Between “New Realism” and “Weak Thought”: Umberto Eco’s “Negative Realism” and the Discourse of Late Postmodern Impegno

The recent theory of a return of realism has sparked a lively and somewhat heated debate among contemporary italian thinkers, generating a split between the supporters of the philosophy of weak thought, and those who argue for an overcoming of postmodernism and the development of a new philosophy of realism. This article explores Umberto Eco’s contribution to this debate, focusing both on Eco’s theory of “negative realism” and on his latest historiographic metafiction. I argue that while Eco’s recent theory further distances the author from the philosophy of weak thought, it does not call, as does Maurizio Ferraris’s philosophy of new realism, for an overcoming of postmodernism. Instead, following the outward shift that is typical of late postmodern impegno, Eco’s later work creates a critical idiom that more clearly uses postmodernist self-awareness as a strategy to promote self-empowerment and social emancipation