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Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo,
Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers
have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy
itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what
acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called
"sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the
domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the
fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long
been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without
which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as
to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies.
In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its
claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider
it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which
had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an
occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather,
to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests
itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous.
Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable
consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a
drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant
combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling
describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing
closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of
intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the
bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my
"here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical
medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world
to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's
"being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature
of identity.
Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo,
Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers
have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy
itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what
acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called
"sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the
domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the
fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long
been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without
which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as
to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies.
In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its
claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider
it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which
had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an
occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather,
to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests
itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous.
Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable
consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a
drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant
combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling
describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing
closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of
intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the
bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my
"here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical
medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world
to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's
"being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature
of identity.
One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to
publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of
fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated
a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and diversity,
its depth and scope, and, above all, for its unfailing rigor and
brilliance. In Time and Festivity, Andrea Cavalletti collects
Jesi's finest essays, ranging from his groundbreaking work on myth
and politics to his reflections on time, festivity, and revolt. He
explores the significance of texts by Rimbaud, Rilke, Lukacs, and
Pavese and the mythological language of the biblical story of
Susanna. Carefully annotated and referenced, and enriched by a
first-person account of Jesi's intellectual biography, Time and
Festivity provides a precious guide to the methodology and approach
at the core of Jesi's thought, displaying how his personal, vitally
intense via negativa might in fact originate from his early
statement: "All I have ever written is poetry."
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Class (Hardcover)
Andrea Cavalletti; Translated by Elisa Fiaccadori; Edited by Alberto Toscano
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R549
Discovery Miles 5 490
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being
in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the
foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in
formations great or small, that sad figure returns the hatred of
minorities is rekindled and the pied-pipers of the crowd stand
triumphant.Class, by Andrea Cavalletti, is a striking montage of
diverse materials Marx and Jules Verne, Benjamin and Gabriel Tarde.
In it, Cavalletti asks whether the untimely concept of class is
once again thinkable. Faced with new pogroms and state racism, he
challenges us to imagine a movement that would unsettle and
eventually destroy the crowd.
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