L’ossimoro come ‘‘terapia”. Critica della modernità e umiltà nella scrittura giornalistica di Franco Cassano

The main focus of the articles published by Franco Cassano since the second half of the 90s in many national newspapers (and later collected in Modernizzare stanca) is the mythology of progress, the idea of an unlimited productivity, the domination of speed and technology in every human sphere, social competition and individualism as a kind of civil religion. These themes seem to be linked to the critique of capitalism made by the late Pasolini, with particular reference to the category of “development without progress”. Cassano himself, in Il pensiero meridiano, identifies Pasolini’s oxymoron as a privileged means to explore the logic of Western modernity, not a simple figure of speech, but a heuristic mode capable to express reality in its complex aspect and make the differences coexist without “closing” them in a synthesis. The sociologist identifies, specifically, in the “measure” – the so-called dissoi logoi, the divergent or in-contrast speech – the only possible antidote to the “mythology of modernity” and to the rhetoric of the north-western development model. According to Cassano, the oxymoron is a means of circumventing the unilinear narrative of progress, the “grafting” of a curative and therapeutic countertrend on the trunk of the mainstream narratives: a “et et” model that opposes the apodictic logic of “aut aut”. There is something constantly “temporary” in Cassano’s research, such as a principle of dissatisfaction with the pre-established models and truths, which refers to a need for a “perennial re-foundation and re-weighting”, a continuous recalibration of the gaze and search for the best conditions for “visibility”. The “humility” of Cassano lies in the knowledge that – as it is stated in Calvino’s Palomar – “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath”