‘Thinking in Fragments’: Abstracts and Speaker Profiles
Pierpaolo ANTONELLO (Cambridge University)
paa25@cam.ac.uk
No fragment is an island: Carlo Ginzburg’s evidential paradigm and the ethical turn
In my paper I will try to sketch the theoretical and epistemological implications of Carlo
Ginzburg's essay Spie: radici di un paradigma indiziario [Clues: Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm] starting from its interesting and quite revealing publication history: it was
initially included in Aldo Gargani's Crisi della ragione (1979), which can be considered
the introduction of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in Italian philosophy and one of the first
examples of the postmodern paradigm in Italian critical thinking. What is at stake in that
essay, however, is an idea of knowledge which cannot be reduced to its discursive value
and that goes beyond any nihilistic and postmodern framework. Despite its being a
hermeneutic practice, the evidential paradigm is in fact grounded, on the one hand, on
an anthropological understanding of what interpretation might entail for the human
mind, and, on the other, on historical and material evidence. This idea of ‘piecing the
fragments of history together’ was in fact later reframed by Ginzburg in theoretical
terms to propose a form of ‘situated knowledge’ — to borrow from Donna Haraway —
that, while acknowledging the constructive nature of any discourse, would resist the
nihilistic consequences (i.e., radical relativism) of the most radical forms of postmodern
thinking. In its underlying request for historical justice (in the use to which it was put, for
instance, by Ginzburg in The Judge and the Historian), one could rather situate the
evidential paradigm within a reformulated realistic definition of the ‘ethical turn’. No
fragment is an island.
Pierpaolo Antonello is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St
John’s College. He specializes in contemporary Italian literature, culture and intellectual history,
and he wrote extensively on the relationship between literature and science. His books include:
Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino (Oxford: Legenda, 2004), coedited with Simon Gilson; Il ménage a quattro. Scienza, filosofia e tecnica nella letteratura
italiana del Novecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 2005); Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and
Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), co-edited with
Alan O’Leary; Postmodern impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), co-edited with Florian Mussgnug. With João Cezar de Castro Rocha
he also published a long interview with the French philosopher and anthropologist René Girard:
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum, 2008),
translated into nine languages. He is the co-editor of the series ‘Italian Modernities’ for Peter
Lang.