In a Time of Monsters

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” This ominous aphorism is often cited admiringly for its uncanny insight into the zealous lurch and extremist lean of recent global politics. The chilling words are typically cited to invoke uncanny parallels to the 1930s, when as a world war raged Antonio Gramsci, writing in notebooks smuggled into his prison cell, noted something about transitions and intermediacy that seems to be a fundamental and recurring truth about monsters. So for example Steve Mintz, in a column that he composed for Inside Higher Ed and entitled “Gramsci’s Warning”:

This phrase speaks not only to Gramsci’s time, but to our own: when older sociopolitical and economic structures are collapsing, but no new stable order has yet emerged. In such transitional moments, Gramsci argued, uncertainty, instability and reactionary forces dominate, creating a breeding ground for extremism, authoritarianism and political “monsters”—figures or movements that thrive in times of disorder.

We are most certainly living in a time when, in Mintz’s gloss, “authoritarian leaders, reactionary movements and political opportunists who capitalize on the instability” have emerged and flourish. But are these “figures” and “movements” monsters?

Let me ask the same question another way. When we include in their company Trump, Musk, Putin, Xi, Erdoğan, Orbán and their ilk, are we not disparaging the eloquent potency and enigmatic possibilities of the monster? These men seem to me the pettiest and most predictable version of what it means to be a human enamored of power, more tedious than monstrous, more banal than category-challenging, figures of foreseeable self-aggrandizement rather than a trigger to critical examination about what it means to be a complicated human in a complicated world. Would-be tyrants and aspirational Caesars have a staggering ability to demolish norms and lay institutions waste because they have been yielded that license. They are most certainly dangerous, a rebuke to custom and rule of law, but I have never found in any of them a philosophical challenge. They seem to me a disheartening reminder that fascism and an ardor for disruption – a delight in knocking things down, sometimes but not always so that structures can be rebuilt in ways that hoard and exclude – are among the most recurrently human patterns that history provides. Authoritarians and their fellow travelers are not forces of chaos per se: they are those who deploy chaos to accomplish the most predictable goals. To label them monsters is an insult to monsters.

Yet the Gramscian postulate beckons. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters. The sentiment seems so right, halfway between poetry and sacred revelation. These words have appeared thousands of times in print and across electronic media since at least the 1990s, mainly through the work of Slavoj Žižek. The Slovenian philosopher invoked the formulation repeatedly, and as if directly translated from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Yet Gramsci never wrote those words. At best they are a loose and poetic English riff on some impressionistic and lyrical French sentences that seem to have been loosely inspired by an observation about transitional times found in Gramsci’s Italian:

“Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres” [The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this light-dark surge monsters]. [1]

They have a hint of a whiff of the flavor of Gramsci’s prose. The closest analogue reads unpoetically:

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati. ["The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”]

Not nearly as Delphic: no rhapsodic framing of struggle and emergence, no thrilling invocation of monsters and the emergent Now.

Perhaps the key to the misquotation’s popularity -- despite the fact that a simple Google search will reveal that Gramsci did not write it -- inheres in its seeming explanatory force. It’s reassuring to live in an age that unfolds as predicted by a revered intellectual, making sense of a perturbing historical turn.

But I would also offer that what makes the lines so memorable, so right, are their poetic reassurance that we live in a time of monsters – and that those companions during trouble are far more interesting spurs to art and thought and fecund uncertainty than any oligarch or autocrat. Figures of movement and never the stillness of a label, monsters emerge with and as restless narrative and arcane poetry, our best technologies for intermixing an unsurpassed past with emerging futures, genesis in motion. They traveling the human at its limit.

Now is the time of monsters. Monsters accompany us, interrogate the human and render identity a constant question rather than a resolved noun. They lead us out of the solitary, the self-evident, and the still. We invoke monsters to reassure ourselves that we have not been abandoned to ourselves, in the limited forms and freedoms that autocrats adore.

For if monsters did not exist, well then how can we?

[1] The Wikiquote page on this is very good (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci), but for fullest context of how the quotation travelled across languages see Ross Wolfe, “The Charnel House” July 3 2015 (https://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/07/03/no-zizek-did-not-attribute-a-goebbels-quote-to-gramsci/)