Conference Program

Abstract

This purely theoretical article argues that the transition from a culture of revenge to a culture of reconciliation is not primarily a moral or legal issue, but a matter of identity formation and therefore an educational one. If the drive for revenge originates in a subjectivity in which the self is conceived as a fixed substance that must be defended against any disturbance, then overcoming violence requires transforming the conditions in which subjects are formed. The central claim is that non-violent education, understood as a pedagogy shaping a different modality of selfhood, is the decisive condition for reconciliation.

The argument is developed through a convergence of two complementary perspectives that approach the same problem from different angles. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological analysis of personal identity (Oneself as Another, 1992) distinguishes between two modalities of selfhood. Idem-identity — perfect identity and permanence of a substance over time — defines a self whose coherence depends on rigidity: any rupture threatens its very existence. Ipse-identity, on the contrary, is a narrative identity defined by fidelity to oneself through change: a self capable of incorporating conflict and encounter with the other without being destroyed. The self of ipse is not a fortress to defend but a story to tell and a word to keep.

Francesco Remotti’s anthropological critique (Contro l’identità, 1996; L’ossessione identitaria, 2010) approaches the same structure from a cultural standpoint: the obsessive attachment to a fixed, self-identical subject — the “individual” as in-dividuus — is not a universal given but a historical construction of Western culture, one that generates a structural inability to coexist with otherness. Remotti’s counter-concept of the condividuo — the subject constituted through sharing and mutual recognition rather than exclusion — reveals that what we call “identity” is always already a relational process. The idem-structure that Ricoeur describes phenomenologically is thus what Remotti diagnoses culturally. Both converge in showing that rigid identity sustains the logic of violence.

Yet neither perspective addresses the conditions under which the transition from idem to ipse — from the individual to the condividuo — can actually take place. This is the gap that the present article seeks to fill. It contends that militarised pedagogies (Galtung, 1969, 1990) — broadly understood as systems structured around competition and conformity — systematically produce idem-subjects or rigid identities predisposed to violence and incapable of democratic coexistence. In contrast, nonviolent education, conceived from a universalist humanist perspective, operates as a pedagogy of narrative identity oriented towards a shared future horizon: the construction of a Universal Human Nation (Silo, 1989).

It is in this dimension of futurity, and not in the conservative defence of the past, that subjects capable of navigating conflict without resorting to retaliation are formed, recognising the other as a constitutive dimension of their own narrative.

The demilitarisation of schools therefore appears not as mere institutional reform but as the fundamental political act through which a society decides whether reconciliation and authentic democratic coexistence will be possible.