La promessa e la festa

(The Promise and the Festival)

Abstract

This essay advances a conception of festival as shared expression of an experience of happiness. Happiness is in turn understood as harmony between the answer we are capable of giving life and the answer life gives us. In the tension implied in this dialectic there lies, for us, the wait for what is truly adequate not only to our desire but also to our being. The essay focuses on a specific form of wait, namely, the wait geared toward the fulfillment of a promise. In this case, the answer that comes from life is not any answer; rather, it is the answer we have started to hope for ever since we have been given an anticipatory word, that is, the announcement of a future liberation or realization of some good. The author that works as guide in such a reflection is Theodor W. Adorno because at the heart of his negative dialectic there remains, in an exemplary manner, the memory of a promise of happiness that is inscribed in human dignity and the value of nature even when both are offended by the stupidity of the logic of domain.