International journal of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy of literature
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Filippo Pennacchio, Il romanzo global. Uno studio narratologico
Review of Filippo Pennacchio, Il romanzo global. Uno studio narratologico.
Interview with Wolf Schmid.
Per un lessico della propaganda barocca: il Kitsch
This paper focuses on baroque propaganda, and it justifies the anachronism of such category by bringing its heuristic potential to light. Through the analysis of some well-known models (Michel Foucault’s raison d’état, Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, Jürgen Habermas’s open sphere), the paper points out the main features of consensus building in 17th-century Europe: intermediality, productivity, asystematicity. Aiming at compiling a lexicon of baroque propaganda, the paper also focuses on the concept of Kitsch. The inquiry primarily concerns the painted cycle of Peter Paul Rubens at the Luxembourg palace and the poem Adone by Giovan Battista Marino. The goal is to define the role played by ancient mythology in the representation of Ancien Régime political power.
Editorial for the celebration of the 10th anniversay of the journal Enthymema.
L’eros e il desiderio. Tradurre l’intraducibile?
Introduction to the annual supplement “Volti del tradurre” edited by Helena Aguilà Ruzola and Donatella Siviero. The section includes a selection of papaers presented at the 5th International Translation Day, held on 3-4 December 2018 at the University of Catania, in collaboration with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Messina.
Volti del tradurre – A cura di Helena Aguilà Ruzola e Donatella Siviero
Introduzione a Poesia e psicoanalisi. L’altra contemporaneità
Introduction to the special section Poetry and Psychoanalysis. The Other Contemporaneity, edited by Matteo Bonazzi, Francesco Adriano Clerici, Rosalba Maletta.
Poetry and Psychoanalysis – Edited by M. Bonazzi, F.A. Clerici and R. Maletta
Copyright (c) 2026 Matteo Bonazzi, Rosalba Maletta
Tradurre l’incesto. Il motivo della moglie di Putifarre tra Oriente e Occidente
This study starts form the idea of how to stranslate what is commoned considered untranstaltable for modesty; the narrative motif of Putifarre’s wife, taken from Bible, has been variously employed in Middle Age literary texts and it was taken from The Book of Sindbad, which has benne so widespread translated in the West.
Dismembered Bodies, Dismembered Texts: Supernatural Anthologies and the Re-animation of the Dead in Post-revolutionary France (1802-1822)
The import of British Gothic novels in post-revolutionary France, from 1797 onwards, triggered French publisher to capitalize on the vogue of supernatural narratives. One of the results was the publication of a number of anthologies, hastily composed by cutting and pasting Old Regime collections, whose first example was the anonymous Le Livre des prodiges (1802). This essay reinstates the supernatural anthologies of 1802-1822 as a powerful link between the British Gothic and later French fantastic literature (particularly Alexandre Dumas), at the same time analysing how the very operation of cutting and pasting pre-revolutionary texts resonates with distinctly post-revolutionary anxieties.
My work analyzes the figure of silence and the way it develops in some of Paul Celan’s poems. More in details, it examines the argumentum e silentio, a real inference based on withholding or lacking an answer. In this silence the death of the German language, Celan’s own language, is at stake. It was violated by the Nazis and slaughtered in the crematoriums. The question is how can it be possible to keep on writing poetry in this language and how poetry can still retain the ethical power which would force to avoid that violence, that barbarization. And furthermore, how can that language possibly reclaim itself as his mother tongue. In this regard, Celan proposes an «erschwiegene Wort», a word which is defeated, conquered, torn from the silence of destruction and, at the same time, a silenced word: the word silence. A word said in silence which could lead closer to the remains of that language, so close to reveal its pauses, its articulations, its own uniqueness. Accordingly, we could state that each language is motherly when it finds its rhythm and its measure around something it cannot pronounce. The language takes action. In Celan’s poetry this action is suggested by the word «Spruch» which I suggested to be translated through a linguistic gesture: it is action and its suspension at the same time. This is the only way to demonstrate that the language is at stake and it is motherly. And, in the end, its words are nothing but ‘pure gestures’ - Unworten, as Celan defines them: true witness of something that is there because it is no longer there.
Alberto Comparini, Un genere letterario in diacronia. Forme e metamorfosi del dialogo nel Nove-cento.
