Pieni-di-vuoto: vuoto e spazio nella condizione giovanile oggi

(Full-of-Emptiness: Emptiness and Space in the Youth’s Situation Today)

Abstract

My generation is facing an infinite empty “space” created by the collapse of the great ideologies, the new freedoms that have been achieved and the new powers attained by the human beings, and the economic form of globalization. In this space, there seem to be no prefixed paths and shared horizons, and the sense is that of such a possibility of free movements as to feel paralyzed. Indeed, we are surrounded by proposals and possibilities, but the sense that everything can lose meaning at any moment is always around the corner: where everything is possible, nothing seems to be real. The idea that guides this essay is that reality often needs to be reversed in order to capture a further, constitutive aspect of it; emptiness and spaces appear, then, as the two sides of the same coin… Are the young individuals capable of facing all the global changes of which they are part? Do they feel surrounded by emptiness, shipwrecked in an open sea, or do they simply feel as if they can live and travel in an immense space, as successful tourists?