Quarantine Thoughts on Italy

4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life Quarantine Thoughts on Italy ABRIL 6, 2020ABRIL 6, 2020 / LIFERESEARCHGROUP The Decameron, 1837–1837. Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Oil on Canvas Bojan Bilić, ICS-ULisboa When I moved to Florence in September 2008, after being awarded a fellowship at the European University Institute, my life took a whole new course. As my train https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 1/7 4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life approached Santa Maria Novella, I caught a glimpse of the dome of Brunelleschi and a Stendhalian adrenaline rush flu ered though my chest inaugurating a period of immersion into many forms of beauty. Years of student hardship, the exhaustion provoked by endless political chaos, and the myriad dilemmas I had about my rigid patriarchal body, had already taken their toll making me long for pleasure. Soon after my arrival, I started going for long walks from San Domenico’s Via dei rocce ini to the Piazza San Marco, passing by the Medici villas full of cypress, lemon, and olive trees, and trying to convince myself that my new surrounding was indeed real. While I slowly synced with the imperceptible rhythm of Italian small city life, both in myself and in many of my colleagues, I noticed a remarkable transformation: tanned by the Tuscan sun, caressed by centuries of culture, and nourished by food prepared with love and a ention, we received an injection of vitality that could hardly be matched by any of my subsequent experiences. Italy has given me far more than other places in which I have lived and the moment I step on its soil I am imbued with the feeling of being at home. Nevertheless, after the initial infatuation, one soon realizes that beauty, however alive it may make one feel, is not sufficient for sustaining life. The more time I spent in contact with the Italian academia, both as student and especially, later on, as lecturer, the more my fascination with Italy subsided and the more distant I became from the ideal that I found upon my arrival and wanted to hug and preserve for the years to come. For example, last May I was shortlisted, along with four other candidates, for an interview for the position of assistant professor of sociology at a major university in Northern Italy. I embraced that invitation with enthusiasm and regardless of some logistical difficulties and the fact that neither travel nor accommodation costs were covered by the university, I made sure to appear in person on the agreed day. Before that I had corresponded on a few occasions with a kind administrative assistant who asked me to complement my application file with further documents strengthening in such a way my belief that I was indeed https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 2/7 4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life entering into a meritocratic procedure. As I prepared myself for the interview, the first doubts appeared once I learned that one of the shortlisted candidates already worked at the university and even had presented herself as assistant professor in a forthcoming book ahead of the interview date. These doubts were cemented during the interview when I was asked to summarise my doctoral thesis and explain to three sociology professors what intersectionality was all about. On my way back, si ing again in a train that went through impeccable vineyards, I realized that I had been drawn into a (for me costly) theatre performance (the application process involved at least three persons who took the time to provide me with references and other necessary documents) in which my role was nothing more than that of a “foreigner” who should “internationalise” the procedure and thus render it more “serious”. Particularly frustrating was my impression that none of the candidates that I managed to meet actually had any faith they might end up with an offer. They were there to make themselves “seen” and circulate information about their tortuous careers hoping that their turn may come at a later point. However, the most puzzling part was the involvement of a soft spoken full professor coming from another major university as a chair of the commi ee. My irremediable lack of “real life” experience, of being able to “read between the lines”, prevented me from comprehending why a senior scholar approaching retirement – and thus supposedly being a person towards whom one might want to turn for ethical guidance (if professors still get associated with this kind of challenge?) – would engage in such an unjust practice. One colleague who was also there in candidate’s capacity was generous enough to resolve my dilemma by providing me with an insider’s insight that, of course, rarely reaches the point of articulation serving instead as an invisible fluid which oils the mechanisms of injustice. He simply said: “The professor had a debt that has now been paid. Alternatively, he has a credit that he can use in the future”. https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 3/7 4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life Witnessing this behaviour at one of the best Italian universities and extrapolating it to the majority of other similar institutions does not only devastate the scholar’s world but it also impoverishes social life more generally as it drains it of trust, truth, transparency, and accountability. Academia is ro ing on the inside infected by omertà that ridicules procedures, pulverises standards, and inflates some – nepotistic – social bonds while destroying others disregarding along the way the innumerable interdependences that keep us together (and present themselves in these days in particularly visible forms). One probable etymological core of this rhizoid code of silence leads to the Sicilian omo (man) unveiling