The Power of Fiction. On a Recent Book by Roberto Evangelista

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to focus on the constitutive nexus between fictio and history that emerges from Roberto Evangelista’s recent work, Finzione e storia. Filosofia dell’ideologia in Spinoza, Locke, Vico (Carocci, Roma, 2025). Starting from the need to redefine knowledge that inaugurates modernity, fiction assumes in fact a crucial role. No longer reducible to the “false,” it appears as directly involved in human historical action. The contribution therefore follows the genealogical reconstruction of fiction developed by the Author through a close engagement with Spinoza, Locke, libertinism— with particular reference to John Toland— and Vico, in whom the fiction–history nexus culminates in the attempt to establish history as a science. Fictions thus operate as “mediations” between life and form, natural necessity and human action, proving essential for the production of new orders and for opening possible spaces of action even at a time – our own – marked by an inability to imagine the future.