Abstract

The contribution aims to outline an elementary phenomenology and a minimal ontology of power, analyzing, in a realistic perspective in a broad sense, some elementary forms and some invariant features of power relations. The main thesis is that the power relations depend on subjective factors and, more particularly, on that constellation of beliefs, meanings, passions that defines the physiognomy of a certain form of subjectivity. To understand, also from the genealogical point of view, the relationship between subjectivity and forms of power it will be used, in the wake of Weber and Blumenberg, the notion of world view ("Weltbild"): that series of beliefs, more or less coherent, cognitive assumptions on "how the world is made" (man, history, nature, society) which play a fundamental function of practical orientation, defining the framework within which individuals interpret themselves, structure their own desires and expectations, elaborate their representations of what is necessary and what is possible, form their ideas of justice, plan their strategies. The activation of power relations is therefore not linked to the quantitative inequality of powers, but to the diversity of desires and representations on the state of the world. Power relations have a subjective prerequisite that takes them away from the mere logic of quantity.