Sulle tracce di Calibano. Subalternità come discorso del mondo-sud

Come è possibile, al giorno d’oggi, affrontare una discussione di economia politica e ritrovarsi, nel corso dello stesso scambio di vedute, a trattare di antropologia? Nello stesso contesto, su quali basi un economista individua convincenti analogie fra la crisi europea contemporanea e la storia greca classica1? In entrambi i casi la risposta ci conduce a due parole chiave del presente: relazione nord-sud e subalternità

Millennium Gramsci: Some Features of his Current US Reception

This is the Abstract of the English-language article by Mauro Pala opening the session on the current position of Gramsci in the Anglophone world, here with special reference to the United States

Neorealism and Transmediality: A Migrating Narration

The lively debate on cinema, literature and the visual arts between the two wars fed into Italian Neorealism in an intertextual way, as emerges in Bazin’s, Zavattini’s and Deleuze’s writings on Neorealism. The French philosopher observed how Neorealism breaks the sensory motor connection typical of classical cinema, thus paving the way for a cinema of pure optical situations. W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of ‘the image as agent’ exemplifies how neorealist movies possess a lasting iconic impact capable of affecting different medias, thus making new venues viable for innovative intertextual narrations. The present contribution analyses how this debate may be translated today in a multimedia theory that orients aesthetic choices and forms of reception in a globalized context.  In rethinking transmediality as a concept we are forced to address semiotics rather than linguistics, and therefore incorporate written, oral and, most of all, visual texts in a new conjuncture. This contribution explores how the Neorealist decade (1945-1956) in Italy can be assimilated to what Thomas Pavel in 1975 theorized as a “possible world” where written and visual expressions are assembled in an unprecedented form of storytelling. W.J.T. Mitchell’s concept of ‘the image as agent’ illustrates how Neorealist cinema has an emotional impact capable of transcending written forms of signification, thus making new venues viable for a participated forms of reception, which are still present in later works such as Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1990) and Costanzo’s My Brilliant Friend (2018)

Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s common sense: Inequality and its narratives, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 222

Book review of Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s common sense: Inequality and its narratives, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 222.Recensione di Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s common sense: Inequality and its narratives, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 222

L’impegno al tempo della globalizzazione, fra discorso ed egemonia: due prospettive rivisitate attraverso Foucault e Gramsci

This contribution compares discourse and hegemony through their distinctive elaboration in the humanities and the social sciences by two major twentieth century theoreticians, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. In discourse Foucault unmasks the speaker’s – or the scientist’s - conscious and unconscious intentions in representing phenomena as if they were part of a coherent and readable whole. This whole results from an ensemble of discursive practices which prescribe what can be accepted and what has to be excluded within a certain social formation, a body of recognized and authoritative knowledge crucial in managing and maintaining power. Gramsci also acknowledges a close link between knowledge and power, but his idea of hegemony, unlike foucauldian discourse, does not deny the possibility of  political agency through which individuals can forge a political strategy to improve their lot. Discourse and hegemony are nowadays essential tools for gauging social confrontations and understanding forms of coercion or negotiations in cultural exchange.   Il contributo affronta la complessa relazione fra discorso ed egemonia, evidenziando alcune della analogie e differenze fa due termini imprescindibili nella prassi critica contemporanea. Il discorso in Foucault rappresenta un tentativo di sopravanzare  le principali forme di indagine sociale e testuale disponibili negli anni Sessanta: lo strutturalismo e l’ermeneutica; il discorso, partendo dall’analisi linguistica, abbraccia varie forme di socialità, dalla considerazione attribuita alla conoscenza, fino alla coscienza di sé a livello individuale e in un particolare gruppo. In questo schema, le istituzioni si basano evidentemente su pratiche discorsive e sulla loro circolazione. Gramsci, così come Foucault, riconosce lo stretto nesso esistente fra conoscenza e potere, ma l’egemonia, a differenza del discorso,  individua, all’interno di una relazione fra due entità sociali, le modalità attraverso le quali una prevale, affermandosi attraverso una negoziazione del potere stesso. Il consenso che sostiene le forme più efficaci di egemonia, presuppone comune, nel quadro dei condizionamenti storico ambientali, una certa libertà d’azione dell’individuo e dunque, a differenza del discorso, non esclude la possibilità di un agente storico e di una prassi di resistenza nei confronti del nucleo egemone

Ginster di Siegfried Kracauer o della difficoltà di abitare

In his first novel, Ginster, Kracauer constructs a double of himself, a young architect dissatisfied with the commercial aspects of architecture and the serialized form of dwellings it is producing for new urban settlements in Weimar Germany. Shocked by WWI warfare which disrupts social ties and belie bourgeois common sense, Ginster focuses on the surface of artefacts and social phenomena in order to make fresh connections between art, craft and society, and thus show his contemporaries how to face an increasing complex reality. The contribution shows how both Ginster and Kracauer’s feuillettons call for a reform of spaces which should bring about new forms of an organic lifestyle in which solidarity inspired by a common pursuit should be paramount.Il primo romanzo di Kracauer, Ginster, che l’autore definisce un’autobiografia anonima, mette in scena un giovane architetto, un alter ego di Kracauer stesso, disgustato dalle implicazioni commerciali dell’architettura e dalle cellule abitative seriali che l’architettura produce per la pianificazione urbanistica della Germania di Weimar. Traumatizzato dagli effetti devastanti della guerra sul fronte interno, Ginster non crede alla costellazione dell’interiorità residuo dell’idealismo e cerca invece negli artefatti e nelle superfici degli oggetti uno stimolo verso una sintesi di estetica e progettualità politica. Nella sua ricerca di una solidarietà organica ma non naturale e la diffidenza verso lo Stato di Weimar si possono individuare interessanti analogie con il pensiero e la prassi della biopolitica postfoucaultiana

