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Requoting the arcades. Walter Benjamin’s idle robbers
Get PDFBy contrasting Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary theory of quotation to the different ways his work has itself undergone quotation thus far, a new insight can be gained into the perception of the materiality and visuality of texts. The so-called Passagen-Werk, the project on the Parisian Arcades which Benjamin pursued for more than ten years until the end of his life, is the overflowing, yet voided space where this crossing takes place
Paris-Monad: Origin, Passage, Intermittency. Benjamin and the Metaphysics of Modern Times
Get PDFThe background thesis of the paper concerns the deep methodological continuity that binds Benjamin’s Project on the Parisian Passages to his book on the Trauerspiel. The starting point is offered then by the reprise of the connection between Benjamin’s micrology and the theological task of critically reconstituting the whole in its original sense. This connection is consequently developed in a consideration of the “passage” as a nominal substance. On this basis is focused the complementarity in Benjamin’s late philosophy between historical materialism and theological nominalism. From the intertwining between urban and linguistic spaces emerges the figure of modern city as a labyrinth. The last move consists in converting the labyrinth in a monad, that is in an intensive space of knowledge and experience of truth
Aesthetic and ethical values. Diderot in front of a painting
Get PDFPassion, structure, and technique: these are the ‘colors’ that Diderot uses to ‘paint’ his opinions in his Salons. Greuze is staged passion, Vernet is form, rhythm and ideal, and while Chardin possesses the technique and touch that are able to say everything, François Boucher is the sterility of the gesture. In Diderot’s thought, virtue can also be seen in relation to the struggle against mediocrity and bad taste. In a society dominated by the petit goût and the sterile virtuosity of the petits maîtres, real genius suffocates as taste becomes perverted. In 18th-century society, there is no art without taste. 
Aesthetics of Emotions: Between Phenomenology and Pragmatism
Get PDFThis paper aims to investigate the nature of aesthetic experience, focusing on the interplay between emotions and cognition. We shall establish a link between a phenomenological account of emotions and a pragmatist, anti-dogmatic view on aesthetics, such as that defended by John Dewey. Although pragmatism and phenomenology have historically emerged as separate traditions, they might mutually share resources to achieve an exhaustive description of aesthetic experience. Both traditions conceive aesthetics as a “philosophy of experience”, and they agree on the decisive role emotional intentionality plays in the constitution of an aesthetic experience
“Erase the traces”: urban experience in Walter Benjamin’s commentary on Brecht’s lyric poetry
Get PDFThis paper addresses Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the poems of the cycle “Handbook for City-Dwellers” by Bertolt Brecht, in order to discuss the specificity of Brechtian lyricism in the realm of Benjamin’s reflexions on modern urban lyric. Benjamin resumes two decisive issues to the constitution of Brecht\u27s work: the sobriety of language and teaching as a form of transmission of urban and political experience. This link between experience and transmission is not reduced to the instruction of survival conditions in the city. It is constituted by the learning of a critical attitude related to the city. While communication between isolated individuals is precarious and the political organization illegal, the poems seek to build a bond between “I” and “you” by the poetic reflection on the urban experience
Sensibility and motility of words in Giacomo Leopardi’s poetic conception
Get PDFThe following essay is mainly concerned with materialism notion, considered as one of the very fundamental architraves of Giacomo Leopardi’s whole thought. This standpoint derives to him from Locke’s work, but our author became much more radical. The goal is to show how the pervasiveness of an integral materialistic point of view is able – in Leopardi’s layout – to effect even the linguistic scope, especially the poetic one. Our aim is to outline the potential ethical content, that the Italian thinker conveys in his pieces of advice to poets and writers
Introduzione
No full textThis section gathers together the improved versions of the papers presented at the Benjaminian Colloquium «Art, Critique and Memory – Values and Historical Tensions in the Experience of the City», which took place at the Faculty for Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade Nova de Lisboa on the 23rd of June 2016 as part of an ongoing research project – conducted by IFILNOVA’s group «Art, Critique and Aesthetic Experience»
Postures of the inactual thinker in search of authenticity: the example of the double life of Pasolini and Nietzsche
Get PDF In this article we intend to analyze some of the aspects that promote a comparison between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Friedrich Nietzsche. Our purpose is to examine the texts with the aim of deducing the traits of the "double life" of the outdated philosopher in face of his own time. Far from wanting to be exhaustive, however, we chose two figures which present emblematic characteristics of this relation. We will focus on two key questions: 1) The sense of out-datedness felt by the two authors 2) The tendency to self-contradiction inspired by their need for authenticity
Cenerentola\u27s playroom: the Rossinian masterpiece reread by director Paolo Bosisio
Get PDFRecensione allo spettacolo La Cenerentola di Gioacchino Rossini, libretto di Jacopo Ferretti, regia di Paolo Bosisio, Teatro all\u27aperto di Kanli Kula, Montenegro, il 18 agosto 2017
Bluebeard’s Castle by Béla Bartók. A reading hypothesis
Get PDFBluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára), composed by Béla Bartók on a libretto by Béla Balázs, is one of the most significant musical works of the early twentieth century and a masterpiece of Hungarian modernism. The opera deals with “the eternal tragedy of the dualism between man and woman” from an original point of view, divergent from the widespread one in Western European thought and art. The essay investigates Bartók’s musical dramaturgy according to this topic