Interregnum
A concept of Giorgio Locchi, in which historical time culminates both in a civilisation’s end and in the possible birth of a new civilisation.
We are currently living through an interregnum, a tragic historical moment when everything is in flames and everything, like a phoenix, might rise reborn from the ashes. This is the dark night, the ‘midnight of the world’ evoked by Hölderlin, between dusk and dawn.[1] The interregnum is the period of regeneration between chaos and post-chaos, the moment of tragedy, when everything is again possible. European peoples are presently living through an interregnum. Metamorphic in essence, European civilisation has known three distinct ages: Antiquity, the Middle Ages which rose from the ruins of Antiquity, and, beginning in the Sixteenth century, a Third Age of expansion, that of ‘modernity’, which is now coming to an end, following the terrible decline inaugurated by the First World War. Colonised by alien peoples, our civilisation faces death in the first twenty years of the new millennium. The interregnum through which we are presently living is the most crucial and decisive period since the Persian and Punic wars.[2] Either Europeans will unite in self-defence, expel the colonisers, throw off the American yoke, and regenerate themselves biologically and morally — or else their civilisation will disappear — forever. Never have the stakes been so high. The interregnum will give birth to the Fourth Age of European Civilisation — or else Europe will die, purely and simply. Everything is to be decided in the decisive period now beginning. And birth, if it occurs, will be painful, full of blood and tears — the fuels of history. For our civilisation, the Twenty-first century is to be a trial of life or death, with no possibility of appeal.
(see chaos, Eurosiberia, history)
- ↑ The author is here most likely referring to Hölderlin’s poem ‘Bread and Wine’. The night is used to symbolically represent our age, when the ancient gods of Greece and Christ have left the world and it is only the poets who attempt to keep their memory alive until their return. Many translations exist. Martin Heidegger discusses this poem at length in his famous essay ‘Why Poets?’, translated in Off the Beaten Path (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- ↑ The Persian Wars were fought between the Persian Empire and the Greek city-states in the Fifth century BC, when the Greeks successfully repelled multiple invasion attempts. The Punic Wars were fought between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian Empire. The Roman victory in these wars secured their dominance in the coming centuries. Both wars could be seen as the triumph of Western civilisation under the threat of foreign invasion.
