Domenico Cortese

The concept of infinity had, in ancient times, an indistinguishable development between mathematics and philosophy. We could also say that his real birth and development was in Magna Graecia, the ancient South of Italy, and it is surprising that we find, in that time, a notable convergence not only of the mathematical and philosophical point of view, but also of what resembles the first “computational approach” to “infinitely” or very large numbers by Archimedes. On the other hand, since the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, the concept of infinite has been closely linked with that of contradiction and, more precisely, with the intellectual effort to overcome contradictions present in an account of Totality as fully grounded. The present work illustrates the ontological and epistemological nature of the paradoxes of the infinite, focusing on the theoretical framework of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, and connecting the epistemological issues about the infinite to concepts such as the continuum in mathematics.

Le tendenze politiche Occidentali attuali sembrerebbero riscoprire il fascino dell'identità nazionale o locale come la maggiore garanzia di quello che Carl Schmitt definisce «massimo grado di intensità di un'unione» riferendosi a cosa distinguerebbe il legame politico entro una comunità "amica" rispetto ad altri tipi di rapporti. Eppure una realtà come quella Scozzese sembra individuare il "nemico politico" non in una figura politica precisa ma, piuttosto, in un modello socio-economico, quello neo-liberista, che sfavorisce il solidarismo, l'apertura all'Altro e la massimizzazione della reciprocità economica all'interno della società umana. Questo approccio valoriale nei confronti del "nemico", presente nell'indipendentismo Scozzese, viene messo in contrasto con quello tipico dell'autonomismo Veneto, per il quale l'obiettivo polemico coincide semplicisticamente con una parte della popolazione Italiana, alla quale occorrerebbe sottrarre parte del potere politico. Today's Western political tendencies appear to rediscover the appeal of national or local identity as a major guarantee of what Carl Schmitt defines as «the highest degree of intensity of a union». With this, he refers to what distinguishes a political bond within a "friendly" community from other kinds of relationships. Nevertheless, a reality such as the Scottish one seems to locate the "political enemy" not in a precise political figure but, rather, in a socioeconomic model. This model is the neo-liberal one, which disadvantages social solidarity, openness to the Other and maximization of economic reciprocity within human society. Such an approach against the "enemy" is about ethical values and is put in contrast with the typical approach of Veneto's claim to political autonomy. For this latter, the polemic target simplistically corresponds to a part of the Italian population, from which it would be necessary to remove some political power.

The concept of freedom has always been object of disputes between the theorists who privilege the “negative” aspects of it – for example, Bentham and Nozick – and who privilege the “positive” liberty typical of Hegel’s dialectic. A real autonomy of intention and a control on the realization of this latter – prerequisites of authentic negative freedom - is always compromised within a chaotic and asymmetric economic context. We need to take into account things such as the balance between an individual’s predicted “disutility” in her production or in her carrying out a career choice and this individual’s utility obtained by exchanging her product. The factors of luck and contingency prevail, and they also include the initial distribution of instruments among individuals. This seems to prove Hegel’s claim on the emptiness of the concept of negative freedom. The determinant of freedom, according to the dialectical perspective, is the feeling of «being a vehicle of Geist». I translate this, in economic terms, as the ability to realize an identity which reflects the highest feeling of union and reciprocity within a social environment. In other words, freedom is the ability to achieve the desired social satisfaction. This coincides with an aggregate maximization of reciprocity, that is to say an optimization of the value of the products – both in a commercial and in a relational sense – we offer in order to obtain the highest values in exchange. Power discrepancies between subjects, though, can weaken the existential bond at the basis of a maximization of ones “production”: the expectations of a suitable reciprocation. The contagion of bad expectations is well described, in non-philosophical terms, by authors such as Keynes, Minsky, Kalecki, Schumpeter, Stiglitz. Here the necessity of problematizing economic financialization takes place. At a social level, in fact, freedom is optimized with a maximization and equalization of reciprocal bargaining power which minimizes discrepancies. Freedom has as its condition the awareness of the necessity of such a holistic calculation. The character of individualistic gamble in the allocation of funds of today’s financial structure suppresses a similar awareness. Equity and bond secondary markets, private credit systems and their relationships with customers, big corporation management, shares buyback practices all share this structure and this will be analyzed. The allocation of capital is determined by individual isolated expectations which are based on an estimate of what others’ expectations are, while these latter are based on what others’ expectations are and so on. The impression of the others influences the outcome of an investment, its cost, the odds of its success and how the fruits of the success are shared: this logic is describable as an individual bet, and it may resemble the essential features of lotteries. Such a distribution of wealth is made according to a solipsistic notion of merit – everybody who succeeds does this thanks to her ability to realize privately and probably short-term successful calculation - and not a holistic notion of it. According to this latter notion, meritocratic recognition can raise the incentives to give long-term contribution to society within a person. The self-referential connection among individual impressions ensures that creation and accumulation of power and wealth follow routes which are completely random in comparison with a careful assessment of the long term holistic result of the intersection of individual wills. A coordination game in Nash equilibrium maximizing aggregate outcome is a good sample of such an assessment. Freedom is ultimately in function of the will to engage in a similar assessment but it would not be completely coincident with the Hegelian conception since, in this latter, highest relationality can be achieved as a synthesis of conventional cultural tendencies – it may justify the power discrepancy of a financial bubble until it is no longer perceived as harmonic by all social classes.

