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JULIA KRISTEVA
Some principles for the humanism of the twenty-first century
What is humanism? A great question mark on the most serious of issues? This reality is a product of the European, Greco- Judeo-Christian tradition,
and the same time it continues to promise, to disappoint, to re-constitute itself.
Ladies and
Gentlemen,
The words of John
Paul II, “Be not afraid!” are not directed solely toward believers,
because they may take heart in their resistance to totalitarianism. The appeal
of that Pope, an apostle of human rights, also drives us not to fear European
culture, but on the contrary, to dare humanism: the construct complicity
between the Christian humanism and that which emerged from the Renaissance and
Enlightenment, and which has the ambition of opening the dangerous ways of
freedom. Thanks today to Pope Benedict XVI, for having invited, for the first time in these places, humanists among you.
1. The humanism
of the twenty-first century is not a theomorphism. Neither “value” or ulterior “end”, Man
with a capital M does not exist. After the Shoah and
the Gulags, humanism has a duty to remind men and women that if, on the one
hand, we retain ourselves to be the only legislators, it is uniquely through
the continuing questioning of our personal, historical and social situation
that we can decide for society and history. Today, far from deglobalization, it is necessary to invent new international rules to regulate and control the finance and the global economy and finally to create a world authority based on universal ethics and solidarity.
2. Humanism is a
process of permanent refoundation, that develops through the ruptures that are
innovations. Memory does not regard the past: the Bible, the Gospels, the
Koran, the Rig Veda, the Tao, live in the present. In
order for humanism might develop and re-found itself, the moment has come to
take up again the moral codes built throughout history: without weakening them,
in order to problematize them, to renew them in the face of new singularities.
3. Humanism is a feminism. The liberation of desires could only lead to the
emancipation of women. The battle for economic, legal and political parity,
necessitate a new reflection on the choice and responsibility of motherhood.
Secularization is until today the only civilization that lacks a discourse on motherhood. This passionate bond between mother and
child, through which biology becomes meaning, alterity,
and word, is a “reliance” that, different
from the paternal function and from religiosity, completes the
participation in full in the humanist ethic.
4. In order that
the desires of men and women be rekindled, Humanism
teaches us to take care of them. The loving care for each other, the care of
the earth, the young, the sick, the disabled, the elderly dependents,
constitute inner experiences that create new proximities and surprising
solidarity. We have no other way to experience the anthropological revolution,
already announced by the leaps of the sciences, from uncontrollable processes
of technology and finance, and the inability of the democratic model to channel
the new pyramid.
5.
Man does not make history, we are history. For the first time, homo sapiens is capable of destroying the earth and himself in the name of his beliefs,
religions or ideologies. Similarly, for the first time men and women are able
to reassess in total transparency the constituent religiosity of the human
being. The diversity of our meeting here in Assisi, shows that this hypothesis of destruction is not the only possible one. No one
knows what human beings will follow us, we who are engaged in this
unprecedented anthropological and cosmic transvaluation. The re-founding of humanism is not a providential dogma or a
spirited game, it is a wager.
Ladies and
Gentlemen,
the age of suspicion is no longer enough. Faced with increasingly grave crisis and
threats, the time has come to wager. We must dare to bet on the continuous
renewal of the capacity of men and women to listen and learn together. So that,
in the “multiverse” surrounded by a void, mankind can continue to
pursue his creative destiny for a long time to come.
Julia Kristeva,
Assisi, 27 october 2011
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