Weak Thought ed. by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (review)

Although Carravetta’s translation of Weak Thought comes precisely thirty years after the original Italian edition, it is safe to assume that Common Knowledge readers are acquainted with this philosophy, and not only because its creator, Gianni Vattimo, has been member of this journal’s editorial board and a regular contributor for decades. Common Knowledge has always given generous space to every expression of this philosophy and to every variation on it. When the original Italian edition was released by the very liberal publisher Feltrinelli in 1983, it immediately became a cultural event: a best seller, promptly translated into several languages, including English—but, on account of various editorial disputes, the English version has been released only now. In these thirty years, weak thought has become a respectable philosophical position within continental philosophy and is still today the most original Italian contribution to philosophical debates since World War II. When Vattimo first used the term pensiero debole in 1979, it quickly caught on with other Italian philosophers, and the result was this edited volume, composed of essays by Vattimo, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Umberto Eco, Gianni Carchia, Alessandro Dal Lago, Maurizio Ferraris, Leonardo Amoroso, Diego Marconi, Giampiero Comolli, Filippo Costa, and Franco Crespi.

Among the most important features of the book is that not all of its contributors were strong believers in weak thought. They supported its antifoundational stance but by means of various methods: Vattimo through hermeneutics, Eco through semantics, Marconi through philosophy of language. Hence Carravetta, in the introduction to this edition, explains that weak thought “is by far the most interdisciplinary ‘movement’ in modern Italian social history.” While some have interpreted this characteristic as a flaw in the project, others (like Richard Rorty) recognized the variety within the movement as a part of the plan. As Vattimo and Rovatti explain, in the Italian foreword (which for some reason is not included, as it should have been, in the new edition):

The essays that compose this volume, which cannot easily be grouped as a school, given the different traditions of its authors, have in common the idea (sensation, impression, presupposition) that Italian debates on the crisis of reason … and … various trends in French poststructuralism … are still too attached to metaphysics. … The expression “weak thought” works as a slogan, an indication that rationality must depower, lose ground, and have the strength to mind its own shadow without looking for a point of enlightened reference.

For the past thirty years, weak thought has been busy writing a chapter in the history of philosophy—a history to which, we may assume, this book will now contribute an important paragraph.