Gianni Vattimo: politics and democracy. More conflict than dialogue

Abstract

This article seeks to clarify the concept of democracy within Gianni Vattimo's nihilistic hermeneutics. The main objective is to establish the guidelines that give meaning to the author's rhetoric around public issues, which is linked to a conceptual framework known by historiography as the "left Heideggerian" position. This Heideggerianism is intended to be left-wing as an anarchist or communist agenda against the institutions of liberal democracy as part of a pessimistic diagnosis of the hegemonic regime of the West, which it considers "metaphysical" and "lack of emergency", that is, supposedly impervious to changes and social demands. The Turinese, however, pretends to be a supporter of democracy in a different sense, in the formula “from dialogue to conflict”. In this context, we will try to show the effective use of "democracy" as a political and social concept in the works of Vattimo, as well as to observe its possible inconsistencies and to find discursive consistency in them. To do this, it will be shown that the Turinese is within a pluralist version of democracy by means of a comparative analysis with the radical version of democracy offered by Chantall Mouffe in 2004. With this procedure, an attempt is made to give indications to reinterpret the left Heideggerian position as an alternative form of liberal political regime in the pluralist key or the hermeneutic radical democracy. As a balance, this proposal to incorporate nihilist rhetoric into a democratic theory would have the advantage of giving conceptual space to social conflicts as part of the dynamics of recognition of diversity within democracy, moving from a metaphysical and closed position to one open to listening to difference and social change.