Philosophy Today

Vattimo’s political liberalism often sits uncomfortably with his non-foundational commitments. The attempt to disentangle postmodern thought from moral relativism is seen as a disingenuous strategy: one either arbitrarily adopts liberal values or does so because it is part of our tradition, thus depending on the very metaphysical foundations which Vattimo denies to other thinkers. One answer may well be to distinguish metaphysics from ontology and show that Vattimo’s justification of liberalism arises from an oscillation between Heidegger and Nietzsche. However, the following article maintains that Vattimo’s justification is often not properly understood because it is peculiarly Italian, seeking a plural account of truth derived from the human being’s peculiar position as the imaginative creature.

Vattimo’s thought, activity and engagement concentrate nowadays primarily on politics—in theory as well as inpraxis. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct how Vattimo developed his political ideas starting from an aesthetical inquiry—and in particular from Luigi Pareyson’s theory of Formativity. This contribution will focus on Vattimo›s “weak, effective fight” against what he describes as the “monopoly of the truth” in order to analyze how a hermeneutical conception of a work of art has been the model for his “Hermeneutic Communism,” based on a renewed, subversive idea of dialogue and weakening democracy.

This manifesto demonstrates the relevance of weak thought to ecological thinking. In eleven theses, I argue that the background meaning of Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy rotates on the invisible orbit of such thinking; that the weakening of metaphysics implies a transformation of the economic into the ecological framing of the world, and that the ensuing ecology is utterly rid of naturalism.

This paper explores the emergency-motif as it is received in Vattimo’s weak communism through his reading of Heidegger’s concept of the “lack of emergency” and Benjamin’s weak messianism. The “event” of weakening the metaphysical grounds of framed democracy and the overcoming of the lack emergency is discussed by taking into consideration the difference between the political and politics. Against the background of this discussion, Vattimo’s interpretations of kenôsis and caritas are conceived of as paving the way to an existential analytic of the kind of being-with which the political project of post-metaphysical hermeneutics tacitly refers to.

With Gianni Vattimo’s late collaborative works with Santiago Zabala, Vattimo is proving to be not only a philosopher of emancipatory hermeneutics but also one who is making his own distinct contribution to liberation philosophy. This article critically explores Vattimo’s liberationist weak thought in the context of the New Materialisms. Though Vattimo’s post-metaphysical hermeneutics lacks the linkage with the natural sciences and eschews the development of a political ontology, which are both characteristic of the New Materialisms, his deliberate reactivation and rehabilitation of Marx by way of Heidegger eventuates in an expressed preferential option for the poor. This animating concern with what Vattimo and Zabala term “the discharge of capitalism” restores the original animating spirit of Marx’s dialectical materialism and thus makes the political dimension latent in materialist thought explicit and provides a new species of the New Materialisms.

Since the 1980s, Vattimo’s “Weak Thought” has been an emendation of his previous revolutionary and dialectical reading of Nietzsche. Marxist terrorism in Europe exposed the indissoluble link between dialectics and violence, and consequently Vattimo’s revision was a rejection of any reconstructive effort for a new political and social order. But in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, Vattimo rediscovered the joy of political commitment. Ecce Comu was a call to pursue “a project of human emancipation” founded “on the search for equality.” More recently, Of Reality and Hermeneutic Communism are a rejection of neoliberal philosophies and constitute a jump back to the Seventies. Vattimo aims once again to change the world and reality, a reality that other philosophies (Ferraris’ New Realism) simply contemplate as a pure fact. Vattimo defends the “revolutionary” meaning of hermeneutics against realism’s conservative tendencies and develops a project close to Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis.”

I propose a reading of Vattimo which focuses attention on and develops his suggestions regarding the Heideggerian meditation on technology in relation to the history of Being. In a number of texts, Vattimo takes up Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology as Ge-Stell, paying particular attention to those moments where he suggests that in the enframing we can catch a first glimpse of a turning in Being. In Bestand, beings begin to loose the characteristics of subject and object, preparing for the Kehre to a new epoch in the history of Being. Vattimo contends that this turn is further developed in the new information and communication technologies of which Heidegger was only dimly aware. I argue then that one of Vattimo’s key contributions to post-Heideggerian hermeneutic ontology is to suggest that we may locate the turn to a new epoch in the history of Being in information, understood as a newly emergent paradigm for the way in which beings appear. However, in order for this to be further developed, Vattimo’s work must be uncoupled from the focus on natural language he inherits from Heidegger and Gadamer.

In La società trasparente (1989), Vattimo places the “relative chaos” of the mass media at the heart of his understanding of postmodernity as an epoch of the weakening of being. The consequent decline of strong foundations for political authority was part of Vattimo’s emancipatory reading of the media. In the second edition of the book (2000) he claims that such postmodern emancipation is limited by a lack of conflictuality in the aesthetic ideals promoted by the free market. In this article, I ask howVattimo’s media philosophy anticipates elements of his more recent political philosophy. Reading Vattimo against Heidegger and Byung-Chul Han, I conclude that his insistence on the nihilistic origins of hermeneutics may offer a way of criticizing the lacking conflictuality in current digital media in a fashion that does not desire a return to ultimate truth claims.

This is the first English translation of the majority of Fichte’s 1807 essay on Machiavelli, which has been hailed as a masterpiece and was important for the development of German idealist political thought, as well as for its reception by figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Max Weber, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt. Fichte’s essay attempts to resuscitate Machiavelli as a legitimate political thinker and an “honest, reasonable, and meritorious man.” It tacitly critiques Napoleon, who was occupying Prussia when Fichte composed the piece, and calls on the Germans to resist the French. And some have argued that it marks a shift in Fichte’s political thought toward a more realist position.