its strongly gendered dimensions associated with manhood and virility and implying a sense of patriarchal hierarchy to which one should unconditionally conform if one wants to go along the well-trodden paths of professional development. How would one expect that particular form of gerontocratic power not to stream downwards from such institutionally entrenched positions like those of presidents and popes that have been for centuries filled by men? How many times did I listen to two-hour long monologues by authoritative professors whose objective seemed to me to be keeping their students in the state of eternal infancy? The proverbial lecturer-student rift that appears in such conservative institutions with long history but short memory results in constant student infantilisation and depoliticisation that cannot be anything else but a strategy of power maintenance. This strategy is often underpinned by an archaic bureaucratic language which creates a fog that envelops responsibility making it impossible for it to emerge. Italy as a suicidal simulacrum While there is perhaps no immediately obvious link between academic dishonesty and authoritarian academic culture, on the one hand, and death that has been pervading us in these months, on the other, there is certainly a more implicit one. Our social systems do not collapse because of a supposed “excess” of democracy that cannot keep people off the streets or restrict their movement in times of a pandemic [pan+demos, involving us all]. They implode, rather, through myriad https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 4/7 4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life “small” acts of corruption in which we are all interpellated. It is through the educational system, and particularly its higher layers, that we are constantly invited into political and moral treasons, into perverted solidarities based on fear and unrestrained ambition that eventually return to uncover our collective fragility and undermine what we thought we had so solidly constructed. The precarity that many of us have been living as scholars without stable employment (with all of its economic and social implications), scholars without firm networks of interest [or as LGBT people marked by a pervasive insecurity and by the idea that our bodily integrity can be quickly disrupted, or in many cases – both] is currently being propagated across the world reminding us that to be alive means to be immersed in risk, but also giving to those in power an unprecedented opportunity to feel how it is to live in the vicinity of danger. I have now spent more than twenty years grieving the disappearance of my country. The tragedy of Yugoslavia has not only become a(n) (dis)integral part of my life, but it has transformed itself into an arche-failure that structures my political experience and makes me clutch at straws of my few socialist years as I struggle to make sense of the present and articulate minimal strategies of resistance to the devastation that surrounds us on a daily basis. Although there certainly are many factors that, while going beyond its reach, contributed to its painful dissolution, Yugoslavia was more than anything else a state which commi ed suicide. My long-term contact with Italy has given me a chance to see how hard it has been working against itself, how its thick social tissue is being unwoven clearing the way for the eruptions of racism that on various scales brews under its public surface. That Italy is a garden of Europe is now li le more than a simulacrum which does not find it particularly problematic to liberate itself from some of its best people (see, for example, the case of Ilaria Capua) unaware of the costs that such a practice inevitably incurs. https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 5/7 4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life The exposure to uncontrollable death (like the one we lived in Yugoslavia in the 1990s) that has been unfolding there over the last months has decimated one generation and pushed another one – all too aggressively – into adulthood. This death is not only physical, biological, but in many ways also social and political. It constitutes a traumatic rupture that invites us to embrace our vulnerability and redraw the frontiers of our communities. As we mourn the world that is disappearing in front of our eyes [and watch the surreal portrait of Fidel Castro among Cuban doctors in Lombardy] perhaps in the unknown that we are facing we can discern the contours of more promising futures? 26 March 2020 Bojan Bilić is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). He is also Adjunct Professor of Gender and Social Movements at the University of Bologna. Como citar este artigo: Bilić, Bojan (2020). Quarantine Thoughts on Italy. Life Research Group Blog, ICSLisboa, h ps://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06 (h ps://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantinethoughts-on-italy/) 6 de abril (Acedido a xx/xx/xx) A rubrica LIFE GOES ON pretende partilhar pequenas reflexões dos membros do Grupo de Investigação LIFE – Percursos de Vida, Desigualdades e Solidariedades: Práticas e Políticas, sobre a situação que hoje vivemos, provocada pela pandemia do COVID-19. Essas reflexões abordarão os seus impactes em vários planos da vida dos seus investigadores: no processo de pesquisa, no trabalho académico e na vida social. https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 6/7 4/7/2020 Quarantine Thoughts on Italy | Life Anúncios Powered by wordads.co Seen ad many times Not relevant Offensive Covers content Broken REPORT THIS AD life course, LIFE GOES ON, sociology ACADEMIA , COVID-19 , DEATH , ITALY , PRECARITY , QUARANTINE TRAUMA , SITE NO WORDPRESS.COM. https://liferesearchgroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/quarantine-thoughts-on-italy/ 7/7