In Memory of Luciano Pellicani | (dot)philosophy
(dot)philosophy | A space by GIACOMO MARIA ARRIGO
On 11 April, Luciano Pellicani died in Rome, killed by a pneumonia probably caused by the coronavirus Covid-19. Sociologist, journalist, academic, he was 81 years old. It is a great loss for the academy and for politics. Pellicani taught Political Sociology and Cultural Anthropology at LUISS University, in Rome.
One of his most influential book is Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism (Westport: Praeger, 2003). Here the table of contents:
From the preface:
«This book is concerned with tragic events that were dominated by one of the most extraordinary anthropological “types” that has ever existed in the history of humanity: the professional revolutionary, generated by the cultural catas- trophe provoked by the uncontrollable advance of modernity. The profes- sional revolutionary is an individual who embraces revolution as a Beruf, an individual who craves the absolute. His disenchantment with the world makes of him “an orphan of God,” dominated by a nostalgia for the totally other. Incapable of accepting reality, he aspires to build a completely new world in the light of a soteriological doctrine—dialectical gnosis—that he proclaims to be the “solved enigma of History.” At last everything will comply with desire, and God’s scepter will be in the hands of humanity. The professional revo- lutionary’s goal is the creation of an evangelical community, based on equality and planetary brotherhood. To do this, he is prepared to wage a war of de- struction against those who have surrendered to mammon and allowed the domination of the law of universal trade that all-profanes and all-degrades. Hence, the destructive calling of gnostic revolution: not a single stone of the corrupt and corrupting world shall remain standing; hence, also, the inevitable destructive and self-destroying outcome of the revolutionary project to purify the existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation».