Il problema dell’orientamento nella soci età liquida: autotrascendimento e aver cura come eserci zio di trasformazione

Abstract

The problem of the orientation in the liquid society. Self-transcending and having care as exercise of transformation.

Lyotard’s thesis of «économie libidinale» proposes to resolve the problem of the orientation through an unlimited extension of the pleasure. Whatever limits the pleasure would be only a moralistic fabulation. This model does contrast with the ascetic capitalism of the first modernity, but not with the capitalism of the second modernity represented by the broker Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. This paper tries to show that the sentiment and the pleasure aren’t a negativity to repress but are a positivity to be taken care and to be formed. The pleasure, which is positive in itself, degenerates in negativity and in depression if there is no care – care in the sense proposed by Pierre Hadot. One type of limitation of the pleasure which doesn’t follow the logic of repression is present in the erotic phenomenon. The eroticism is based on the momentary postponement of the pleasure. In not satisfying automatically the need with the first available form of pleasure a man has the possibility to choose what is more important for him and in this way to experience his own desire and to become conscious of himself. To exercise the function of preferring means for an individual not to suffer blindly the logic of the need, but to humanize and to singularize the pleasure, i.e. to form his own desire. By forming his own desire the individual forms himself. The theme dealt with in the ancient philosophy, under the concept of epimeleia heautou can be interpreted in this perspective as the care of the desire, which is directed toward a transformation of the individual, toward a second birth. This care requests an act of self-transcending, distancing critically oneself from the own self, a push given by the otherness. I propose to call an otherness of this kind with the name of «exemplarity». The exemplarity doesn’t refer to a form of authoritarian verticality – as the models of social success do – but implies a form of horizontality that expresses solidarity. The representation of this form of orientation isn’t the ladder to the paradise of Climachus, but, if anything, the breaking wave of Hokusai.