Of the phantom pain and phantom desire of Savonarola
A good ten years ago, while working on my Digitale Renaissance1, as if by chance, my gaze fell on Becket's Waiting for Godot on the bookshelf, and this sentence appeared like an inspiration before my inner eye: Waiting for Savonarola! Now you don't have to be a prophet to recognize certain structural similarities since much of what is currently taking place before our eyes is reminiscent of when this Dominican monk plunged Florence — perhaps the most politically advanced city-state of the time — into turbulence. However, in the judgment of historians, Savonarola proves to be a highly iridescent, almost paradoxical figure. For here, the verdict vacillates between the image of a fanatical dark horse and the portrait of a first bourgeois leader. Max Horkheimer, of all people, a member of the Frankfurt School, characterized Savonarola as the prototype of a bourgeois leader in his essay Egoism and the Freedom Movement.
Max Horkheimer and his wife Rose, Photo: Barbara Niggl-RadloffNow, this may be an almost counterintuitive classification given his dark shadow, but arguments can certainly be found for such an assignation. This is supported by the fact that the first Florentine constitution goes back to Savonarola, who pleaded for a "just administration; incorruptible officialdom; political prudence; preservation of official secrecy; punishment of national unreliability; above all reform of the administration of justice, and generally conscientious fulfillment of civic duties."2 Undoubtedly, Savonarola represented the bourgeois classes in his fight against the Florentine patricians, primarily the Medici; along with his fight against the Vatican, which had chosen perhaps in the form of Rodrigo Borgia the most corrupt cleric as Pope Alexander VI, and thus could rely on this class’s aversive resentment — an aversion that Horkheimer immediately transfers to the register of the erotic:
Behind the hatred against the courtesan, the contempt against the aristocratic existence, and the rage against Jewish immorality, Epicureanism, and materialism, there is a deep erotic resentment that demands the death of their representatives. They are to be extinguished, if possible in agony; for the meaning of one's existence is called into question by every moment of theirs.3
In the biography of Savonarola, an episode preceding his clerical vocation is vouched for, which shows the young merchant's son on suitor's feet, having fallen madly in love with the daughter of a Florentine patrician, Roberto Strozzi.
Laudomia Strozzi and Girolamo SavonarolaAlthough Laudomia was an illegitimate daughter, she nevertheless gave the admirer a harsh rebuff: "How can you imagine that the noble blood and lineage of Strozzi would stoop to a union with the house of Savonarola?" The moment of shame did not merely turn into resentment but allowed the rejected lover to find refuge in the bosom of the church — here, he could abandon himself to that higher morality as it erased the memory of the shame he’d suffered while allowing the resentment to dissolve into a form of phantom lust.4 Insofar we'd fall short if we saw in Savonarola's rage against the corrupt patricians just a form of bourgeois rationality at work. Undoubtedly, we are dealing with unconscious processes, even a moment of a schismatical fissioning. And here, the bourgeois ratio is opposed by a no less powerful personality trait - a logic that’s most definitely reminiscent of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you look at what the 'bourgeois leader' opposes, unmistakably, it is that the moral relaxations incriminated are failed temptations - epiphenomena of nascent capitalism. From this point of view, Savonarola's sermons would have to be read as an expression of a highly paradoxical desire:
Protect me from what I want. (Jenny Holzer)5
In fact - and this at least makes Horkheimer's thesis waver — it is precisely these anti-modern impulses that bring Savonarola to power. Because if he was able to become a morally fixed star in the turmoil of the time, in which Florence had broken away from its autocratic leadership (the Medici) while, at the same time, had to struggle with the French king and a corrupt pope, it was because — with a sure instinct for charismatic leadership - he acted as a prophesying prophet of God. This was precisely his attraction for the masses.6 But in the end, it was in the government measures he instigated that the anti-modern trait emerged. The abolition of the catasto, that is, the tax system that had brought the city through its various militaristic disputes, and the prohibition of the taking of interest, is proof of how far chiliastic thinking has moved away from the bourgeois society's operating system — even that it believed it could return to a Christian morality without further ado. In this sense, the mountain of debt that Savonarola piles up, the monte de pietà , is, most importantly, evidence of a forgetfulness of time and reality.
Now, Brother Girolamo was by no means alone in his erotic resentment but could rely on large parts of the Florentine citizenry. And this should precisely be the occasion to subject what we tell ourselves is the heroic history of the Renaissance ("the discovery of the world and man," as Jacob Burckhardt called it) to a somewhat more critical examination. Because if the narrative betrays a signature, it bears an unmistakable kinship to Antonio Gramsci's interregnum — that transitional epoch in which the old does not want to die and the new does not want to come into the world.7 If we translate the concept of erotic resentment back into a somewhat more plausible psychology, the mentality of the epoch could be characterized as follows. In its practices, a semblance of modern thinking is undoubtedly noticeable in its appearances and claims. In this sense, the city's inhabitants are modern beings who no longer have much in common with their medieval predecessors. Insofar Ernst Piper agrees when he writes:
What Savonarola fought against with all determination was the medieval sense of the body, the direct relationship to one's own body, which seemed so "barbaric" and "pagan" to the civilized Europe of modern times.8
But because modernity leads to a sense of believers being deprived of the certainties of their faith, the era is struck with a sense of deep phantom pain. It's precisely at this point that Savonarola's appearance becomes understandable: by castigating the rulers of corruption and moral decay, the less well-off can bask in the glow of moral integrity. That you don't have to live virtue in the process but that it's enough to incriminate others' transgressions as a guardian of virtue creates the carte blanche for moral disinhibition. When Carl Schmitt (in recourse to Theodor Däubler) said that the enemy is a question of the self in a different form, this is how the impositions of the new age can be delegated to the Other.9
Learn respectability from the Turkish women, who even cover their faces with a black veil! (Savonarola)
In this way, paradoxical desire (erotic resentment) can be lived out almost perfectly: If you wish all imaginable evils on the enemy, you can, on the other hand, indulge in the full consciousness of your power and supremacy.
