Il pensiero meridiano come mediterraneismo anti-popolare

About five years after the publication of my book Mediterraneismo. Il pensiero antimeridiano (Meltemi 2017), I still wonder whether it was necessary to publish such a text. This contribution is an attempt to formulate an answer to that question. An answer that, in my opinion, is affirmative. And it is so because not only are the traces of what I had defined in the book as Mediterraneanism of the first kind (of backwardness) still widespread; but above all because what I had defined as a second form of Mediterraneanism (of redemption), that is, the process of the reversal of the stigma, which was the central focus of the book, does not receive adequate critical attention. Here I attempt to contribute to that discussion, pointing out how Mediterraneanism of the second type (which we can identify here with the expression ‘Meridian thought’) does nothing more, in its attempt to construct a ‘Meridian’ identity, than re-propose those same stereotypes of Mediterraneanism of the first type, only overturned and re-semantitised. Meridian thought continues to produce its aesthetic and political effects.