LIBRI DI LELLA MAZZOLI

The article proposes some remarks on the relationship between the contemporary practices of identity and the more and more worldwide media landscape. The remarks begin from a research lead on the exemplar case of Al Jazeera, by starting from the typically glocal logics that it embodies and supports. Actually Al Jazeera represents a media experience that is an Arabian answer to the western-style globalization because of its history and structure. In Arabian people’s opinion, as the interviews show, it is a central lens through which they can have an idea of the world in its globality and out of stuffy cultural schemes. At the same time it offers an occasion to satisfy needs of identity and rootedness that globalization continuously challenges. The result is the construction of a new totally medial communitarian form. An imagined community that fits to the routes of globalization without getting out of the ever pressing needs of identification.

The essay has the aim to demonstrate how making culture means to make communication, and to make its strategic management a meeting area among several instances which reveal themselves under the form of cultures and culture in its original and primary meaning. On this basis, promoting the idea of a virtuous circle between culture - in its widest and deepest meaning - and the different cultural manifestations from the bottom, linked to the specific areas also media areas and to different ways of living in them and/or to tell them, could become, in the authoress’s purpose, the first step to set up a sort of manifesto of the modern culture and its richness.

A laudatio for Michel Serres might be based on the opportunity to go over again the stages of his thought, through the rich literary production and the masters whom his philosophical project is based on. The research - and in itself the passage from the natural sciences to the human sciences starts by considering the turning points of humanity toward the transcendental space of communication which characterizes Serres’ trans-disciplinary investigation. Scientific principles from Lucretius, Archimedes to Prigogines and information Theory get integrated with the anthropological philosophy that wants to find out the basis of the culture, the meaning of the artistic and literary creativity, till the hypothesis and the pedagogical proposal of the third instructed to reach the hominescence, a new rising of the human that in Serres becomes also a moral commitment of peace and love in these tragic and painful times.