{"id":16,"date":"2010-02-22T23:55:07","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T23:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=16"},"modified":"2016-03-30T10:59:24","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T10:59:24","slug":"giacomantonio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/05-1\/reviews51\/giacomantonio\/","title":{"rendered":"Francesco Giacomantonio, Minima cura. Lunario del filosofo sociale (Rome: Aracne, 2008)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
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Modernity has never been easy. In its early stages, it had to fight gruesome battles against the feudal order. In its successive stages, it has had to fight against itself. Liberty\u2014the elusive aim and defining character of modernity\u2014liberated an array of novel individual and collective dimensions of existence, many of which have proved to be rather unpleasant. Scores of Western intellectuals have acknowledged modernity\u2019s unpleasantness by scores of different names: anomie, alienation, absence of recognition, ennui, blas\u00e9 attitude, inauthentic life, relativism, ejection, meaninglessness, etc. Giacomantonio dubs it \u201cexistential uneasiness\u201d (15).<\/p>\n

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By demolishing the mythical totems of all previous systems and augmenting the individual\u2019s perceived opportunities for choice and self-definition, the modern person has had to face a greater degree of uncertainty and responsibility vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> her life. At the same time, the modern person has felt threatened and even dwarfed by the broader, cosmopolitan reality of the new global order unleashed by countless and never fully successful revolutions: English, French, Russian, industrial, sexual, dot com. In other terms, modernity has advanced in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, it has increased the felt scope of individual self-determination. On the other hand, it has diminished the actual importance of the choices we make. Ironically, as Giacomantonio states, \u201cthe factors whereby individualisation is accomplished produce standardisation\u201d (23).<\/p>\n

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Post- or late-modern consumer society is, in this sense, most representative and unsettling. Then, it is exactly the section of modern Western history that Giacomantonio focuses upon in the first part of the book. Specifically, by means of a comprehensive overview of philosophical and sociological critiques of modernity as well as of post- or late-modernity, Giacomantonio endeavours to show how \u201cthe I and personhood\u201d are seen no longer as expressions of \u201clinearity, univocity, precise identity, autonomy\u201d (18). Rather, \u201cthe individual\u2026 perceives her own identity as pulverised, fragmented, troubled, isolated\u201d (18) and condemned to bleak \u201canonymity\u201d by the affirmation of the impersonal structures of \u201cbureaucracy\u201d (20) and \u201ctechnological production\u201d (21) in \u201call the traditionally most relevant sectors of social existence: work, education, communication, emotional ties\u201d (21). The modern person is claimed to be forced by \u201cthe society of risk\u201d (24) to strive endlessly for an eventually ungraspable \u201ccontrol\u201d over her own \u201cdisenfranchised\u201d and \u201cdisenchanted\u201d condition (24). Frustration and a quasi- yet not always pathological \u201cexistential uneasiness\u201d cannot but be commonplace.<\/p>\n

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Nevertheless, Giacomantonio wishes to cure the modern malaise, even if only to a limited extent, as the title of his book suggests. The medicine he decides to employ is a mixture of Wissenssoziologie<\/em>, critical theory and post-structuralism. The first ingredient should help the modern individual to realise that the social and ideological structures that surround her are not at all natural and inevitable. The second ingredient should lead the modern individual to \u201cact\u201d, whether to accept or deny her \u201ccollocation\u201d within society, the contingency of which she now recognises (31). The third ingredient should make the modern individual understand that her self-perception qua<\/em> individual is itself part of the problem, insofar as modern society has created a certain type of individuality, which is said to be free while is in fact \u201censlaved to one\u2019s own desires\u201d (39). Eventually, if the medicine takes effect, \u201csocial philosophy\u201d should enable the modern individual \u201cto find herself and deal with the world, even the post-modern, unequal, pulverising and precarious world of the 21st<\/sup> century\u201d (49).<\/p>\n

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In this perspective, the second part of Giacomantonio\u2019s book offers a rich, diverse array of applications of his proposed medicine. Fields of individual and collective existence as mutually remote as religious belief, football, international law, welfare policies, fast love and spoiled teenagers are discussed in the light of explanatory and hermeneutical criteria derived from the three \u201cingredients\u201d mentioned above. The outcome of these applications should be a deeper, wiser, healthier understanding of contemporary society and of one\u2019s own place within it. And this is probably the outcome that the author must have experienced himself when confronting post- or late-modern phenomena with his armoury of socio-theoretical notions. Will the same outcome be available to anyone reading Giacomantonio\u2019s book? This is an empirical question, to which each individual reader is bound to answer for herself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cModernity is much more than just a chronological dimension or a purely epistemological concept, because, progressively, it develops into a sort of ontological experience with which the individual, sooner or later, must reckon\u201d (17-8).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":254,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[91,92,93,94,95],"coauthors":[990],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews51","tag-epistemology","tag-individuality","tag-modernity","tag-personhood","tag-social-sciences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1126,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/1126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}