"Hybris" e rivoluzione. Il caso della rivolta cilena

Abstract

This paper discusses the binomial hybris and revolution. In particular, the question of whether the excessive dominants’ arrogance, who have too much both in material and symbolic terms, is sufficient to explain the deflagration of an insurgency and the interruption of a legal order. The question will be addressed by interweaving the reflections of authors who have discussed this topic with a material collected by the author through a legal-political ethnography conducted in Chile during the revolt that broke out in October 2019 and led to a new constituent phase. Categories and definitions used in this text are partly borrowed from the course devoted to political change and revolution taught by Norberto Bobbio in the 1978/79 academic year and from Michelangelo Bovero’s lectures that took place in that course. But they are placed in dialogue with revolutionary visions and practices rooted in the Latin American continent, in particular with Paulo Freire’s thought and with the so called Mapuche «cosmovision». From this comparison, the author comes to hypothesize: a. the relevance of the intimate (epistemic and emotional) dimension of revolutions; b. the priority in the etiology of insurgencies of the subjective cause, understood as the opening of the «possibles» due to the cracking of the epistemic violence exerted by the structure of domination in charge; c. the desire for radical change as an effect rather than a cause of insurgencies; d. the non-opposition between the «accelerated time» typical of revolutionary phenomena and the slow and hardly perceptible preparatory phase of latency.