Interregnum and the Time of Monsters

The old world is dead, the new world is not yet born, and now is the time of monsters—the line is everywhere now, credited to Gramsci and passed along as the sharpest available diagnosis of the present. Whether he wrote exactly that can wait; the claim is worth testing on its own terms first. To say it is to describe an interregnum: the interval between two orders, when one framework of authority has lost its grip and no successor has yet earned legitimacy. The claim does real diagnostic work, and the work is structural rather than atmospheric. Legitimacy is not destroyed and replaced in a single motion; there is a lag, and in that lag the rules that once bound behavior no longer bind while the rules that might replace them do not yet exist. Institutions still stand and still issue commands, but nothing underwrites them. That is a useful way to understand why periods of breakdown so often feel less like a clean fight between old and new than like an eruption of forms that obey no recognizable logic at all.

The force of the formulation lives in its last word. A monster, in the Latin sense the metaphor reaches back toward, is a monstrum—a portent, a sign, something shown. Its root is shared with monere, to warn: the same derivation that gives English admonish and monument. Monsters in this reading are not merely the horrors the period produces but its omens: hybrid, category-breaking things that appear precisely because the categories themselves have dissolved. When the rules that sorted the world into recognizable forms stop functioning, what emerges is malformed by definition, neither the old shape nor a coherent new one. Demagogues who are neither statesmen nor revolutionaries, ideologies stitched from incompatible parts, technologies without a moral grammar to govern them—these are the characteristic products of a time that has lost its template.

But the line owes its menace to an attribution error, not a translation. Gramsci wrote, in the Prison Notebooks composed after his 1926 arrest: “In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.” The standard English versions render this plainly—Hoare and Nowell-Smith’s 1971 translation has “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”; Joseph Buttigieg’s 1996 edition has “phenomena.” Neither says monsters, and no authoritative translation ever has. The phrase belongs to someone else: Slavoj Žižek popularized “time of monsters” in a 2010 New Left Review essay and later admitted he could not recall where he had picked it up; a French version—“dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”—appears in Gustave Massiah’s writing from 2003 and in Le Monde as early as 1996. Decades of circulation have welded it to Gramsci’s name regardless. The shift from symptom to monster is not cosmetic. A symptom is a sign of an underlying disorder, something to be read and traced back to its cause; it keeps the analyst in a clinical posture, diagnosing a body that is ill but still legible. A monster is an agent, a thing with intentions, an enemy. The monstrous framing flatters the speaker by casting the present as the beleaguered protagonist of a horror story, not a participant in a system under strain. It converts analysis into atmosphere. The pathology can be examined; the monster can only be feared or slain.

That trade is the statement’s larger vulnerability. Its three-part rhythm—death, unbornness, present danger—is so satisfying that it can substitute for thought instead of provoking it. It explains nothing about why the old order failed, what the new one might be, or which of the present’s disturbances are genuinely novel and which are ordinary cruelty wearing fresh clothes. It also presumes that worlds die and are born at all, that history moves in discrete epochs separated by clean intervals, when most historical change does not work this way: orders overlap, persist in fragments, and mutate without ever fully expiring. The people who feel themselves stranded between a dead past and an unborn future are usually living inside an old order more alive than they think and a new one already partly here. And the feeling is a flattering one—to believe oneself in the interregnum is to believe one stands at the hinge of an age. Nearly every generation has reached for some version of that conviction, which should make us suspicious, not persuaded. The honest question is whether a given period is actually an interregnum or merely a difficult stretch of an order that is bending rather than breaking, and the phrase offers no equipment for telling the difference.

The formulation also smuggles in a politics under cover of description. To say the new world is not yet born is to assume there is a new world struggling to be born—a determinate successor gestating somewhere, delayed but inevitable. Gramsci, writing from a Fascist prison as a Marxist, could hold that assumption because his theory told him what was coming. Stripped of that framework, the metaphor of birth does unearned work. Nothing guarantees that the breakdown of an order is labor pains, not simple ruin. The interregnum might not be a passage to anything; it might be the condition itself, prolonged indefinitely, or a slide into something worse than what preceded it. The reassurance hidden in the word born is precisely the consolation the line elsewhere refuses.

Set those overreaches aside and a harder problem remains, which is that recognizing an interregnum from inside one is close to impossible. The difficulty is constitutive rather than incidental. An interregnum is defined by the absence of the settled categories that would let you name your situation; you can identify the end of a coherent order only by reference to some other coherent order, and during the interval no such reference frame is available. The very tools you would use to diagnose the moment—shared institutions, stable expectations, a working consensus about what counts as normal—are the things that have dissolved. So people living through the transition read disorder as temporary deviation rather than as the new baseline. They keep waiting for a return to a mean that no longer exists. The morbid symptoms get filed under crisis, a word implying an acute episode with a resolution, when what is underway is a phase change with no return ticket.

Reading the moment early is therefore a genuine advantage—but only if it is paired with the right aim, and this is the sharp edge of the whole idea. The person who sees clearly that the old order is gone and then turns that clarity toward restoration has spent a rare insight on an impossible task. The diagnosis was correct; the prescription nullifies it. Recognizing that an order has ended while working to revive it is a kind of self-canceling lucidity, because the recognition itself implies that revival isn’t possible: what ended did so for reasons that persist, and the conditions that supported the old stability are the same conditions that have changed. Nostalgia here is sentimental and strategically ruinous, and it is most dangerous in the hands of those clear-sighted enough to have seen the transition coming, because their accurate read lends false authority to a doomed project.

The same shape governs the liminal passages of a single life, well below the scale of civilizations. A person who has left a faith, a marriage, a vocation, or a settled self before constructing whatever comes next inhabits exactly this interval, and the monsters arrive on schedule: the impulsive substitutions, the half-formed identities tried on and discarded, the grandiosity and despair that alternate when no stable ground is underfoot. Grief works this way, and so does adolescence, and so does any reinvention undertaken in earnest. The failure of aim recurs at this scale too—in the person whose marriage or vocation has structurally ended and who bends all their intelligence toward reconstruction rather than passage.

What the statement withholds, in every register, is consolation about duration. It marks the present as a time of monsters without promising the new world will be born at all, or born well. This is the part most often dropped when the line is quoted approvingly, as though the monsters were a thrilling weather system to be admired while waiting for it to pass. The more demanding reading treats them as work: if they are portents, they are warnings about what the unborn world will become unless someone does the unglamorous labor of midwifing a better one. The danger of an interregnum is not the monsters themselves but the temptation to find them so vivid, so confirming of one’s sense of living in significant times, that one forgets they are signs of a birth someone has to bring about. The hardest discipline is not seeing that the ground has shifted; it is refusing to use that sight in the service of standing where you used to stand. Advantage in an interregnum belongs not to those who see first but to those who, having seen, consent to move.

Sources:

• ‘The time of monsters’: everyone is quoting Gramsci – but what did he actually say?