In my paper I will propose a revision of Carl Schmitt’s famous concepts of “enemy” in what can be defined as a “pragmatist” sense. By means of this I will describe the typology of Constitution which is most consistent with a non-ideological pursue of a community’s well-being and I will recognize an example of it in the Italian Constitution or, at least, in its 1948 version. Despite the contradictions characterizing his figure, Carl Schmitt remains an essential author when one needs to go to the root of the foundation of a sovereign political power and of the form which such a power ought to take. We accept the axiom that a political power is only justified by consensus. One can say that it occurs when accepting such a power is seen as coincident with the preferable way to fulfill needs and desires or, in other words, to fulfill a potential naturalness – with such a definition fitting a natural law, and a contractualist and a dialectical conception of political power. But, in order to really fulfill its end of maximizing its community’s consensus and well-being, a political power must strictly focus its decision on the “existential” aim that is achievement of life satisfaction. It does not have to base its actions on any other self-referential category, such as the purse of “good” or “bad” in a moral sense, of “beauty” or “ugliness” in an aesthetic sense or of “profitable” or “unprofitable” in an economic sense. Following these kinds of values – which constitutively result from contingent cultural convictions or distribution of power among citizens, above all the vision of what is most economically ‘advantageous’ – would be a deceiving distraction, an alienation fruit of moral or class ideologies. Schmitt’s criticism to the liberal bourgeois political practices seems to stem from a similar preoccupation, since these practices are disapproved of as consisting in endless technical discussions over ways of managing existing socio-economic rules and axioms, without any concern for putting their overall existential sense into question. In this sense, liberal practices are seen as “politically neutral”, because they can easily be founded on the pursuit of some of the other listed categories without taking an “authentic” political decision. This latter would correspond, instead, to the very focus on the recalled maximization of the existential well-being of a community, a focus which needs a new methodological category: the enemy, as any structure of forces which disturb the path to this achievement. In this pragmatic sense, the enemy is not necessarily the “other” in a physical or geographical sense, but any value or behavior absolutely attached to the reach of some of the other categories. It is what the politician – and the interest of the people - can and should conceivably annihilate. The Italian Constitution was originally written in a language which put any institutional or economic instrument in function of the realization of every citizen’s happiness. It was a “formal” Constitution which was ideologically “neutral” in economics but explicitly favored the achieving of collective well-being over individuals’ liberties. No particular form of technical economic procedure was privileged per se. Everything has changed since the introduction of the Communitarian rules in the Italian law. Balanced budget amendment, prohibition of State subsidies and of nationalization of enterprises (including of banks and credit institutions), free movement of goods and persons have become axioms to pursue a priori, indifferently to the context. They are functioning as self-referential values. Some of them have been inserted into the Constitution itself, others have been ratified by Italian national and international laws, depriving the Constitution of its political role. A formal Constitution, similar to the 1948 Italian one, which imposes the management of credit distribution, savings, wage levels and trade control with the objective of maximizing social happiness and not in order to apply contingent self-justifying rules, has the merit of acting itself as a wake-up call in what Schmitt would name as “states of exceptions”. That is to say, it would remind the parties involved of the real role of the sovereign politician, devoid of any merely technical attitude, in the situations in which the structural contingency of reality makes any accepted legal and technical norm completely unsuitable.

