35	WEAK THOUGHT

Weak thought got its name, pensiero debole, only in autumn 1979, and it became the title of a collection of essays—it seems incredible now, when everyone is shunning it like the plague—edited by Pier Aldo Rovatti and me in 1983.

In autumn 1979, more than fifteen years after my first “debilist” reading of Heidegger, the idea of the history of Being as that of its growing lighter and more distant assumed a firm contour in my mind. And as time went on, so did all that it entailed, and was still to yield in the years ahead.

I was increasingly excited by the idea of interpreting Heidegger from the viewpoint of weakening, rather than that of the wait for a new apparition of Being. And a host of other things went into it: my preference for a nonaggressive ethics, ecology. Even Arthur Schopenhauer became, along with Heidegger and Nietzsche, one of the components of this “interpretation.” And my personal rereading of Christianity and religion was also taking shape.

In a little art gallery in Salerno I gave a paper entitled “Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole” (Dialectic, difference, weak thought), which became the first essay in the edited collection of 1983.

What did Pier Aldo and I write in the introduction? For example, “Italian discourse on the crisis of reason still has too much nostalgia for metaphysics. And it fails to assume the full brunt of the experience of the forgetting of Being, or of the ‘death of God,’ which Heidegger and Nietzsche have announced to our culture.” We backed all this up, and we expressed our hope for “a thought capable of articulating itself in the half-light” (one of my interpretations of Heidegger), a path forward that doesn’t try to “rediscover the originary, true Being that metaphysics has forgotten, in its scientistic, technological success,” but rather “a way to encounter Being once more as trace, recall, a Being used up and weakened, and on that account alone, worthy of attention,” an ethic of weakness that we knew to be “not simple, much more costly, less reassuring.” And again: “a difficult balance between contemplating the abyss of negativity and the cancellation of every origin.” He and I were aware that we were speaking about a “metaphor, and in a certain way a paradox.” But the conclusion was upbeat because “the price paid by potent reason strikingly limits the objects than can be seen and of which it is possible to speak.” Amen.

Technology is relieving social relations of their weight, making them lighter, less heavy. The idea behind weak thought was to turn that to advantage, to the point of realizing a form of liberation. Emancipation through inflation: if you receive just one television channel, whatever it tells you seems like gospel truth; if you have twenty, you take it or leave it. And postmodernity, the end of rationalized society, that is, of society with central rationality—this is a serious development, an advance, in the crisis of reason.

A few years later, in 1989, when I published La società trasparente (The transparent society), I realized that once again I was using an oxymoronic title. Because in reality, it’s anything but transparent: a society that has all the means for becoming transparent becomes in reality more confusional. But it’s precisely in confusion that you’re obliged to become an autonomous subject. It’s what Nietzsche is saying when he writes that in accomplished nihilism, one either becomes an overman or one is lost. Paradoxically, it’s in mass society that it becomes necessary to be an overman, because you have to become an autonomous interpreter. If you are hearing too many voices without inventing one of your own amid the rest, well, you’re lost, you are no more, you disappear.

So weak thought was a strong theory, a strong philosophical proposal. And—it seemed to us—very civil too, very “reasonable,” very “dialogic,” very unarrogant, especially given that a predilection for a nonaggressive ethics did and does form part of weak thought.

Instead there was an uproar.

Years later, in a set of lectures delivered at Bologna at the invitation of Umberto Eco that became my book Oltre l’interpretazione (Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, a book I dedicated to the memory of Gianpiero in 1994), I tried again to “dissipate various misunderstandings that have accumulated over the years regarding the significance of that theoretical proposal, primarily because the notion of weakness has been deliberately taken in too narrow and literal a sense.” Wasted effort. The outcry is directed at me; Pier Aldo is less exposed, he doesn’t get around, rarely writes in the newspapers. And it comes from little provincial Italy, absolutely not from the rest of the world. I am attacked on every possible front: personal, philosophical, political. Everyone piles on. And it shows no sign of waning.

Why?

The main reason lies, I believe, in the beginning. And when I say “beginning” I mean it seriously, not as a figure of speech.