La guerra come ritorno impossibile della storia

An easy equation would like to explain the reappearance of war in Europe as the return of the great repressed and of what postmodernism had declared to be inexorably concluded – that is, as the return of History. Taken in these terms, war would regain a political meaning and, at the same time, the dignity of an ever-available move, where the end of history had decreed its non-necessity and even its uselessness. But however different today’s world may be from the rigid geopolitical equilibrium that accompanied the rise of the concept of the postmodern in the second half of the twentieth century, the equation “return of war equals return of history” risks positing a rather rough equivalence – both with regard to the concept of history and to the return of war as an instrument of history itself.