Il silenzio della terra e dei volti: censura e narrazioni in After the Last Sky di Edward Said

In 1983 Edward Said, who was then serving as a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine suggested that photographs of Palestinians should be hung in the entrance to the main conference site in Geneva. The official response was that the photographs could be displayed, but with no caption or explanation. This form of censorship marks the beginning of After the Last Sky a book of pictures by the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, commented and expanded by Said, who explores the ways and modes through which memory can, challenging censorship, interact with photographs and written texts, and thereby attempt to reconstruct a people’s past and current historical trajectory. The contribution also explores how Palestinians suffered censorship of their own experience through a systematic dispossession of territories, affiliations and, eventually, their identity as a national ethnic group, a brutal strategy of segregation against which Said’s philological approach provides a strong ethical argument.  Nel 1983 Edward Said, in veste di consulente delle Nazioni Unite per la United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine propose di organizzare una mostra fotografica sulla Palestina nel salone d’ingresso del complesso dove si teneva la conferenza. Gli organizzatori della conferenza diedero l’assenso ad esporre le foto, ma prive di qualsiasi didascalia. Nasce da questa singolare forma di censura il libro fotografico After the Last Sky, nel quale le foto di Jean Mohr vengono illustrate e commentate da Said, per contrastare la censura con la rammemorazione della traiettoria storica di un intero popolo. Nel contributo si indaga la relazione fra fotografia e censura, parallelamente a quella fra comunicazione visuale e testo scritto. La censura si colloca infine al centro della ricerca filologica di Said, vista come antidoto alla strategia di espropriazione (= dispossession) ai danni dei Palestinesi di strumenti simbolici per la ricostituzione di un consesso comunitari

Per un’archeologia della biopoetica. Response a Michele Cometa

For an archaeology of biopoetics. (Mauro Pala) It is useful to look at current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist or biopoetic approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at texts as the product of particular social conditions, or as a network of references to other texts. Literary Darwinists instead aim at studying literature through biology, not politics or semiotics. They also take as a given that literature derives its only truth from laws of nature. And yet, in some cases, as Cometa’s provocative paper suggests, issues tackled by practitioners of biopoetics coincide with the ground on which scholars of biopsychology, cognitive rhetoric, evolutionary psychology develop their research. The latter would agreed on the fact that what the literary Darwinists call human nature consists in a set of highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection. Seen in this light, biopoetics may help, especially in its recent evolution through German academia, understanding the processes through which metaphors are conceived and both language and communication workIt is useful to look at current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist or biopoetic approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at texts as the product of particular social conditions, or as a network of references to other texts. Literary Darwinists instead aim at studying literature through biology, not politics or semiotics. They also take as a given that literature derives its only truth from laws of nature. And yet, in some cases, as Cometa’s provocative paper suggests, issues tackled by practitioners of biopoetics coincide with the ground on which scholars of biopsychology, cognitive rhetoric, evolutionary psychology develop their research. The latter would agreed on the fact that what the literary Darwinists call human nature consists in a set of highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection. Seen in this light, biopoetics may help, especially in its recent evolution through German academia, understanding the processes through which metaphors are conceived and both language and communication work

Per un’archeologia della biopoetica. Response a Michele Cometa

For an archaeology of biopoetics. (Mauro Pala) It is useful to look at current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist or biopoetic approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at texts as the product of particular social conditions, or as a network of references to other texts. Literary Darwinists instead aim at studying literature through biology, not politics or semiotics. They also take as a given that literature derives its only truth from laws of nature. And yet, in some cases, as Cometa’s provocative paper suggests, issues tackled by practitioners of biopoetics coincide with the ground on which scholars of biopsychology, cognitive rhetoric, evolutionary psychology develop their research. The latter would agreed on the fact that what the literary Darwinists call human nature consists in a set of highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection. Seen in this light, biopoetics may help, especially in its recent evolution through German academia, understanding the processes through which metaphors are conceived and both language and communication workIt is useful to look at current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist or biopoetic approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at texts as the product of particular social conditions, or as a network of references to other texts. Literary Darwinists instead aim at studying literature through biology, not politics or semiotics. They also take as a given that literature derives its only truth from laws of nature. And yet, in some cases, as Cometa’s provocative paper suggests, issues tackled by practitioners of biopoetics coincide with the ground on which scholars of biopsychology, cognitive rhetoric, evolutionary psychology develop their research. The latter would agreed on the fact that what the literary Darwinists call human nature consists in a set of highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection. Seen in this light, biopoetics may help, especially in its recent evolution through German academia, understanding the processes through which metaphors are conceived and both language and communication work

Presentazione

Speaking of literature and geography today means clarifying and rebuilding ideologies and speeches inscribed in space. Geography - and its related discourses - implies the activation of a number of concepts such as knowledge, power, science, discursive formations, gaze, episteme. Each of these terms would be meaningless without geographical contextualization.Parlare oggi di letteratura e geografia, cartografia, topografia significa affrontare, chiarire, ricostruire le ideologie e i discorsi iscritti nello spazio; sollecitare la geografia – e i discorsi ad essa correlati – implica perciò l’attivazione di un certo numero di concetti come sapere, potere, scienza, formazioni discorsive, sguardo, episteme. Ognuno di questi termini sarebbe privo di significato – di un significato che in tal modo si qualifica come storico – senza una contestualizzazione geografica