four functions of the word in the political dialogue.
1. The antilingua “Voice for voice reached me an echo”, the poet says, to point out an epoch in which the dialogue is grown weak, is extinguished in front of the enormousness of the events. The din of every explosion suffocates the words of the protagonists and leaves only a supported distant reverberation, for a few days, from the means of communication of mass. Unfortunately the discourse of our historical epoch is not fragmentary as Roland Barthes1 he would have liked, it is not composed in a language. Unfortunately the discourse of the our present political is stammering. Positions of fear, the expressions of the modernity stumble on events that they don't know how to check anymore, disconnected among them, I would say dislessici, that cannot tie in an articulated expressive finished. They stammer. Seem to me to assist to the “Dialogue among two writers in crisis”, well described from Italo Calvino, in which both make their oppositions extreme, a little bit because they believe in what they say and a little bit to reciprocally make themselves some evil. Each continuous to represent his world. Each talks of itself to the other. Each runs away in his antilingua and it produces for the other a terror semantic fact of “meant removed, relegated after all to a perspective of words that than for him same they don't want to say nothing or they want to say something of vague and sfuggente”
They are incomprehensible words for the daily practical life, totally extraneous to the spoken use and for this same motive incommunicable. It deals with an instrumental slang, finalized to strengthen his own cultural identity and to frighten the enemy. From a side, myths and rites of the secularization; from the other, myths and rites of the religion. Two monologues of the fundamentalism. You can be objected that this stuttering of the contemporary politics is not lingua that is modeled with the true life, but only language, artifice, terminology, lexicon. Certain. But it is really this the limit of the contemporary comparison: what languages are used too much specialistic and evocative and too little lived lingua, practice, clear. “Our epoch is characterized by this contradiction: on one side we have need that everything that we are said is immediately translatable in other languages; from the other one we have the conscience that every language is a system of thought itself, untranslatable for definition”.
I have experimented this double phenomenon of the translation, while I was turning into English this text written in Italian. There are Italian lexical feelings that in English they are not succeeded in expressing and whereas; because every language brings with itself a whole system of values. And we are friends. To a large extent we are participants to an identical process of globalizzation that integrates, in the daily life, our mutual expressions. If we don't use too much specialistic languages we can intend us and to compare us. How can we talk to an enemy that is protected in the language - power of the antilingua? How can we do it when our political representatives oppose that Messianic language with their technological language?
2. The word condition In first place it is necessary to know how to integrate lingua and language. If we speak of the enemy translating the lingua of his daily life, of his demands, of his anxieties, of his problems we understand better it in his humanity. If we use only instead or also primarily the technical language - mechanic of a discipline we identify better it as subject, in his military organization or in his militant function, from the point of view of his war potential. They are two different logical orders that are reciprocally worth in different contexts. If he is wanted to speak of the enemy to understand him and to contest him, is eventually very important to know the complexity of signs and meanings of his lingua. If he is wanted to speak of the enemy to analyze him and eventually to oppose him, the language is essential. Finally, if he is wanted to understand him to oppose him or to analyze him to contest him, a mix of lingua and language you can be used, in the awareness that is drawn always and however of a mystification. To talk at the enemy the lingua owes to be preceding and the following language. It is first of all necessary to define a horizon interpretative comprehensible, made of common or daily acquisitions so that to be able to establish the correct approach and a suitable syntactic vivacity. Unless is not wanted to express threat or to spread an incomprehension panic, in this case the language can go very well. Instead, the discourse to the enemy has one strategic validity of his if the specialistic technical language follows the decision assumed on the base of a sharing of the content that the lingua has helped to determine. In other terms, when it doesn't serve to frighten, the language can serve to organize.
In the systemic and systematic phase of the discourse, the vague lingua, inaccurate and often approximate, it is able to be trite and even to confuse. Also this can strategically be naturally an useful operation, to pact however that is developed consciously her, strong of the fact that is absolutely necessary to say in this case. To talk to the enemy, is instead much more important to know how to listen. In fact this is the case in which our discourse can be only reagent. Rather than to face a theme it is necessary to know how to answer to a problem constantly maintaining an oratorical equilibrium. Lingua and language have to compose him in operation of the matter set by our interlocutor, with the purpose to govern the dialogue, to do so that it conduct us where we want to go. Otherwise we risk to produce very more effects devastating of those that we wanted to get. In fact, although is essential to speak of the enemy and profit to talk to the enemy, to talk to the enemy it absolutely is not always necessary.
