Some refletions on contemporary interdiction of interdiction:

a new modality of malaise?

Abstract

The article examines whether the contemporary interdiction of thinking constitutes a new modality of Malaise, articulating three argumentative axes. In the first, it genealogically reconstructs the concept of contemporary thought from positivism to the postmodern radicalization of Nietzschean suspicion, culminating in the contemporary paradox of unrestricted enthusiasm for the technological derivatives of reason accompanied by hostility to thinking in the ethical, political, and cultural domains. In the second axis, the article accepts the tragic structure of Freudian theory in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), but points out two decisive insufficiencies: the deliberate fusion of Kultur and Zivilisation contracts culture to its protective-instrumental function, silencing the constitutive dimension of Bildung — the cultivation of the self as cultura animi — which the Western tradition, from Cicero to Hegel, identified as the differentiating trait of the human; and the erasure of the distinction between the genetic plane and the plane of validity compromises the normative autonomy of the products of thought relative to their instinctual conditions. In the third axis, the article argues that the malaise produced by the interdiction of thinking is qualitatively distinct from Freudian Unbehagen: while the latter is a structural side effect of the repression necessary for culture, the former attacks the very condition of possibility of culture itself, for thinking is not a mere reactive instrument, but a spontaneous and sense-producing faculty.