Recensione a Comparini, Alberto. Un genere letterario in diacronia. Forme e metamorfosi del dialogo nel Novecento. Edizioni Fiorini, 2018.
The Turn of the Screw. A tale that “turns”
This article offers a new interpretation of The Turn of the Screw. The reader is not asked to choose between ghosts and hallucinations, but rather to understand that James’ intention was to include a ghost story in a story of hallucinations. These two stories intertwine and transform into one another. Nonetheless, the mental dimension remains prevalent: The Turn of the Screw is a tale of identity or rather of the dissolution of the principium individuationis and the consequent establishment of a “confusive regime”. The rise in personal pronouns is the detail that points to and confirms this interpretation.
Giorgio Agamben, Karman. Breve trattato sull’azione, la colpa e il gesto
Review of Giorgio Agamben, Karman. Breve trattato sull’azione, la colpa e il gesto, Bollati Boringhieri, 2017.
«La danza a due schiere»: dis/incarnare l’eros nel Cantico dei cantici
Se l’eros deve il proprio carattere enigmatico al fatto che, insieme, «dice e tace l’indicibile, tormenta e provoca» (Levinas, Totalità e infinito 267), nel Cantico dei cantici tale enigma appare, dal punto di vista semiotico, come «una relazione con ciò che si sottrae per sempre» (Levinas, Il Tempo e l’Altro 55) e perciò stesso lambisce il limite estremo del discorso amoroso. Provocato dalla mobilità metaforica del dialogo elusivo tra gli amanti che dis/articola la passione carnale, il suo principio di «incarnazione poetica» (Wolfson 221-22) drammatizza nella più astratta tangibilità «il trasferimento del soggetto nel luogo dell’altro» (Kristeva 80). Amplificati dal registro francamente erotico, vi risuonano gli echi della sua costituzione eterologica, le tracce sonore di una «ospitalità» linguistica e culturale che ha insinuato nello spazio intersoggettivo del testo visioni religiose e sessuali irriducibili ed aliene. Che cosa ne è stato di questo principio di «incarnazione poetica» eterologica del Cantico dei cantici, una volta trapiantato sul suolo, più refrattario, del monismo culturale dell’Occidente cristiano, ad esempio nella cultura rinascimentale inglese al tempo dello scisma protestante? A questa domanda proverò a dare risposta attraverso un’analisi “in controluce” dell’approccio al testo di due versioni coeve, quello della protestante King James Bible (1611) e quello della cattolica Rheims-Douay Bible (1609-1610).
Il campo dell’essere. Alcune note su poesia e psicoanalisi
The following paper addresses the huge complexity of the relationship psychoanalysis / poetry. It explores the theoretical hypothesis according to which the poetic element can be characterized as the search for a ‘state of being’ constituted through processes of ‘negativization’ of the object. Such processes would give form to the attempt of rediscovering original conditions which inspire different ways of moving across language. To say no to the world, then: in order to realize, as Alain Badiou writes, “the incessant migration towards heteroclite phenomena”. Thus, expressing the affirmative significance of poetry.
Boris Ejchenbaum, Gor’kij: fisionomia di uno scrittore
I classici ‘proibiti’ nell’età vittoriana tra pornografia e poesia saffica
Questo saggio si serve degli strumenti metodologici degli studi culturali e di genere, dei Translation Studies e della critica letteraria femminista per esaminare i modi in cui i testi classici con un contenuto sessualmente esplicito, o socialmente inaccettabile perché omoerotico, circolano nella cultura vittoriana attraverso diverse strategie traduttive ed editoriali. Se, da una parte, l’età vittoriana è stata definita «the great age of expurgation» per la tendenza censoria di curatori e traduttori, dall’altra l’Inghilterra vittoriana vede una proliferazione di discorsi sul sesso. Nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento fiorisce la produzione di pornografia, mentre le discipline dell’antropologia e della sessuologia rendono il desiderio sessuale oggetto di studio ‘scientifico’ – tutti ambiti discorsivi che attingono alle traduzioni dei classici. Al tempo stesso, l’Ellenismo tardo-vittoriano svolge un ruolo centrale nella riconfigurazione dei discorsi su sessualità e genere: la classicità viene evocata ai fini di una legittimazione culturale dell’omosessualità maschile, mentre l’omoerotismo della poesia di Saffo, puntualmente soppresso dai traduttori, alla fine del secolo viene rivelato al grande pubblico nel volume di traduzioni a cura di Henry Wharton, Sappho. Questo volume ispira la creazione di un nuovo linguaggio poetico, per la prima volta apertamente omoerotico, nelle liriche saffiche raccolte in Long Ago da ‘Michael Field’ (Katherine Bradley e Edith Cooper). La traduzione dei classici ‘proibiti’, lungi dall’essere mero oggetto di bowdlerization, emerge così come uno degli ambiti che regolamentano, e al tempo stesso alimentano, la produzione di discorsi sul sesso nell’Inghilterra vittoriana e la creazione di nuovi linguaggi poetici nella letteratura inglese.
