Metabasis N. 28
digital edition
peer review
Each essay of this journal is reviewed by two anonymous referees and their comments are sent to the authors .
Technological imaginaries and political systems
November 2019 - Year XIV - Number 28
Political reflections
Epochal criticalities and symbolic dispersions of belonging. Politics and impolitics in our time
Fiammetta Ricci
DOI: 10.7413/18281567151
The contemporary political scenery has been defined, in fact, the place of disaffection from politics, perhaps also because of this radicalization of its paradoxes and uncertainties. One could speak of an unpolitical deconstruction of the individual and the community, but we would almost find ourselves facing an irremediable breakdown, a self-dissolving short circuit to doing politics and also to undoing politics.hIn the linguistic-symbolic game of the construction of an increasingly polysemic reality, we should ask ourselves whether it is possible to reconstruct a properly political order of life and thought or if, by now, the interhuman connection space must necessarily be configured as unpolitical.
Society, law and politics within Bouchard's collective imaginary
Giuseppe Maria Ambrosio
DOI: 10.7413/18281567155
The present essay, inspired by Bouchard’s Social Myths and Collective Imaginaries by Gerard Bouchard, aims to propose a symbolic reading of some ideological, historical, juridical and political events. Perceived as a multifaceted set of combined symbolic forces, collective imaginary will be used as a key point to analyse the categories of sovereignty and utopia, the eighteenth-century myth of Reason and finally some aspects of the current socio-political scenario.
Political violence and axiological principles. Axiological structuration of clandestine political violence.
Caroline Guibet Lafaye
DOI: 10.7413/18281567156
Sociology has traditionally neglected the ethics of political violence carried by clandestine groups, often described as terrorists, the use of violence being immediately associated to the sphere of prohibition and immorality. However, the use of semi-directive interviews offers rare data allowing a sociological approach, taking into consideration the ethical dimension of actions deemed illegal. They allow the use of classical qualitative empirical methods. In this paper, we will explore the frequent objections to efforts to give legitimate status to the voices of actors involved in illegal political violence and outline the methodological approaches that can be used to rigorously exploit their interviews. We will show how the use of empirical material allows a shift in the focus on the motivations and reasons of the actors, in a comprehensive logic. We will highlight the usefulness of the “frame analysis” theory to capture the conceptual and axiological categories from which these actors construct significations, elaborate the meaning of ideas and values used to mobilize or counter-mobilize, to act and implement clandestine violence.
The ephemeral imaginary of politics
Elpidio Bucci e Michela Luzi
DOI: 10.7413/18281567158
The imaginary is not simply an area of unreality but is an ephemeral world of life that can be able to restore complexity to the reality in which actions are performed, also helping political management processes. The imaginary refers to a vague set of elements: beliefs, myths, memories, dreams, fictions that are decisive for an individual, and which, in certain circumstances, are made their own even by politics, especially the most recent one.
A policy that often to stimulate and foster public opinion and obtain consensus can and must also appeal to the imaginary and to do so can use various forms of communication, especially the more recent ones that have contributed to realize mass self-communication.
Philosophical Horizons
The Metamorphosis of truth between reality and fiction. The dilemma of Diderot in Jacques the fatalist.
Enrico Graziani
DOI: 10.7413/18281567152
The article intends to analyse a classic theme of political philosophy concerning the relationship between truth, true and real in contrast to abstract thought starting from Jacques le fataliste et son maître of Diderot. On this basis it triggers the antithetical relationship between truth as alétheia and the discarding of the truth that assumes the pesudological character of reality. This makes images destined to veil the truth and to dull the complexity of reality.
On God’s omniscience, eternity and omnipresence
Juan Canseco
DOI: 10.7413/18281567150
The attribute of omniscience raises serious problems for theism. What the theist can coherently say about divine omniscience will, however, be constrained by the interpretation which he or she accepts of two further defining properties of God, namely his eternity and his omnipresence. We explore how these two properties can be interpreted, and then consider how they generate problems about omniscience.
Apophatic theology in baroque iconography
John Hendrix
DOI: 10.7413/18281567157
In 1530, Antonio Correggio painted the Assumption of the Virgin fresco in Parma Cathedral. Heaven is a blinding light in a void at the center of a spiraling vortex of bodies circling around it, both leading up to it and falling away from it. Such an image would be repeated several times in the period of the Baroque, and it would be one of the core aesthetic devices of Baroque art. In Correggio’s fresco, and in the Ba-roque, God is a void of blinding light, ineffable and inaccessible, represented as a negation, as in nega-tive theology, or as what cannot be conceptualized or perceived, as in apophatic theology. Despite its prominent role in Baroque iconography in the Counter Reformation, apophatic theology is a product of the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition.
Virtual borders in the age of globalisation
Giuliana Parotto
DOI: 10.7413/18281567160
The article analyses the relation between globalization and borders. The elimination of borders is one of the main characteristics of globalization, also present in cognitive models that arose from reflections on the post-human and posthumous. The drive to restore borders can thus be seen as a form of resistance against the fenomena of globalization. In reality, globalization traces new borders that can be seen on bodies.
Inside “An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation” by Jeremy Bentham
Claudio Anta
DOI: 10.7413/18281567154
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) published the first edition of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) a century after the Glorious Revolution. He sought to encapsulate in the juridical field the reform needs that were coming from England and the rest of Europe: a moral science which would allow the legislator to make his choices depending on rational external calculations rather than on his arbitrary whims deriving from customary law in order to ensure the greatest happiness for his subjects. In Bentham’s thought, there was no longer true rationality in the ancient natural law construction; utility was the main principle that could be attributed to reason in order to support a rational legislative science that would be comprehensible and not oppressive. Through this detailed masterpiece, the English philosopher brought to fruition a sort of Copernican revolution of law that had already begun some decades earlier with Claude-Adrien Helvétius and Cesare Beccaria (to mention but two names), by seeking to extirpate prejudice and superstition from legal science.
The Catholic Movement from Pius IX to Pius X. Which State?
Franca Menichetti
DOI: 10.7413/18281567153
These papers reconstruct, from a critical and historical point of view, the facts and the ideologies that were present in Italy because of Church, between Pius IX and Pius X. For example: Catholic liberalism, State of law, Catholic socialisms, Trade-unionism, Sturzo, Meda, Labriola and Croce. The conclusion: in the first years of Giolitti government, the clerical idea of a State without laicism will be only a dream.
The sovereignity of the individual. The relationship between the duty of inner formation (Bildung) and the rights of the citizen in the political humanism of Johann Adam Bergk.
Vanda Fiorillo
DOI: 10.7413/18281567159
The sovereignity of the individual. The relationship between the duty of inner formation (bildung) and the rights of the citizen in the political humanism of Johann Adam Bergk.
Metabasis N. 28
digital edition
peer review
Each essay of this journal is reviewed by two anonymous referees and their comments are sent to the authors .
