Tra mafia, politica e “discorsi di legalità”

Starting from a synthetic review of the studies about the importance of symbolic dimension for the construction of Cosa Nostra’s power (from the area of knowledge to the one of identity, from rituals to myths and apologetics), the paper analyses the ambiguity of the talk-interactions between “men of honour” during the development of conversational grounding for their inter-subjectivity (in Schegloff‘s words). According to the rules, spoken exchanges between Cosa Nostra’s members should be governed by the twofold restriction of the law of silence toward the world outside and the obligation of speaking the truth inside the organization. But in real life, things are different. Mafia’s language is equipped with a semantic obliqueness which provides speakers with a margin of freedom by preserving the unpredictability of their intentions. For these reasons the state witness Tommaso Buscetta has qualified Cosa Nostra as “the realm of incomplete speech”. Analysing conversations inside Cosa Nostra we can see that the order of interaction is based on the practice of misunderstanding, in particular, on the one of the “misunderstanding-doubly-well-understood” (“malentendu-doublement-bien-entendu” in the meaning of Jankélévitch ). This kind of communicative exchange includes not only a fake relationship but also a fake situation, maintaining mutual knowledge of deception thereby permitting an infinite, dialectic game. This game, and its unspoken side (involving political affairs and crimes), are explored in the paper starting from some judicial confrontations between Gaspare Spatuzza, a former man of honour who became a state witness, and some of his previous co-associated. Particularly significant for its contents - which concern the relationship between mafia and politics – is the confrontation with Filippo Graviano, who was, with his brother, the capomandamento of Spatuzza’s same “family”. The interaction between the two men, on the stage of the court, is a real “Battle for identity” (as Goffman says).