Gianni Vattimo is the philosopher who has fought all his life against the confines of object-ivity and the absolutes that imprison us. This book—which tries to recount, in a comprehensible manner, the life and thought of Gianni Vattimo, who turned seventy in 2006, when it was written—cannot, therefore, advance claims to object-ivity, to absolute truth. Besides, it is a strange book. We both know it, Vattimo and I. We made the choice. It is not an autobiography in the usual sense, because I wrote it, and it’s not a biography because Vattimo is cosigning it and speaks in the first person.
So how did we arrive at this fused impasto of two voices, two persons? Ultimately, because I wanted to do it (long live subjectivity) and because Gianni Vattimo agreed to do it with me. But above all, because this necessary (auto)biography is something he—who writes so engagingly, unlike many of his colleagues—would never have written. The idea would never have occurred to him, and he would not have written it anyway. So this note already forms part of the (auto)biography. It states fact number one about Gianni Vattimo: Gianni Vattimo is someone who would never have written his own autobiography for himself.
Over his long philosophical trajectory, which began and is constantly interpenetrated with the theme of Being, Gianni Vattimo has come to the view that Being eventuates for us in language, or rather in human conversation, in “colloquy.”
This (auto)biography comes about exactly so: in human colloquy between the great philosopher and me.
Lately Vattimo has been defending, and accepts as positive and fertile, a certain indeterminacy in history and in the writing of books. Resonances, even, and perhaps something more. Because anyone telling his own story selects, consciously and unconsciously; to use a favorite expression of Gianni Vattimo, he “goes and finds out” (va a sapere). And this selection is obviously overlaid with my own. With a certain claim to honesty and objectivity, if not object-ivity, in an attitude of listening, something especially dear as well to Vattimo the man and Vattimo the thinker.
The one thing that can’t be said about this book is that its structure does not respect, indeed virtually replicate—in a way quite unexpected and surprising, even for me—the existential, human, and philosophical trajectory of the person doing the telling.
Piergiorgio Paterlini