Massimo Adinolfi

Il saggio si propone di liberare la questione della verità tanto dai formalismi della riflessione e dalle argomentazioni elenctiche con le quali si suole confutare lo scetticismo in filosofia, quanto dall’appello perentorio ad una supposta verità dei fatti e alla concezione della verità come oggettività. L’obiettivo non è però quello di rinunciare alla verità né tantomeno di proporne una piatta relativizzazione, bensì quello di intendere la filosofia come incontro sempre ricominciante con l’evento della verità.The paper aims to free the issue of truth: on the one side, from both the formalisms of reflection and the elenctical argumentations usually used to refute skepticism in philosophy. And, on the other side, from the imperative call for a supposed truth of facts and the conception of truth as objectivity. The main objective, though, is not to give up truth, nor to propose its mere relativization, but rather to conceive philosophy as an encounter that always begins with the event of truth itself.

Starting from the Derridean statement that deconstruction applies above all to institutional structures, the essay provides the terms for a critical comparison, deriving it essentially from the examination of three crucial moments in the French thinker’s work: the discussion of the notion of context and its relationship with the phenomenon of performativity; the Foucault-Derrida debate in the hermeneutics of the Cartesian Cogito; finally, the question of the “mystical foundation of authority” on which, according to the philosopher of El-Biar, every law and every institution would be based.

This contribution aims at discussing the presentation of the philosophical idea of book in Jacques Derrida, the opposition that Derrida draws between the philosophical idea of book on the one hand and writing on the other, and, above all, the ambiguous placing of Hegel in this opposition. Hegelian philosophical writing is for Derrida (and not only for him) a threshold beyond which the philosophy of the Book in its ‘total’ form is no longer possible. The aim, however, is to suggest that what is “now underway in all domains”can’t be, as Derrida claims, the pure and simple “destruction of the book”, and it is doubtful that this will happen or could happen in favour of the denudation of the “surface of a text”.