RISULTATI RICERCA

Contemporary liberalism is unfit to take into account the questions originating from the rise of the so called «risk society». In particular, contemporary liberalism has three main problems. The problem of liberty, of (free) trade and of law. First, the concept of negative liberalism is insufficient in the era of global ecological risks. Second, the social organization is not reducible to the global market. Third, common sense transforms itself in ideology. In sum, the main limits of contemporary liberalism have to do with an obsolete between human and non-human association and the maintenence of a cleavage between internal and external nature.

Two different Freud seem to cohabit in Foucault’s works. On the one hand, the rationalist Freud, deaf to the discourse of folly, authority which the disciplinary power can refer to in order to legitimate its own proceedings of normalization and who has been elected by Foucault to his own main polemic target. On the other end, the Freud willing to elaborate his own «pensé du dehors», the so-called «Jenseits des Lustprinzips», who can be found only in the folds of Foucault’s writings of the Sixties, and who comes out always through the reading of authors such as Bataille and Lacan, who are very important for the thought of the early Foucault.

The article analyses the relation between sovereignty and life in Michel Foucault’s criminological and psychiatric studies. His critique of the juridical subject is centred on modifications of penalty. But the real basis of the deconstruction of juridical subjectivity is the bio-medical epistemology. In xix century, the power of decision as decision of death is not actual yet. Sovereignty is really a power of death. The life becomes a limit. What kind of limit? Abnormals and hermaphrodites are figures of this limit. They show how life, biological life, designs modern political strategies. Epistemology becomes a key of Foucault’s critique of political reason.

Consiousness and memory were considered identitary key factors in modern philosophy. The article deals with yhe role played by smells in constituting the identity of the self, on three levels: corporeal (as body smell), social-cultural (negatively, by means of the prejudices against the stench of poor and strangers, and positively, as olfactory ideal about being perfumed or inodorous), and personal (as olfactory memory). On the one hand, own’s body smell acts as a principium individuationis. On the other, smells ground a closed and utmost conservative community. Finally, self emerges by recollecting his/her own «stories» and memories about smells.

This paper aims at shoving that the Hegelian theory of recognition is an alternative to traditional self-consiousness and subjective theories. After a confrontation with the objections. D. Henrich and M. Frank raised against recognition theory. I try to sketch how the point of view that Hegel expressed could be nowadays reconstructed. In the last section I argue that the notion of «Self-Intimacy» that was used by Henrich and Frank against theories of intersubjectivity can be integrated within the recognition model.

An innocent murderer is one who kills and humiliates human beings on account of a Weltanschauung. On this basis, he denies his victims any human dignity. The «secret» of persecution is this presence of both good conscience and willingness to kill and degrade. Most persecutors are driven by a paradoxical «silence», chosing a public and repeated narration which becomes their Truth. It is, however, useless to contrast it with another Truth, different but closed as well. A limit of persecution lies rather in the individual feeling of horror before suffering, in the choice of refusing the crimes, a disobedience which is in itself already a statement of value.