Responsabilità e pena da Kant a Nietzsche. La decostruzione del rimprovero

This paper interprets the current, rather misunderstood, meaning of the process of questioning criminal liability in the philosophy of the 19th century, through to the deconstruction of criminal blame. From Kant, to Feuerbach, Hegel, to Benthamand criminological positivism, through to Bovio, von Liszt and Nietzsche, the central theme investigated in this paper the premises for issuing a judgement of guilt. The analysis considers the underlying deficits in the proportion between crime and punishment, which can only be politically managed, once the “law” of retaliation is overcome, and reviews the criminological orientation towards the perpetrator or the moralizing approach focusing on subjective states, as the pseudoscientific basis of an alleged, new measure of punishment. This new awareness, compounded by the deconstruction of the very category of responsibility and of the subject, after the overwhelming analyses of Nietzsche, leaves behind, at the beginning of the 20th century, a legacy that is re-emerging only now, after a century of theories on criminal blame: the need to rethink responsibility through personal premises when giving an account of the charges raised instead of a mere accountability lacking in transparency and inquiries, because in a trial both the judgment and the evidence are mostly limited to the objective and subjective wrongdoing, while guilt presents the charge of an absent structure.

Lo studio interpreta il significato attuale, piuttosto misconosciuto, del processo di messa in discussione della responsabilità penale nel corso dell’Ottocento filosofico, sino alla decostruzione del rimprovero penale. Da Kant, a Feuerbach, Hegel, fino a Bentham e al positivismo criminologico, via via per arrivare a Bovio, von Liszt e Nietzsche, il tema centrale enucleato riguarda le premesse dell’attribuzione di un giudizio di colpevolezza. L’analisi considera i deficit di fondo nella proporzione tra il reato e la pena, la quale appare gestibile solo politicamente una volta superata la legge del taglione, e ripercorre l’orienta- mento criminologico all’autore o quello moraleggiante sugli stati soggettivi, quale base pseudoscientifica di una pretesa, nuova, commisurazione.