The Beatitudes Are Still Being Sung — Davide Fadda

A philosopher, a writer, an artist, and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work.

I am an Italian teacher of history and philosophy, a writer, and a singer-songwriter. I consider myself a somewhat unconventional teacher, both because of my personal background and because of the many different experiences I have had in education. Music was my first great passion: even before I imagined myself as an essayist, I wanted to write songs, sing, and reach an audience through them.

However, I do not make a sharp distinction between the Davide who teaches, the one who writes books, and the one who composes music. They are different languages through which I try to express the same nature and explore similar questions. A lesson, an essay, and a song require different forms, but they arise from the same need to interpret human experience and communicate it to others. For this reason, I tend to move across different fields without experiencing them as separate activities.

I regard teaching and writing as two aspects of the same work: critically understanding human phenomena and making them accessible beyond a strictly academic context. Teaching also forces me to test philosophical ideas continually against reality, against my students’ questions, and against the problems of contemporary society.

In my books, I have addressed different subjects, but they are connected by a common interest in the relationship between individuals, culture, and power. I have written about historical memory and the figure of Anne Frank, questioning the way in which we remember the Holocaust and transform a real person into a symbol. I have also explored the relationship between religion, public ritual, and organised crime in southern Italy, seeking to understand how apparently shared traditions can be used to legitimise forms of social domination.

The same critical approach has led me, in my most recent book, Apology of a Loser: Challenging the Myth of Self-Made Success, to examine a different subject: the idea that success is always the direct result of individual talent, effort, and determination. Without denying the value of personal commitment, I try to show the role played by social conditions, inequality, privilege, circumstance, and chance. The central problem is that meritocratic culture often turns success into evidence of moral worth and failure into a personal fault. My aim is to offer a more realistic and more humane view of the limits and possibilities of individual existence.

What is your understanding of “humour” proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour?

I believe it is particularly important to discuss humour in our time, especially in its most visible and popular form: comedy. In the contemporary Western world, public language is often subject to constant scrutiny. Many people speak cautiously, indirectly and, at times, hypocritically, avoiding the full expression of what they actually think. I am not referring simply to politeness, which is necessary for social life, but to a linguistic mode that tends to neutralise conflict, avoid uncomfortable words and force every discussion into socially acceptable formulas.

In this context, humour can function as an alternative language. A comedian can say what would rarely be said openly in an ordinary conversation. Comedy can address illness, disability, death, failure, sexuality and other painful or socially uncomfortable experiences. A significant part of contemporary comedy adopts a form that appears cruel. I am thinking, despite their very different styles, of Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Matt Rife. Their language can seem insensitive or morally unacceptable. Yet this harshness does not necessarily imply a lack of sensitivity towards the subjects they address.

In many cases, the comedian is not simply mocking suffering. Rather, comedy can become a way of sublimating it, making it verbally manageable and temporarily freeing it from the system of euphemisms, conventional reactions and compulsory expressions of compassion that usually surrounds it. Humour makes it possible to name what is normally silenced, treated with embarrassment or protected by ritualised language.

The success of certain comedians depends, in my view, precisely on their ability to enter forbidden territories. They give expression to thoughts, fears and contradictions that public language tends to repress. The audience does not necessarily laugh because it is cruel, but because it suddenly recognises something familiar that, until that moment, it had been unable or unwilling to express.

From this perspective, humour is related to other forms of cultural transgression. Even figures who are very different from comedians can acquire major public significance when they openly violate established codes of respectability. In Italy, for example, Moana Pozzi became culturally significant not only because of her profession as an adult-film actress, but also because she spoke about sexuality with a freedom and independence that were incompatible with the traditional model of respectable behaviour at that time.

What connects such different phenomena is not their specific content, but their ability to reveal how artificial the boundaries of what may be said really are. Humour, especially when it is uncomfortable, reminds us that society does not censor only offensive words: it often also suppresses experiences that it does not know how to process.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work’s purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

Yes, cruelty has played an important role in my work, especially because my historical studies have led me to engage with events that are still relatively close to us and capable of affecting us emotionally. I wrote, for example, a book on Anne Frank: studying the Holocaust means examining not only violence itself, but also the cultural, political and bureaucratic processes through which cruelty can become normalised.

I believe that one fundamental difficulty lies in the idealised image that human beings construct of themselves. We know that we belong to the animal world, yet we tend to regard ourselves as almost exclusively rational beings, repressing our instinctive and aggressive dimension. Konrad Lorenz argued that aggression is not simply an anomaly, but part of our nature. Recognising this does not mean justifying it; it means understanding that it must be governed and channelled, rather than merely denied.

Aggression and cruelty, of course, are not identical. Human cruelty can be conscious, organised and institutionalised. It can take the form of physical violence, but also of humiliation, exclusion, indifference and bureaucracy.

Moreover, as Nietzsche suggests, what a society recognises as cruel depends partly on its values and power structures. A regime can present persecution as necessary or just. Had Nazism prevailed, the Holocaust might have been concealed or legitimised by the dominant culture. This would not have erased the suffering of its victims, but it would have changed the way that suffering was publicly interpreted.

For this reason, I consider the philosophical, and even more so the historical, study of cruelty essential: it shows that cruelty does not always present itself openly as evil, but can hide behind ideologies, institutions and apparently rational forms of language.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true “classics” and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato’s Republic or Machiavelli’s Prince can be said to be “classics” in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend?

To answer this question, I would begin not so much with theoretical works on humour and cruelty, but with texts that actually use comedy, parody and allegory as instruments of knowledge and social criticism.

The first author I would certainly mention is Giovanni Boccaccio, especially the novellas of the Decameron. In Boccaccio, humour is never merely decorative: it is used to question social hierarchies, religious authority, moral conventions and the respectable image that human beings try to present of themselves. Through practical jokes, misunderstandings, desire and reversals of role, Boccaccio repeatedly exposes the distance between what people claim to be and what they really are.

I find it particularly significant that this extraordinary celebration of narrative intelligence and human vitality is set against the background of the plague. The stories emerge from a situation dominated by death, fear and the collapse of social order. Laughter and storytelling do not erase tragedy, but become ways of passing through it, responding to the cruelty of existence and temporarily rebuilding a shared human space.

The second work I would recommend is Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly. Here too, the ironic and paradoxical form makes it possible to address very serious themes without adopting the solemn tone of a philosophical treatise. Folly herself is the speaker and, through this reversal, Erasmus is able to reveal the contradictions of intellectuals, religious figures, rulers and society as a whole. Humour thus becomes a means of exposing hypocrisy without necessarily turning into a moral sermon.

Boccaccio and Erasmus seem particularly relevant to a body of work based on fragments, allegories, parody and philosophical storytelling. Both demonstrate that thought does not necessarily have to take a systematic or academic form: it can emerge through an ironic voice, a novella, a grotesque character or an apparently light-hearted situation.

Davide Fadda's Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/saggidautore?igsh=MWsxOGUwcWZuNGZ0Zw%3D%3D