The objective of this essay is to formulate a broad definition of authority and of the functioning of this figure in the contingent and intersubjective environment by which the personal self is constituted. The coincidence of the formulated concept with the figure of the " other " to whom Derrida claims to grant an unconditional sacrifice will show the dangerous lack of political difference between Derrida's attitude and the logocentric attitude he intends to deconstruct. Both of these attitudes appear, in fact, as a way of simply relying on the tastes, desires and bargaining power of some privileged authorities, without further investigating whether there is a more preferable allocation of resources. Afterwards, I will propose an alternative approach to maximize the " justice to the Other " , which aims at optimizing every individual's capacity to be useful and claim reciprocity rather than aiming at relying on a supposedly " more reliable " authority's values. The enhancement of every individual's capacity to be useful and claim reciprocity will be considered as being the way to optimize every consciousness' satisfaction within a social web, that is to say the way to " maximize the justice to the Other " .

In this study I will present two approaches to the issue of sovereignty which are spreading today in order to solve the asymmetries of European Union. The first one is the " Bataillian " approach, whereby within a community you will always reach a stage in which production growth through traditional economic exchanges is no longer feasible and the energy in excess needs to be dissipated without profit expectation. This " non-do-ut-des " logic should avoid the utilization of the energy in excess in destructive initiatives such as wars and it can paradoxically facilitate a long term recovery to ordinary economic logic – as the Marshall plan did. This would corresponds to base the economy on a general, " Bataillian " logic rather than a " restricted " traditional one. This would correspond to being " politically sovereign " , that is to say to cultivate our authentic well-being without being alienated in abstract logics which do not fulfill a community's " general " nature. Among the federalists' proposals, similarly, there are transfer of " energy " from better-off countries to worse-off ones by means of fiscal transfers and the centralized sharing of credit risk. However, the problem with this type of general economy is that the factors quoted to justify the unsustainability of traditional economic reciprocity are not inherent to human nature but produced by historical and contingent asymmetries, due to political decisions. This means that Bataille's " general economy " would simply be the expression of the awareness of contingent needs, distorted by historically determined relations of force which is not necessarily able to aim at a maximization of well-being within an exchange economy. If sovereignty means the capacity to fulfill one's naturalness as much as possible, a " scientific " approach to sovereignty must calculate, by means of verifications of historical-empirical regularities and consequent theories, the monetary instruments most suitable to maximize reciprocal economic expectation.

