Uranus’ revenge on Cronus (and Cronus’ on Zeus)

In the current technical reorganization of capital, it is the mobilization of individual life in all its dimensions, in order to keep up with a selected innovation, that protects the economic principle of socialization instructed by the self-valorization of value from the inexorable law of time (tempus edax rerum). Everything is called upon to update itself: tools, objects, knowledge, sensitivities, environments. Below, however, it is the unassailable law of the “rationalization” of value - of a value ensnared by the infinite evil of pleonexia - and its univocal forms of social mediation, which, in today's situation, has given substance to that continuous acting within certain limits, to that inexhaustible renewing of the “secondary things” without ever affecting the “principal things”, as Tocqueville says, when in his incomparable writings he reflects on the reasons for the rarity of revolutions in the democratic era. In this way, the present can continually reproduce itself, despite appearances. It saves itself from the very imperative of historical process, whereby no present can claim not to be surpassed, removed, or included within another and subsequent societal order of the time: as the myth of Uranus and Cronus teaches us. Here instead we witness the revenge of Uranus on Cronus and of Cronus on Zeus: a desire to finally and unfortunately fulfill oneself eternally.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of C.G. Jung (1875-1961), the Eranos Foundation dedicates its Eranos-Jung Lectures - the public conferences held at the Monte Verità Conference Center in Ascona - to the exploration of a Jungian micro-lexicon, with which we wish to map some problematic nodes of our present. These are six words - Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge - to which Jung, during his intellectual and human journey, dedicated pages of great clarity and depth. For us today, they are precious notions through which we can shed light on ourselves, on our relationship with others and with the surrounding world. In this way, Jung will accompany us on a journey of discovery inside and outside ourselves, to help us better understand what went wrong in the process of civilization to which we owe both our power and our fragility, in the face of a reality that no longer seems to respond as we would like to our hegemonic designs