Introduction to the papers from the June 2017 conference “The Sick Action”
Introduction to the papers from the June 2017 conference “The Sick Action”
Read More...Category Archives: Volume 12, no. 4 (2018)
Official programme of the conference “The Sick Action. Shadows of the World, Shadows of Mankind” (Palermo, 9-10th June 2017)
Official programme of the conference “The Sick Action. Shadows of the World, Shadows of Mankind” (Palermo, 9-10th June 2017)
Read More...Speech of Dr. Luigi Patronaggio, Chief Prosecutor of Agrigento
Is it possible to have a kind of justice that goes beyond punitive action? Is it possible to form a social conflict, also considering the new migratory flows and the different cultural identities of social actors? Are we capable of handling the complexity of this society where different cultures coexist and “shadows/hates”, apparently unmanageable, are more and more present? This speech attempts to answer to all of these questions by entrusting the solution to principles of right and tolerance.
Read More...Isis, the Shadow of the West (Mediterranean 2017: The roots of hatred)
International terrorism is one of today’s chief threats to the socio-economic stability of Western countries. It is generally perceived as alien to the Western lifestyle and it is often explained away as the sorry outcome of psychosis or fanaticism. In what follows, I endeavour to show how, in a globalised world such as ours, there are no truly alien phenomena, and Isis itself can be better understood in light of global causal patterns. I conclude by indicating a possible constructive approach in our difficult times.
Read More...Politics as Soul Therapy
“The most important thing is that depression is a collective endemic disease and we feel it and think it’s just inside our brain. “In… my family, in my marriage, in my work, in my economy”… We have brought all this into a “me”. Instead, if there is an Anima Mundi, if there is a Soul of the World – and we are part of the Soul of the World – then what happens in the external Soul also happens to me and so I feel the extinction of the plants, animals, cultures, languages, customs, crafts, stories… They’re all disappearing. Of course, my soul necessarily feels a sensation of loss, of loneliness, of isolation, of mourning and nostalgia, and sadness too: it is the reflection in me of a matter of fact. And if I do not feel depressed, then I’m crazy! This is the real disease! I would be completely excluded from the reality of what is happening in the world, the ecological destruction” (J. Hillman)
Read More...Universal Evil and Individual Good: From Chaos to Cosmos
We often allocate evil to ‘others’; when the ‘others’ are simply different, far away, evil is partially projected outside or hidden in the unconscious. Mankind tends to reject the idea of taking on the responsibility for evil itself. The borderline between good and evil separates our good from others’ evil; so, other people’s malice underlines our alleged purity. Evil comes from the outside; post-industrial society contributes to the ridiculing of evil: the Shadow is expelled, at least at first glance. Contemporary society is losing its sense of expectation and of the sacred: the sign and the symbol have become equated, with a resulting chaos that runs the risk of creating the conditions for increasing global violence and international terrorism.
Read More...Thinking of the Shadow. Conceptions of Cruelty in the History of Western Thought
As regards thinking of the shadow, I can contribute to the present discussion qua intellectual historian who, together with the theologian Michael Trice, has reconstructed in recent years the understanding of a particular manifestation of the shadow in the long life of Western philosophy: cruelty. Between 1998, when I started investigating Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s liberalism of fear, and 2017, when I completed a volume of collected essays of mine to be published by Northwest Passage Books under the title Philosophy of Cruelty, I devoted considerable time and attention to retrieving, mapping and reflecting upon the conceptions of cruelty developed in the history of Western thought. What follows here is a concise overview of the five most common and/or most articulate conceptions that I have identified in the course of my studies, and repeats almost verbatim what I state in the aforementioned collection of essays of mine. Longer and more detailed analyses can be retrieved in my older publications on this subject. Please note also that my research is intentionally limited to explicit uses of the terms “cruelty” and “cruel” in the languages accessible to me. Extending it to cognates such as “violence” or “aggressiveness” would make the project unmanageable.
Read More...