17:00-18:00 // BOOK PRESENTATION
IN COLLABORATION WITH LIBRERIA GHIBELLINA
Presenter: Matteo Pelliti
Speaker: Remo Bodei
For a long time, passion was condemned as a factor of disturbance or a momentary loss of reason. Several strategies have been so developed to eliminate, temper or tame them. But while individuals aim for self-control, from society’s point of view, passions can forge instruments of political dominance. As relatively fixed in their goals and coherent in their composition, in the past they were considered a matter for rigorous philosophical and appropriate political treatment. Today, it seems instead that they are not just impossible to regulate, but also outweighed by “desires” (passions geared toward future goals). Through a broad theoretical and historical analysis, this book shows how the opposition between reason and passion leads to the failure of all ethics and policies that continue to oscillate between repression and a laissez-faire attitude. In its structure, the volume is conceived in “geometric” terms: in the form of an ellipse outlined by pairs of “fires”. Fear and hope, in their reciprocal tension, make up the generating nuclei. The path of the book runs through them, exploring the “mountain passes” of philosophical thought and some of the main examples of political theory.