Adrien Candiard, Member of the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO), writer, author of Qualche parola prima dell’apocalisse (Lev); Oliver Roy, Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Director of the ReligioWest project, author of L’Aplatissement du monde: La crise de la culture et l’empire des normes (Seuil), to be released in 2024 by Feltrinelli. Moderated by Marco Bardazzi, Journalist.

In our time, we face a profound crisis of culture from which it seems difficult to escape. The lack of a common cultural foundation, within an increasingly simplified and impoverished lexical context, makes it necessary to explicitly express everything in order to peacefully coexist among different sensibilities. Multiple criteria (gender pronouns, the massive and constant use of emoticons to better represent the meaning of words) are employed to regulate interpersonal communication, out of fear of offending others’ sensibilities. In the virtual and self-referential world of the Internet, interpersonal relationships, instead of being direct (disintermediated?), lack humanity. In this general flattening, the implicit cannot exist, and everything must be categorized, recognized, and publicly declared, without the possibility of implications. To reaffirm our humanity and gradually rebuild a culture in crisis, a process of self-reappropriation is necessary. From here arises a quest for truth about oneself and the world, about the nature and purpose of relationships between people. We constantly seek to attribute meaning to the events that happen to us; we could almost say we strive to discover the truth. This also reflects in the greater History: we desire to know the direction in which we are heading, we need a revelation so that everything that happens does not become distressing. An intriguing dialogue with two extraordinary protagonists of our time.