Perniola

Of Roberto Pecchioli

Source: Heretically
The small bookstores and street bouquinistes are precious. Old editions can be found from them, books that were thought to be out of print, authors and texts from small publishers, garrison of freedom. Visiting a bookshop in the historic center of a small town we came across a little book of a few pages written in 2011 by the philosopher and art historian Mario Perniola, passed away recently. The title is intriguing, The text is interesting and can be read in one go: Berlusconi or '68 realized...
The thesis of the intellectual from Asti is that the Knight would be proof of the success of the anthropological revolution triggered by the ideas, Parisian and Californian, of the 1968. Strange indeed that the heterodox positions of a few thinkers are considered reactionary, together with powerful but isolated voices accused of "Rossobrunism" (Costanzo Preve) are accepted in some way, or at least revisited, by a figure like that of Perniola. Already a left-wing extremist, close to the Situationist International in his youth until his personal friendship with Guy Debord, subsequently historian and philosopher of art on very critical positions of post modernity, enemy of “weak thinking”, protagonist of heated controversies with Gianni Vattimo, presents a surprising thesis and not without a certain charm. The knight of Arcore would be, in the vision of Luigi Pareyson's student, the one who achieved what 1968 had supported.
As an insider of the movement (Perniola was born in 1941 and began to intervene in the cultural debate in the mid-1950s 60) he sees in the figure of Berlusconi “that will to power, that ranting triumphalism, that extreme desire to destabilize the whole of society which pervaded 1968. End of work and family, deschooling, destruction of the university, deregulation of sexuality, counter-culture, and discredit of medical expertise and collapse of healthcare facilities, hostility towards judicial institutions considered repressive, youthful vitalism, triumph of mass media communication, oblivion of stories and spontaneous presentism, all this has now become reality.” Read More