The Suspension of Historical Time

<p>The text we are presenting here, “The Suspension of Historical Time,” is drawn from the book <em>Spartakus: Simbologia della rivolta</em>, which Furio Jesi wrote between 1968 and 1969. Jesi was born into a partly Jewish family in Turin in 1941 and died in Genoa in 1980; despite this early demise, he was one of twentieth-century Italy’s most important and original thinkers and essayists. A true <em>enfant prodige</em>, he got his start as an Egyptologist when he was barely fifteen. In the early 1960s, he turned to the study of mythology and the science of myth, or rather, of how ancient myths re-emerge in the modern era, at times in distorted and treacherous form.</p> <p>In 1964, Jesi began corresponding with Karl Kerényi, a scholar whom he always admired and took as a model. In that very period, Kerényi had given a lecture in Rome, about genuine myth and its “technicization,” which identified the true mythic experience, i.e., inspired contact with the <em>echter Mythos</em> (Kerényi also calls it <em>Urphänomen</em>, an expression borrowed from Goethe), as something that only poets are capable of in our era. Above all, he drew a distinction between “genuine myth” and the exploitative, distorted adoption of ancient mythemes for political ends: a dangerous use, or technicization, that he saw in both totalitarian propaganda and the ideas of Georges Sorel…</p>