Listen on SoundCloud

Referring to Ilya Kabakov’s installation “We are living here”, displayed at Centre Georges Pompidou of Paris and referred to as a “monument to a lost civilization”, Giairo Daghini summons the differences between project and action, converging into the logical categories of “history” and “event”. Meaning by “history” a big form trying to absorb every energy within itself and containing already the trace of a future, he talks about the “events” as escape lines, strategies of resistance to the pre-existing conditions in which desires, expectations and vitalistic energies condense, possibilities to get people free from their pre-traced horizons. Revolutions and May ‘68 were events exiting from the “present” to become “actual”, overlapping the history without being generated by it, without having any precedent. Calling the deleuzian “minority”, Daghini addresses the risk that events aspire to become “majority” and paralize in history, losing their subversive potential as in USSR socialism, or that they try to relocate what they abandoned in different contexts as in reactionary nationalisms. In its “becoming a philosopher” and investigating the becoming of contemporaneity, men have the duty of self-diagnose deviations of this kind.

Giairo Daghini (1934) is a lecturer and philosopher interested in architecture and urban spaces. He studied philosophy in the sixties in Milan with Enzo Paci. He joined the foundation of Potere Operario. Moving to Paris, he edited Change International with Félix Guattari and Nanni Balestrini. He was a lecturer in University of Geneva, where he founded and led Faces magazine. He is the author of several essays on becoming and the city. In 2021 published A proposito di nomadologia, edit by Uqbar.