Sacrificio. Gentile e la violenza dei fascisti

A double declination of the notion of violence emerges from Gentile’s political writings: the one is violence of the Regime, about which the philosopher of the “pure act” is often reticent, and the other is violence that the fascist is called upon to continually exercise on himself, in order to respond to the higher value of the political stability of Fascism. The fascist is the one who ‘takes life seriously’, who ‘does not laugh’ and who sacrifices all his own desires and expectations for the good of the Fatherland. It is precisely on this continuous self-imposed violence that Gentile bases his justification of a model of “cadaveric obedience”, indispensable to guarantee social peace in the dictatorship.