La cura e la necessaria ecologia dell'attenzione

In Moral Boundaries (1993) Joan Tronto defines care a «practice» and individuates four phases of care (caring for, caring about, taking care of and care receiving), which she further expands in Caring Democracy (2013) with the addition of a fifth phase (caring with). The present paper has two main aims: the first one is to understand what we gain theoretically from a definition of care as a practice (instead of labor, or an emotion or a principle) and to explore once again the different phases of care, the tensions and conflicts that may emerge between them; the second aim is to deal with the particular epistemology of attention that must be presupposed as a conditio sine qua non, even if never sufficient by itself, to pass from the first to the following phases of care.

A real caring democracy needs an ‘ecology of attention'. In the present ‘economy of attention' that has established a regime of mass distraction we need to learn again the art of listening to the (human and non human) other and of paying attention, developing a horizontal thinking. [Publisher's text]