La volontà di sapere = The Will to Knowledge

Michel Foucault, in "La volonté de savoir", described how the mechanisms of the examination of conscience belonging to the pastoral tradition of the 17th century progressively extended to all areas of society, marking the threshold of a biopolitical modernity. Here, the ‘will to knowledge’ is not the subject’s drive for research, but the injunction to bring into the field of knowledge-power those borderline domains of life that had been previously excluded from it: death, birth, sexuality. ‘The will to knowledge’ also carries a more straightforward, primary meaning: here we encounter the sphere of the desire for knowledge and its challenges, a theme constantly evoked today – above all, that of finding orientation within a hypertrophic labyrinth of information. Thus, a few years after Foucault’s work, we encounter another text on the inexhaustible drive towards knowledge, its infinite resources of seduction, its lethal traps. With "The Name of the Rose", Umberto Eco constructs a thriller whose origin lies in the will to knowledge, with a book at its centre and, surrounding it, the desire of the aspiring initiates in opposition to the strenuous defence mounted by the custodians of tradition. This introductory text to the issue traces some of the many areas in which the ‘will to knowledge’ is pursued.