Words, Practices, Citizenship

The study day, whose Proceedings are collected in this volume, was dedicated to a reflection on the relationship between the Humanities and the public sphere. How can (or simply can) the artistic or literary criticism compare with the forms of social criticism? What is the relationship between academic research and “earthly city”; between philology and politics (in the broad sense)? Finally, how can we ensure that specialist research proves to be a specific mode of citizenship? We chose to focus on the relationship between art history and criticism and the public sphere, since we are convinced that the two worlds are now separated by a growing distance both in Italy and abroad. And that this distance does not benefit the one or the other - i.e. the fate of our democracy. We also investigated the gap that has arisen between formal and cultural opinion; between cultural theory and artistic practices. In reflecting on the current loss of authority of “contemporary art”, we encouraged the speakers to keep an equidistant perspective from shrill complaints and unnecessary corporatism. “The risk”, as properly pointed out by Giovanni Solimine in Senza Sapere (2014), “is that an increasingly wide and deep gap may arise between education places, which often young people continue to attend reluctantly and without attributing them any function, and an ‘implicit curriculum’, based on the ideology of a self-education via the web”. Little is left, in the current academic system and in the daily practice of those dealing with research, of that “ceterorum hominum caritas”, which, according to Petrarch and early humanists, strengthened and made the studia humanitatis necessary. However, it does not seem possible - or desirable - to eradicate humanities research from the civil and pragmatic dimension of the origins. Therefore, the conference also involved scholars active in the “third mission” of the research: scholars who also were columnists or maybe curators, directors of cultural magazines or collective blogs, or engaged in social. 80 If it seems important to try to reduce the distance between scientific institutions and the world “out there”, it is however necessary to do so in specific and well-balanced ways. And so, how do the philological toolbox and the critical theory cooperate, if they do? How important can we consider, in modern society, the observance of good argumentative practices, the education to a public use of emotions, and a constant, appropriate stimulation of written language?