La vita (sociale) “cucita a fil doppio” col conflitto: il programma della Lebenssoziologie di Georg Simmel

The essay intends to highlight the role and value that the theme of the Leben ("life") takes on in the sociology of culture and in the philosophy of values of Georg Simmel. The aim of the paper is also to test the relevance and validity of the Simmelian perspective, starting from the established fact of Simmel's unavoidability, up to the possible use of the program of his Lebenssoziologie, term indicating, faithfully to the teachings of the Berlin sociologist, the science that investigates the "vital social forms". The characteristic feature of modern society is the progressive proliferation of catalyst semantic centers, for which the "hidden king" of our age seems lost. The extreme paradox that we live is given by the coexistence on the one hand of a very refined rationality and technology making the other ever closer (in a social, political, anthropological, biological, astronomical, etc. sense), and on the other hand, of an inability to "represent", "imagine" this other. The "tragic" dialectic of the social structuring, and therefore of the cultural production, indicated and studied masterfully by Simmel, is the fulcrum of the Lebenssoziologie that underpins his last works and which still shows all its freshness, its argumentative vigor and its relevance.