One of the main themes of Bobbio’s writings was the relationship between law and politics. Yet an ambiguity runs through his writings on this point. He saw politics and law as intimately related, with the one entailed by the other. Yet, the tautologous relationship he saw as existing between the two posed a potential problem – what could be called the Hobbes challenge. For if politics is impossible without law, yet all law flows from politics, then we seem faced with (...) a dilemma of either a vicious circle or an infinite regress. Bobbio never really confronted this dilemma, although in a bid to escape the prospect of the Hobbesian lawless sovereign he gestured towards a natural law solution at odds with his legal positivism. Instead, this article suggests an alternative in precisely the non-sovereign account of politics Hobbes criticized, that of a republican democracy based on political equality rather than popular sovereignty. In this account, the rule of law can be reconciled with the rule of persons precisely because men must rule together as rulers and ruled in turn, rather than any one or group of them permanently ruling over the others. Law on this account results from a particular type of politics. (shrink)

Focusing on her essay “On Violence”, I explain and defend the sharp distinction that Hannah Arendt draws between power and violence. Although fully aware of how power and violence are frequently combined, she argues that they are conceptually distinct – even antithetical. I show how these concepts are related to many other themes in her thinking including politics, action, speech, persuasion, and judgment. I also explore the wider context of the role of violence in her philosophic and political thinking. She (...) challenges not only contemporary and traditional ways of understanding power and violence but provides an important critical perspective for understanding power and violence in the contemporary world. (shrink)

The article proposes a kind of imaginary chess match in seven moves between memory and oblivion in which the construction of collective identity is at stake. Starting from the experience of unexpected changes, such as the collapse of political regimes, it aims to show how the failure to nourish established memory provokes oblivion. Memory and forgetting do not represent neutral territories, but actual battlefields in which identity – especially collective identity – is decided, molded, and legitimized. Moreover, every victorious power (...) or faith has always organized a kind of “vertical forgetting” in the sense of superimposing itself literally on old beliefs in the places where these traditionally held their celebrations. However, the defense of memory’s preciseness also has an ethical dimension, that of protecting a more conscious – and therefore, freer – identity. The final move of this game consists in understanding the conflicting complicity of the logic of forgetting and the logic of remembering. Together, they operate according to the formula of “neither with you nor without you.” And despite their mutual bitterness, forgetting is just as indispensable to memory as memory is to forgetting. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relationship between memory, female identity and the history of women: issues and areas of scholarship that have a comparatively recent history, but already present a rich spectrum of contrasting approaches and studies. In the case at hand, interpretations rooted in Foucault’s genealogical approach are contrasted with more recent postcolonial studies, against the backdrop of the political history of European and American feminism, a position that can scarcely be reduced to the more familiar terms of the (...) debate between philosophers and neuroscientists. The writing that springs from female memory is not the function of an alleged specificity of the female brain, but the product of the ability of a specific cultural subject to construct a genealogy from the point of view of its unprecedented reality: a seemingly minor “supplement,” but one that has the power to subvert the main corpus of history and knowledge, as Virginia Woolf already showed in magisterial terms as early as 1929. (shrink)

This article argues for the need for philosophical reflection on political myth. It does so by addressing the twofold question “Why philosophy?” and “Why political myth?” The first part of the essay examines the ways that political philosophy could contribute to a better understanding of political myth. In particular, it proposes to look at political myth as a process rather than as an object, and to define it as the work of a common narrative, which grants significance to the political (...) experience and deeds of a social group. In light of this definition, the second part addresses the subsequent question: “Why political myth and not other related concepts such as history, utopia or ideology?”. (shrink)

In this article the author reflects on some of the most recent instances of the hybridization of identities, brought about by movements of migration in the more general context of globalization. New situations triggered by the epoch-making historical developments of the world we live in require us to modify our notion of individual identity, which is no longer seen as a fundamental and self-referential essence of the individual, but rather as the product of a number of relational variables, many of (...) which arise from processes of ethnic amalgamation and cultural blending. In this new historical condition, one that old styles of thought are no longer able to grasp, the notion of memory is paramount. Memory, as Said has indicated, is connected to Vico’s concept of “invention” as “finding again,” that is, as an incessant process of the remembrance and the discovery of stories that are lived, leading to a “re-creation” and reconfiguration of one’s roots. This article, however, does not simply formulate, articulate and discuss the problem, but also raises the question of its genealogy, locating this in Vico’s distinction between the topical and the critical, that is connected with the triad of memory-imagination-ingenuity, and in certain philosophical positions – such as that of Dilthey, which is specifically acknowledged here – that involve an instance of hybridism, interpreted as a relationship between biological-natural and psychological subjectivity on one hand and historical-cultural identity on the other. (shrink)

The following article addresses the political dimension of identity in its complex interrelations with memory on one hand and normativity on the other. Identity, as Amartya Sen has shown, is neither an essence nor a function of religious belonging, as determinists and reductionists have assumed, but the result of an active process of choice. Autonomous choice, however, does not take place outside of time and space, far from external resistance and contradictions, but is rooted in situations, emotions, corporeality and all (...) sorts of qualitative dimensions. Identity, that is, is neither passivity nor unbound freedom. It is “invention”, as Said has suggested: an unstable compromise of past, present and future that is the work of imagination. By drawing on categories from Arendt and Taylor, the interplay of memory, imagination and identity is explored from the point of view of contemporary social theory and its challenges, and the notion of “memory politics” is brought to bear on controversial issues such as the cohabitation of secular and religious worldviews in a multicultural society. (shrink)

The article provides a close hermeneutical reading and philosophical interpretation of a short text by Mikhail Bakhtin from 1943, quoted and translated in the beginning. Contra the modern Cartesian interpretation of the subject as always open to itself in an act of self-reflection, it is argued that one’s self is not immediately accessible and fully transparent to itself. Looking at oneself in the mirror stands for an attempt of self-cognition, in which one both recognizes and misses oneself, seeing oneself as (...) another with no “seamy side.” Thinking oneself, then, constitutes a constant dialogue with oneself, in which one is always involved in a process of non-finalizable explanation of oneself to oneself as one’s own other. (shrink)

The theoretical interpretations of liberalism in its relations to multiculturalism occupy a central role in contemporary political theory. Yet, although arguments of rights and equal respect have provided for reasonable justifications of cultural diversity, daily papers and political columns give us an image of democratic societies that is often intolerant, exclusionary and insensitive to the argument of rights when faced with cultural and religious pluralism. The diachronic rhythm between intellectual reasonableness and widespread opinion often goes unobserved in academic literature. In (...) this chapter I dwell on this unobserved reality and call attention to the phenomenology of subordination that the failure to respect cultural diversity can generate or exacerbate. Relaying upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of the relationship between the “three races” in America, I render the phenomenology of subordination through the relationship between memory and forgetting and treat the latter as a terrain in which cultural discrimination can occur. (shrink)