The major institutions which grant credit today in the Western world can be considered a symptom of what Max Weber describes as the typical rationalization of modern age.
Such a rationalization would bring a lack of reflection on the existential significance of certain technical means, which are confused with a self-referential source of progress and with the value-in-itself of a social context. A “rational” consciousness must realize a rigorous analysis of what original meaning and ultimate scope certain instruments – such as credit – have for the necessities expressed by human will, for «the pursuing of an end defined by ultimate values or life-meanings through a free articulation of an adequate means». Otherwise, there may be only a passive acceptation of some of the current characters of this means; characters which are often a result of historical contingencies which make them no longer necessary for the “real” end of the means. The typical rationalization of the modern age becomes “irrational” in the moment in which it neglects the ultimate, “human” goal of such techniques.
What can be considered, then, to be the “original meaning and ultimate end” of credit, the end which is as consistent as possible with “the necessities expressed by human will”?
The instrument of credit seems to be justified by the fact that within a market economy not everybody immediately possesses the adequate means to set up a new activity or to improve an enterprise to respond to the contingent variation of demand. Credit can be defined as an implicit agreement between a future producer and the community she is part of, whereby this latter – by means of the figure who materially provides the service – grants in advance to the former a part of the reward she is going to obtain from the community itself for her products. Conceived in this way, the function of credit is that of a coordination between the “bargaining wills” of different individuals of a society who aim at obtaining the highest benefit by means of the utility of their products and of the products of their peers. A coordination which is necessary in order to maximize this reciprocal usefulness, given the temporal discrepancies which can physiologically occur between some agents’ capacity to produce and their needs of resources from others in order to live and commit themselves to such a production.
We can notice, then, that our epoch has favored the elevation of contingent and historically determined characters of credit issuing to ultimate ends and values, because of reasons which will not be faced here. This situation makes the process assume a logic which is substantially different from the one acknowledged above as the social scope of credit for human will.
First of all, one has to deal with the inadequacy of the monetary structure of banking. Even though commercial banks can grant loans by electronically crediting the bank account of their customers with a certain deposit without practical limits, they need central bank money in order to settle every transfer a customer requires them to carry out. This money has a cost and this gives rise to several issues.
For instance, at a certain juncture a bank may transfer to other banks a larger quantity of central bank money than the quantity it obtains from the rest of the banking circuit or by issuing shares. Such a bank is therefore forced to borrow a further amount to make new loans, altering either the convenience of new lending or the interest rates it charges – which would reduce people’s desire to borrow.
Also, because of non-performing loans or financial gambling losses, a commercial bank may lose central bank money, causing the same problems in the convenience of new lending as just described, because it needs to retain liquidity to make up for losses and fulfill due payments soon. It is because of such a private risk that commercial banks may become structurally risk-averse, meaning that in order to safeguard their private business they tend to avoid financing small entrepreneurs and innovations which are quite difficult to assess, despite the fact that they may give a great contribution to the technological and social advancement of a community.
The consequence of this structure is that ultimate values and scopes of the concept of credit do not coincide with the maximization and economic reciprocity but, in the first place, with the assessment of a convenience or risk which are distinctly private. This represents a scenario which is different from an assessment of risks and benefits considered in a collective sense, which would be consistent with the function of credit as a social investment.
An individual lender who assesses her personal risk, for example, can be indifferent to the possible technical advance which an investment on a start-up may bring to the entire society and very concerned about a possible loss of sixty-thousands euros. A calculus made by a collective institution of credit will be different.
In the second place, because of the described structure, credit granting can be read as dependent on the availability or scarcity – within a circumscribed economic web – of a specific credit “raw material” which has a cost: central bank’s liquidity.
As a matter of fact, liquidity availability in the system described is above all in function of the availability of liquidity of depositors, shareholders and financial investors of a determined commercial bank, as well as being in function of its debtors’ capacity to pay back. These agents’ willingness to invest their liquidity depends on their expectations about bankers’ ability to realize good investments, about the capacity to pay their loans back by previous debtors of the bank and, in general, about the income condition of the community where previous and potential debtors live: all elements which can be poor after a recession, favoring a pro-cyclical evolution. It is clear that, in this state of affairs, a credit institution and its capacity to grant loans cannot be considered in function of the creation of reciprocal bargaining power and economic benefit among individuals. It is, rather, in function of momentary expectations about the current level of reciprocity and expected reciprocal enrichment proper of a determined economic web, which is what is in fact reflected by the current quantity of central bank’s money in circulation.
In the structure of credit granting outlined above, therefore, availability of credit is in function of a private assessment of the risk-benefit ratio. It can be illustrated as the consequence of the following two value-axioms. The first is the privilege, as credit issuers, of private actors with private commercial goals and necessities. The second is connected with the necessity of central bank liquidity institutionalized as a kind of “credit raw material”. To use the lexicon which Weber uses in his essay The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality”, these value-axioms are incompatible with the first value-axiom I have recalled – the one consistent with the ultimate scope of credit - above all because of the result of their practical consequences. Hence, it may be concluded that there is an inappropriate confusion between means and ultimate value-axioms and that we have the necessity to rearrange these means in order to put them univocally in function of established value-rational conclusions.

