Aggirarsi tra le macerie della Storia. Saggio sugli intellettuali e il potere

The essay presented here intends to trace a profile of the figure of the intellectual after the Second World War. The starting point for this reflection is the work on intellectuals, politics and culture proposed by Norberto Bobbio, who emphasised the need for the intellectual, far from cultivating separateness from the world, instead of having an Olympian gaze, to immerse himself in reality. Later on, this idea was criticised for having a neo-positivist faith in the idea of ‘truth’, which in the meantime was being undermined by the fall of postmodern theory on the social sciences. The essay reconstructs this debate with particular attention to the Italian context, analysing the figures of Pasolini, Calvino and Fortini. Then the essay focuses on the Gramsci Renaissance and its importance within the so-called (new) ‘critical theory’. The last sections of the essay are dedicated to analysing, in the light of a public figure like Edward Said, the idea of the epistemological task of the intellectual. A final reflection is devoted to the case of Giorgio Agamben and the link between academia and critical knowledge.