Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2022) XXIV/1

What is the role of the intellectual? And what is the relationship between culture, society and power? This essay attempts to answer these key questions by starting from the ideas that Norberto Bobbio had given us after World War II in the pages of his book Politica e cultura (Politics and Culture ), in which he sketched a figure of the intellectual that was neither partisan nor Olympian, yet vaguely evocative of that Weberian wertfreiheit that already seemed a very problematic concept at the time. Bobbio’s words, which already testified to the crisis of modern public reason, had to be set against the postmodern atmosphere and its effects, its critics and its advocates. Did postmodernism authorise disengagement, inviting us to cultiver notre jardin? Should it be discarded in order to recover a ‘romantic’ image of the engaged intellectual, a sort of ‘Green Beret’ of culture? The proposal of this essay is that the intellectual should play the role of saboteur, only to find himself rummaging through the rubble of History that he himself has contributed to disseminating.

In this article, I show how Bruschi’s Le matérialisme politique de Louis Althusser offers, against all attempts conjure up a self-generating general theory of history, a reconstruction of Althusser’s work that shows how its systematicity relies upon the unfinished, incomplete and provisional character of scientific research, always subject to constant rectification. I then claim that, from the conceptualisa-tion of the reproduction of the mode of production as dependent upon the singularity of the con-juncture, to the theorisation of the encounter as the source of historical necessity, this constant re-working is crucial to Althusser’s ability to grasp the reality of class struggle.

Iris Vidmar Jovanović ’s (2021) ‘Applied Ethical Criticism of Narrative Art’ has a goal the significance of which can hardly be overestimated, the development of an analytic aesthetic framework for a publicly relevant ethical criticism. She employs public relevance to delineate a critique that is confined to neither the value interaction debate (VID) nor the debate about aesthetic cognitivism (AC), both of which are unique to analytic aesthetics and have little impact beyond the discipline of philosophy, let alone beyond academia. In drawing attention to the relationship between applied ethical criticism on the one hand and the VID and AC on the other, Vidmar Jovanović levels a scathing indictment against the majority of philosophers of art, who are for the most part disinterested in the social and political implications of their theoretical research. In this brief reply, I begin by setting out the practical limitations of analytic aesthetics, endorsing and extending her critique. I then discuss Vidmar Jovanović ’s criticism of my own contribution to AC (McGregor 2018). I conclude with her proposed framework, which makes an insightful and urgent appeal for an analytic aesthetics rooted in both interdisciplinary and phenomenological research.

ABSTRACT The article analyses from a philosophical point of view the bioethical and biopolitical implications of torture as an attempt to justify violence according to the (alleged) benefits for defending the State or obtaining information potentially useful for the prevention of a terrorist attack. The core argument of the paper is that the regulatory framework of the prohibition of torture would be strengthened establishing a qualitative definition of torture as the control of political authority over individual human life. Mentioning some claims appeared in the period after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the article shows that in the juridical and political debate torture has been increasingly defined in a quantitative way, basing it e.g., on the measure of pain and on the consequences for the victim. The Author then briefly describes bioethics and human rights perspective; main categories of biopolitics envisioned as politics over life are then sketched according to Foucault’s and Agamben’s views. Both bioethics and biopolitics, from different perspectives, deal with individual human life; a classical account (Aristotle’s one) of this issue offers the basis for a conceptualization useful to compare critically bioethical and biopolitical perspectives and to set a qualitative definition of torture. From this perspective, torture can be seen as violence on individual human life, aimed at the annihilation of the victim's identity and as an act of domination by political authority over the victim.

The aim of this paper is to propose an articulated reflection on some theoretical and methodological problems inherent in the study of a crucial aspect of the way ethnicity works in social space. We refer to the practices of ethnic naming, that is, the kind of social categorization that makes use of ethnonyms. The analysis will be guided by an anti-essentialist, relational and dynamic conception of ethnicity, as well as by the idea that ethnicity, beyond very different local embodiments, possesses a basic unitary core that transcends the distinction between premodern and modern world. In the author’s opinion, the theoretical and methodological investigation of ethnic categorization and ethnonyms, on the one hand, will contribute to support the correctness of this approach to ethnicity, on the other, will provide a rich set of conceptual tools useful for analyzing a particularly complex aspect of identity constructions within both living and extinct populations. With reference to the contemporary world, this “toolkit” should be of decisive help in understanding a phenomenon, ethnicity, whose global impact on a social, political and sometimes legal level is still very noteworthy.

