Lukács und die marxistische ›Lebenskunst‹

This essay draws a line of continuity linking Lukács’ early work to his later ›official‹ role as a communist intellectual. "Soul and Form" ("Die Seele und die Formen") is not read as an expression of Lukács’ early idealism. Rather, the book bears witness to a much more complex vision. "Soul and Form" may be read as the first surprising movement in Lukács’ impending conversion to his peculiar materialism. Literature and art ceaselessly struggle for freedom and autonomy from any, either religious or political, function. Yet at the same time, there is a philosophical awareness that forms can be created, and indeed used, as cultural tools to shape both individual and collective lives.Der Aufsatz postuliert eine Linie der Kontinuität zwischen Lukács̕ Frühwerk und seiner späteren ›offiziellen‹ Rolle als kommunistischer Intellektueller. Die Seele und die Formen wird nicht als Ausdruck von Lukács̕ frühem Idealismus gelesen, vielmehr zeugt dieses Werk von einer viel komplexeren Vision. Es kann als erste überraschende Bewegung hin zur bevorstehenden Bekehrung Lukacs̕ zu seinem eigentümlichen Materialismus gelesen werden. Literatur und Kunst ringen unaufhörlich um Freiheit und Autonomie gegenüber jedweder Funktion, sei sie religiöser oder politischer Art. Doch gleichzeitig gibt es ein philosophisches Bewusstsein dafür, dass Formen als kulturelle Werkzeuge zur Gestaltung des individuellen und kollektiven Lebens geschaffen und auch benutzt werden können

Contestazione studentesca: cultura del dissenso in America e in Europa negli anni Sessanta e Settanta

Dissent is the nineteen-sixties-seventies cultural keyword both in the States and Western Europe. Dissent defines the long uninterrupted 1960s – 1970s juvenile cultural revolution both in the United States and Europe. The new time was announced by the 1964 free-speech movement at Berkley University involving from its very beginning the civil rights question, to which the protest was soon added against the American military involvement in the twenty-years long Viet-Nam war. As a matter of fact, the student movement was meant to radically change the world. Some of the roots of this revolution are to be looked for in the late forties and in the fifties. The question more or less knowingly being dealt with was first of all the radical perspective of freeing the mind from all social conditioning and received ideas. It was the same perspective defined by Ronald Laing’s and David Cooper’s new anti-psychiatric approach. Protest, and the struggle for freedom, however, was doomed to extreme radicalization, turning discussion, and utopian dreams into political violence the Weathermen, of course, in the States, die Rote Armée Fraktion in Germany, Le Brigate Rosse in Italy, turning dreams and ideological struggle into a nightmare.Contestazione è parola chiave per definire la tipologia culturale sia negli Stati Uniti che in Europa tra gli anni Sessanta e gli anni Settanta. Contestazione è il termine che definisce la lunga, ininterrotta rivoluzione culturale giovanile che definisce la condizione di una nuova modernità. L’annuncio del tempo nuovo viene lanciato a Berkeley nel 1964 dal free-speech movement (movimento per la libertà di parola). La protesta fu provocata dalla questione razziale in primo luogo, e dunque dell’uguaglianza dei diritti tra tutti i soggetti. Si aggiunse poi a questa la protesta contro l’intervento militare americano in Viet-Nam. Ma la sommossa studentesca, già a Berkeley, a parte gli obiettivi specifici, era intesa a cambiare il mondo. Le ragioni della sommossa vanno cercate negli anni quaranta e cinquanta del Novecento. Ciò che era in gioco, fin da quegli anni, era una prospettiva di liberazione della mente da ogni idea ricevuta e da ogni condizionamento sociale, una questione di libertà di pensiero dunque, in una prospettiva analoga a quella definita nell’antipsichiatria di Ronald Laing e David Cooper.  La protesta giovanile, e la ricerca di una diversa libertà di pensiero, tuttavia, si piegò anche a forme di estrema radicalizzazione, nel declinare della discussione, della protesta e dei sogni utopici verso la violenza politica dei Weathermen e, in Europa, della Rote Armée Fraktion tedesca, o delle Brigate Rosse, nel declinare della lotta ideologica e del sogno della libertà verso l’incubo

