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1. When We Ceased to Understand the World
The Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut (b. Rotterdam, 1980) attempts to grasp the spirit of the times: a mad plunge into the trembling uncertainty.
In 2021, Adelphi published the third work of the writer, When We Ceased to Understand the World (orig. ed. Un verdor terrible, 2020): here Labatut attempts to "map the network of associations, ideas, and discoveries that are at the origin of today's chemistry, mathematics, and physics," which "form the core of the current worldview"[1]. Between reality and invention, emerge the profiles of Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Karl Schwarzschild, and Erwin Schrödinger, as the flame of scientific discovery blazes.
Behold, The Stone of Madness – a small book of 77 pages – constitutes the extension of the discourse begun by L. in When We Ceased to Understand the World.
2. Páthei Máthos
Labatut's reflections start from that dismay that has overwhelmed, for at least a moment, each of us: "who has not perceived, or still perceives, the sword of Damocles hanging over one's head, the terrible suspicion of being worth nothing, of having no talent, of being incapable of doing anything worthy of note, beautiful, or of value, and that, no matter how hard we try, we will end up forgotten, unseen, or worse, mocked and ridiculed? Who has never had the sensation that, in the end, writing serves no purpose other than to dig one's own grave? Who has not worked with their head down without even suspecting once that all that effort only served to fill their own tomb, ready as we are to sustain our castles in the air, no matter the cost?"[2].
In short: twenty-first-century men desperately seeking a meaning to the unnamable current[3]. L.'s essay sinks into this inconsistency where – with God murdered[4] – everything is both true and false. In the soft underbelly of postmodernity, the cry resounds "we must know! We shall know!"[5].
3. The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born
We live, Labatut observes, in "a collective and paranoid nightmare in which we can never truly be sure of what we feel, hear, say, and even think. We no longer [paradoxically] have access to the real"[6]. L. continues, "perhaps we find ourselves in a phase where the old stories that captured the meaning of the world are collapsing, and at this moment, before a new grand narrative emerges, a mass of trillions and trillions of meaningless fragments plummets into the void, and for a brief historic period we are immersed in a world that makes no sense"[7].
Notes that capture a recurring thought. Through a mixture of chance and will, Hermes disassembles and reassembles facts in order to sustain the non-correspondence (convergence = punishment) of concrete circumstances against the general and abstract circumstances contrived by the legislator. As the table is laden with gears, a suspicion arises: there are no truths, only infinite possibilities equally true and false. The more intense the gaze, the more intense the doubt.
3.1 Lovecraft
What does it mean to live in the third decade of the twenty-first century?
God is dead and, in His place, scientific knowledge has ascended to the throne. Moreover, "science is not only method, but also metaphysical delirium: the illusion that this world of ours conforms to an order, an order that we can not only recognize but even understand"[8].
In complexity, the step is uneasy, while loudspeakers repeat: faith in science is required – the paradox of reason – their indecipherable knowledge is inaccessible to the masses. Belief is necessary. The principle of authority as a constant of history, beyond good and evil.
Meanwhile, the torch of reason illuminates that intricate labyrinth that is forming around us: the corridors are teeming with the monstrous wonders of scientific progress. And yet, the myth of free will is shattered[9], Lorenz's simulations show a cosmos sensitive to infinitesimal variations[10], Gödel's incompleteness theorems prove that "in any logical system powerful enough to formalize basic arithmetic operations, there will always be truths that, while true, cannot be proven within that system; and that, by applying the same rules, one can prove both a statement and its opposite"[11].
In this mare magnum, "as science slowly unravels the mysteries of the universe, the reality before our eyes is, paradoxically, even more difficult to grasp"[12]. Chaos as a metaphor for our current condition: on one hand, faith in reason; on the other hand, the re-emergence of archaic beliefs with reassuring explanatory models[13].
