Political Philosophy facing domination (Ordinario)

In the first part of the course (Module 1) we will deal with how the political philosophy of the last century, since the 1930s, has dealt with the problem of a power that has claimed to extend not only to society as a whole, but even to the functioning of human reality in its entirety, psychic and physical. From Simone Weil to Theodor W. Adorno, from Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault , via other lesser-known but no less important authors, twentieth-century philosophy of a European bent has as its main problems both that of understanding how the intensity and ubiquity of total domination were possible and that of thinking about a subjectivity that could cope with such a totalizing drive. It is this dual philosophical aspect that we will analyze, following the route described here.

In the second part (Module 2) we will deal with how political philosophy, between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, has reflected on the transformations of power since the end of the so-called totalitarian regimes. If in the postwar period the hope for the triumph of liberal democracy had been kindled, the crisis of recent decades has overwhelmingly brought to the fore the problem of what we might call ‘totalitarian drives’. From Günther Anders to Sheldon Wolin, from Gilles Deleuze to Shoshana Zuboff (and with her the critics of algorithmic rationality), we will follow the most articulate critiques of the new forms of power that are unfolding.