Reflections

About knowing how to read

Nobody knows how to read. Not in the primary meaning, that is, to read as to account for certain graphic signs and that this enables an understanding between people, preceded by agreements. Another type of reading is the one that is in question, today more than ever, in question. Knowing how to read has to do with the cracks, the gaps, the wounds of language.

Franco Gatti

About Defending Freedom

The prostitution of essential values must not be allowed. Freedom must not become a value of the extreme right, which in reality wants to put an end to it. If we accept that, we are lost. Freedom does not consist in doing what one wants; that is not freedom: that is the law of the jungle. No, freedom has limits. Absolute freedom leads to barbarism, just as absolute justice can be the most absolute of injustices. The essential thing, as I said before, is to find a balance of values: the maximum possible freedom combined with the maximum possible equality; that’s where we go to a society where we can live. Good taken to the extreme often becomes evil, and absolute freedom degenerates into absolute chaos: I cannot run a red light or stop paying taxes in the name of freedom. Nor can equality be absolute. We are all equal before the law, but that does not mean that we are equal in everything. Do you remember what Fogwill said about Borges? “He writes better than me,” he said. “But I see better than him.”

Javier Cercas

About Criminal Law

Criminal law should only be applied to the management of social conflicts that could not be resolved under other less aggressive and violent tools of the State, or when alternative legal tools of possible application are not found, circumstances that are not observed in the case studied. Failure to comply with these premises would generate an undesired risk of punitive expansion within the framework of a constitutional democracy.

Franco Picardi