“Ho sondato gli abissi del popolo più onesto”. Il Simposio internazionale L’antropologia di Dostoevskij. L'uomo come problema e oggetto di rappresentazione nel mondo di Dostoevskij
From October 23 to 26 of last year eminent scholars, specialists of Dostoevsky, met in Sofia for the «International Symposium: Dostoevsky’s Anthropology. The man as a problem and object of representation in the world of Dostoevsky», a conference organized at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” by the Bulgarian Dostoevsky Society and by the Institut for Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alessandra Elisa Visinoni
The contribution questions the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry starting from the process of subjectivation that analytic practice offers to singularity: while the subject speaks during the analysis, something is written behind his shoulders. The relationship between the speaking body and the writing is thus investigated thanks to the poetic nature of the unconscious, at the core of which one meets the object of the drive and the silence of the word. Unlike the nihilistic or mystical outcome, the analytical experience invites us to write what cannot be said, replacing the ideal of poetic enunciation, grounded on the creative ego’s enunciation, with the weaving of the poem from which each is constituted.
Erotismo e regimi scopici nella ricreazione televisiva de La viuda valenciana (2010) di Lope de Vega
L’articolo mette a confronto la comedia secentesca La viuda valenciana (1599) di Lope de Vega e la sua ricreazione televisiva per Estudio 1 (2010), al fine di evidenziare come, mutando il genere e i rispettivi contesti di fruizione, si delineino delle specifiche configurazioni di spettatorialità rispetto all’erotismo. Nella fattispecie, utilizzando il paradigma di regime scopico – inteso con Jay come la concrezione storica di una specifica pratica visuale determinata dall’interplay fra lo sguardo, le immagini che ad esso si offrono, e le convenzioni che ne consentono la fruizione –, le pagine che seguono mirano ad esplorare i meccanismi che regolano e dirigono la percezione della scena erotica, sia all’interno del dispositivo teatrale barocco che nella ricreazione televisiva.
Encounters, in Spite of All. Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan
The paper investigates from a literary perspective the question of the ‘missed encounter’ between two crucial authors of 20th century: Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Although both living in Paris for the most part of their adult life, sharing acquaintances and friendships, Beckett and Celan never met in person. A last chance presented in March 1970, as the poet and translator Franz Wurm, a mutual friend, invited Celan to come along and meet Beckett. The meeting never took place; few weeks thereafter, Celan drowned unobserved in the Seine. In this paper, I propose a retrospective reading of the ‘missed’, or ‘failed’ encounter between Beckett and Celan within a psychoanalytic framework. I will analyse it as a negative event, re-elaborating thus an expression used by André Green in his interpretation of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle (1903). What Green calls negative event does not provide a patho-biographical category. On the contrary, it bridges the reverberations of the psychic work on absence with the creative process of writing and the dynamics of sublimation. Shifting the attention from the bare biographical data to the textual dimension of such ‘missed encounter’, I aim to show how the writings of the two authors may be read as an articulation of an après-coup of a non-encounter which, instead of taking place in ‘real life’, opens new margins of representation of an alterity within the ‘life of writing’. As such, writing becomes—between poetry and psychoanalysis—that ‘thirdness’ harbouring the very possibility of an encounter beyond phenomenological categories, bearing testimony for an unknown transgenerational reader.