This paper is an attempt to found a set of ethical guidelines in respect of specific macroeconomic problems, so that the failure to fulfill these guidelines can be considered both the root of economic crises like the current one and the reason why such crises are ethically unacceptable. The main topic I will face is the ethical aspect of the instrument of credit. I will do that by means of an examination of what being " ethical " within intersubjective life means for Hegel. Credit would assume the role of a major instrument aimed at putting the material and relational conditions for a full reciprocal recognition and fulfillment of desires among economic agents who originally have imbalanced instruments and discrepant times in their capacity to claim recognition and recognize others' desires. The development and maximization of reciprocal trust, expectation and " attraction " are established as ethical and teleological categories and their interpretation is also utilized to hint at two other issues, the utilization of credit to set up a Ponzi scheme and the debate about the necessity of a flexible exchange rate between the currencies of different countries – relevant in the Euro area today. 1-Hegelian dialectic and the ethical insights which can be drawn from it For Hegel, notoriously, speaking about justice means «indicating the ways through which freedom materializes».1 And the Hegelian system rejects any notion of negative freedom as " liberation from environmental constraints ". It embraces, instead, the idea whereby the highest freedom coincides with the state which lets consciousness determine itself, according to how it " feels itself in its full identity and satisfaction " within certain social relations and constraints. This idea of freedom and justice is, in the end, coincident with the goal of the highest human reciprocity. In fact, human self-consciousness cannot fully develop within the dominion of mere sensuality and perception of pure objectivity. In the immediate realm of inert objects consciousness can spot a contradiction, it can perceive the desire to overcome it and it can satisfy this desire by negating the contradiction in some way, so that it is ready to begin the process again. But without clashing with another self-consciousness, it cannot achieve the awareness of its own desiring as a human desiring.2 A self-consciousness needs to meet another self-consciousness which recognizes it as desiring, so that its desiring is reflected, as in a mirror, in the actions and reactions of this other self-consciousness.3 The formation of an identity has nothing to do with the sameness of the self, but coincides with its social relations and context from the very beginning. As Hegel puts it: «A self-consciousness is what it is for another self-consciousness. Only as such is it in fact self-consciousness, for only in this way does the unity of itself and its otherness become effective for it».4 Let us now paraphrase this idea in order to point out the paradoxical character of " contingent necessity " it implies. For Hegel, to talk about a dialectical advance for a consciousness means to describe a process of overcoming the perceived contradictions in order to reach a stage in which " being " and " thought " coincide5 and in which an achievement reflects what is felt as spontaneous, as " natural " for a consciousness to be.

Especially since the start of the so-called economic recession, the mainstream Western political-economical conception of an evolved community responsibility has been ineluctably linked to the ability and availability of such a community to honour its national debt and fulfil certain parameters – such as inflation rate and government budget balance – which are identified with a sort of moral duty toward the community creditors. With the support of Jacques Derrida’s comment on texts by Bataille, the contribution will highlight that political decisions such as measures of austerity or those focused on economic competitiveness draw their sense from their being a way to “fulfil a debt” contracted toward a model of rationality or a «restricted economy». Such a «restricted economy» is the tendency to calculate the economic – and existential – value and meaning of an element without referring to a pure contextual calculus of the potential total happiness generated by such a element. It is necessary, though, to go beyond Derrida himself and his recommending an act of responsibility as a mad «hospitality of the Other» within the singularity of event. An attempt – such as this – to «dismiss the system of credit from which one acquires one’s authority» turns out to be, in fact, also typical of most of the economic reforms which try to make our system of credit more “sustainable”, like the proposal of creating a new banking regulation through an Eu banking union or of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. None of these, in effect – and no attempt made to simply get out of a system of credit – can avoid resting on what Zizek would call a tautological «meta-law», which legitimates the economic-existential value of their elements; none of these attempts can avoid falling back on a certain system of credit.

A criticism of Quine’s methodology, from a neo-pragmatist’s point of view, cannot rely on the objection whereby for a historicist and holistic conception of scientific language the regulatory concept of «proximity to real data» is senseless – as Rorty believes. This latter concept would be “pragmatically” justified, in fact, as a satisfactory emerging of constant typologies of structures and relations of forces which would coincide with a “useful” agreement within Quine’s community. To show why this latter occurrence of «agreement» is problematic, therefore, we need to integrate Rorty’s holism with Derrida’s notions of dissemination and singularity of the event. Derrida's reflection might suggest that Quine’s scientific criteria of clarity, simplicity, linearity, agreement and – consequently - the very concept of “science”, can in no way be ontologically discerned from the necessity of an ethical assessment of the event.

