A large and highly titled group of scholars and intellectuals, including philosophers, critics, sociologists, teachers, writers: all together very passionately to explain to us, in detail, how the classics speak to the future. And not only if and when they travel, as now happens, on the Internet or on TikTok. Because, if our hyper-connected times, voracious of a hit-and-run even cognitive, seem destined for the rapid consumption of suggestions and ideas, they, the classics, do not cease to have the right of citizenship among us.
If needed, it would be enough to mention the unexpected success that the festival dedicated to them by the Circolo dei Lettore rewards: last year – in its digital version due to pandemic – it totaled over 600 thousand views. And not only thanks to pop guests like Neri Marcorè: just think that the lesson of the historian Eva Cantarella on the plague of Athens was followed by 100,000 people. More than the packed San Siro stadium. Whether or not the pandemic has something to do with it, which perhaps makes us less frivolous and more reflective, in need of a raft on which to ferry these crumbling days out of an almost infernal circle, it is not known. But if the results have their own reasons, the Turin club is doing very well to ride a triumph and re-propose – this time live – the Festival del Classico, openly born on a bet, that is, «The classics have a future. They do not offer simplified solutions, but they re-propose ancient dilemmas. They do not present a one-sided and sweetened image of man and the world, but they make one think ”, as explained by the president of the exhibition, Luciano Canfora, and the curator Ugo Cardinale.
As for the theme of this fourth edition, Cardinal recounts it thus: «The antinomy of our present, the contradiction between the defense of freedom to the point of selfishness and the legitimacy of slavery. The disproportionate inequality of rights in the globalized world requires us to think of a different idea of freedom ». From 2 to 5 December, these are the dates of the event, which opens, however, with a preview scheduled for November 25 at 7pm online (on Facebook, YouTube, festivaldelclassico.it), entitled “The strength of myths” : protagonist, the American writer Madeline Miller, who writes mythological novels, starting with «The song of Achilles», her debut title. What made her universally known and widely read by young people was the rebound of some of her pages on Tik Tok. For this appointment he will focus on the figure of Circe, to whom he has dedicated another narrative sortie and of which he will draw an unpublished portrait in a feminist key, telling of a woman who has chosen her destiny alone and preferred independence to the constraints of a wedding.
On the 2nd at 6.30 pm, at the Circolo, debut lesson on «Freedom and slavery», with the philologist Luciano Canfora, flanked by Eva Cantarella. We will talk about Athenian democracy which, however enlightened, envisaged slavery and an emblem like Spartacus, admired even by Marx, who called him “the most grandiose figure in all of ancient history”. Among the subsequent meetings, the one with Piergiorgio Odifreddi, on the concept of free will according to Fëdor Dostoevskij, Umberto Galimberti (“The illusion of freedom”), Giorgio Ficara (“Liberal arts today”), while the sociologist Derrick De Kerckhove, on the subject of digital philosophy, will reflect on the transformation, thanks to the technological advance, of democracy into “datacracy”. –
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