Giancarlo Depretis, Saramago’s voice: intellectuality and power

 

With regard to the relationship between intellectuality and power, the author believes that the voice which best suits to the current time is Saramago’s voice. The reasonableness of the words of the Portuguese writer does not result from a generic intellectual practice or from the engineering of rationality, nor even from the engineering of the soul, but rather from a pragmatic analysis within the economic, social and moral reality. A reality to which the current humanity – more and more homogeneous and standardized in the actual scenarios of ephemeral economies that are in the service of a pervasive power – has devoted itself. Its intolerance against power intimates that same critical vocation showed also by Foucault, which is necessary to keep on thinking of a possible liberation from new subjugations and new slaveries.

 

Published on: Intellectual Educators N. 16 New Series – Year VIII 2012