Rorty shares the view of the linguistic phenomenon with Derrida as a dynamics of relations which lacks an interpretative “centre”. He also has a conception of experience in common with the French author whereby the classical concept of reference is dismissed: our use of “language” and our perception of what we call “brute facts” function as and coincide with equivalent systems of forces, games whose elements exist because they refer to some conventions. Nevertheless, a disagreement as fundamental as it is slight arises on the question of whether to consider this position itself as a sort of transcendentalism or not. Hence, the necessity to analyze how the Rortyan neo-pragmatism, in avoiding an acknowledgement of its own inevitable interpretative preference towards a certain type of language, develops into a contradiction and a paradox. The same paradox for which, paradoxically, Rorty had criticized Derrida’s quasi-transcendentalism.

We are witnessing a passionate intellectual debate throughout the Western world about the legitimacy and the efficacy of the current form of banking system and the suitability of the monetary and fiscal policy it allows to perform. Especially since the explosion of the so-called economic crisis and the consequent recession, there have been many reinterpretations of the modality in which creation of credit really works and what institutions really have the authority – by law or de facto – to choose the appropriate level of aggregate demand and fiscal pressure. Recently, the Bank of England and Standard and Poor's published two papers which contest the ordinary monetary interpretation given to measures such as Quantitative Easing in order to break the " credit crunch " spiral. What these texts officially state has been perceived by experts and columnists as an original admission of what the real last mechanisms influencing the circuit of credit and its cycles of booms and busts are. Martin Wolf points out, for instance, that since deposits are created by banks as a by-product of their lending – and not the other way around – and in the UK such deposits make up about 97 per cent of the money supply, the action of governments and central banks can only act to balance the effects of such a monopoly, rather than act in other effective ways to safeguard the " real economy ". He proposes – as some euro sceptical economists of Capital Economics who discuss the failures of ECB mechanisms – the transfer of the monopoly of money creation and interest rates to states governments. Banks, in particular, «could offer investment accounts, which would provide loans. But they could only loan money actually invested by customers. They would be prevented from creating such accounts out of thin air and so would become the intermediaries that many wrongly believe they now are». The problem with the above-mentioned studies and these positions is, first of all, a linguistic one. They all offer researches about a structural legitimacy and a preferability of certain authorities and present a clarification of what economic sovereignty actually should be. It should be, in fact, a correct utilisation and a full consciousness of the functioning of our institutions of credit. A criticism of Bataille's aporetic notion of «sovereignty» can help us understand how limiting ourselves to the simple process of becoming conscious of the overall technical implications of an economic context may prevent us to develop the consciousness of its implications on the quality and fairness of society-no economic authority is, in effect, so " sovereign " as to assure a fulfilment of its promises. Therein lies the necessity of crossing the borders of such a model of rationality: those studies need to be re-read in terms of relations of power, violence, waste of resources and distribution of wealth so as to elaborate new contextual methods which are purely focused on these issues, rather than on legitimating some " correct " ways of relying on existing authorities.

The Hegelian dialectic pictures a scenario whereby a consciousness develops its ethical capacities by becoming aware of the necessity of an agreement with the other self-consciousnesses in order to construct what is reciprocally maximally satisfying and “natural” within the constraints of intersubjective life. According to this guideline, the instrument of credit would be justified by being a community investment on its members’ production potentialities, after the recognition of how these potentialities can maximize reciprocal fulfilment of individual needs and desires. But the material frameworks by means of which the institution of credit functions today makes the process of credit granting neglect this “language game”. I will analyse these frameworks and the arbitrary logic they impose to credit granting. I will then propose a concrete Italian social experiment of complementary currency as a structure embracing a methodology of credit allocation which concretely coincides which the “Hegelian ethical logic” which I have illustrated.

