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Gargani, ne Il filtro creativo, riprendendo un discorso sulla verità e sulle condizioni di verità che era stato sollevato da Heidegger e successivamente ripreso dalla filosofia contempora-nea, da Derrida a Rorty, sostiene la tesi della non corrispondenza tra linguaggio e mondo, tra rappresentazione e cosa. Si tratta del rifiuto dell'idea di rappresentazione come corri-spondenza in quanto adaequatio rei et intellectus. Solo se si presuppone la fine della corri-spondenza tra linguaggio e mondo si possono immaginare l'eccedere, il togliere, l'aggiungere. E non per questo perdiamo la razionalità o finiamo nel pastiche. Al contrario, ci apriamo all'infinito mondo delle possibilità che, facendo capolino tra ciò che è regolare, conforme, necessario, irrompendo razionalmente su una ragione in crisi, come direbbe Gar-gani, ci stupiscono e ci spingono a creare. E sappiamo bene che noi umani non creiamo dal nulla, ma sempre da qualcosa che c'è già, così come il futuro non sorge da un presente-eterno, ma dal passato.

In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, written after the fall of the Berlin wall and in controversary with Fukuyama’s book about the end of History, he points out that when Marx talks about commodity fetishism in his book Capital he refers to the dancing tables of a spiritualistic seance, and when he gives the example of the table, he uses the term auftritt which means enters the stage. A table is a table when it has use-value and is made of wood, an organic material that takes shape (a table), it changes and transforms itself, but it is still wood. When Marx refers to the table as a commodity which is ‘sensuously supersensitive’, placing the accent on the adverb ‘sensuously’, he emphasizes materiality, that is, a referent that is not an original, but a support that has to have a physical dimension. It is supersensitive because the table has an exchange value which is its representation of the use-value, exceeding reality while representing it. This excess is both the visible and invisible: the exchange is visible as the result of social labour, of the cooperation among men, of a collective process, it remains invisible. In commodity the immateriality of human and social relationships is presented as an exchange of relations.

This chapter locates the problem of abstraction in Marx’s critique and method. The author focuses on the deployment of the epistemological problem that classical economists had to face in their investigations when constructing a simplified, unhistorical, economical model, through a bad abstraction represented by a ‘lone and isolated hunter/fisherman’. Given that on this level a meaningful reduction takes place, the author identifies this abstraction, a byproduct of an extremely simplified model, with capitalist means of production, that is to say, an extremely complex model. Therefore, it is all about a movement of idealized transposition of the relations in the field of circulation to the relations in the field of production.

In Adam Smith, the contemporaneity of the savage nations took on the dimension of delay and inferiority measured by the evolutionary time of western societies and presented itself as the repetition of a time without leaps and without breaks. The ‘recognition’ of the ‘humanity’ of savage people became an insertion within an evolutionary scale hierarchized according to the criterion of the capitalist mode of production of thinking and imagining one’s own power. Savage people, precisely in so far as they are ‘recognized’, take their place in the lowest rungs of a single evolutionary scale that leads up to the capitalist mode of production, exactly like Friday, whose ‘humanity’ is built by the power of Robinson, from his weapons, from his language, from his religion.

There is a decisive element of Mauss’s political philosophy: the great attempt to reflect, through ethnological research, on the modern relationship between individual will and forms of cohesion and collective organization. Despite and through the autonomy of structures of unintended relationships, individuals can recognize their voluntary participation, their relationship, spontaneous and contradictory, with the collective fact in front of them and of which, at the same time, they are part. From this point of view, the comprehension of the complexity of the forms of cohesion that exist before and outside state law remains a fundamental contribution to contemporary philosophical-political reflection.

In Turgot behind the relationship between the isolated individual and nature as a means of satisfying his needs lies a history of domination. Behind the idea of so many isolated individuals, there is presupposition of the real enslavement of work for profit. The subordination of social purposes to the private interest of the individual isolated from nature reveals to us what the dark mirror of the universalization of the sense of the capitalist mode of production is. Precisely what is removed from this vision of society—domination and subordination—already transpires in a filtered and deformed way from this representation of social life in which society appears to be an instrument for individuals’ private purposes.

‘Particularly—I said aloud, though to myself—what would I have done without a rifle, without munitions, without tools with which to do anything or work, without clothes, without blankets, without curtain, without anything to shelter with?’. This is what Robinson thinks, after being able to rescue from the wreck the objects and tools that would have been necessary to survive on the island. He knows very well that without all the necessary recovered from the wreck he would have had no escape. He is perfectly aware that without a rifle, without munitions, without work tools and without clothes he would never have been able to organize his life on the island and to reconstruct the material conditions of his existence.

