Quaderni di Teoria Sociale

Se rendre présents pour résister au présent. Entretien avec Miguel Benasayag

Massimo Cerulo, Alessandra Polidori — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

In this interview Miguel Benasayag explores possible forms of resistance in a time marked by pervasive crisis. Drawing on the reflections of the Argentine-born psychoanalyst and philosopher based in Paris, the conversation examines the role of psychoanalysis in understanding sad passions not merely as individual pathologies to be repaired or normalized, but as symptoms of broader social dysfunctions. From this perspective, Benasayag calls for a counter-offensive — a mode of resistance grounded in everyday life rather than heroic gestures, based on awareness, relational presence, and the capacity to inhabit the present with critical lucidity.

La comunicazione artificiale e il senso profondo della contingenza: intervista con Elena Esposito

Luca Guizzardi, Luca Martignani — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Elena Esposito ha studiato sociologia all’Università di Bologna (1983). Presso lo stesso Ateneo ha conseguito la laurea in filosofia sotto la guida di Umberto Eco (1987). Ha conseguito un dottorato in sociologia presso l’Università di Bielefeld con una tesi sul funzionamento dell’osservazione nel costruttivismo con la supervisione di Niklas Luhmann.

Attualmente è Full Professor presso la Fakultät für Soziologie dell’Università di Bielefeld e Professoressa ordinaria presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali dell’Università di Bologna. È stata visiting presso il Max Planck Institute for the History of Science di Berlino (2017) e Niklas Luhmann Distinguished Visiting Chair in Social Theory presso l’Università di Bielefeld (2015-2016). Ha pubblicato numerosi lavori sulla teoria dei sistemi sociali, sulla teoria dei media e della memoria e sulla sociologia dei mercati finanziari. La sua attuale ricerca sulla previsione algoritmica è supportata da un Advanced Grant quinquennale dello European Research Council.

Per la rivista Quaderni di teoria sociale, abbiamo incontrato Elena Esposito presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali dell’Università di Bologna, il 9 dicembre 2024.

Recensioni

Francesco Biagi, Nicole Braida, Roberto Cipriani, Fabio Lucchini, Bianca Solari — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Francesco Biagi

Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin.

Fragments of Metropolis, London- New York, Palgrave Mcmillan, 2022, pp. 396. 287

Nicole Braida

Chiara Bertone, Il familiare è politico. Attrezzi di ricerca per uno sguardo posizionato,

Meltemi, Sesto San Giovanni, 2024, pp. 167. 290

Roberto Cipriani

Antonio Camorrino, Da Dio all’Io: riflessioni sul sacro. Un saggio di sociologia

della religione, Mondadori Università, Milano, 2024, pp. 252. 294

Fabio Lucchini

Andrea Membretti, Filippo Barbera, Gianni Tartari, Associazione

Riabilitare l’Italia (a cura di), Migrazioni verticali: La montagna ci salverà?,

Roma, Donzelli Editore, 2024, pp. 192. 298

Bianca Solari

Micheal Oliver, Le politiche della disabilitazione. Il Modello Sociale della disabilità,

Verona, Ombre Corte, 2023, pp. 175.

Politici celebrities e cittadini fans: come si crea coinvolgimento politico attraverso il fandom

Donatella Campus, Alberta Giorgi — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

In the article we conceptualize political fandom as a form of political participation. After situating the study of political fandom among fandom studies, we propose a typology of political fandom, illustrated through contemporary examples, and clarify who can be considered as a political fan, pointing out four dimensions (plus one) of political fandom: consumption, production, affection, community (and contestation). In presenting the concept of political fandom, we highlight the tensions and connections between political fandom and celebrity politics, discussing tensions and implications. In the conclusions, we show the connections between political fandom and contemporary debates in political and cultural studies, discussing three main issues: political fandom and political disintermediation, political fandom and emotions in politics, political fandom and digital politics.