The ethical core of Marx's discussion on the concept of surplus value is often neglected by neo-Keynesian authors. Steve Keen is emblematic in his being exclusively concerned with the technical mistake Marx makes in his labour theory of value, as he argues that surplus value cannot be reduced to an act of exploitation, since it originates from the gap between the use-value and exchange-value proper of a mean of production. It is dangerous, nevertheless, to reduce Marx's attack on the social structure of production to an empirical account of a certain labour time stolen by capitalists from the workers. The structural conditions of Marx's stance are here taken into account and accompanied by an empirical investigation of an innovative Italian complementary currency circuit, which appears to realize the cooperative form of credit granting which would be essential to mitigate the social binary opposition between labour demanders and labour suppliers.

The objective of this paper is to formulate a broad concept of “authority”, whose correspondence with the institution of the contingent “other” to whom Derrida claims to grant an unconditioned sacrifice shows the dangerous lack of effective political difference between Derrida’s attitude and the attitudes, such as dialectics, he intends to deconstruct. Authority is here understood as any structure of forces whose power is actively recognized as cogent or legitimate. This is due to the fact that accepting such a power is seen as coincident with the preferable way to fulfill perceived needs and desires or, in other words, to fulfill a perceived naturalness. This preferable attempt of fulfillment is mostly accompanied by a compromise among different individuals’ naturalness - also in the sense to reach the lesser evil by subordinating oneself to a violent individual-authority. Such a definition causes a paradox in the interpretation of Derrida’s ethical move. In fact, it can be employed to describe the unconditioned openness to the Other’s claims as a doing justice to any singularity’s naturalness and as the recognition of each of these singularities as a self-legitimized authority, regardless of the features of previous and other authorities. But the structure of the formation of any authority is better described through Derrida’s very interpretation of Foucault’s History of Madness and Hegel’s construction of the Absolute. In the first case, the ultimate authority who silences madness can do that, paradoxically, only at the cost of recognizing the always “present” unpredictable effects of madness itself. In other words, any authority is an awareness of naturalness which is intelligible despite – or, maybe, thank to – the possibility of losing its sense due to unpredictable contingency. Similarly, any Hegelian act of reciprocal recognition of self-consciousnesses suffers the aporia whereby one can recognize her own desires and the other’s desires only in function of certain existent social institutions, which do not necessarily let each individual’s potentialities stand out. As can be drawn from the semiological analysis of The Pit and the Pyramid, the arbitrariness of “linguistic” institutions always leaves a remainder which compromises absolutism. The formation of the Other, being itself an awareness of a certain naturalness in function of certain institutions, does not escape this overall structure and the shortcomings linked to unpredictable contingency and arbitrariness. Rather than relying on the ideality of an authority, I propose a logic of maximization of reciprocal bargaining power in order to optimize reciprocal recognition and fulfillment of desires. Reciprocal bargaining power can be interpreted as the basic structure of intersubjective agreements founded on what can be defined as an impulse toward reciprocal attraction - explained by the recognition of reciprocal utility. While Derrida’s proposal is more likely to limit an evaluation to what stands out in a certain moment as the solution to a problem perceived by a certain authority, to take into account the intersubjective structure I suggested may help to investigate whether there may be an even better overall allocation of instruments and potentialities.