Copyright (c) 2026 Francesco Adriano Clerici
Ol’ga Frejdenberg, La trama di Tristano e Isotta sui mitologemi del segmento Egeo del Mar Mediterraneo
Here it is presented the Italian translation of Syuzhet Tristana i Isolda v mifologemakh egeyskogo otrezka sredizemnomorya (1932) by Olga Mikhailovna Freydenberg. The essay is part of the work collection Tristan i Isolda. Ot geroini lyubvi feodalnoj Evropy do bogini matriarkhalnoj Afrevrazii and it was published by the Academy of Sciences of Leningrad.
L’insidioso fascino di narrare l’erotismo della Cina imperiale: un’analisi semiotica delle tra-duzioni del Rouputuan (Il tappeto da preghiera di carne), XVII secolo
Rouputuan is a 17th-century Chinese erotic novel published under a pseudonym but traditionally attributed (though not without dispute) to the versatile writer, poet, publisher, essayist, painter, as well as author and theatrical impresario, Li Yu (1610-1680). The novel is remarkable also for its refined style, its beautiful narrative structure, and its alternance between the uses of an amiguous and sarcastic irony and a faithful adherence to the Buddhist belief and doctrine. Rouputuan has long been the object of censorship by government censorship during the last imperial dynasty, and it is mostly considered a pornographic work because it doesn’t seem to offer an explicit denunciation of the corrupt customs of the time, as it is found in other erotic novels such as the Jinpingmei. The Rouputuan seems to have creating a peculiar system of ideological values that is conveyed by a double code of communication: on the one hand, it uses the vernacular language, linked to the oral tradition, and therefore more easily conveyed; on the other hand it has an important figurative apparatus, aimed at giving greater emphasis and effectiveness to the described subject. This is strictly linked to the Chinese social context that encouraged a symbiotic connection between calligraphy, poetry and painting which was one of the basic characteristics of the literati formation. This two-part contribution intends to examine the problems related to the translation of the novel also in reference to its iconographic apparatus, to reflect on the aesthetic and literary choices to define the (cultural) boundaries in late imperial China between licit and illicit, eros and pornography, moralistic repression and evasion, vulgarity and artistic aspiration, orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
Educazione, poesia e gesto. Dell’avventura
The paper deals with the relationship between educational gesture and poetic word starting from a reading of the educational experience which, when compared to the analytic experience, can be considered as a non-prefigured and prescriptive path, but as an "open" movement generative of meaning. In this research the figures of Exile and Adventure seem to be significant.
La Torre e il Giardino. Per un'interpretazione iniziatica de Gli Anelli di Saturno di W. G. Sebald
The article proposes an analysis of W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn as a text focused on an initiatory journey. In the text there seems to be a path of gradual transformations that progressively lead the traveller-narrator to a deeper form of knowledge of reality. The initiatory journey provides for the subject to get rid of the burden of Time, to enter post-existential dimension and finally to take a detached view of the world in order to regain a knowledge based on Analogy. Analogy, one of the key themes in the book, is seen as the regulating form of the cosmos and as the principle that can withstand Destruction through correspondences between human, natural and animal components of life.
For a 'semiotic' sociology of literature: reification, ideology and vision of the world between Goldmann and Rossi-Landi
This contribution wants to show how Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s reflections, some of which are still unpublished and presented in this study for the very first time, enrich Lucien Goldmann’s ones on ideology, reification and vision of the world, thus permitting to understand the possible usage of Rossi-Landian semiotics in a Materialist-Dialectical sociology of literature as Goldmann used to conceive it.
Our epoch is superficial and vain, with no substance nor depth, crystallized within the concepts of science and technology. It is necessary to think of a rebeginning prompted by being so as to eventually inaugurate a subversion of thought. A rebeginning? And how? As the poetic word claims, one must ensure that the stars – all of them – are left to the sky and to the names that only the sky can give them. Only in this way will it be possible to witness the shift in the question of being, from the plane of existence to the plane of being itself – a shift that allows us to remove ourselves from exile, and to dwell in the unexplored boundaries of language.
Solo una scrittura automatica è vera scrittura, cioè poesia
The surrealist movement thought that in the mediumistic technique of automatic writing a way was found to renew art and literature, but the unconscious is not something that can be decided when and how to probe. Writing is a theme dealt with acutely by Jacques Lacan in his last teaching. In this article we will see how, with the assumptions of his research, we can advance the hypothesis that only automatic writing can reach the rank of poetry.
