The political virtue of friendship.
Within the framework of a philosophical reflection on the founding principles of the political, this year the course will address the issue of friendship, understood since Greek philosophy as the essential virtue on which a community can be built. The text of reference will be the book by J. Derrida with which the French philosopher faces his deconstructive work of the main concepts of the western philosophical tradition in the ethical-political field, in view of a tight critique of the principle of sovereignty. In tracing this Derridean critique, some classics of ethical and political thought of the Western tradition will be examined and interpreted, in particular Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Schmitt's Concept of the Political, but also Plato's Lyside, Cicero's Lelio and others.
The critique of the category of friend will allow to read in a reflexive way contemporary phenomena such as hospitality and enmity, to try to free them from obvious readings and return the complexity and problematicity.