In certain moments discouragement can be produced in the organizations that are represented, credibility and legitimization that can be lost, up to also lose the life as many cases of failures attempts of dialogue for the Middle East they show. There is someone that can interpret the comparison as a form of weakness or renouncement and to decide for the extremism or the revolt. In every case, he can decide for the substitution of one of the two interlocutors. If he cannot do him with the enemy, it will do him with the friend (become to that point adversary). There is finally who tries to speak for the enemy. But this is really another problem.
3. The word action “Where the action is possible, a true social passion is expressed in the azione”. It is in the word, if this word is a form of action. I resort to Jürgen Habermas that the scientist of the last generation seems to me that better others he has set and proposed this active function of the word. For Habermas terrorism is “a defect of comunicazione”. Many conflicts “they are born from troubles of communication” and “they end from the psychotherapist or in court if only the consequences are enough painful.” Terrorism is one of these. For Habermas “the spiral of the violence starts with a spiral of communicative troubles that you/they create a spiral of mutual distrust; this last, if it becomes uncontrollable, it flows in the interruption of the communication.” The only condition of possibility that the modern man has to overcome this dissonance is that to avoid the monologues and to seek the civilization through a dialogue intersubjective. The dialogue is a “to act moral”, both because in the dialogue the subject “it is not an isolated agent and potentially self-sufficient, but an unity working in a community of interlocutors”; both because in the linguistic action it is “intrinsically present” the orientation to the consent, considering that “when I say something, I implicitly become available to defend him”. The risk of the world is that to stay imprisoned in “confinements monological” that, to my notice, it is happening. Instead, the dialogue is a real “communicative action” that it contemplates to the solution of the possible disagreements with a critical method freely assumed in which “the best matter will win.” The only threat is the monologue that obstructs the action of the word and it builds the silence of the humanity.
Can you be talked to the terrorists? It depends, Habermas responds: an account is the local terrorism that was introduced in military form; other account is the global terrorism, that has drawn anarchists. For both the fact is worth of however to be “a retrospective designation”, in the sense that only the future can attribute to them the qualification of terrorists or criminals. In every case today we can establish already that, while the local terrorism (in the form of the indiscriminate guerrilla or of that military) has given “his imprint to many movements of national liberation in the second half the XX century”, the global terrorism again type, having as “only possible effect” that “to frighten and to alarm the government and the population”, “it has the anarchic lines of a revolt powerless”.
To speak is difficult, both for the graphic value of the imaginary collective on which is hacked when it reaches the symbolic strength of the stricken objectives, both for his impossible identification that jeopardizes “a realistic evaluation of the risk”, both finally because the west (for the failure of the European governments and for the impassive perseverance of Bush) has continued “in the his autoscored impenitent political superpower”. Therefore it is always worth not to speak. You can often be worthwhile to listen. The word has a very precise political function. It contributes to the democracy of the languages, in a complex planetary language, only when it is action: communicative action that breaks the rigid frame of the monologue. What a monologue is useless fact of empty firm words, of a nothing conceptual autoreferenziale that reverses the interpretations and it produces equivocal or dissonances, an old Moroccan proverb remembers it: “You tell me that you go to Fez. Now, if you say that you go to Fez, this means that don't go to Fez. But I know that you go to Fez. Because you lie me, you that you are my amico?”.
I feel many protagonists of our epoch repeat, in the deafening megaphones of the masses middle, this fool refrain.
