Metafisica e microfisica del male: Dai demoni assoluti ai demoni mediocri

Two different ways of thinking political evil are contrasted and named, respectively, (i) "Dostoyevsky paradigm" and (ii) "mediocre demons paradigm". Will, omnipotence, and nothingness: although no longer framed in Dostoyevsky's religious outlook, the correlation between these three terms has been reworked by later philosophers, who continue to think of evil as a result of perversion of will in omnipotence, and of a sovereign subject - whether collective or individual - which, by raising itself up to everything, creates nothingness. It is argued that now is the time to abandon this approach and focus on the paradigm of "mediocre demons". Following this direction, it should become clear that evil is a system, in the sense of a tangle of subjectivities, a network of relations, whose threads knit together thanks to a perfect complementarity. Thinking within the paradigm of "mediocre demons" means primarily questioning the exclusive role of the will and desire for death, and viewing instead the scenes of evil as powerfully inhabited by the will to life, as the result of the attempt to maximize life itself.