La costruzione del self narratologico: deterritorializzazione e flusso transnazionale
This essay aims to investigate the construction of the autobiographical self, in the light of contemporary narratives theories. The aim of this essay is to analyse not only the narrative styles, the cultural traditions and the social context from which the narrations take place, but also the possible distance between the construction of the Western self and of the Eastern one. The analysis will try to understand if the contemporary transnational flows and the deterritorialization could be taken into account by the cognitive narratology. In particular, the attention will be focused on the chance of this theoretical approach to keep in mind these changes and the fluidity of contemporary storytelling, which inevitably lead to the existence of flexible identity structures.
Natalia Taccetta, Dalla segnatura all’avanguardia. Agamben e Benjamin fra rovina e collezione
Translation of: Taccetta, Natalia, “Signatura e historia: una aproximación al encuentro Benjamin-Agamben”, Metahistorias, 2011. The aim of this article is to discuss the relation between Benjamin and Agamben in defining the Avant-guard as aesthetic and cognitive phenomenon.
The psychoanalytic practice of the word finds its own regime in an affinity with the saying of poetry, made up of resonances rather than meaning and narration, evocative more of figures than of meaning. A poetess like Nadia Campana, at the intersection of the experience of psychoanalysis, barely touched, and that of the poetic vision, in which she immersed herself up to being overwhelmed, offers a starting point for a reflection that accompanies us in that extreme edge where enjoyment is presented in its aspect of destruction.
Freuds Poetik des Unheimlichen oder Von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen
The article concentrates on Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a key to his poetics. The starting point of the investigation in Freud’s poetics is not his well-known interpretation of E.T.A. Hoffmann, but the narrative elements of his own text who give a clue to his notion of psychoanalysis. As not only a theoretical approach to literature, but also as a practice of poetry, The Uncanny represents an important part of Freud’s poetics.
Un'introduzione critica alle teorie contemporanee sugli affect studies
Gli affect studies, un campo di studi che ha origine negli anni Novanta in ambito anglofono grazie soprattutto al lavoro pionieristico di Brian Massumi e Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, hanno permesso di riconcepire le categorie ermeneutiche affermando la centralità non tanto dei soggetti, quanto piuttosto della loro interazione. La in-between-ness degli studi ha permesso altresì di mettere in discussione i dualismi che hanno permeato il pensiero occidentale, proponendo invece un’indagine di tipo non descrittivo che superi i tradizionali confini tra le discipline in cui viene incasellato il sapere. La pubblicazione di The Affect Theory Reader (2009) costituisce il momento cardine nella sistematizzazione degli Affect studies con il delinearsi di alcune genealogie, proposte nel volume da Melissa Gregg e Gregory Seigworth, che riflettono le varie direzioni prese da questi studi nella rilettura di Gilles Deleuze e Silvan Tomkins. Successivamente la critica femminista e neo-materialista ha individuato nell’affetto una componente incorporata che sovverte tanto i principi deterministici quanto quelli di libero arbitrio.
Abstract – Dall’invenzione del Web, sempre più studiosi si chiedono in quale misura le nuove modalità di scrittura e fruizione delle storie stiano modificando il modo in cui comunichiamo, ci relazioniamo, raccontiamo, e come influiscano sul nostro cervello. Questo contributo mette in luce come le modalità di produzione e pubblicazione dei racconti autobiografici e delle fanfiction all’interno del cyberspazio e la natura ‘convergente’ delle comunità online entro cui vengono creati renderebbero questo fenomeno culturale l’ambiente ideale per la costituzione di una identità ibrida, che contribuisce alla creazione di nuove modalità di formattazione del racconto. Dall’analisi a campione di blog, microblog e fanfiction emerge un nuovo format digitale, che si allontana sempre più dal tradizionale impianto narrativo occidentale. Parole chiave – format narrativi; storytelling digitale; identità narrativa; fanfiction; blog; microblog. Abstract – From the invention of the Web more and more scholars are asking themselves how the new ways of writing and using stories are changing the way we communicate, relate, tell, and how they affect our brain. This article highlights how the methods of production and publication of weblog, microblog and fanfiction within cyberspace and the ‘convergent’ nature of the fandom communities within which they are created would make this cultural phenomenon the ideal environment for the creation of a hybrid identity. The latter opens new horizons in terms of narrative format. The sample analysis of different blog, microblog and fanfics shows the development of a new narrative format. As a result, this format moves away from the traditional Western narrative format. Keywords – narrative format; digital storytelling; narrative identity; fanfiction; blog; microblog.
