Gianni Vattimo and the weakness of politics

Abstract

This article develops the thesis that, from the text published in Spanish in 1996 Hermeneutics, democracy and emancipation, the weakness of politics is thought by Gianni Vattimo from the relationship between philosophy and democracy. That is, that philosophy fails to think politics because by using its categories with metaphysical bases it ends up, consciously or unconsciously, by uncritically accepting liberal democracy which, as some Italian philosophers have suggested (Agamben and Esposito), hides the danger of authoritarianism and which, as we know, Vattimo will call democratic fundamentalism. The weakness of politics, however, does not imply for Vattimo to renounce projects of emancipation, on the contrary, it means rather a way out in which hermeneutics, leaving its condition of neutrality, can, weakly, found a revolutionary ontology.