The following paper, focusing on the emptiness of political language, offers a specific study of the expression “useful idiot” which, considered in the objectivity of its linguistic components, doesn’t seem to reveal – prima facie – all its broad horizon of meaning. The interpretation of such oxymoric syntagm, as an expression of a paradox, presupposes, however, the conjunction of critical ability, argumentative logic and philosophical irony. Both the origin and the meaning of such idiomatic expression will therefore be investigated by virtue of a retrospective excursus which, starting from the last writings of Lenin and focusing on the codification of the concept of idiotism in nineteenth-century nosography, will eventually encompass the suggestive and ambivalent acquisition of the figure of the idiot, at first in the novels of Fedor Dostoevsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and then in the philosophical writings of Nicola da Kues and Aristotle. An attempt aimed at – if not to resolve – at least to cope in a compelling way with the ancient Aristotelian doubt: is the idiot a beast or a god?
Sull’utilità dell’idiota (rileggendo Aristotele, Politica, 1253a)
Cesaro, Antimo
Writing – Review & Editing
2020
Abstract
The following paper, focusing on the emptiness of political language, offers a specific study of the expression “useful idiot” which, considered in the objectivity of its linguistic components, doesn’t seem to reveal – prima facie – all its broad horizon of meaning. The interpretation of such oxymoric syntagm, as an expression of a paradox, presupposes, however, the conjunction of critical ability, argumentative logic and philosophical irony. Both the origin and the meaning of such idiomatic expression will therefore be investigated by virtue of a retrospective excursus which, starting from the last writings of Lenin and focusing on the codification of the concept of idiotism in nineteenth-century nosography, will eventually encompass the suggestive and ambivalent acquisition of the figure of the idiot, at first in the novels of Fedor Dostoevsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and then in the philosophical writings of Nicola da Kues and Aristotle. An attempt aimed at – if not to resolve – at least to cope in a compelling way with the ancient Aristotelian doubt: is the idiot a beast or a god?I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
