Against the Tyranny of Progress. Exercises in Resistance in DeLillo and Sebald

Abstract

The essay aims at offering a critical revision of the category of “progress”, which had a central role in the theoretical and political lexicon of modernity and which to this day continues to maintain its full value. As evidenced by Nietzsche throughout his oeuvre, what is often forgotten is the nihilist root of the category of progress, projected for the sake of an endless, individual and collective advancement onto a temporal framework that nullifies the dimension of the present. In view of this, a Foucauldian resistance to the temptations of progress translates into an attempt to create an imaginary that sees the present time, with its unpredictable metamorphoses, as the single historical moment when actual change is possible. This is exemplified by the two novels on which the essay is focused: Sebald’s Austerlitz and DeLillo’s Point Omega.