Cervantesov Don Quijote, Agamben i zlo od vlasti
Cervantes' Don Quijote, Agamben and Powerholder's Evil Deeds

Summary/Abstract: The great story of don Quijote is the first novel in the literary West which attempts to restore the lost gestures (of mercy, chivalry, generosity, morality, and politicality as common interest), or rather bring them within the range of remembrance of the new epoch. Or, in the words of G. Agamben, “it tries for the last time to evoke that which threatens to elude it forever”. The insanity of the epoch is manifest primarily through the insanity related to “loss of control over the gestures”; thus a demented gesticulation with absolute gestures of power becomes a universal symptom. It is precisely to this insanity of his time that the insane don Quijote responds with imagined or imaginary pure gestures of pure chivalry. This is the code of don Quijote’s insanity: everyone claims that he alone is insane, but no one is aware that they themselves have fallen into the trap of insanity. The historical events testify to this fall into insanity, to the forgetting of every genuine chivalrous gesture, first and foremost towards adversaries, women, children, the elderly and the politically deprived. The end of religious tolerance is connected with the collapse of chivalrous idealism. The unhappy or lost mankind has lost its gestures of chivalry, morality and politicality, and this is the hour of the cruel world of outright political violence. The centre of this world of dismay is the court as “the court of death”, as the image of “evil giants” and “colossuses” which it sends forth from its deadly womb as the sole life-forces. Presently the court spreads the seed of wizardry as the seed of death to all corners of the world, as well as all arbitrary powers, from wizarding to nuclear, both in the present and in the future.

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