we face: ecology, environmentalism, the death of diversity. We continuously postpone the solutions, we always did. Not postponing means being in the presence, in the here-and-now. It is not about the usual rigmarole of 'do it for your children', 'do it for future generations'; no, do it now, do it for yourself! It is nonsense, that of postponing». And, to be very clear, the situation today for our philosopher is the following: «We are basically in shit, but very few intellectuals understood it». Intimately linked to this reasoning is also Leonardo Caffo's speech about posthuman, addressed in his essay Fragile humanity, an important and dense book revolving around the inevitable overcoming of anthropocentrism and supporting a strong criticism of the idea of humanism. «Mine is a great battle against humanism, more or less like that of Adorno and Horkheimer against enlightenment. Enlightenment gave you the tools to criticize it, otherwise there would have been no match. So does humanism: it gave us the possibility to amaze about what West is. Today we live in a moment of stupid criticism of the West, we say that we should learn, but from what? If one is used to travel around the world, he knows well that West means human rights, it means technique... West is feminism, West is environmentalism, but it is also the condition of possibility for a great deal of suffering. Humanism means centrality for Homo Sapiens; today we must be humanists putting life at the center, not only the life of man or of a type of man, but life in general». For this reason, in Caffo's philosophical proposal (as he likes to say and repeat), life takes the shape – as it happens in different, but equally strong ways, in Morton or in Donna Haraway – of a reasoning on other species, on hybridization and on mutation that the posthuman, who does not have any of the bio-technological features of transhumanism here, must meet. «I am talking about an inescapable condition, that is how to live after a forthcoming catastrophe; it is useless to be kind of weekend optimistic, if one analyzes the data, if he analyzes curves and how we are behaving, things can only end badly. Whether because of an environmental collapse, of a war collapse, or of a pandemic collapse: what we have in front of us is kind of a huge bogeyman, which will lead humanity to an epochal transformation, in which our future will probably look much more like Neanderthal man’s life rather than the Asimovian scenarios of flying machines and so on. Mine is a radical criticism because we have been great at building the progress, but we have not been able to stop us. Which exactly represents the difference between the limit as a resource and the limit as something negative». As aforementioned, Leonardo's thought thrives and feeds also on its contradictions, which in the case of the West speech become seminal, when he takes it with the tout-court criticism regarding the
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