L¡ngua e Politica em Vico

The article is divided into two parts. The first part reconstructs the interpretations of the language-politics nexus in Vico that prevailed in the 20th century: from Croce's denial of a significant depth of these two dimensions, to the various readings of the second half of the century, which between Nouvelle rhétorique and Hermeneutik brought on the contrary to the foreground their relevance, without however grasping the "political radicality" of Vico's reflection on language. In the second part, a survey is made on Vico's theory of the "double characters", a theory that is completed only in the last editing of the Scienza Nuova, definitively linking the evolution of the symbolic expressive forms to the social and political conflict between fathers and plebeians. A trend that indicates the "genetic" character of the Neapolitan philosopher's reflection on politics. Vico, in this sense, is first of all a philosopher of politics, and only later, more slowly and laboriously, a philosopher of history: a philosopher of the regularities, the constances, the laws that govern "ideal eternal history". It is his attempt to bring to "evidence of genesis" the intractable fire, the irreducible constituent magma of politics that makes Vico an eccentric figure, both with respect to the founding logic of classicism (the naturalness of ethos), and with respect to the constructivist-functional or dialectical instances of modern reason.