To its merit, Alessio Musio’s book gathers the main objections set forth by more conservative bioethical thinking towards assisted reproduction, and reframes them in a new perspective. The Author’s polemic objective is apparently surrogate motherhood (or gestation for others); but for Musio, surrogate motherhood is actually but the final stage in an almost irreversible process which, as assisted reproduction asserts itself, reduces the child born to a product. We shall demonstrate through a series of arguments that it is wrong to equate having a child via medically assisted reproduction techniques with mass-producing objects. Medically assisted reproduction techniques change our conception of birth not because they reduce generation into the production of goods, but because they place us in a state of looking after the wellbeing of those we put into the world from their conception. In the light of the technological revolution, it is no longer morally acceptable to keep opposing new generating methods in the name of an alleged ‘authenticity’ of ‘natural’ conception.

Technosciences such as biotechnologies aim to analyse, modify and reconstruct livings and complex biochemical components, using top-down or bottom-up approaches to simplify these complex systems. Because of the large number of involved parameters, these technosciences need more and more big data techniques (Artificial Intelligence with machine and deep learning) to find efficient correlations to predict the evolution of systems in their environments. This prediction is especially used to reconstruct livings or artificial pieces of livings in biotechnology and to give medical diagnostics in medicine. Two examples corresponding to these two different cases are analysed in this paper. The aim is to highlight interests and limitations of such digital approach in terms of human free will and responsibility, in relation to provisional scientific truth. A difference is established between classical digital-assisted technoscience and digital-driven technoscience through an epistemological analysis of this new way to practice science. This allows to precise values which are favoured in a digital driven science, what we call an « ethics of knowledge ». Thus “capabilities to predict for making “, based on efficient correlations, look more important than “capabilities to know for making » and determine complex biological mechanisms or causes of evolutions. Consequences about technoscientific mentality are drawn and practical ethical questioning is consequently reassessed.

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics is an open access philosophical journal, being published only in an electronic format. The journal aims at promoting research and reflection, both historically and theoretically, in the fields of moral, political and legal philosophy, with no preclusion or adhesion to any cultural current or philosophical tradition. Contributions should be submitted in one of these languages: Italian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish. The editorial staff especially welcomes interdisciplinary contributions with special attention to the main trends of the world of practice.

In this article, I analyse how Bruschi’s Le matérialisme politique de Louis Althusser redefines the idea of revolution through the conceptualisation of the over- and under-determination of class struggle and a reconstruction of the Marxist topic around the fundamental concepts of the modes of production and the ideological State apparatuses. I then question the possibility of the strategy of communism to bypass the necessity to « mythologise » the course of history and the tension between the idea of a communism « already there » in the emancipatory actions of the masses and communism as a mode of production.

This paper argues that the most effective way to distribute capabilities, as part of a capabilitybased theory of justice, involves the implementation of an unconditional basic income. On the one hand, unconditional access to the means – external conditions – required by capabilities has a positive impact on capabilities’ robustness and security. On the other hand, income, as an external condition, enhances at least three important aspects in the distribution of capabilities: (1) it enhances the multiple realisability of capabilities; (2) it allows for changes across time in the sources of variation that affect the conversion of means into capabilities; and (3) it increases the effectiveness of other external conditions with which income is combined.

In this work I deal with the theophanic side of the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels by Walter Benjamin. It means that the essence of being reveals itself in the allegorical figure of Saturn and in its rule: the methaphysics of exception. In this context, it becomes perspicuous the nature of the Darstellung der Ideen as the representation of the absolute conjunction between Destiny – the eternal constellation of truth in which the "platonic salvation of phenomena", and the historical reality dominated by the juridical dialectics of violence happens. This conjunction expresses a mutual implication between the two dimensions and it could be written in this form: representation of [(De˄de)]stiny. This ontological perspective is intelligible in the light of the theory of Baroque allegory linked with the doctrine of state of exception as "nearly impossible to decide".

The paper addresses Locke’s political implications in the theory of fiduciary powers presented in the Second Treatise on Government. I proceed by analysing Locke’s conception of natural rights in the state of nature as well as his conception of property in accordance with its different articulations (particularly the idea of the private ownership of an acquired object). I reconstruct the logic of the social contract theory and the foundation of the modern bourgeois (liberal) state. The paper concludes by showing the limits of Locke’s minimalist conception of the state. It argues that the original placing of the civil society in the state of nature prevents the recognition of a conflictual and dynamical composition of class interests whose mediation is the proper task of politics at the parliamentary level.

