La critica di fronte alla sofferenza sociale, oggi

In the last few years the social suffering has gained a new visibility in the public scene of democracies: unemployment, precarization of life conditions, labour market deregulation and social marginalization cannot be denied any more by politicians, journalists and social researchers. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence of social suffering due to these conditions finds it hard to be represented by social movements of critique: beyond the spectacularization of social suffering, contemporary societies are shot through by a privatization of the experience of injustice. Rather than being due to mass conformism or to the absence of alternatives, this empirical diagnosis allows to read today’s crisis of social critique as the effect of the spread dissociation of social suffering from feelings of injustice. In order to shrank this distance, critical theory should take social suffering seriously, by adopting a normative language able to interrupt its silence and the fragmentation of existing social struggles. Nevertheless, social suffering is not only removed from the disciplinary fields of social sciences and political philosophy; it is often denied by the subjects who are directly affected by this experience in their ordinary life, within and out their workplaces. In order to avoid these theoretical and practical denials of social suffering, a negative theory of justice puts the attention on those asymmetrical relations of power which undermine human beings’ dignity at economical, cultural and political level. According to this theoretical perspective, social justice requires the practical overcoming of these humiliating asymmetrical relations of power. Starting from a diagnosis of the existing asymmetrical relations of power, the critique of social injustices is always connected to a critique of justifications linked with these asymmetries: they are synonymous of social injustices when they are grounded on self-contradictory or paradoxical promises. The promises of self-actualization embodied in the new spirit of capitalism are of this second type: contemporary capitalism does not maintain them, because they cannot be maintained, since that they are incompatible with the social conditions which should render possible a «good life» for individuals. In this new scenery, the social critique can claim its emancipatory issues by putting the attention on the paradoxes of capitalism.