Libertarismo ringhioso. Siamo divenuti moderni

Two phenomena mark the politics of late Western modernity and its crisis, affecting the dynamics and institutions of representation, the physiognomy and function of political bodies, the forms of conflict and those of critique: the hypertrophy of mediation and individualism of singularity (singularism). It is a question of a state of the world and a form of subjectivity which, on the one hand, reinforce each other, on the other hand, find themselves in tension with each other. The point at which this ambivalent coexistence precipitates is that unprecedented declination of freedom that dominates the liberal democracies of the West and which I propose to define snarling libertarianism: the specific declination of the freedom of the moderns in the age of singularism and the global expansion of mediation. In terms of political effects, growling libertarianism is a hybrid that holds together the impolitic vocation of freedom of the moderns and the need for disintermediation and particularism politics as a condition for the recovery of margins of freedom/autonomy. On the one hand, it constitutes a sort of liberal extremism, an essentially anti-political attitude oriented towards maximizing negative freedom which exalts and radicalises the demands for emancipation from politics and its institutions, intolerance for the forms of representation, the radical refusal towards any form of authority. On the other hand, snarling libertarianism also exhibits the excluding and intolerant, hierarchical and discriminating face of the strategies of hardening political and social borders. It is a coexistence not without tensions and ambivalences between the protection and expansion of one’s own freedoms and the disinterest, if not hostility, for those of others.