This article focuses on Bruschi’s interpretation of Althusserian theory, developed in Le matérialisme politique de L. Althusser. The first part of the article focuses on Bruschi’s analyses of aleatory materialism. Bruschi argues that Althusser’s latest writings embody a reformulation of historical materialism and a new representation of the “transition”. I question whether this rewriting does not rather imply a dissolution of the “transition” problem. The second part focuses on Bruschi’s reading of the Althusserian representation of the revolutionary process. Without conflicting with his key assumption of the deep continuity of Althusser’s path, I argue that the principle of the “autonomous action of masses” represents a turning point in the shaping of the link between theory and praxis.

In this essay, I propose an interpretation of Benjamin’s Politik, a philosophical project of the 1920s that was later abandoned and of which a few essays and fragments remain, through Paul Scheerbart’s science-fiction novel Lesabéndio, published in 1913. Benjamin believed that the novel’s protagonist, Lesabéndio, represented the ‘true politician’. Through an in-depth analysis of Scheerbart’s novel, it is indeed possible to address crucial questions such as the relationship between technique and politics, the temporality of political action and happiness. At the end of the article, critical insights into Benjamin’s political philosophy are offered.

In this paper, I discuss some points of Bruschi's book, in order to underline the political interest of the original philosophical proposal contained in his interpretation of Althusser. I point out the problematic character of the continuist reading of Althusser's work developed by Bruschi, around three fundamental perspectives: the application of the materialist method to read the evolution of a thought "under conjuncture", the effects of the subtraction of theory from the epistemological field and the legitimacy of the recourse to the metaphor of the island of communism in the theory of the transition.

This article seeks to undertake a brief politics & aesthetics-based reading of two works of Walter Benjamin and César Vallejo, relying on significant encounters with Soviet culture through visits to Moscow in the late twenties of the past century. Ideological and aesthetic affinities between the two authors are explored, focusing on the way in which they assimilated and artistically expressed a vision of the city during the first stages of the proletarian revolution. The individual expectations each one harbored relative to the forthcoming change in lifestyle are also outlined.

In this paper I examine Rorty’s article The Seer of Prague, in which He reflects on Václav Havel’s speech at the US Congress – February the 21th, 1990 – and analyzes Havel’s approach to politics in the light of Martin Heidegger’s and Jan Patoč ka’s Philosophy. Rorty appreciated Havel’s and Patoč ka’s engagement in defense of democracy and civil rights in Seventies’ Czechoslovakia (Cahrter77), despite He criticizes their philosophical aptitude as a political task. On the one hand, I try to argue that Rorty’s claim about freeing liberal-democracy from the problem of metaphysical foundation – as a matter of private life of the philosopher – is incoherent; on the other hand, I try to enhance Rorty’s distributive justice argument (in Achieving our Country) in the light of nowadays populist’s challenge to liberal democracy.

The present paper attempts to investigate the conceptual relationship between «Law» and «State» in Gentile’s doctrine. If we consider them discretely, these two elements seem theoretically clear. But, when analyzed together, they assume problematic features and show themselves in a completely different light. When approached in this sense, they entail significant philosophical implications. More specifically, the aim of this article is to argue the condition of «suspension of law» in Gentile’s works. Such condition is determined by the ambiguous position that leaves the legal domain to the mercy of political will, on one hand, and in dependence of morality, on the other. These issues reveal the undeniable contradictions characterizing legal actualism, especially with respect to the concept of law and the relationship between individuals and state authority.

In this paper, I discuss the reconstruction offered by Fabio Bruschi of the Althusserian theory of social transformation. In particular, I consider the way in which the emergence of historical novelty is conceived, comparing it with other theories. Subsequently, I critically examine the interpretation that he offers of the so-called " materialism of encounter", thereby raising some objections.

The epistemological structure of the “concept of history”65, which Benjamin presents in a monadic dialectical image, is characterized by a temporal dimension neither linear nor progressive, but intensive and ideal, in which the cognitive concept coincides with the ideal (of the good, of justice), which is characterized by totality and eternity. Here emerges the link between the transcedent, ideal theological setting, secretly active in the immanence of redemption, and the immanent setting of the political. In fact, the redeemed past summons into present time, for a fugitive moment, the messianic time of the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God, thus providing the occasion and direction for praxis, for revolutionary action, messianically and theologically motivated, striving for the construction of a society without classes. Political action is made possible precisely by its link to the past, from the cognitive capacity of the historical materialist to restore forgotten moments and bring them to a point of explosion, fueling the destructive and liberating power of the oppressed classes through the image of their enslaved ancestors.