No other European country experienced the disruption of political and everyday life suffered by Italy in the so-called years of lead (1969-c.1983), when there were more than 12,000 incidents of terrorist violence. This experience affected all aspects of Italian cultural life, shaping political, judicial and everyday language as well as artistic representation of every kind. In this innovative and broad-ranging study, experts from the fields of philosophy, history, media, law, cinema, theatre and literary studies trace how the experience and legacies of terrorism have determined the form and content of Italian cultural production and shaped the country s way of thinking about such events?

This book traces how the experience and legacies of terrorism have determined the form and content of Italian cultural production. It helps to understand how political violence was expressed, symbolized and analysed at different rhetorical, philosophical and linguistic levels.

This book challenges widespread and largely negative assumptions about Italian postmodernism and postmodernism in general. It considers contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for pluriform struggles of an ethical or political kind, struggles which build upon, whilst rejecting the essentialist assumptions behind, conventional notions of artistic commitment, or impegno. Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media - from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and the giallo; from feminism to pensiero debole; from theatrical performance to shared practices of cultural memory - the volume charts instances of ethical commitment and emancipatory social and political intervention in Italian culture within a post-ideological and post-hegemonic framework, siding with a more constructive and less 'apocalyptic' analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy. This balancing act is described by the contributors as 'postmodern impegno'. The authors, artists and thinkers discussed in the essays include, among others, Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Vattimo and Antonio Tabucchi. Questo libro mette in discussione la diffusa posizione critica che tende a svalutare l'esperienza culturale della postmodernita e del postmodernismo in Italia. Il contesto italiano contemporaneo e di fatto un esempio quanto mai interessante e sintomatico per il definirsi di forme plurali e non monologiche di impegno politico-culturale, che pur rifiutando forme di assolutismo o essenzialismo epistemico o ideologico, mantengono fede a una consolidata tradizione di engagement artistico. Partendo dall'analisi di vari generi e strategie discorsive - cinema, teatro, filosofia, letteratura di genere (romance, giallo, autobiografia) o di denuncia - e di vari autori - Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Antonio Tabucchi, Gianni Vattimo, e altri - questo volume raccoglie e analizza esempi di impegno etico e di intervento socio-politico all'interno di una prospettiva post-ideologica e post-egemonica, proponendo una visione piu costruttiva e meno "apocalittica" del clima culturale generale degli ultimi vent'anni in Italia.

The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives.

"Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith" advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and Ren? Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence.

Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world.

L'opera di Primo Levi presenta un caso straordinariamente ricco e articolato di intertestualita. Lettore curioso, onnivoro, asistematico, Levi esploro molteplici campi del sapere - letterari, scientifici, storici, ecc. - navigando tra libri e riviste specializzate e di divulgazione, per motivi di ricerca o di puro divertimento, spesso accostandosi alle culture straniere in lingua originale, mosso da una curiosita eclettica e dal desiderio intenso di conoscere e di comprendere. Gia scandagliata in parte da Levi stesso nella sua antologia La ricerca delle radici (1981), la biblioteca di Levi rimane comunque tutta da scoprire. Questo volume intende tracciare i lineamenti di una mappa critica degli innesti, intertesti e trapianti che collegano l'opera leviana ai libri altrui, mettendola a confronto con ventuno autori, in una galleria "poliglotta e polivalente" che include classici come Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Baudelaire e Carroll, autori di letteratura moderna come Kafka, Mann e Calvino, e scienziati come Galileo, Darwin, Heisenberg e Lorenz.

From his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Rene Girard's mimetic theory is presented as elucidating "the origins of culture". He posits that archaic religion (or "the sacred"), particularly in its dynamics of sacrifice and ritual, is a neglected and major key to unlocking the enigma of "how we became human". French philosopher of science Michel Serres states that Girard's theory provides a Darwinian theory of culture because it "proposes a dynamic, shows an evolution and gives a universal explanation". This major claim has, however, remained underscrutinized by scholars working on Girard's theory, and it is mostly overlooked within the natural and social sciences. Joining disciplinary worlds, this book explores this ambitious claim, invoking viewpoints as diverse as evolutionary culture theory, cultural anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and philosophy. The contributors provide major evidence in favour of Girard's hypothesis. Equally, Girard's theory is presented as having the potential to become for the human and social sciences something akin to the integrating framework that present-day biological science owes to Darwin - something compatible with it and complementary to it in accounting for the still remarkably little understood phenomenon of human emergence.

Are religions intrinsically violent (as is strenuously argued by the 'new atheists')? Or, as Girard argues, have they been functionally rational instruments developed to manage and cope with the intrinsically violent runaway dynamic that characterizes human social organization in all periods of human history? Is violence decreasing in this time of secular modernity post-Christendom (as argued by Steven Pinker and others)? Or are we, rather, at increased and even apocalyptic risk from our enhanced powers of action and our decreased socio-symbolic protections? Rene Girard's mimetic theory has been slowly but progressively recognized as one of the most striking breakthrough contributions to twentieth-century critical thinking in fundamental anthropology: in particular for its power to model and explain violent sacralities, ancient and modern. The present volume sets this power of explanation in an evolutionary and Darwinian frame. It asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization - i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence - still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to - or should we look beyond - Darwinian survival? What - and where (if anywhere) - is salvation?