Tra poesia e psicoanalisi Note sull’opera di Durs Grünbein
Between Corporeal Turn and biocognitive models, poetry and psychoanalysis do not cease to draw attention to the crucial importance of language in order to show that human knowledge is overdetermined with phantasmatic dimensions, which do express themselves in words, rythm and rhetorical strategies. Poetry and psychoanalysis transgress the limits of selfconscious communication and grow in complexity and alternative modes of expression by showing deep distrust in naming, conceptualising and defining, thus enhancing a knowledge which obviates mastery. This account of the inextricability of psychoanalysis and poetry is worked out in a reading of the lyrical and essaystic production of Durs Grünbein, one of the most eminent contemporary German poets. The works of the poet, who spent more than 20 years in East-Germany, where he was born, explore the creative processes that preside over poetic production and emerge in everyday life, whenever the individual breaks free from the imposition of preconceived categories thwarting human emotions and feelings. Focusing upon the creative potentialities at stake in unconscious processes, Grünbein investigates the fragmentariness of our world, the fragility and precariousness of life in order to represent the impingement of “Being” on prosodic and stylistic features inspired by poetic objects, whose shapes and motion of words on the page can be compared with the internalised objects of psychoanalysis. Freud’s concept of Bahnung will also act as a beacon for navigating the creative strategies developed by Grünbein’s production in coping with internal objects and projective identifications.
Shaun Gallagher, Ermeneutica e scienze cognitive. L’ermeneutica riconsiderata alla luce delle scienze cognitive
In “Hermeneutics and the Cognitive Sciences,” which is proposed here in translation, Shaun Gallagher considers the possible relations between hermeneutics and the cognitive sciences, focusing on the points on which the two perspectives of investigation agree and on mutual contributions that each could provide to the other. Particular attention is given to the discussion of the characteristics of intersubjective understanding, considering both Diltheyan thought and the most recent results of the study of subjectivity within the field of the cognitive sciences. The article is preceded by an introduction which, in addition to presenting the most important aspects of Gallagher's argumentation, aims to highlight some of the outcomes of the current debate on the interdisciplinarity between humanities, on one side, and cognitive sciences and neuroscience, on the other.
Abitare la lingua maternale. Appunti sulla poesia
In the poem the words narrate their attempt to make themselves understood and, in their expressiveness, become holds for a lyrical understanding. But to make this possible, the poet must “know” about them, about their nature; know their imprint, their character, their posture but above all understand, where they come from and from whom, as well as from what. It is necessary, as Antonio Porta said so many times, to “go to shop”, that is, to enter an operational scriptural workshop, where matter and material know how to be present together on the table of language and language, scattered and stacked among the tools of the profession that every poet should possess and know how to manage. The poet's “job” is to dedicate time to the word, and the “task” of poetry is to give it back regenerated / reinvented from one's mother tongue. Here the poetic language must become more adherent to what must be brought to light, to what it must show: to let other people see and seize. Thinking in a poem also means remaining connected to the “place of elaboration”, in that exact point where language is installed between the experience and its deciphering in word. In all this the word experiences the life that was deemed to be its own. It will repay what it has been given.
Vom Gebrauch der Sprache in der Psychoanalyse
The psychoanalytical talking cure is interested beyond the speech act or linguistic act in language as a “structure” in the multiple sense: as a bearer of knowledge concerning pleasure/jouissance in the form of cultural imperatives (ideal demands, prohibitions and commands) in myths, fairy tales, jokes, and other manifestations of high and popular culture, and as a grammar i.e. definition of relations of subject, predicate, object (see Freud on Schreber) as well as an arsenal of logical operations that determine the course of an instinct's vicissitude: reversal into its opposite, active-passive, turning round upon the subject's own self, condensation and displacement, etc.text. These structures result from the culture process (as its interim results), emerge from processes of repression and sublimation, which for their part form the current psychic instruments, including those of sublimation and psychoanalytic work. For their part, they form the current psychic instruments, including those of sublimation and psychoanalytic work.
