If the world is a plural set of singular beings, an ethic at the height of the phenomenon we call "globalization" can only rely on the good reasons of this communality, intervening on the disturbed developments, typical of modernity and its recent results, and characterized by poor polarity between obsession with I and obsession with us, between an endless individualism, narcissistic, and a communitarianism which is in need of a social bond now eroded. Both constitute a pathology of feeling, one for the absence, the second for an excess of pathos. According to Elena Pulcini we have to restart precisely from the passions, from their cognitive and communicative function.

Elena Pulcini teaches Social Philosophy at the University of Florence. Her many essays reflect, within a theory of modernity, about individualism, passion, female subjectivity and social bond.