The initiative has been welcomed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is promoted through the network of Italian Cultural Institutes worldwide.
"I met Umberto Eco so long ago at the Sorbonne, in the corridors of the Philosophy Department, a sad place like a gray Tuesday morning in November, a sort of cemetery of thought only animated at the time by the brilliant voice and brittle of Canguilhem.
We walked around the semi-deserted corridors, discussing everything without paying attention to our outbursts. We cried with laughter under the frescoes of the Richelieu amphitheater which welcomed, on winter mornings, the tramps of the City, happy to sleep on the unoccupied benches of the class fund.
Life passed like a long, not at all peaceful river, leading me to discover in Canada the political philosophy of the Renaissance, an oxymoron for philosophy professors who only attributed the title to writings built like so many bunkers on concrete bases which we want to believe are not friable.
How could they then take seriously that I devoted a thesis to The Utopia of Thomas More. This 500-year-old text, with its overflowing imagination, its little comic-style drawings and its puns which seemed written by laughing schoolboys, was nevertheless one of the most fascinating text I read and one of the most exciting to decipher. Umberto Eco thus returned to my life, first through his laughter, but also through his first masterpiece The Name of the Rose.
I was amazed to discover implicitly in the brilliant text of Utopia the revolutionary postulates on which modern States are based, states which became "modern" thanks to the print.
Then Umberto Eco warned us about the coming revolution, the Universal fascism cyber charged by the "chip" .
“There was only one Nazism,” he said, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.”
Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
Thats for the basis but Umberto Eco added to the classic list of the 13 Common Features of Fascism 14th one: Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Thank you for having existed