Taking Amber Guyger’s 2019 trial for the murder of Botham Jean as a point of departure, this article uses the work of Vladimir Jankélévitch and Saidiya Hartman to consider the structural relationship between anti-Blackness and forgiveness, and more specifically the way forgiveness functions to maintain and reinscribe anti-Blackness and the afterlives of slavery. I argue that, whereas Jankélévitch and others center the forgiving subject’s agency in their accounts, the structure of anti-Blackness displaces the Black subject and complicates any conception of their agency, thereby rendering Black forgiveness into a gift which has always already been taken for granted by whiteness, but which the Black subject must nevertheless freely give and bear.
This article examines Gianni Vattimo’s concept of weak thought, outlining its key elements and discussing its limitations in a cross-cultural context. While Vattimo’s weak thought dismantles absolute principles and embraces ethical plurality, it remains largely confined to the Western philosophical tradition. For Vattimo, the history of Being is a process of weakening that is inseparable from its Western roots. Although this framework critiques metaphysical rigidity and promotes pluralism, its Eurocentric focus risks perpetuating the exclusions it seeks to address, limiting meaningful dialogue with other philosophical traditions. I conclude that a development of weak thought should not be confined within the Western philosophical canon; rather, it should engage with other philosophical traditions that can resonate with it. As an example, I propose to relate weak thought to the Chinese concept of wuwei 無為 as articulated in the Daodejing 道德經. Such cross-cultural resonance could redefine weakening as a decolonial praxis, opening pathways for philosophy to engage equitably with diverse traditions while actively dismantling entrenched structures of dominance.
This paper examines Gianni Vattimo’s interpretation of Being as a temporal and interpretative process rather than a static metaphysical foundation. Drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo frames Being as an event unfolding through history. Central to his project is the notion of Verwindung (convalescence), through which metaphysical structures are weakened and reconfigured rather than decisively overcome. I argue that here we encounter the same tensions that arise in his engagement with secularization: while aiming to overcome metaphysical foundations, his weakening and convalescence also preserves Christianity and Western metaphysics. This ambivalence raises questions about whether weakening leads to liberation or a softened preservation of tradition, inviting further reflection on the challenges of post-metaphysical thought.
Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography, which Gianni Vattimo published in 2006 with the collaboration of Piergiorgio Paterlini, is a book-length interview that opens the way to a new way of understanding philosophical autobiography. Through a theoretical recognition of the concept of philosophical autobiography, starting with Montaigne and continuing to the present, this essay highlights how the points of Gianni Vattimo’s philosophical thought constitute a fil rouge that crosses an entire existence lived as a theoretical project in action. After an introductory section examining Vattimo’s models in the tradition of philosophical autobiography, this essay seeks to understand how his work represented a turning point and a reference model for the autobiographical writings of contemporary philosophers.
What is the relation between philosophy and the person of the philosopher? And what is the responsibility of the philosopher in the practice of philosophy? Gianni Vattimo is one of the few philosophers directly to address such questions both in general and in relation to his own life and thought. That he does so is itself a reflection of the personal engagement and commitment that characterized much of his thinking. The present essay is an attempt to explore a little of what is at issue here, especially as it relates to hermeneutics, as well as to express something of my own gratitude for having been lucky enough to have known Gianni, and the affection and respect I have for him.
The renewed interest in communism among continental philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek has catalyzed a range of reinterpretations of Marxist thought in response to the failures of twentieth-century socialism and the persistent crises of global capitalism. Among these, Gianni Vattimo’s concept of hermeneutic communism presents a unique ontological and ethical intervention. Grounded in his philosophical project of “weak thought,” Vattimo envisions communism not as an ideological or revolutionary orthodoxy but as a post-metaphysical practice of interpretation, solidarity, and democratic pluralism. This essay explores Vattimo’s “weak communism” as a response to the metaphysical rigidity and dogmatism that have often characterized both Marxist and liberal traditions. Rather than retreating into relativism, Vattimo’s weakening of metaphysical foundations opens space for a historically grounded, ethically committed politics that resists domination and affirms interpretive responsibility. Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of Geschick (destiny), Vattimo reframes nihilism as a condition of philosophical and political possibility. His work ultimately offers a radical rethinking of communism, one that privileges dialogue over rupture, contingency over certainty, and historical inheritance over doctrinal purity.
In both his philosophical and political commitments, Vattimo had consistently made explicit his stance for the weak, the poor, and the excluded. What is the relationship between Weak Thought and poverty? What implications and forms can this relationship take on today? In this paper, I will first emphasize the paradoxical role of weakness, poverty, and reduction in Vattimo. I will then show how the very renunciation of the hegemonic Western arché leads to the anarchic liberation and multiplication of different voices and forms of life. I will finally hint at the subversive and transformative role of these differences, if kept alive in an (inexhaustible) hermeneutical dialogue.
This paper is an affirmation of the legacy of the work of Gianni Vattimo. It attempts to bring to light the radicality of Vattimo’s thought from within the postmodern and nihilistic situation that his work confronted. This is the situation whereby interpretations are deemed to haunt each attempt to determine truth, where every figure of truth appears to be weakened in its own decline and thrown into a constant refutation which doubles back upon its own claim to (the) truth (of untruth). From this situation—and its philosophical problematics—this paper affirms Vattimo’s response to such a decline by overviewing a general picture of the core of his ontology of (the history of) Being. In excavating its core, this paper then points to an alternative approach to the decline of truth following Vattimo’s gift of weakening Being.
Gianni Vattimo wrote prolifically about art, scattering insightful interpretations of literature, poetry, and photography across many of his books and essays. The one artform he did not seem much interested in, though, was cinema. In only a handful of texts did Vattimo comment on the movies. But these musings—about Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), say, or the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009)—signal an appreciation of film’s philosophical potential that remains unexplored in the secondary literature devoted to Vattimo’s life and legacy. After surveying some of his brief remarks about film art, including his analysis—in The Transparent Society—of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the following outlines an approach to motion picture interpretation that might adequately reflect Vattimo’s hermeneutical, kenotic, and ontological understanding of aesthetics, emphasizing the formative, ongoing interaction of artists, audiences, and the movies.
Balancing a hermeneutic of trust with a hermeneutic of suspicion, this article develops a phenomenological description of imagination that highlights its alethic ambiguity. Imagination is an act of disclosure, without which the world of fiction and pure possibility cannot be constituted. Imagination is also an act of self-indulgence and narcissism, the source of much concealment and untruth. It is not the one or the other, but both at the same time, essentially ambiguous because of its phenomenological constitution. In this article, I will take some steps towards clarifying this essential ambiguity of the imagination by drawing on the insights of Husserl and Sartre. Beginning with Husserl’s parallel treatment of imagination and perception as intuitive, objectifying acts, I will argue, drawing on insights from Sartre, that there is an important discrepancy between them with respect to the role of desire. While the constitution of perceptual presence is inseparable from a desire for truth, the desire involved in the constitution of imaginary presence has an ambiguous character, both alethic and magical. This duplicity of desire partly accounts for the ambiguity of imagination, which is all the more pronounced the more the imagination demands the full emotional involvement of the imagining subject.
