IL PRINCIPIO RESPONDERABILITÀ

L’ATTUALITÀ DI HOBBES E GIRARD, TRA STATO DI NATURA E CAPRO ESPIATORIO NELLE DINAMICHE AMICALI

Paolo Parrottino

The heuristic fiction of the state of nature described by Hobbes lends itself to showing the causes of violence presence in any group of friends. The mutual fear, which arises from the vainglory of some, finds its natural antidote in the killing of a scapegoat. Girard’s mimetic theory highlights the polarization of violence, initially directed by everyone towards everyone, towards an individual who has specific preferential signs of victimization. The structure of the scapegoat’s killing, fundamental in the mimetic theory, would not seem to give importance to the fact that the victim has recently been self-victimized. Girard focuses his attention on the crowd’s behavior that carries out the lynching: in this way he seems to overlook the responsibility that the scapegoat has towards himself for his social killing. In this regard, a new paradigm of responsibility is proposed: responderabilità. Usually, when anyone thinks of an individual’s responsibility, he tends to imagine a triadic relationship for which the subject (1) is responsible for his own action (2), with respect to a legal entity or a moral principle (3), therefore always confronting an element external to the acting subject. The concept of coscienza della responderabilità aims to maintain the triadic structure of classical responsibility, by making two of the three poles of the paradigm coincide: the soggetto responderabile (1) is the one who is aware of being responsible, towards himself (3), for the evaluation, the judgment, the interpretation (2) of the facts that he experiences. In reference to the scapegoat’s symbolic killing inside of the group of friends, the coscienza della responderabilità would like to bring the focus on the victim itself. The scapegoat is essentially a self-victimizing victim, and the responsibility for his symbolic killing is attributable to his responderabilità.