through europe

Avevo esitato per settimane. Dopo avere accettato l’invito ci avevo ripensato e avevo cercato di cancellare la mia iniziale disponibilità. Ero spaventato dalla distanza, dal tempo caldo e umido dell’estate di Seoul, perciò declinai l’invito del mio editore coreano. Gli ho mandato un’email: “Sono troppo stanco per fare questo viaggio. Soffro di asma, e temo che il lungo viaggio e il clima umido e afoso mi possa fare male alla salute.”

 

Ma il mio editore, che è un tipo molto simpatico, ha insistito con gentilezza: “Davvero credi che i nord-coreani ci lanceranno una bomba nucleare mentre tu sei qui?”

 

Il sarcasmo delle sue parole mi fece incazzare di brutto.

Philosophy, in all its many and wide articulations, is perhaps too large a discipline to encompass with only one definition. It is thinking developed into understanding, and understanding unfolded as imagination. It is theory – in its etymological meaning of passionate, empathic observing – of life and of the world. Having observed life, like sailors used to do with the stars at night, philosophers draw a map for the rest of their journey, which they follow and change as their journey progresses.

Although philosophy has been often thought to have to do with understanding the world, or with changing it, I would claim that it essentially has to do with the art of inhabiting it.

 

Yet, such a fundamental discipline has long been relegated to the miserable position of an ancient dance remembered only by the elderly, or of a fast-fading dialect. Something of a secret cult to be performed far away from the world, deep inside the catacombs of academia.

 

Such a regression, I believe, originates from two main sources: one is to be found among the philosophers, the other among those who are not philosophers, and in particular non-philosophizing young people.

 

 

There was a time, approximately twenty years ago, when topics like exile and escape were addressed in generous and original ways in the Italian culture. There was the cinema of Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo, Marrakech Express) "dedicated to all those who are running away", and that of Mario Martone (Death of A Neapolitan Mathematician,War Theatre), filled with characters defeated by life. There were bands like 99 Posse, Almamegretta, Daniele Sepe & Rote Jazz Fraktion who celebrated the roots of militant anti-fascism, while suggesting desertion from Western society. And then, the nomadic literature of Pino Cacucci (Puerto Escondido), the anti-militarist comics of Sergio Bonelli (Tex, Dylan Dog) and Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese) and overall in any field of the arts you could feel the influence of post-1977 counter-culture. In very different ways, those voices were describing a generation unwilling to enter ‘capitalist’ adulthood and to finally become ‘bourgeois’. They were talking about virile friendship, human cowardice, disgust for the so called ‘return of the Private’ (or ‘Reflux’) of the 1980s.

 

The Other

 

At the basis of our relationship with the Other, according to Emmanuel Levinas and to Judaeo-Christian religion, is the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

Upon encountering the Other – any human other – his/her face communicates to us something that far exceeds the limits of our rational understanding. Through his/her face, the Other reveals him/herself as an abyss of infinite mystery, and as the place in which God shows Himself as the essence of Otherness. Such an encounter comes as a trauma to the person who is faced by the Other. The Other forces us to accept that our dreams of individual autonomy were always ill-founded, and that we always carry within ourselves an infinite responsibility towards the Other-God – a responsibility that haunts us forever, to the point of being a true persecution. We are ruptured inside by the presence and the demands of the Other, yet we cannot fully comprehend him/her. We are bound to the Other, yet this burden is always excessively heavy for us to carry. The injunction ‘though shalt not kill’ reveals our most immediate reaction in the face of the revolution that the Other brings into our lives: our desire to kill the Other, so to free ourselves from our responsibility towards him/her and to be able to pursue our dreams of perfect autonomy.