Gramsci interregnum, when old is dying, monsters emerge
anecdote · Gramsci ·
retold in 4 talks
Žižek cites Gramsci's Prison Notebooks passage on the interregnum, when the old order is dying but the new is not yet born, morbid symptoms and monstrous entities fill the gap, and applies it directly to the current political moment.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“When the old is dying but the new is not yet born, this is the monster where horrible entities come. We are in that era.”
“when the old is dying but the new is not yet born it's a time when monsters emerge”
“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.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Antonio Gramsci4Emanuel Swedenborg1Gong Li1Garry Kasparov1Pilate’s Wife’s Dream1Volker Schlöndorff's Cinema1Xiang Biao1Stojan Pelko1
alongside works
Every retelling 4
Žižek cites Gramsci's Prison Notebooks passage on the interregnum, when the old order is dying but the new is not yet born, morbid symptoms and monstrous entities fill the gap, and applies it directly to the current political moment., illustrating interregnum / when the old is dying but the new is not yet born,yin-yang oscillation
Žižek quotes Gramsci's famous line, when the old is dying but the new is not yet born, monsters emerge, to characterize the current historical moment and argue that Hegel is par excellence the thinker of such transition., illustrating vanishing mediator,historical transition
Žižek re-reads Gramsci's 'interregnum' not just as a pause, but as a period where the 'new' is a catastrophe (like Stalinism), and true novelty emerges only in reaction to that failure., illustrating morbid phenomena,communism-socialism
Žižek cites Gramsci's observation that in moments of transition when the old is dying but the new has not yet formed itself, strange terrifying monsters and apparitions are born, applying it to the current political situation., illustrating the interregnum,capitalism with Asian values,the emerging political space