4. The word organization The deep sense of a word - action is that it is very clear when it is not necessary to use it. And it is not necessary to use it when it is alone, when it is not situated in a context. To talk to the enemy has a meaning when that dialogue is situated in a precise strategic context, inside a methodology of general resolution of the conflicts as moment of a complex operation of contrast or pacification. The word action complains one space of his and one dialogue organization of his. This is his taking root: this ability to identify us in a story, that starts before us and it will end after us, but that you cannot be developed without us. Our life is one “narration of identity”. We participate, with the narration of our history, to a series of narrated histories. We are all situated ones in a story: “the conversations particularly, the actions human in general they are stories envoys in atto”. Sometimes, when these narrations are met they are turned into conversations. We are at least in two to converse and therefore it takes place a positioning that “it is accepted, refused or improved by the partners in the conversation”. There is then an area of discretion, the area of whom can include us or to exclude us from the collective narration of the politics and the history. It is the area of the power that decides for us, that it pre-arranges our taking root and our positioning in a plot of narration without us; as exactly Marshall McLuhan it said, that in the society of the communication the true one or the forgery but the void or the full one it doesn't exist. In this void of narration that we have built for him, in this exclusion from the story of the history, our enemy rises that, to affirm its taking root, is equipped with a word - organization that can guarantee him a positionament. It tries to fill the void in which the power of the narrator has relegated him. And him ago, as political subject, with a word organization able to make him protagonist of the plot; as I individualize, with a word explosive action that tries to drag the absolute power of the narrator in the void of communication. To that point to talk to him is difficult. “To convince a person ready to sacrifice his own life to damage how much more possible what an implacable enemy judges, that if he is wanted to fight it has to do it in the forms that its enemy has formalized it is an absurd enterprise, first still that irrealizzabile”. Both as I individualize that as political subject he has tasted the absolute power, that to be himself the craftsman of the plot, a character that doesn't look for his author because it is him same author of a divine narration, absolute protagonist of a history written by God; the only true possible narrator, that can save me and to cancel from the story of the life my enemy. “The base of the terrorism, and particularly of that suicide, it is the desperate awareness that the formality of the attack as form of communication exist only with his own antagonist. Anybody else mean is blocked or too debole”.
We have to definitely take conscience that to defeat the word militant organization of the terrorist with the word military organization of our armies, is not been able. To eliminate the global terrorist of the society of the communication it is necessary to use a word organization that is also a word situation, that is that I am occupied and you are worried about the state social strength of our enemy, to eliminate the incubatori of the terror that crowd the areas of the underdevelopment. The humanity eliminated by the narration of the globalizzation is as. The large majority of the humanity lives in areas of discomfort, in horrors conflittuali and in poverty, corpses still for hunger and for silk. With how much hostile we have to speak? How much incubatori of terror are disseminated in parts of the world that we don't know because are excluded by the narration of the modernity that the globalizzazione has imposed? How much do you want to sink us in the communicative void in which we have relegated them? A word new situation is needed, that knows to individualize the real interlocutors and not those desired; interlocutory that is in real condition of “to open a dialogue that raises the communication from the level of the violence to that of the diplomazia”. The word situation Of however “as the police it is not the only tool to fight against the delinquency, the employment of the strength you/he/she cannot be the only answer to the social and cultural fractures that terrorism renders explicit with the violence”. Strength is the word organization that we have to abolish. A word new situation there is: it is Responsibility. Who intends to talk to the enemy, responsibility is taken on of always to do it. Yet, the history of the politics is characterized by the affirmation of the strength. The power, at least from Hobbes in then he has always been considered as an expression of applied strength,: legitimately in the democracies, illegitimately in the tyrannies, hypocritically in the oligarchies. After the second world war, Hannah Arendt has taught us that this trisection aristotelica of the political form tied by the strength doesn't exist anymore.
The totalitarianisms or the democracies exist, that are new political forms risen by the action. Today we know that percentages of democracy also exist in the totalitarianism and percentages of totalitarianism in the democracy. Every form of government is progressive. Strength all it takes is anymore for holding together her in the dynamics of the complexity. And it doesn't serve if this complexity is crushed by a wave of terror that wants to sink it in a void. Maids to talk to a word - new situation, to inaugurate a new dialogue, where is the responsibility of the interlocutors to establish the level of civilization in which we want to live. “The climate of violence begins when the word is disprezzata” from the irresponsibility of its incapable interlocutors to draw from a discussion some “practical consequence”: “when the criticism more founded and shared and grieved it slips on the skin of hippo of the system pachiderma without provoking to him some turbamento”. The word serves if it resolves the problems, if it changes the things, if it is a word situation able, with its organization addressed toward one defined action, to change the condition of the actors of the planetary narration of the world. Otherwise an exercise logorroico stays and idle, of rhetorical narrators. They are there, static, boring turns of words without future in which seems that the history has already had a result, that the world has, somehow lived its epilogue. There is again instead a diffused onset that he never takes form. This is the terrorism: one perpetually onset without ever rising. It is opposed to a conceited globalization because he thinks that over of itself cannot be gone. For definition, the globalization can expand only. Every change is one character of his and therefore it doesn't admit mutations. The globalization would like to force us to a pre-arranged present, that can be only threatened, petrified, terrorized. You cannot be modified, having incorporated in his social gene every possible mutation.
