L'evasione dell'evasione della realtà

Abstract

The paper evaluates the combination between a politics of fear and terror, and an ethics of paradox and farce, in the workings of Italian democracy and international relations. On the background of two major geopolitical events, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial havoc produced by the Great Recession, the author argues that terror and farce feed on each other to produce not only a diversion, or evasion, from the real challenges of the moment, but more perversely, an “evasion of the evasion of reality,” which prevents citizens from recognizing the mechanism of dissimulation, thus disabling any meaningful resistance to it. In the paper, the author reconstructs the place of fear and terror in Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, and shows how the ethics of paradox and farce excludes any authentic confrontation with the other, whether we conceive of it as the foreigner, the immigrant, or the refugee.