Il reale, la forza, l’individuo. Nicola Chiaromonte e la critica della modernita di massa

Abstract

The essay reconstructs the intellectual and moral profile of Nicola Chiaromonte through the crucial nexus between the individual, history, and mass society, taking as its privileged axis his dialogue with Albert Camus, his engagement with Simone Weil, and his critical confrontation with Marxism and twentieth-century ideologies. Drawing on the correspondence with Camus and on Chiaromonte’s notebooks, the article brings to light a conception of history as a contingent and irreducible event, marked by the constant presence of death and by the experience of the tragic, against any attempt at metaphysical or teleological reconciliation of the real.
The analysis traces the development of Chiaromonte’s thought from the 1930s to the postwar period, focusing on his critique of modernist vitalism, the mythology of the masses, and totalitarian forms of domination, up to his disillusionment with the movements of 1968, interpreted as expressions of a “conformist revolt”. Within this framework, Chiaromonte emerges as a radically anti-ideological thinker, committed to the verification of the real and hostile to the totalizing languages of “mystification”.
In conclusion, the essay proposes a critical comparison between Chiaromonte’s “imagination of nothingness” and contemporary forms of philosophical nihilism, particularly Ray Brassier’s speculative realism, understood here as a negative polarity: whereas Brassier embraces extinction as a definitive rational outcome, Chiaromonte entrusts the possibility of meaning to the vitalization of the nexus between consciousness and world, preserving an ethical space for individual experience within historical catastrophe.