1. The term "trust", according to the great etymologist Giacomo Devoto, derives, like the word "fides", from the root BHEIDH, widely attested in the Italic and Greek areas. From this root also derives the Latin word "foedus", which means: pact. [1]
Corresponding terms, all deriving from this common root, circulate in other European languages as well: faith, foi etc. This massive linguistic presence does not, however, seem to be matched by a familiarity with the meaning of the term. Today trusting is difficult. Pacts are indeed made, but it seems hard to catch sight of the intimate connection between the pact and trust.
Trusting has perhaps always been difficult, but all the more so today, in the absence of strong points of reference on the level of truth, ethics and institutions. To trust: this act implies, in its very structure, that the I, the person, the subject, or whatever we wish to call it, should give up a mastery, a control over its relationship both with itself and with others. Unlike other seasons of the human, in present-day society a conscious command able to control one's own acts seems an indispensable prerogative of the individual, and in any case of the citizen.
It has not always been so: in the ancient traditions, whether very primitive or Mediterranean, pagan and/or Judaeo-Christian, the individual was conceived as called forth by, and belonging to, a tribe, a clan, the body of a people or of a church. The other, the other man, like oneself, whether benevolent or hostile, was conceived as a partner, constitutive and structural, of one's own (?) existence.

2. Without trusting, in fact, the small human being could not survive and grow, and the development of its path cannot rest upon a complete mastery of itself and of its relationships and actions. It is indeed true that trusting entails the risk of a loss, the risk of losing, but on the other hand, without such a risk no human life is livable, a life that entails, by its very nature, social bonds.
The small human being cannot exist and grow except by trusting: the mother, the father, the teacher, the friend, the wife. Despite the fact that all of these are not always, literally, trustworthy, there remains the unobjectionable consideration that the said small human being, without them, would not have survived as a human being and, in the difficult favourable case, would have done so in a much stunted way.

3. Examining the question from the point of view of social bonds and their outward expression, for example in commercial dealings, the question of trusting takes on, if that were possible, even greater prominence. One trusts that one will receive a piece of merchandise, one trusts that one will receive it unspoiled, one trusts that the other party will do what he has said. On the other hand, over all these steps there looms the possibility of being proved wrong.
The foedus, the pact in ancient Rome, was, in its most remote ritual and religious origins, an extension of trusting. Consider the relationship between patricians and plebeians. Consider the pact with the vanquished, who were subsequently "federated", whereby Rome wagered on their loyalty to the point of committing itself to their defence, up to total war, as if they were Roman citizens. A pact, then, laden with these connotations at once of trust and loyalty and of risk, historically constituted ancient Rome as the most solid and formidable political institution and the most formidable war machine.

4. Trust, understood in this way, is called faith. This mode of believing is proper to the religious traditions. The religious traditions have brought a support to trust because they have brought a meaning. A meaning implies a certain lordship over time and therefore a form of salvation: salvation from the nothingness of meaning and from destruction.
In the religious traditions this way of believing is objectively a belonging, subjectively an adhering. In the secularized society in which we live, belongings grow fainter because of the levelling and segregating action of the capitalist structures, which need human beings who are individualistic and subservient to the production rhythms of the great financial and technocratic powerhouses. There thus grows fainter in the person the sense of lack, of the disproportion between oneself and a task that exceeds one, in some way conceived as transcendent and unifying: except in today's fundamentalisms, which take the shortcut of a despotic God, the object of an ideology that absorbs the sense of lack, of the other, of death.

5. Trusting, then, constitutes one of the most decisive aspects of human reality in its bonds. And yet one tends to trust nothing and no one. In this "liquid" society, to use Bauman's definition, what could situate man, identify him, that is, think him in the joint between the past and the future, if not "trust"?
Trust is the necessary hinge between the past and the future. Trust sets out from a memory (the past) and precisely by virtue of this it opens up and makes accessible a "future". In the "other" the I has somehow believed, has had, at least in some moment, relief: affective, religious, aesthetic, economic. It has taken a risk, and the other has answered it. When the other answers, the human individual is re-born, feels re-cognized.
For that matter, without trusting, the future is impossible. The future, in fact, cannot be a mere programme. The programme, even if in the wishes and in the ways in which we represent it to ourselves it may be collective, is in reality, at best, the exercise of a mastery, which is, as such, exposed to danger and to failure.
What, then, enables us to hold memory and promise together? The past and the future? Trust is that programme, sui generis, which does not suppress hope, risk, change, otherness. Human history was history when it invented itself (invenire: in Latin it means both to invent and to find), when the other was invented and found.
Trust implies a conversion, in a purely secular sense. Conversion means, literally, a change of direction, that is, a change of gaze, a change of relationships.
I believe that trusting means not only, and not so much, openness, gift, gift of oneself, but rather, and more radically, a risk, a structure of risk. If one is answered in kind by the other, what happens is not only a pact, but a being restored to the origin of one's own desire.

Notes

[1] Cfr, GH, Devoto, Avviamento alla etimologia italiana, Le Monnier, Firenze 1957, p.168.

Gianfranco Dalmasso introduced Derrida's thought into Italy with his translations of La voix et le phenomène (1968; 2nd ed. 1984) and of De la grammatologie (1969, 2nd updated edition 1998), and is the editor, together with Silvano Facioni, of the Italian edition of the Seminari published by Galilée. Among his most recent works: Chi dice io. Razionalità e nichilismo (Jaca Book 2005), Hegel probabilmente. Il movimento del vero (Jaca Book 2015). He has taught at the Universities of Calabria, of Rome Tor Vergata and of Bergamo. He is co-director of Phasis. European Journal of Philosophy and Honorary President of the Società Italiana di Filosofia Teoretica.