This work is aimed at examining in a different perspective the typically philosophical pursuit of a “privileged place”, a fundamental structure or a “ground” from which one can evaluate whether a kind of experience is “appropriate” or not. The fundamental issue determines if and how this pursuit is inherent in any philosophical and “non-philosophical” way of thinking, even in those which claim to overcome foundationalism. The latter generally argue that the idealization of metaphysical values depends on a radical abstraction from the vital and total context, where one concretely lives and from where those values would be formed and negatively derived. Nevertheless, I try here to demonstrate that the “authentic life” which would display such a “total context” which certain thinkers thematize from time to time is nothing but a typology of experience of meaning dynamics of the same level as and equivalent to any other living style. In fact, I aim to show that many thinkers suppose, in an incoherent way, the total context manifests itself only in some privileged styles of experience. The first and the main philosopher I consider is Martin Heidegger. First of all, I observe how – above all in his early works – it is evident that he could not keep his theoretical proposals for a mind regeneration separate from a sharp criticism of some general German cultural styles. A criticism in the end which could be founded– I argue – only on his conviction of what is a “genuine” experience and what is not. My perplexity is strongly confirmed after an appraisal of the strictly ‘theoretical’ pages of Heidegger’s 1919 course. Among them, I recognize a twisted argument aimed solely at maintaining a tension towards a more authentic and pre-theoretical ground. Heidegger ascertains the inevitability of being a formal something for every kind and ‘level’ of experience, but rather than problematizing his own hierarchy of experience, the author hastily interprets this general “diffusion” as a vagueness that would be an indication of a vital and pre-theoretical energy. Furthermore, my work displays how this point can be considered a decisive turning-point for Heidegger’s successive philosophical journey, which was to continue along the same lines and goals until its end, with only a change in the linguistic modes. Here I begin a full confrontation between Heidegger and Jacques Derrida’s main works. The study sets up a dense dialogue with the latter, the fruits of which are a temporary answer to why it had been substantially impossible to distinguish – at least with “empirical”, pragmatic and concrete criteria –the quality of Heidegger’s favoured worldly experiences from the quality of the others. Any formal something or, better, any experience of a meaning, can function because it is an equivalent idealizing dynamic, a signifier/signified dynamic, the sense of which is continuously self-decontextualizing, in an equivalent way in any typology of experience. From here, I try to infer a radical assimilation of the concept of signifier and signified, and an assimilation of these to the sense of “their” total context (a sense which changes from event to event). From here, therefore, the impossibility of admitting the existence of a less idealized or less parasitic experience of everyday life. From these conclusions another necessity is born: a confrontation with the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation of Willard Quine, which apparently seems to match my position. A decisive difference, however, is found in the fact that for Quine there is a certain type of language with the capacity to mitigate this indeterminacy. The point of view of my work, however, considers a “meaning of a meaning” as a role which acts in and is formed by the “changing story” of a certain “subject”. The “meaning of a meaning” is not evaluated through a limited context and definite parameters, but by reading it as working in the “total context” which is continuously self-decontextualizing in every event. So, all systems of prejudicial-idealization, which are the meaning-roles, have – in the course of time – a relevant and maybe equivalent possibility of producing “harms” or “misunderstandings” (which is basically what an indeterminacy of translation is). Having considered how the total context works in this way, we cannot, without prejudice, exempt any typology of experience from having this functioning and the same potential risk of “misunderstandings”. Furthermore, given the substantial coincidence between signifier and signified as sense events which are continuously self-decontextualizing, the difference between metaphysical schemes and post-metaphysical assumptions could be reduced to a question of empirical denominations. The text goes on to underline the clear tendencies of authors like Maurice Merlau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Ludwig Binswanger, Gian-Carlo Rota and Derrida himself to confer to a specific typology of practices and culture the intrinsic capacity to bring more benefits and less “violence”. Their persuasion that these kind of practices – for instance, the perception preceding any scientific objectification or a distinctly material and creative praxis – reflect a more “radical” and fundamental way of facing reality is also highlighted. According to the conclusions reached and contextualizing this debate on actual matters, I argue that it would be misleading to fight against a peculiar “system” or type of attitude; it would be more convenient to struggle “only” against empirical, “single” and violent decisions, which could be part of any style of culture. It means that a socio-economic criticism would make sense only if realized through a merely pragmatic-empirical judgment (which does not mean a “short-term” one) of the total harms/benefits rate which a model of thought/conduct could produce in certain events. At the end of the thesis, though, a need for clarification occurs: the formation and structure itself of any philosophical and human position has appeared, as such, an idealizing interpretation-of-the-world from which one can prefer certain “classes of experience”. But this is the same type of point of view that I propose in my work: in an incoherent way, it seems that the suggested position backfires against itself by proposing a certain interpretation and “story-of-the-world” to the detriment of other equivalent interpretations. The work ends with a reflection on this very issue, and poses the question as to whether focusing intentions upon the complex goal of solely estimating the rate of harms-benefits in a story-event could, in fact, be a peculiar and effective way of acting.