La Resistenza al nazi-fascismo. Un'antropologia etica

The object of this study is the philosophical anthropology that appeared and took shape, even if in filigree, in the historical fracture – a true and proper event, as in Alain Badiou’s ontological reflection – that opened up in the European Resistance to Nazi-fascism. We have grasped this anthropology with a philosophical ‘take’ on texts and signs of a non-philosophical form such as testimonies, letters, novels, films and political posters, which, if they are interpellated correctly, express a valuable speculative intention. An intention that was characterised by a clear ethical-political coloration, which is here used to show the existential ‘resurgence’ that the Resistance subjects set in motion with their attempt to delineate their own anthropology. Chapter I examines the constellation of Resistance literature and its inherently moral dimension. This morality resides in the evental nature of the experience being narrated, as well as in the transformation of the narrator into a witness, which the Resistance entailed. The literature thus demonstrates not only its immanent representative properties, but also its vocation of pursuing on a different plane the same loyalty to the truth process that begins with the choice to resist and to fight. Chapter II delves into the theme of the choice to resist, capturing its ethical-political element, starting from its inescapable setting in terms of its historical determinations. Indeed, it is in the position that the subject takes faced with the bind imposed on him by his time – that is, in the subject’s conscious self-attachment to this necessity and in his reflection on his own fate – that the gesture of choosing to resist expresses its emancipatory potential and heralds the political status of the partisan, in a plural horizon of recognition. Chapter III captures the anthropological dimension of the Resistance in terms of its structural oscillation between the exemplary and the shadowed. The presence of the Resistance subject expresses the very syntax of his political action. The truth of the act of Resistance is located in its existence both on the level of representation and in its inexhaustible reference to an axiological horizon, as is its indelible – even if at times liminal – difference with regard to the anthropological register that took shape under the Fascist regimes. The partisan is continually “coming to, arriving at” his presence, Andrea Zanzotto writes. In the uncertain suspension of his appearance – in his wanderings – he is representing the meaning of his own action and his own anthropology, indicating it without ever exhausting its full significance. As Levinas would say, the fascist, conversely, is confined to his own presence, he “is” in this presence. His own corporeal presence is a finished idea of man, whose meaning is nailed down. Finally, the conclusions look into the nexuses of co-possibility between philosophical practice and Resistance praxis – bearing dual testimony to a peculiar form of contemporaneity to one’s own time – declining them in terms of consciousness and, with particular reference to Jean Cavaillès’s work, conceptually.