Per Mirri la resistenza fu una guerra di liberazione nazionale, non una guerra civile. Non fu una lotta di popolo, ma, e qui sta un punto interessante, "la piu grande disobbedienza di massa della storia del nostro paese". Sobrieta, ironia e coraggio: tre parole con cui si caratterizza questo libro. Ne consiglierei la lettura ad ogni ragazzo che volesse cercare di comprendere il nostro recente passato insieme a I sommersi e i salvati di Primo Levi e a Lettera a una professoressa di Don Milani.

In 1907, Marcel Mauss put an end to the role that the concept of fetishism played in the field of ethnology and in the history of religions. In reviewing a book by Dennett for “Annee Sociologique,” Mauss observed: When the history of the science of religions and ethnography comes to be written, one will be astonished by the unmerited and fortuitous role that the notion like that of the ‘fetish’ has played in theoretical and descriptive works. It corresponds to nothing but an immense misunderstanding between two civilizations, the African and the European; it has no other foundation than a blind obedience to colonial usage, to the lingua francas spoken by Europeans on the West coast. One has no more right to speak about fetishism concerning the western Bantu than one may be accustomed to speaking about it with regard to other central or eastern Bantu. Equally one does not have the right to speak of Negro fetishism: Guinean or Congolese idolatry (this is very rare), Congolese witchcraft, the ownership taboo, and others, are not found to be, in the Congo or Guinea, of a different nature than that of other religions or other societies. On the contrary, it is really remarkable that the fact of what appears to be the very truth concerning the notion of the fetish had been known since the seventeenth century…. The success of the book by de Brosses had to be due to some sort of simplicity, of mistake, perhaps necessary, in which the science and the study of religions, African religions in particular, have existed up to now.1

In the previous chapter I introduced some of the premises of de Brosses’s theory. Before the president of the Assembly of Dijon set out to write on fetishism, discussions of Guinean fetishes had already appeared, alongside descriptions in travelers’ accounts, and had been compared to similar phenomena common among other “savage” peoples. As the comparative method was gaining ground, it became clear that its connection to theories on the progress of humankind impinged on the question of religion and its possible origin.

Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has generally been addressed and examined from two main points of view: that of its Relation to the notion of alienation and that of its connection to the theory of value. In both cases, however, the central problem—or, if one wishes, an obstacle to be overcome—has been and continues to be that of the social process which leads to the phenomenon of commodity fetishism and, consequently, to the theoretical practice used by Marx for describing the phenomenon. In one of the sections of Marx’s Capital entitled “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” (Chapter I, section 4) the notion of fetishism assumes an analogical function and, as is known, once again puts forward the problem of appearances, that is to say, of the gap existing between a social being and the “nebulous and fantastic” images it assumes when seen and conceived of by men. This topic recurs throughout the evolution of Marx’s thought and takes on a specific value dimension within the theory of commodity fetishism, since in this case Marx’s analysis is not carried out in general terms, as in The German Ideology. It does not involve, in other words, a general discourse about the application of historical materialism within the framework of the Relation between “real life” and “conscience,” but rather entails an analysis within a specific context such as the one embodied by the capitalist mode of production.

The word “fetish” derives from the Portuguese “feitico” and, since it refers to cult objects of the so-called savage peoples, it may already be found in sixteenth-century accounts of the Portuguese voyages to West Africa.1 This word, in turn, comes from the Latin “facticius,” meaning artificial. As a noun, the word has also assumed the meaning of “witchcraft” and sorcery.2 Hence, it is a word with which Europeans originally indicated the indigenous cults of Guinea.

When referring to so-called primitive societies in his analysis of the historical development of civilization, Bukharin argued: In the former society, all activities are devoted to the immediate securing of foodstuffs, hunting, fishing, the gathering of roots, primitive agriculture; of “ideas,” of “mental culture,” etc, there is very little; we are dealing here with men that are hardly more than monkeys, tribal animals. […] The growth of material production, the increase in the power of man over nature, the increase in the productivity of human labor. For, when not all the available time is consumed in exhausting material labor, people are free a portion of the time, which affords them an opportunity to think, reason, work with a Plan, create a “mental culture.”1

Questo lavoro intende mettere a confronto la teoria di Donald Winnicott e quella di Gregory Bateson in rapporto ai temi del gioco e dell'imitazione. I bambini, come ci ricorda una poesia di Tagore, costruiscono mondi, creando e imitando. I bambini inventano mondi intermedi. Essi creano imitando e imitano creando. Giambattista Vico aveva osservato che i bambini sono dotati di fantasia, imitazione, memoria. La fantasia ha bisogno dell'imitazione e della memoria, perché essi non creano dal nulla, ma da qualcosa e questo qualcosa č dato da ciň che hanno visto, sentito, toccato. Un mondo nuovo, un mondo intermedio, fatto di fantasia, nasce dall'imitazione e dal ricordo di un altro mondo.