Oscillazioni della suscettibilità

Abstract

We live in an age of susceptibility. Increasingly, for some time now, we are all ready to take offence at anything, anywhere and at any time in our lives, both personally and collectively: at the way this film has portrayed situations that could affect us, because this television programme has forgotten the minority to which I belong, at the disrespectful tones of this advertisement, at the way our boss treats staff in the office, and so on, in a whirlwind of provocations and insults, innuendoes and insults that end up paralysing us. The so-called 'cancellation culture' would be the next step: since I am offended, or could be offended anywhere at any time, that is, since I am constitutively susceptible, there is someone who preemptively eliminates the reasons for this possible offence. You never know: better to avoid. And so, by eliminating and eliminating, the panorama of stimuli - intellectual, moral, political, aesthetic... - becomes flat and deserted. Extreme sensitivity, i.e. susceptibility, does not lead to not to perpetual conflict, to perpetual tension, as we might reasonably imagine, but to its opposite, to perpetual peace, to programmatic ataraxia, to forced asceticism... Like a flat electroencephalogram.