The anthropological paradox: niches, micro-worlds and psychic dissociation

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Notes

1 See, for example, Massimo De Carolis, Il “linguaggio originario” in Heidegger (Filosofia 1978); Massimo De Carolis, ‘Destino e grammatico. Il rapport tra il linguaggio e la morte nel pensiero di Heidegger’ (1981) 187–88 Aut Aut 59–101; Massimo De Carolis, ‘La possibilità della decisione nei “Beiträge”’ (1992) 248–49 Aut Aut 173–86; Massimo De Carolis, Una lettura del “Tractatus” di Wittgenstein (Cronopio 2002); Massimo De Carolis and Arturo Martone (eds), Sensibilità e linguaggio. Un seminario su Wittgenstein (Quodlibet 2002); Massimo De Carolis, ‘La questione dello psicologismo tra Frege e Wittgenstein’ (2004) 319–20 Aut Aut 171–95.

2 See, Massimo De Carolis, La vita nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica (Bollati Boringhieri 2004).

3 See, Massimo De Carolis, Il rovescio della libertà. Tramonto del neoliberalismo e disagio della civiltà (Quodlibet, 2017).

4 Massimo De Carolis, The Anthropological Paradox: Niches, Micro-Worlds and Psychic Dissociation (Routledge 2018) 7 (hereinafter AP).

5 ibid.

6 For De Carolis, the text is an intervention which explicitly refrains from ‘value judgments, emotional warnings or gratuitous forecasts about the future’ (ibid 27). This methodological gesture is the corollary of a text which offers a sustained reflection in order to contribute to ‘re-awakening that critical thinking whose crisis in the last few decades has impoverished the theoretical debate in Europe (…)’ (ibid).

7 The particular relationship of De Carolis to the German tradition of philosophical anthropology is also evident in this focus upon the anthropological paradox. For the anthropological paradox, by assuming the position of the central organizing framework of this tradition, places at a distance the genesis of philosophical anthropology in the critique of Kant, which marks the development of both Helmut Plessner, Krisis der transzendentalen Wahrheit im Anfang (Winter, 1918) and Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Niemeyer 1913). In this manner, the anthropological paradox can be understood as the critical appropriation of this tradition orientated by the discussion, within contemporary Italian philosophy, of the semantically rich Italian term, potenza. In addition, it indicates a link to a further aspect of De Carolis’s previous work, see, in particular, Massimo De Carolis, ‘Dynamis e Macht: il problema della potenza in Nietzsche e in Aristotele’ in Massimo De Carolis and others (eds), Sulla Potenza: Da Aristotele A Nietzsche (Guida 1989) 7–52.

8 ibid 2.

9 ibid 3.

10 ibid 2.

11 ibid 3.

12 Thus, the text is also a critique, though articulated differently in each case, of the work of Heidegger and Schmitt. In relation to Heidegger, the critique is marked by a predominant focus upon the works of the 1930s and traces the incapacity of Heidegger to fully articulate the anthropological paradox. The incapacity marks the limits of Heidegger’s thought which, for De Carolis, encompass the involvement with National Socialism and the subsequent difficulties of according a place to individual existence. In relation to Schmitt, the critique centres, first, upon the importance accorded by Schmitt to pluralism whilst rejecting its Schmittian designation as an entirely negative phenomenon of depoliticization. The Schmittian response of ‘repoliticization’ is equally rejected, but the process of rejection represents a further task for this Schmittian response has recourse to the far older conceptual framework of ‘European political culture’ (ibid. 85).

13 ibid 21.

14 ibid (emphasis in the original).

15 The context is critically reconstructed in detail in Massimo De Carolis, La vita nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica (Bollati Boringhieri 2004). The critical analysis is itself the further re-examination and development of De Carolis’s earlier work, Tempo di esodo: la dissonanza tra sistemi sociali e singolarità (Manifestolibri 1994).

16 ibid 22.

17 ibid 25. It should also be emphasized that, although the text discusses the transition from the classical (exemplified by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) to the modern paradigm (ibid 22), there is also no possibility, for De Carolis, of a return to, nor recuperation of, the classical paradigm.

18 ibid 22 (emphasis in the original).

19 ibid (emphasis in the original).

20 ibid (emphasis in the original).

21 ibid (emphasis in the original).

22 ibid 25 (emphasis in the original).

23 ibid.

24 ibid.

25 ibid 36 (emphasis in the original). Citing A Goldberg, Being of Two Minds (The Analytic Press 1999).

26 ibid 42.

27 ibid (emphasis in the original).

28 ibid 44.

29 ibid 43.

30 ibid 44 (emphasis in the original).

31 ibid 51 (emphasis in the original).

32 ibid (emphasis in the original).

33 ibid 52 (emphasis in the original).

34 ibid 53 (emphasis in the original).

35 ibid 54.

36 Here, De Carolis draws only upon the work of J.L. Austin (JL Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford 1962/1975)) and Emile Benveniste, ‘Analytical Philosophy and Language’ in E Benveniste (ed), Problems in General Linguistics (Mary Elizabeth Meek tr, University of Miami Press 1971) 231–38), leaving unexamined, the further development of these performative theories of language in the work of Searle, Grice and Recanati. It also leaves unexamined the critical appropriation of this approach to language in the work of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and the distinctly different approach to both the analysis of the connection between individual and society and the position of thought, informed by this appropriation, with regard to technology. For, as is developed, in Chapter 3, De Carolis seeks to focus upon the notion of performatives from a different direction commencing from the work in anthropology involving the application of the notion of performatives to the understanding of ritual practice (SJ Tambiah, Culture, Thought and Social Action (Harvard University Press 1985), V Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (Paj Publications 1986) and R Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press 1999)).

37 ibid 54–55 (emphasis in the original).

38 ibid 55 (emphasis in the original).

39 ibid (emphasis in the original).

40 ibid (emphasis in the original).

41 ibid (emphasis in the original).

42 ibid (emphasis in the original).

43 ibid 56 (emphasis in the original).

44 ibid (emphasis in the original).

45 ibid.

46 ibid 57

47 ibid.

48 ibid 58 (emphasis in the original).

49 ibid.

50 ibid 59 (emphasis in the original).

51 ibid 60 (emphasis in the original).

52 ibid 62 (emphasis in the original).

53 ibid 65 (emphasis in the original).

54 ibid 63–64.

55 ibid 67.

56 ibid 68.

57 ibid.

58 ibid 71 (emphasis in the original).

59 ibid 74 (emphasis in the original).

60 ibid 75.

61 ibid 85.

62 ibid.

63 ibid (emphasis in the original).

64 ibid.

65 ibid 83 (emphasis in the original).

66 ibid 86–87 (emphasis in the original).

67 ibid 93.

68 ibid 86.

69 Here, for De Carolis, it is the work of Foucault, in particular the two lecture courses of the late 1970s (Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Palgrave Macmillan 2007); and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) which reveal, in place of the opposition of technology and politics, the interpenetration of politics and the technology of government.

70 ibid 92.

71 ibid.

72 ibid. It is the second creative logic which De Carolis will subsequently refine and develop, through the notion of an imperfect community, in Massimo De Carolis, Il rovescio della libertà. Tramonto del neoliberalismo e disagio della civiltà (Quodlibet 2017). The Preface to the English edition of AP, (vi-xvii), traces the outlines of this development between the two texts.