Stability of Whom and for What? Rethinking the Challenge of Living Together in the Intercultural Age

The starting point of the present essay is a basic distinction and understanding of two concepts of ‘stability’: the ‘identitarian stability’ and the ‘place stability’. Such a distinction will enable us to build up a conceptual toolbox for increasingly problematic times, which are explicitly evoked by the linkage between migration and stability itself that we will explore (§ 1). We will also thus try to outline the elements that should guide a philosophical, ethical-political understanding of the ‘identitarian stability’ (§ 2). This is also a constitutive part of the ‘challenge of living together’, whose correlative facet is related to the passage from the perspective of the individual to that of a group (§ 3). To complete the theoretical framework, a further attention will be devoted to the ‘place stability’. With this respect, the analysis will focus on the topic of ‘places’ and on the correlative and increasingly important issue of ‘non-places’ that characterizes the contemporary way of living together, at least in Western contexts (§ 4). The constitutive interrelation between the two understandings of stability and the correlative concepts, in the end, shall offer an indirect confirmation about the complexity which every understanding of the link between migration and stability is forced to deal with (§ 5).