At this point, we understand the paramount role of the child police, which Savonarola used to enforce his goals. In the child, childlike innocence, credulity, and that moral rigorism, which only knows black or white, are combined. Consequently, in the processions organized by Savonarola, the children became the angel Impersonators who led them — and were followed by the religious, the clergy, and only then by the citizens. Having thus established a form of filial supremacy, it was only logical to incite them to supervise public order. How efficiently the children did this, and the considerable threat of violence they posed, can be read in the diary of Luca Landucci:
And on the 27th, the Friar encouraged the children to take away the baskets of carnival pretzels, as well as the players' boards and many indecent things that the women used so that when the players heard that the children of the Friar were coming, everyone fled. Nor was there a woman who had the audacity to go out dressed otherwise than according to custom." [Two days later, the children systematically scoured the entire city] "They went ... everywhere, along the walls, into the taverns, wherever they noticed accumulations, and this they did in every quarter, and whoever would have rebelled against them would have been in danger of his life, it might be whoever."10
You don't have to have any prophetic or historical-philosophical gifts to discover certain parallels to the present. The present age has also entered a state of interregnum, in which the old does not die, the new is not born. And since the contemporary establishment also needs a Latter-day Saint, the ground is prepared for infantilization — the overriding need for conversion and moral purification finds form in the figure of a child. Children's mouths tell the truth, as the saying goes. Freed from dealing with the complexities of the digital world, credulity can disguise itself as a virtue: Follow the science! The fact that the child soldiers have taken up a position with the last generation and that, in addition, language police have been appointed to monitor the current purity laws shows the exhausted modern age, viewed structurally, to be an uncanny revenant of the Renaissance. We mustn't forget that the things we ascribe to the Dark Ages (Inquisition, torture, witch hunts) are outgrowths not of the Middle Ages but of precisely this transitional period: It is no coincidence that Botticelli's Birth of Venus was painted in the same year that Heinrich Kramer published his Malleus Maleficarum, his Hexenhammer. What did Horkheimer say?
The enemy must be annihilated (if possible in agony) since the meaning of one's own existence (the lust of erotic resentment) is questioned at every moment by his.
What is more terrible for a prophet than that the predicted end of the world will not happen?
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
1Martin Burckhardt, Digitale Renaissance: Manifest fĂĽr eine Neue Welt, Metrolit Verlag, Berlin, 2014.
2Max Horkheimer, Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung, in: Critical Theory II, Frankfurt/M. 1968, p. 27.
3Ibid, p. 70.
4One could say that the erotic debacle becomes, as it were, systematized — and becomes a fight against the whore of Babylon, which Girolamo later refers to the Catholic Church as. In this context, it is remarkable that the diarist Luca Landucci always emphasizes to what extent Savonarola insisted on a strict separation of the sexes. Luca Landucci, A Florentine diary from 1450 to 1516, London/New York 1927
5Martin refers to American Artist Jenny Holtzer’s work titled Protect me from what I want, which was commissioned as the 15thwork for the BMW ART Car Project. [Translator’s note]
6If you want to visualize the schizophrenia of the time, which oscillated between being a Christian faith and a new kind of this-worldly credit order, you can show this moment of division on every page of Luca Landucci's diary, from one sentence to the next: "So it was assumed that the Virgin Mary really wanted to help Florence and that this was proof of it. There could be no doubt that the miracle had happened expressly. At that time, the price of corn was 58 soldi, and some of the best varieties 3 lire per bushel." Ibid, p. 113
7By analogy, this reflects the turbulent, transitional period in Martin’s thinking when a Universal Machine’s Gesellschaftstriebwerk [Social Drive] begins fading into its replacement, where the old Psychotope becomes visible as its anti-gravitational effect wanes as the new Machine begins waxing into its full-power. [Translator’s note]
8See Ernst Piper, Savonarola, Munich 2009, p. 87 ff.
9How backward Savoraola's hostility to the body was can be clearly seen in the fixed separation of the sexes, he insisted on in his processions. And because he preached about the moral corruption of the rich to his child soldiers, they were empowered to rebuke the Mistresses of society — in the same way that children were once reprimanded by their parents: Learn respectability from the Turkish women who even cover their faces with a black veil!
10Ibid, p. 103
