Comparatistica storico-filosofica dei processi di despecificazione e idealtipi della discriminazione razziale

This introduction reconstructs the philosophical and militant contribution of Domenico Losurdo to the understanding of processes of racial discrimination, with particular attention to his comparative analysis of the Jewish condition and his commitment to the Palestinian people. The author takes as his starting point an emblematic episode – the 1997 Bologna conference "In the Name of Race" – in which Losurdo, presenting a phenomenology of ideal-typical situations that arrest the paths of minority emancipation, was unjustly accused of antisemitism for having broken two taboos: that of "eternal antisemitism" (a metaphysical and ahistorical hatred of Jews) and that of the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust (the Shoah as incomparable absolute evil). The article shows how Losurdo, on the contrary, historicizes the extermination and traces it back to the convergence in Germany of five objective dynamics (total war, migrations, colonialism, conflict between national movements, fear of revolutionary conspiracy), without however hierarchizing the victims. Losurdo's conceptual distinctions (anti-Judaism, Judeophobia, antisemitism) and his proposal of three ideal-types of naturalistic "despecification" are then presented: the "human instrument of production" (Blacks), the "ballast to be removed" (Indians), and the "pathogenic agent to be eradicated" (Jews). The introduction emphasizes how Losurdo rejects any "uniqueness" that conceals the genocide of colonial peoples and instead calls for a "unitary history of the victims." Finally, the author distinguishes contemporary critical anti-Zionism (which challenges the ethnic statute of Israel and its policies of apartheid and genocide) from antisemitism, defending the legitimacy of political criticism, and concludes that the current tragedy of Gaza requires bringing these texts back to light – texts that had already understood and denounced what is now visible to all.