We have forgotten the future: cultural memory and the Italian feft's horizon of expectation

Bellin, Stefano

doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2024.2420504

We have forgotten the future: cultural memory and the Italian feft's horizon of expectation

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Bellin S. We have forgotten the future: cultural memory and the Italian feft's horizon of expectation. Italian culture. 2024;42(2):156-79. DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2024.2420504

Abstract

This article analyzes Italy's politics of memory in the age of presentism, a "regime of historicity" that posits a kind of eternal present that corresponds with a neoliberal ethos that naturalizes the current political-economic order. Drawing on mnemonic hegemonic theory, it examines how the loss of a utopian dimension and our problematic relationship with the future influence Italy's flawed relationship with its past. The article focuses on Francesco Piccolo's Il desiderio di essere come tutti (2013), a novel that interweaves autobiography, cultural and historical commentary, and a narrative analysis of the developments of the Italian left from the years (1972-1984) when Enrico Berlinguer was the secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to the last Berlusconi government (2008-2011). Drawing on the work of Reinhart Koselleck, François Hartog, Enzo Traverso, and others, the article outlines a sociocultural analysis of presentism and of the feeling of "stuckness" that pervades our political conjuncture. Building on this theoretical framework, it then analyzes how Il desiderio di essere come tutti represents the disappearance of the Italian left's horizon of expectation. By working through the historical defeat of the communist left, Piccolo's novel gives us an insight into the causes and effects of presentism in Italian society. This enables me to clarify what I mean by "forgetting the future," and explore how the exhaustion of a particular hope of sociopolitical transformation bears upon Italy's politics of memory. Ultimately, this article aims to open a conversation on whether it is possible to fight multidimensional forgetting in a time in which neoliberal rationality has penetrated every human sphere, remaking the subject and dismantling the social in the process.