Su cosa possiamo contare? Passioni dell'io e cura del mondo: l'itinerario intellettuale di Elena Pulcini

Elena Pulcini reflects on the global age by identifying its pathologies as well as its remedies. She identifies in particular two pathologies: unlimited individualism and endogamous communitarianism, namely Self- and UsObsession, which, respectively, sacrifice and distort the relationship with the other. Globalization tragically reveals the impossibility of closing oneself in an immune space, it in fact reveals what is an ontological truth: namely, that the meaning of the world lies in coexistence. This revelation can prelude the creation of a different form of the world, in which everyone is guaranteed a “successful life”. This possibility depends on declining in a positive way the fear of the other as well as the conditions of contamination and vulnerability. Eliminating fear, for Pulcini, is not practicable or desirable, we should reactivate it, virtuously transforming it from fear of the other into fear for the other. Fear, indeed, does not only found Leviathan, because it is a heuristic virtue, which can allow us to discover that the subject is relational. Pulcini’s reflections are placed within the field of the deconstruction of the modern subject, which is isolated in its own presumption of self-sufficiency. Pulcini thinks of the passivization of the subject, understood as a pathos of the subject, which is crossed by an internal otherness and compelled to respond to the other. Pulcini thinks a subject contaminated by an unassimilable otherness, which she calls “difference in”. The acknowledgment of the co-essential extraneousness of the subject contains the possibility of positively declining contamination as a co-division of the “differences (from)”. If contamination allows us to think of a being-with, vulnerability of the subject to the other, as Pulcini learns from Levinas, allows us to think of a being-for, an ethical subject. The subject is never simply vulnerable, but it is vulnerable to, as a result, it is not simply responsible for itself, but for the other. Contrary to philosophical tradition, Levinas teaches that responsibility does not have a principle, much less a subjective principle such as freedom. Thinking of responsibility before freedom is ratifying the death of the solipsistic subject. It is “a necessary mourning” to create another form of the world.