Author: Nuccio Ordine
Publisher: Cliff
ISBN: 9788415689928
Binding: paperback
Pages: 176
Format: 12.5 x 19 cm
Spanish Language
The oxymoron evoked by the title The Usefulness of the Useless deserves clarification. The paradoxical utility to which I refer is not the same as that in which humanistic knowledge is considered useless, and more generally, all knowledge that does not produce benefits. In a very different and much broader sense, I have wanted to put at the centre of my reflections the idea of the usefulness of that knowledge whose essential value is completely alien to any utilitarian purpose. […] If we let the gratuitous die, if we renounce the generative force of the useless, if we listen only to the deadly siren song that impels us to pursue profit, we will only be able to produce a sick and memoryless collectivity that, lost, will end up losing its sense of itself and of life. And at that moment, when the desertification of the spirit has already exhausted us, it will be truly difficult to imagine that ignorant homo sapiens can still play a role in the task of making humanity more human.
