Review of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) by Mauro_Lanari — 27 Jan 2023

(Mauro Lanari).

I take this opportunity to explain the matter (perhaps) once and for all. Nietzsche's anthropology is dualistic by contrasting the active nihilists to the passive ones: while the former accept the status quo for "amor fati", the latter fail to adapt to it as they do not possess a disposition that allows them to accept survivalism with its degenerative process until the extinction. Alternative dichotomies such as floats vs. drowned, integrated vs. apocalyptics, settled vs. marginalized, conformists vs. eccentrics are more imprecise. So far, humanity has shown that it falls within such a binary category, idem the entire planetary culture. Twentieth-century existentialism was a mass phenomenon that disappeared in the second half of the period. Earlier we find the Greek epic poems from Homer to Hesiod, the pre-Socratic philosophy, the Athenian tragedy that reached the point of no return with Sophocles' "Oedipus at Colonus" in 401. In the Jewish sphere, the further root of Western thought, we find the defeatism of Qohèlet. The problem lies in the fact that they have only ever known how to complain or protest, never suggesting anything constructive. The active nihilists are instead Epicureans, Horatians, Juvenalesques, cantors of the "carpe diem". Even art and therefore cinema can be traced back to the two Nietzschean typologies, and individual authors or single works can even oscillate unsteadily between one pole and another. "Tertium datur"? In effect, yes. In 524, the year before he was killed, Boethius exposes in the "De consolatione philosophiae" a dilemma that will find a more rigorous formula with Leibniz in the "Essais de Théodicée", written in 1705 and published in 1710: "Si Deus est, unde malum? Si non est, unde bonum?". For atheists, materialists and immanentists the opportunity opened up to analyze the second horn of the dilemma. How many took advantage of it? How many finally began to provide a proposal? To my knowledge, only one thinker: Ernst Bloch, starting with his main book released in '59. That is, our debut attempt beyond active and passive nihilisms dates back to only a few decades ago. Shocking and devastating. With this, even McDonagh cannot but refer to the "despair of Kierkegaard" (Federico Pontiggia), to the "funereal twilight of Beckett" (Enrico Azzano), "not for nothing Samuel Beckett is Dubliner and certainly one of the strongest referents, [...] very skilled weaver of plots and dialogues mixed in the absurd" (Emanuela Martini), "it looks like a comedy of the absurd in costume written by Beckett" (Carlo Valeri). And why not even 1938 Sartre's "La Nausée"? Stop with this rearguard, after decades and millennia I demand from culture something that at least [re]starts from Bloch.