Narratives of violence in the making of an oppositional public space
Résumé
A central element of the Italian public space, the No TAV movement has been widely studied already. Considering it as a socio-ecological conflict, marked by discourses on State violence against individual subjects and the “militarization” of the territory, this social struggle has shed new light on the concept of oppositional public space as developed by critic theoretician of the Frankfurt School Oskar Negt, in contrast with the bourgeois public sphere conceived by Jürgen Habermas. This resolutely proletarian perspective considers social class-based conflicts, marked by violence and marginality, as the motor of social change. Even if the socioeconomic dimension appears as secondary in the No TAV movement, the State violence it suffers, its marginality in the national public space, and its creative and emancipatory dimension nourish an extended definition of the oppositional public space