Una proposta teorica raffinata, duttile e disponibile per la sociologia: Franco Crespi

Costantino Cipolla — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Franco Crespi is one of the most significant Italian sociologists of the post-war period, particularly for the formation of the theoretical foundations of sociological knowledge. His profound philosophical culture and acute social sensitivity allowed him to develop a sophisticated and multidimensional sociological approach, characterised by nuanced and versatile arguments. His work embodies a secular and open sociology that embraces multiple perspectives and cultivates intellectual fields often considered distinct. This essay aims to explore these key aspects of Crespi’s thought, shedding light on the depth and breadth of his contributions to contemporary sociology.

Relational reflexivity: a processual approach

Enzo Colombo — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Reflexivity has become an indispensable concept in the social science toolbox. Also thanks to its polysemy, the concept is helpful for exploring and analysing both epistemological and socio-political issues. The theoretical sociological development of the idea has often fluctuated between two poles. On the one hand, a notion of reflexivity as an individual capacity (often the capacity of the researcher) and linked to the concepts of awareness and agency. On the other, a notion of it as a structural dimension of the “second modernity”. The article explores the advantages of conceiving reflexivity as processual and relational, neither the result of individual will or personal skills nor of external constraints of society. The article supports the usefulness of a dialogic conception of reflexivity which is characterized by its constant elaboration in interaction with others and with contexts.

L’identità collettiva e i suoi rituali

Carlo De Rose — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The concept of collective identity is often questioned, yet it remains widely used in the social sciences. While acknowledging the concerns raised by its critics, this article nonetheless defends its heuristic value. To this end, I emphasize the need to differentiate among various identity matrices to address the objection that the concept is applied indiscriminately across fundamentally distinct collectivities (such as nation, ethnicity, social class, or social movement). Given the importance of symbolic expression in the social construction of identity, particular attention is devoted to collective rituals. The aim is to elucidate their latent functions in cultivating and reinforcing feelings of identity due to their sacred and solemn nature and their capacity to evoke emotion. Finally, shifting to a more analytical level, I propose a typology of rituals designed to make more visible the practices through which identity is socially constructed.

Socialmente eterei: un inquadramento del fenomeno Hikikomori attraverso la teoria di Ian Hacking

Vincenzo Esposito — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

First described by psychiatrist Tamaki Saito in 1990s Japan (Saito, 1998), the hikikomori phenomenon has accelerated in Western advanced economies as well (Varnum, Kwon, 2016). In Italy, the parliamentary debate of October 2023 initiated the regulatory definition of this voluntary withdrawal. This study critically compares the interpretations offered by Merton’s theory of anomie and Goffman’s approach to stigma, highlighting their limitations in accounting for the diagnostic and identity dynamics typical of hikikomori. It then proposes adopting Ian Hacking’s model, based on interactive classification, the looping effect, and ecological niche, as a framework capable of integrating the clinical practices, representations, and socio-cultural conditions that fuel and sustain self-isolation in contemporary societies.

Sguardi sul partner all’epoca dell’amore di sé. Il valutativo, il clinico e l’atopico

Laura Gherardi — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

In this article, I introduce a theory of gazes on partner from descriptions of current and past partners by people in their twenties to forties, during a pilot study on intimate relationships. The evaluative gaze - when the partner is described by socially relevant qualities (e.g. He is good-looking) -, the atopic gaze - when the evaluative parameter is deactivated and the partner is said not be exhausted by language (e.g. Paul is Paul) - and the clinical gaze - when the partner (and the relationship, usually a past relationship) is posited as pathological and told by means of a psychological or psychiatric lexicon, typically (a male) narcissistic or manipulative. The diffusion and normalization of the clinical gaze is a historical unprecedented, rooted in the new semantics of self-love, which I reconstruct analyzing the ten best-seller self-help books aimed at women to avoid toxic love relationships (millions of copies sold on Amazon.com between 2014 and 2024). From the semantic of self-love, I discuss the idea that relationships, the affective ones in particular, are an expenditure of energy that must be continually evaluated, or even an obstacle to emotional well-being and self-fulfillment, notably for women. With respect to the other two gazes, which have longer historical roots, I show their actualization by linking them to the performative demands of contemporary society, from which authenticity and failure emerge as crucial for future research. Finally, I show crasis and critiques from one gaze to all the others, following the method of French pragmatic sociology, and how the same person leaps from one gaze to another, on the same partner, even in the space of a few moments, a leap that is felt on a linguistic level just as, in a musical analogy, one feels the leap from one octave to another.

