Între mitul progresului și regressus ad uterum: Considerații asupra gândirii umaniste a lui Tzvetan Todorov

Tracing the historical evolution of the ways in which the Self relates to the Other – from the discovery of America to the aftermath of the collapse of communist totalitarianism – Tzvetan Todorov progressively dismantles the utopian dimensions embedded in the modern myth of continuous progress. His ultimate concern is to understand how the human being can endure, and resist, the recurring temptations of both good and evil that historical experience repeatedly stages. Unlike archaic myths, which are obsessively oriented toward Origins, modern mythological constructions tend either to project an optimistic “golden age” into the future – no longer anchored in a primordial past but in a science-driven tomorrow (a secularized offshoot of utopia, to which the myth of progress belongs) – or to generate fatalistic, sometimes openly apocalyptic visions, such as the millenarian imaginaries cultivated by various totalitarian ideologies. In the absence of any possibility of a cyclical return to the exemplary archetype of Origins, what remains available to modern humanity, in Todorov’s view, is a return to the profoundly human: a form of rebirth grounded in self-rediscovery, conceived as aregressus ad uterum. The exemplary use of memory, a humanist grammar that acknowledges the existence of the Other – unlike the totalitarian grammar – and the practice of goodness to the point of banality thus emerge as elementary gestures capable of sustaining the modern individual within the sphere of the human. For Todorov, this movement itself amounts to a veritable regressus ad uterum.