Ethics, and violence; chalk and cheese. These days, however, anything goes: let them eat chalk. And so Carlo Bordoni invites us into his sitting room for a chat about the ways of the world today, of crisis, modernity, interregnum. His is a civilised, measured conversation, wideranging and itself ethical, indeed. Bordoni is a wonderful storyteller, even if the story of modernity is one of tragedy and turbulence. He takes on some of the big questions. How should we live? and, why do we tolerate, how is it that we manage to bring on all the forces of evil in the world today? What is our own complicity in this mess of modernity?

This little book is not given to close summary. As Colin Crouch says in endorsing it, ‘it makes you stop and think after nearly every sentence’. It combines a coherent narrative with the structure of a kind of patchwork quilt. In this, in its style as well as in its critical narrative, it seems to reflect and follow on Bordoni’s close working relationship with the late Zygmunt Bauman. It is generous and ambulatory, even when it strolls close to the abyss.

This kind of conversational style introduces problems and themes and then turns to precedents. For as we know, and not only from Bauman, we always enter already existing fields of discourse. There are always precedents and interlocutors, from Aristotle to Hobbes, then to Arendt and Schmitt, Agamben and Butler and Mbembe. And there are always keywords, and definitions, traditions of interpretation to help us along our way.

What is ethical? that which is morally permissable; but also that which refers to first principles, and not only to moral norms or rules of the day. That which takes us closer, at least in conversation, to the Good Society. What is violence? we associate it with the unwarranted or unnecessary physical and mental infliction of pain, but also, as Bordoni reminds, with Weber, with the legitimate monopoly power of the state. Violence is not only personal, or domestic, not only the realm of anger or impulse to abuse. Rational violence belongs to the state; irrational violence evokes the world of random acts of cruelty. Or, so we thought; chalk and cheese being what they are, or were.

For today, and in modern times, we are prepared to tolerate and even justify what may be called ethical violence. If we were to summon another contemporary conversationalist, whose work has recently been reviewed in these pages, Dirk Moses would say this may be a matter of preemptive violence, often delivered on behalf of the security state. Bordoni returns to this theme later, via Foucault: if you want to live, then the other must die. The other means to kill us, so we must kill them first. Violence of this kind may then be deemed to be ethical, as it serves the higher end of protecting us from our deadly enemies. Ethics in the classical, or principled sense has gone to hell in a handbasket. Ethics becomes a matter of national, or sovereign or ethnic self-interest.

Bordoni traces a number of contemporary dimensions to these developments in theory and in practice: the increasing centrality of emotions and the irrational in everyday life, of populism and resentment, individualism and technology. Oppenheimer and Anders, Bauman and Adorno, Zamyatin, Fritz Lang and Mary Shelley: ‘Prometheus is to blame for it.’ Against Prometheus, Bordoni petitions us to reinstate Minerva. For technology has been removed from us, on this account. Only technology can save us, this moderated by the spirit of Minerva, by knowledge.

As Crouch says, this makes you stop and think after every sentence. ‘Prometheus is to blame for it’? This may be a sentence that warrants another book, so soon as is humanly possible.

Prometheus was also a rebel.