The Age of Susceptibility

All it takes is nothing: a song from fifty years ago, a movie set in the mid-nineteenth century, a joke from today - here it comes, the indignation of the day, world pastime, monopolizer of conversations and moods. Every morning the contemporary human being wakes up and knows that, at the marketplace of passing scandals, he will find a fresh outrage of the day, a new philosophical angle of the right to susceptibility, a Robespierre of the week. The death of context, the overbearing fetishism of fragility, whereby "poor guy" has become the only approach allowed, and identity epistemology, whereby belonging prevails over any scholarly curriculum, are just some of the most obvious and disruptive phenomena of recent years, with dangerous and grotesque effects that in other centuries were occasional damnatio memoriae and are now daily cancel cultures. Guia Soncini questions the origins of this eternal present in which everything that does not perfectly reflect us seems a violation of our identity. She recalls the works that foresaw the dictatorship of respectability, from the usual Orwell to Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, "the matrix of all disasters of misunderstanding and susceptibility"; she challenges the role of social media as amplifiers of dissent and indignation; she identifies some worrying political implications: if the left loses the ability not to consider every wrong word the end of the world, what will become of freedom of expression? Will only the right be left with the space to say anything, and not spend their days feeling hurt by every rudeness? It is time to rebuild how we got here. To the right to be offended, to the duty to be outraged.

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Publication date: 04.03.2021
Publisher: Marsilio

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