We are the first generations to coexist with the risk of our own extinction. Such an experience ought to unleash some form of upheaval in the ways we act, think and feel. But everything proceeds as before or almost as before. The dominant economic and power structures of the present age are not the only obstacles to a line of action proportionate to the risk of extinction now confronting the human race. There are also thought structures that have calcified in the modern knowledges, and this includes the humanities. Certain categories that have guided the human sciences must also be radically rethought: from those which in the era of modernity have forged an abstract and simplified idea of human history and the natural environment, to certain more particular imaginative and narrative models, such as the apocalyptic form inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition, because of which we are accustomed to think there will be an end to man and his civilization, but which in actual fact hinders any feeling that an emergency may exist.
Carla Benedetti is professor of Italian Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Pisa. She has been fellow of Italian Academy at Columbia University, recurrent visiting professor in some U.S. universities, and Chair of Italian Culture at the University of California-Berkeley. Her interests mainly concern the 19th and 20th century Italian and Comparative Literature, Literary theory and Philosophy. She founded with others the blog "Nazione indiana" and the review "Il primo amore". She has been columnist (novels review) of the magazine L’Espresso . Among her most important publications: La soggettività nel racconto. Proust e Svevo (Liguori, 1984); Pasolini contro Calvino (Bollati Boringhieri, 1998); Il tradimento dei critici (Bollati Boringhieri, 2002); The Empty Cage. Inquiry into the Mysterious Disappearance of the Author (Cornell University Press, 2005); Disumane lettere, Indagine sulla cultura della nostra epoca (Laterza, 2011); with Giovanni Giovannetti, Frocio e basta. Pasolini, Cefis, Petrolio (Effigie 2012); and with Maurizio Bettini, Oracoli che sbagliano. Un dialogo sugli antichi e sui moderni (Effigie, 2016). Her latest book is La letteratura ci salverà dall’estinzione (Literature will save us from extinction), Einaudi 2021.
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