His representatives have to fight only himself to preserve her. And they fight against other representatives that want to preserve an ideological or religious identity. They do it inserting inside the expansive mechanism of the globality the virus of the terror. If they took form they would be visible and somehow englobed. They rise up and they explode. This is everything. The play of the contemporary political violence is really its diffused onset. The world seems an old ruin that floats and that it embarks violence from every leak of his. They are not succeeded in braking the infiltrations. The pressure grows every day and the risk of an explosion it is strong and concrete. Nobody understands indeed because all this is happening. The only since we can ascertain, in our explosive historical phase, it is that there is not a motivation a reasoning. We listen only to the strength and his propaganda. There is not an idea. And when it misses an idea, as Ortega y Gasset said, “an conservative emotion” stays only.
We are assisting to a clash among conservatories that want to affirm his own supremacy in the dress of the fundamentalism of the religion or the secularization. But, however bloody, I repeat, is drawn only of a clash of maintenance. The masters of the political language are conservative leader that stammers. They don't speak to them because they don't know it to do and because they don't feel the responsibility of it. When, for so many years, alive favorite to New York or to Rome and you see the war filtered from I screen it television, inside the dish to the time of supper, “sat pacific from a part to the other of the table”, as it recites a splendid poetry of Dacia Maraini , and a car jumps in air above an insalatiera, you lose “the carnal experience of the pain.” Until the wave of bump of the death it doesn't overwhelm you, in the Twin Towers or in a field in Iraq. We have felt him to us Wednesday morning this wave of unfair and unjustified death that has overwhelmed 18 military Italians. An army has been stricken that in so many operations of peacekeeping he has given test of equilibrium and wisdom. An army that has always known how to integrate, more than whoever to the world, the difficult and debatable choices of international politics with the understanding of the uneasiness of the people, of the territories and of the individuals. A liked army has been stricken. And we have done again “the carnal experience of the pain.” Who would have liked to talk to that hostile? The revenge is the alone answer of a strength that reacts to the strength without any responsibility. It is this the only way that you have the enemies to speak to him today. But, the matters that we have of forehead are of long course. Strength doesn't hold up. It is necessary to build the system of the International Relationships on the principle of responsibility and on the reasons for the democracy. With moderation and equilibrium, however. The last stratagem that Schopenhauer individualized in the art to get reason, “when it realizes us that the adversary is superior and will be ended up being wrong” it is that to become “offensive, outrageous, coarse”, that is to pass “from the object of the argument (since there he has been departed lost) to contend and you are attached” directly the enemy. Therefore, when it is not had more reason, is usual to abandon the matters and to direct “his own attack against the person of the adversary” becoming “insolent, perfidious, outrageous, coarse.”
It is easily an applicable rule “because whoever is able to put it into practice, and he is employed therefore often.” If we want to talk to the enemy, we look for therefore not to oppress it with our reason. The reason for the democracy is evidently superior. The enemies of the democracy as it systematizes genetic of guardianship of the life and respect of the other one they inevitably end up always being wrong. I intend the external enemies and those insides, that are often really his rulers. They end up being wrong and it is for this that you become insolent, perfidious, outrageous, coarse: violent. Whoever of them can always appeal to the strengths of the body or the animalità against the strengths of the spirit and the humanity. Our reason is superior. He is affirmed alone on the road of the tolerance and the dialogue. We don't have need to impose it. It is enough for there to sustain it. Otherwise whoever is able sferrare his own attack against the person of the adversary in outrageous and violent way. Also those people that you/they here think that I have misused too much of their patience.
