Ossigeno

«The world is all that is the case», wrote Wittgenstein. And what is the case, at times, takes on surprising and contradictory connotations which however, added together, generate an overall notion of meaning, of completeness, even in the unsolved. Meeting Leonardo Caffo , one of the most interesting radical thinkers on the Italian scene, is an opportunity to talk about philosophy in conditions that, albeit common in several respects, we both immediately decode ( ontologically , I would say, smiling) as an absolute privilege: two western white males, with education, in a pleasant university context on a Milanese afternoon in which winter, in the words of D'Annunzio, was dyingquite sweetly . Just a week after this meeting, the Coronavirus emergency would have broken out in a devastating way in Italy, and everything was about to change. In a certain sense we were all going to die, as a metaphor concerning a previous way of life. Covid-19 was not yet officially there, but Caffo's vision already included a reflection on our being in relation to the threat of a global pandemic. Today it is clear to me that, as well as prophetic, from this point of view, ours has been also a metaphorical meeting , full of surprises and productive contradictions and therefore, in turn, an applied metaphor («The world is the totality of facts, not of things», continues Wittgenstein) of what we are talking about – that is, in a completely personal and partial measure, of course, of philosophy in itself . The "Thing in itself", after all, is the great philosophical myth, from Plato's Cave to Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects , passing through Kant and with the friendly participation of Fruttero & Lucentini. But how is a radical philosopher made? How does he exist within this world ? Imagining a cultured version of the singer Achille Lauro was a fascinating hypothesis (and in some ways, in the end, not even so wrong), but Caffo – theorist, professor, militant thinker and father of a baby – looks more like a brilliant and normally flashy student: blue round neck sweater with no shirt, numerous bracelets on his wrist, big round glasses with black frame, immediate human empathy. And soon we find ourselves talking about other philosophers, such as for example Paul B. Preciado , one of the greatest living thinkers (and in Wittgenstein he had made me think when, a few months ago, I interviewed him in Ferrara). «After all, philosophy - Caffo told me when talking about the definition of philosophical space today - has always been queer , only it was queer before the disciplinary distinctions began to exist; therefore, in a certain sense, it is philosophy that created the disciplines, and when these became autonomous, it still remained an annoying structure crossing them all, constantly questioning itself about their conditions of possibility. I strongly believe in this queer space, especially today that all disciplinary and taxonomic distinctions blew off. Preciado told me that he does not care to be interdisciplinary, he is interested in being in-disciplinary , that is, staying within the disciplines and doing exactly like a transgender , therefore going from one condition to another». I try to imagine what a queer version of Hegel (or Heidegger) would have been, I am very amused by the thought but, I have to confess, I am not able to visualize its content; anyway it doesn’t matter, because what I begin to perceive, standing in front of Leonardo Caffo, is the need for contradictions , their indispensable status as mediators in the face of the risks of absolute thoughts. An example: «We must try to be in the world in a completely different way – he told me – and it is a challenge that we cannot win, we have already lost it. Culture has always shown us what we have lost , scenarios towards which we would have had to go, only had we been men of good will, scenarios which actually we do not have the power to cross». Here, in the awareness of the impossibility of winning this challenge, it would seem to catch some kind of uselessness in the action, but this would represent an inaccurate reading too, because philosophy 115