Il Male politico e la responsabilità del Bene. Verso una democrazia a venire

Can politics – traditionally considered as a protective space for the human – turn into a place of arbitrary and limitless violence against the human itself? This is the paradox of political Evil: it constitutes the central question of the research path of my doctoral thesis. Faced with the darkest face of the 20th century, constituted by the brutality of the extermination camps produced by totalitarianism, Evil is posed in this work as the spectre of an unresolved problem. It shows what the imagination has relegated to dystopian scenarios for centuries can actually take place. Starting from this observation, the thesis was primarily driven by the philosophical need for an excavation into the abyss of Evil, in order to then envisage a different political horizon. The aim of the project was to outline a possibility – albeit a fragile one – of Good that would inspire another politics, rooted first and foremost in the responsibility of each man for the other man. To tackle this path, the thesis, in the first part, made use of the tools of symbolic-political hermeneutics, through mythical-religious, anthropological and literary language, attempting to look into the obscure depths of the political with logics other than the traditional ones. On the trail of an ancient question – but one that is constantly metamorphosing – it is necessary to ask: «Unde malum?». Great mythical and religious narratives of the beginning suggested an answer by recalling that «we are all “sons of Cain”», murderer of his brother Abel and founder of the first city. Public space, therefore, cannot help but be confronted with the consubstantial risk of an Evil inscribed since its origin, with a violence that is not only destructive, but even foundational. Western philosophical and political thought seems to have removed this mystery: not only is the political space not extraneous to violence – as the order of the logos has wished to claim – but it is an expression of violence that, while not denied, is nevertheless “controlled” by the legitimising force of the logos. The subject of the second part of the work was precisely the rational construction of the political dimension, making use of traditional philosophical and political categories; through a comparison between Plato (father of classical politics) and Hobbes (father of modern politics), an attempt was made to understand the logic underlying its delineation and the praxis that guided its maintenance. It was therefore highlighted how this dimension, created for the defence and security of human coexistence, has been turned upside down in the 20th century into a space totalised by evil and destruction. Rather than a “monster” generated by the sleep of reason, totalitarianism appeared as the concretisation of the nightmare of a “hyper-vigilant” rationality that, absolutizing itself, lost its sense of limits: power turned into a destructive terror, in a “paranoid” delirium of omnipotence, in the dream of a “total” dominion over man, in view of the realisation of a Whole without remnants and waste. It was particularly evident in Hannah Arendt's reflection. Totalitarian Evil, therefore, did not appear as a necessity that imposes itself on politics from outside, but as an abyssal possibility of freedom that voluntarily chooses to destroy. Thus, the confrontation with its eventual realisation imposes a surplus of theoretical, ethical and political vigilance: if Evil is always possible, it is also possible to choose, however, to think – and act – otherwise. Starting from this awareness, the third part of the thesis sought to imagine a metamorphosis of the political through a thought that – while not denying the always potential possibility of violence – nevertheless allows civil coexistence to be conceived in resistance to the destructiveness of evil: a perspective that the voices of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida have helped to outline, starting from a rethinking of the relationship with the other as other, accepting the problematic challenge that its irruption imposes on contemporary politics, in the perspective of plurality against the risks of a renewed Totalitarian Evil. The research itinerary proposed here has culminated in the delineation of the wager of the possibility, perhaps impossible, of a democracy to come that becomes a political place of responsible response, before legitimate violence.