Wounds of the Common

Abstract

In speaking of Italian thought outside of its original context and language, there is a sense of displacement that invites interrogation. This can have two different effects. One can try to master it, assuming stance of a sovereign subject who seeks to conquer a foreign territory and flood its markets with a homemade good, which is an already known factor in its proportions and intensities, its potentialities and fallouts, its composition and inter nal hierarchies—there remains in this case fantasy of deciding destination and im pact of this thought, of prescribing how it will be received as well as its uses and effects. Alternatively, one can let this feeling of displacement run its course, accepting risks of misunderstanding, friction and dispossession that it involves, as well as promises of opening, contamination, and doubt that it implies. Within ontological condition that marks us as inhabitants of global space and time, thought (and particularly construc tion of a tradition of thought) is not immune to identitarian contractions and sovereign temptations. But it is only at intersection of different cultural perspectives, where the demand for translation is acute and its promise of success, uncertain [Butler, Gender Trouble ix] that conditions for thinking creatively are given. Referring to theme of commonalities, we can say that such an opportunity is also given commonly: that is to say, in a way that is not engaged in affirming or defending an identity, but rather is open to risks of dislocation and contamination. Far from believing that we are here to display a Made in Italy product, I believe instead that reconsidering Italian thought by displacing it in a different language can help us discern its qualities but also its limits: in other words, it can help us to globalize as well as to provincialize it,putting it to test of different experiences and opening it to other voices.1 More so in theory than in other areas, national labels have a relative or allusive value. The philosophers who have been convoked or evoked here—Remo Bodei, Roberto Es