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Topic: Critical Thinking and Democracy Speaker: Carlo Galli (University of Bologna) Date: 7 March 2022 Link: https://www.eui.eu/events?id=539872 Abstract: The report is based on three theses. The first is that democracy is a complex political form, which requires among other things the possibility of publicly exercising critical thinking. Democracy does not live on institutions and procedures alone, nor on consensus alone, but also on radical discussion, on ideal and material conflict. The second thesis is that criticism means bringing to the surface the deep structures of a socio-economic and political-cultural order, and showing their contradictions. The third thesis is that the crisis of democracy, evident today, is not the excess of criticism and conflict, as it might seem, but rather their lack, or rather the fact that they present themselves in merely reactive and passive forms, devoid of strategic capacity. Critical thinking is instead the way to understand from the inside how and why we have arrived at this situation. The forms of critique, or rather the ways to a radical understanding of the present, are multiple, generated in different ways by different subjects with different intentions: for example, the critique of political economy, biopolitics, race, gender, political theology, geopolitics. Some theoretical and systematic coordinates of these will be given.