Del reale, dell’immaginario, delle rappresentazioni come forma dell’esperienza. Response a Silvano Tagliagambe

Domenichelli’s response to Tagliagambe’s thick and powerful intervention moves from Lacan’s note on the spiderweb geometry and the wonders of the surface, and writing as the threshold of the imaginary between the real and the symbolic. The subject of Domenichelli’s response is the concept of representation as a mixture of memory and oblivion grounding the shaping of the self. The nature of representations, as Tagliagambe says, is translucent; it is semi-transparent, being both the place of Florenskji’s skvoznoj, (inner shining), as well as of opacity and darkness. Literary representations therefore, exactly because of their semitransparent nature, offer the Ansatzpunkt to Gadamer’s hermeneutic horizontverschmelzung, and a kind of impossible answer to T.S. Eliot’s radical question on the redemption of time in Burn Norton.Domenichelli’s response to Tagliagambe’s thick and powerful intervention moves from Lacan’s note on the spiderweb geometry and the wonders of the surface, and writing as the threshold of the imaginary between the real and the symbolic. The subject of Domenichelli’s response is the concept of representation as a mixture of memory and oblivion grounding the shaping of the self. The nature of representations, as Tagliagambe says, is translucent; it is semi-transparent, being both the place of Florenskji’s skvoznoj, (inner shining), as well as of opacity and darkness. Literary representations therefore, exactly because of their semitransparent nature, offer the Ansatzpunkt to Gadamer’s hermeneutic horizontverschmelzung, and a kind of impossible answer to T.S. Eliot’s radical question on the redemption of time in Burn Norton

Letteratura e poteri: forme e funzioni del consenso e del dissenso

Mimetic fictions, mimetic narratives are the multi-faceted multiplication of some foundation myth representing the legitimation of any political power based on the consent on common values, common beliefs grounding the common political ratio, and the social pact in democratic societies. This also implies the consent on the common dissent on behaviours, opinions, and values shaping some counter-foundation myth, or simply denying the truth of any given master-fiction. Literature often  defines its own autonomy from any given power, its own pureté detached from the materiality and violence of history and the struggle for power. As a matter of fact the production of fictions opens an imaginary space in which cultural memory, history itself, takes its shape in the dialectic of memory and oblivion. Mass culture largely coincides with the production of mimetic fictions and therefore with the production space of both global consent and  global conflict and dissent. In this global/glocal space a new intellectual must invent a new critical language.Le finzioni ‘mimetiche’, le narrazioni, in quanto moltiplicazione nella variazione di un mito di fondazione, sono lo strumento attraverso cui il potere dominante si legittima e governa con il consenso dei governati su comuni valori e credenze e dunque l’accordo su di una condivisa ratio politica, ciò che implica anche il dissenso su istanze che si contrappongano al grand récit, o alla master fiction del potere costituito. C’è una terza posizione al proposito, quella della letteratura come campo di forza autonomo, la letteratura come discorso della pureté che vuole porsi al di fuori, al di sopra, del gioco contrapposto di poteri e contropoteri.  In realtà la letteratura, la produzione di finzioni apre uno spazio immaginario, uno spazio in cui prende forma la memoria culturale, si dà forma la storia stessa nella dialettica tra ciò che viene rammemorato, e ciò che invece viene obliato. La cultura di massa in quanto produzione di finzioni ‘mimetiche’ è lo spazio in cui  si costruisce un consenso globale, e in cui, pertanto, si apre anche conflittualità globale senza remissione: l’intellettuale, chi ha funzione critica, deve, in questo spazio globale davvero inventare un nuovo linguaggio

De la contre-histoire dans les représentations du Risorgimento italien

L’Histoire est la représentation de ce qui a été, des événements du passé et, dans un sens plus général ce qu’on pourrait appeler la mémoire collective de l’humanité, ou d’une partie de celle-ci : la mémoire d’une nation, d’un groupe, d’une collectivité. L’Histoire se donne comme garantie de la vérité même du récit. Cependant, Lyotard, comme De Certeau, Ricoeur ou, en Italie, Carlo Ginzburg, et aux États-Unis Stephen Greenblatt, en parlent comme d’une fiction, comme du grand récit d’émancipat..