Lovecraft foresees "so far, the sciences, each pursuing its own path, have minimally harmed us; but the day will come when the mosaic of all the fragments of knowledge will offer us such an appalling vision of reality, and of the place we occupy within it, that we will either go mad in the face of that revelation, or we will flee enlightenment by retreating into the peace and security of a new dark age"[14].
4. The Cure of Madness (or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness)
In the Prado Museum, a tiny painting is on display: The Cure of Madness (or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness) by Hieronymus Bosch[15]. The painter depicts a medieval superstition: the idea that madness was caused by a stone – in B., a tulip – that could be implanted or grow spontaneously in the skull; in the scene, the stone is removed by a surgeon with the intent to cure the madman.
The delusion of reason that cultivates the hope of being able to grasp the unknowable. Michel Foucault wrote: "let us not forget Bosch's famous doctor, even more insane than he who he wishes to cure: for all his false science has done little more than cover him with the worst rags of a madness that all can see except himself"[16].
We advance in this interregnum where – with the myths of the past collapsed, while ancient demons continue to crawl at our feet – the sciences persist in trying to know every nook of the real. We wander in the complexity of frightful worlds, purified of magic, where the winds of nothingness blow.
Labatut, with unsettling lucidity, looks upon these upheavals in the Stone of Madness.
"But perhaps the title of the painting misleads us. Perhaps the surgeon is not removing a stone, but implanting something, a tulip, a flower that once bloomed will tower in the patient's head with its long stem without leaves, a flower that, by unfurling its waxy, pale petals, will reintroduce into our world the poisonous but fertile fruits of madness, which, brought back to light from the underground where we sought to bury them, will rise from the nothing that reason relegates everything it does not accept and does not understand, or everything that reminds us that we, who have conquered the surface of the Earth, who have immersed ourselves in the depths of the ocean, pushed beyond our atmosphere, where only stars live, contain a legion of angels and demons over whom we will never have full control, regardless of the progress of our civilization"[17].
[1] B. Labatut, The Stone of Madness, trans. it. L. Topi, Adelphi, 2021 (orig. ed. The Stone of Madness, 2021), p. 25.
[2] Ibid., pp. 65-66.
[3] R. Calasso, The Unnamable Present, Adelphi, 2017.
[4] "Where has God gone? – he cried – I want to tell you! We have killed him: you and I! We are all his murderers! But how did we do this? How could we drink the sea up till the last drop? Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What ever did we do, to unchain this earth from its sun? Where does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Is not our own an endless plunge? In reverse, sideways, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not wandering as through an infinite nothing?"; F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. it. F. Masini, Adelphi, 1977 (orig. ed. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882), aphorism 125.
[5] So the mathematician D. Hilbert is cited in B. Labatut, The Stone of Madness, op. cit., p. 18.
[6] Ibid., p. 24.
[7] So the director Adam Curtis; ibid., p. 35.
[8] Ibid., p. 47.
[9] "Alas! I face a tough choice. I am uneasy. Okay, I've decided! In the act of choosing, I experience a sense of belonging: the choice is mine, it belongs to me, I am the free author of the choice and I feel certainty. Yet, even if I had no doubts, even if in hindsight I were dissatisfied, I would have made a free choice. But, despite the certainty I feel of having been the one to decide, was it really me who did it?"; G. Tratteur, The Free Prisoner, Adelphi, 2020, p. 4.
[10] B. Labatut, The Stone of Madness, op. cit., pp. 40 ff.
[11] Ibid., p. 23.
[12] Ibid., p. 44.
[13] On age-old conspiracy theories and ratio-supremacism, Wu Ming 1, The Q of Conspiracy. QAnon and Surroundings. How Conspiracy Fantasies Defend the System, Alegre, 2021.
[14] B. Labatut, The Stone of Madness, op. cit., p. 13.
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraction_of_the_Stone_of_Madness#/media/File:Extraction_of_the_Stone_Hieronymus_Bosch.jpg
[16] B. Labatut, The Stone of Madness, op. cit., p. 54.
[17] Ibid., p. 74.
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