Fabio Ciaramelli

Behind the disappointment, as imagined in a well-known poem by Constantine Cavafy, that the barbarians have failed to arrive, is a civilization closing upon itself and unable to envision an exit from its crisis. This metaphor is for the unfulfilled desire to overcome, at last, the impasse of a form of life whose shared significations are collapsing without success in renewing themselves. Such a form, enslaved as it is to the monotonous and incontestable repetition of its own identity, and in which it is ruled out that faits accomplis might be called upon to justify themselves, is a social condition that ultimately verges on barbarism. It is this possibility—of barbarism “without barbarians”—that Cavafy's poem makes us consider. Whenever there is submission of the weakest to the intimidation of the strongest, and especially when the strong treat intimidation as a natural given that they need not justify, civilization gives way to barbarism. This lesson can be drawn from the dialogue in the History of the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and the Melians, in its rereading by Cornelius Castoriadis: To the extent that the impulse to dominate others is unchecked and any effort to call the instituted into question disappears or is neutralized, we have a case of barbarism without barbarians.

The primacy of representation, to which – at least according to Paul Ricoeur – Edmund Husserl would have remained faithful, is radically questioned in Emmanuel Levinas’ famous essay on the "ruin of representation" (1959). The phenomenological structure of intentionality, in which “something appears as something”, confirms the need to “break out of the magic circle of representation”. Indeed, it is precisely by means of a detailed analysis of “intentionality”, insofar as the latter appears as characterized by an essential Mehrmeinun. Levinas brings out the overcoming of representation, that is, the abandonment of the latter's claim to subordinate thought to the objective necessity of presence. Within the horizon of presence, the necessity of being-thus-and-not-otherwise overwhelms the sense of the possible, and the actual evidence annihilates the being-able-to-be-otherwise of human experience. Through the analysis of intentionality and its potentiality, it is possible to bring out the transition from a philosophy of the necessary constraints of evidence, linked to the primacy of representation, to a philosophy of the power-able-to-be-otherwise. After all, the ruin of representation is the ruin of the instant or eternity of evidence, relegated into the actuality of consciousness. By subtracting itself from the self-referential necessity of evidence, the ethical Sinngebung evocated by Levinas at the end of his 1959 article connects intentionality to the sense of the possible, making explicit its openness to the future in radical form.

My homage to Jacques Taminiaux aims to show the fecundity of his investigations on the theoretical privilege of intuition, by pointing out the political implications of the “seduction of unanimity”. The latter implies a deep depreciating of multiplicity of opinions, and consequently a virtual destruction of political space. The internal link between immediacy and unanimity implies the short-circuit between inter-locution and inter-action in favor of the purported objectivity and universality of theoria, retained capable of seizing, in its solitary gaze, the truth of Being. I would like to suggest that the drift to unanimous solutions in social field and political questions finds its unconcealed reason in the ontological paradigm of an ideal truth directly delivered to the solitude of a philosophical gaze. I will defend such a view by developing a critical reading of a classical text in political philosophy: the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Etienne de La Boétie.

n his last writings published after his death under the title "La fine del mondo", Ernesto de Martino described the cultural crisis of the Western civilization as the extreme risk of a loss of “presence”. This word meant for him the human effort of giving sense to nature and external reality through a general kind of "Kulturareit". The only human way to react to this criseswas for him the will for history. Starting from de Martino, the paper tries to reflect on contemporary implications of a new understanding of human task to reinvent the "presence".

In Western societies the relation between institutions and norms presents itself like an explicitly instituted relation which is ruled by verifiable public procedures. The anthropological analysis allows a full consideration of this juridical experience. It focuses on some of its specific characteristics which identify it and contextualize it, removing thus any pretension of absoluteness to the Western experience. In such a way, the specific Greek-Western contribution to the constitution of “juridical civilization” comes out clearly. It has been identified in the active and therefore tendentially autonomous relation between collectivity and the social structure. The “game” in question is therefore extremely serious and complex and, in it, the symbolic dimension and the normative instance intertwine to give rise to the actual identity of the social subjects.

Thinking the origin in a radical way amounts to thinking the movement by which what does not proceed from something else - what does not have its origin elsewhere - comes to itself, has within itself precisely the ontological energy to detach itself from itself and to exist as origin. In its primordial sense, then, origin is self-origin: it is, becomes, and is known starting from itself. This self-presupposition of the origin constitutes the very advent of Being, its unmotivated and permanent upsurge, which has to be thought in terms of creation. Human creation responds to this ontological genesis, to its indeterminacy and to its incompletion - and, consequently, to its temporality. At once individual and collective - that is, both psychical and social - human creation alone can give meaning to ontological genesis.