The divine comedy in revolutionary times

Dante’s poem is an allegory of modernity; the paradigm of post -medieval European thought is not the act of breaking out of the Platonic cave, but the passage, through the Inferno and Purgatory, to Paradise. Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis can be interpreted in Dante’s spirit; the psychoanalytical -theological context can be applied to a reading of Hegel’s Jena Lectures. According to Hegel, the Purgatory of modernity – the most effective lesson in subjectivity or, in other words, the ability to objectify and instrumentalize the self – is capitalism, a form of “group therapy.” However, such an understanding of capitalism on the ground of Hegel’s theory involves an inextricable aporia: the education which capitalism affords is connected with dehumanisation and pauperization of whole social groups, laying down the foundations for a revolution.