The New Realism Manifesto by Maurizio Ferraris criticises hermeneutics and postmodernism for their passive and conservative positions, claiming that they are responsible for having delegitimised all philosophical reflection on reality and ontology and favoured the affirmation of a “show-biz” society and a proprietary personalisation of politics. Gianni Vattimo answers this thesis, accusing realism of colluding both with the hierarchy of the powers-that-be and with technocracy and claiming the left-wing orientation of hermeneutics. But to be fair, Vattimo has noticeably changed his (...) own position with respect to the years of “weak Thought”, when every hypothesis of political intervention on reality and every project of transformation were excluded. Hermeneutics today merits being considered a sort of new and revolutionary “philosophy of praxis” in which a weakened Marxism joins up (improbably) with Nietzsche and Heidegger’s thought. Although bitter, the conflict between these positions, which openly claim an emancipationist orientation, is an indication of a process of radicalization of Italian philosophy that is also confirmed by the recent theses of other authors. However, in the absence of a rediscovery of that reality which more than any other has been obscured by postmodernism – the reality of work and the material processes of production and social reproduction – and in the absence of a real subject interested in an overall transformation of the contemporary world, the risk is that such radicalisation of the intellectual classes will stay incomplete and remain within a theoretical debate that is incapable of changing the imbalances and relations of subordination and dominion present in society. (shrink)

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 1970s. Vattimo aims once again to change the world and reality, a reality that other philosophies (Ferraris’s 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.”. (shrink)