Il problema della secolarizzazione in Max Horkheimer: la dimensione della trascendenza nella Teoria critica

Davide Ruggieri — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This essay aims to analyze the question of religion in Max Horkheimer’s sociological and philosophical thought; more particularly, it focuses on the issue of “secularization”, which, although not explicitly or systematically addressed by Horkheimer, seems to be transversal in many of his essays dedicated to the relationship between modernity and theology. The progressive rationalisation in the western world and society leads to an inevitable “disenchantment of the world” (to say it with Weber’s words): this means on the one hand an ever-increasing explicability, controllability and predictability of reality in rational (i.e. scientific) terms, but on the other hand a loss of value of the theological and religious dimension which is intended as an inner disposal for humans tuning to a transcendent dimension. Compared to his colleague Adorno, and mostly to the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, this essay shows how for Horkheimer - especially in the last period of his intellectual production - there is a constant focus on the theme of the “transcendent”. In addition, it could be argued that the specific feature of Critical Theory advanced by Horkheimer posits precisely the openness to the transcendent dimension as an essential condition for a very authentic Critical Theory. Interweaving themes ranging from sociology to social philosophy, intersecting analyses of the crisis of theology with a fundamentally pessimistic theoretical orientation, this essay sheds light on an aspect of Horkheimer’s work that fits coherently within a still topical debate on the sociology of religion and the role of religion in the civil sphere.

Su di una relazione tra teoria della selezione e dottrina della conoscenza

Georg Simmel, Francesco Azzarone, Vincenzo Mele — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This contribution presents the first Italian translation of Georg Simmel’s 1885 article, Über eine Beziehung der Selektionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie. Simmel’s essay outlines a concept of truth derived from practical needs, aligning it with Pragmatism. The text is essential for challenging the restrictive, three-phase periodization of Simmel’s philosophy, demonstrating a fundamental continuity in his thought based on a relativist, pragmatist, and evolutionist approach to the theory of knowledge. The 1885 essay shows Simmel’s critical engagement with Kant and Neo-Kantianism. While adopting the focus on critique as a theory of knowledge, he rejects Kant’s alleged notion of a static, abstract subject whose a priori forms are immutable. Simmel contends that the mind’s structure must also participate in the process of evolution. Simmel argues that there is no inherent, theoretically valid truth; instead, ideas are designated as ‘true’ only if they successfully motivate actions that promote life and survival. Truth is thus synonymous with efficacy. Natural selection preserves and validates mental representations that prove to be useful for the species. This approach ultimately resolves the dualism between the theoretical world of representation and the world of practical action: the utility of the knowing subject is what ultimately produces the objects of knowing.

L’impostura come dispositivo emotivo: uno sguardo sociologico sul desiderio di credere

Brigida Orria — mer, 31 dic 2025 00:00:00 +0100

“Impostori. Storie di inganni e autoinganni” si inserisce nel solco tracciato da Gabriella Turnaturi con le sue opere precedenti, nell’analisi dei comportamenti intimi e relazionali che mettono in risalto il ruolo fondativo della fiducia sociale, come le culture emozionali, le maschere della civiltà, e per antitesi i tradimenti. In “Tradimenti. L’imprevedibilità nelle relazioni umane” (2000), Turnaturi aveva esplorato il tradimento al di là di uno sguardo morale, come dispositivo culturale e relazionale, capace di svelare le contraddizioni dei legami sociali. Il tradimento, come l’impostura, rompendo la norma della lealtà, infrange un patto emotivo, mette a nudo la vulnerabilità delle relazioni e la loro necessaria ambivalenza. In “Tradimenti”, la sociologa mostrava come la violazione del patto affettivo fosse vissuta e narrata in modi profondamente diversi secondo epoche e contesti culturali, e sempre con una potente funzione emotiva. Ritroviamo questa stessa sensibilità in “Impostori”, dove l’inganno non è valutato eticamente, ma emotivamente e culturalmente.