J. Alber, S. Iversen, H. S. Nielsen e B. Richardson, Narrativa e narratologia innaturale: oltre i modelli mimetici
Unnatural narratology is one of the most interesting proposals in today’s narratological landscape. “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models”, by J. Alber, S. Iversen, H. S. Nielsen e B. Richardson, offers an initial understanding of this perspective, while the introduction aims to further enlarge the discourse in light of its most recent developments.
Resonanz als das Andere der Vernunft Versuch einer Verortung im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs der Postmoderne
In the course of modernisation, religious narratives have lost their unifying power. They have been replaced by human reason and its objective of acting rationally towards progress, while experiences of relationships and their inextricably linked desire for resonance are receding into the background. However, people of modern societies will not be satisfied forever with efficiency-oriented feedback alone. They await recognition from outside; they await resonance. It is not without reason that Hartmut Rosa identifies the idea of the world falling silent, of one’s desperate call for the other finding no answer, as the deepest fear that drives people today. Against this background, Christa Rohde-Dachser describes the experience of resonance as a basic human need. Initially, she refers to examples from literature which show how resonance can be found in extraordinary experiences of nature, in the self-delimitation of love relationships or in the pre-reflexive experience of God, which requires no further justification. Subsequently, the author investigates resonance experiences in the field of psychoanalysis. In the final part of her work, she deals with the experience of resonance in a pluralistic society where there are different interpretations of meaning which are equally valid.
Borgna: psichiatria fenomenologica e poesie
The essay aims to investigate the connection between phenomenological psychiatry and poetry in the books on “fragile passions” and “nostalgia” of Eugenio Borgna. For him the aesthetic-artistic world has a cognitive value: the literature is not matter of literary criticism or philological attention; literature is rather source, testimony and corroboration of psychiatric knowledge.
Ariosto e il Cardinale. Appunti critici su Freud e lo scrittore creativo
Freud’s attitude towards imagination is ambivalent. On the one hand, he follows a positivist method and considers the products of the imagination as “unproven” and therefore false, on the other hand, however, in describing his clinical cases (The Case of Dora, The Wolf Man ...), he shows himself being a good writer to such an extent as to receive the Goethe prize in 1930. His insisting in many cases on looking for causes was criticized since the 1920’s, for example by L. Vygotsky. However, Freud’s psychoanalysis is not only bound to this context. We can see this aspect from some of his works’ passages which show that imagination and the dream scene constitute a sort of deconstruction apt to reinvent the reality.
Copyright (c) 2026 Gianantonio Trimarchi
We mostly think of the free act, the creative gesture, as something endometabolic, adhering to a deep and introverted disposition, like an action that responds to the will of the agent, sincere, faithful. The phantom forces us to turn, to a change of perspective. It is written down there, away from our body, in a separate space, thanks to a telegraphy. If it leaps out of secret crypts, the latter are not intimate, assimilated places, but mundane spaces that share with the crypt the latency, the unconscious character, not the proximity to the subject. The phantom comes from afar and we give it form not by shaping materials between the hands, but through distant tactility. Hands-free.
Per via di levare. Una nota su psicoanalisi e poesia
In a famous metaphor, Freud compares psychoanalysis to sculpture rather than to painting because, while the latter adds something in order to depict, the sculpture takes away something to achieve the same result. It is on the same line as Michelangelo, who had said that the block of marble on which he worked, already contained the statue he had in mind: it was only a matter of removing the more preventing his vision. What the patient in treatment shows, is intended to be similar to the excess of marble in sculpture; it covers the most important thing even if this one is hidden. Lacan takes this concept to the extreme by affirming that the essence of psychoanalytic theory is a speech without words. Poetry too, this thesis is expressed here, is the form of art which finds expression per via di levare, because its essence is not sayable: as some poets show, including Quasimodo and Verlaine, the task of poetry is to subtract this not sayable from nothing. Otherwise it is only elocutio, the art of saying in a good manner.