E’ tempo di aggiornare: recensioni di filosofia pratica

Come dicevo nel post precedente, negli ultimi mesi ho scritto diverse recensioni di argomento filosofico. Spero vi possano interessare.
Queste qui sono tutte apparse su Moralia On The Web:

Antonio Da Re, Le parole dell’etica, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2010

Jonathan Safran Foer, Se niente importa. Perchè mangiamo gli animali?, Guanda, Milano 2010

Michela Marzano, Etica oggi, Fondazione Ericksson, Trento 2011


E’ tempo di aggiornare: recensioni di estetica

C’è nessuno?

Io sono tornata. Negli ultimi mesi ho scritto varie recensioni di libri di filosofia per altri blog e siti. Qui vi posto i link alle recensioni di opere di estetica. Spero che possano tornare utili a qualcuno.

Per wwww.aisthesisonline.it ho recensito:

Tiziana Andina, Arthur Danto: un filosofo pop, Carocci, Roma 2010

Catharine Abell, Katerina Bantinaki (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010

Per www.moraliaontheweb.com ho recensito:

Paolo D’Angelo, Estetica, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011


From the blog “Letters with Character”: my letter to Proust’s Narrator. / Dal blog “Letters with Character”. La mia lettera al Narratore proustiano.

My sugary love letter to the Narrator of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”.

Un’ incursione semiseria in un bel blog. La mia sdolcinata lettera d’amore al Narratore di “Alla ricerca del tempo perduto”.

http://letterswithcharacter.blogspot.com/2010/07/marcel-proust-in-search-of-lost-time.html


Notes from a randomly selected book. 6.

Bruce Nauman, Human/Need/Desire (1983)

Bruce Nauman, Human/Need/Desire (1983)

“If it passes, then it was not true love.” Why was it not in that case? Is it our experience, that only this feeling and not that endures? Or are we using a picture: we test love for its inner character, which the immediate feeling does not discover. Still, the picture is  important to us. Love, what is important, is not a feeling, but something deeper, which merely manifests itself in the feeling.

L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on The Philosophy of Psychology, 115, 1946-1949.

What if it does not pass?


Notes from a randomly selected book. 5.

Thoughts reduced to paper are generally nothing more than the footprints of a man walking in the sand. It is true that we see the path he has taken; but to know what he saw on the way, we must use our own eyes.

Schopenhauer (in P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein. Meaning and Mind. Part I: Essays, 1990).

Murales - Berlin Kreuzberg

Murales - Berlin Kreuzberg


Notes from a randomly selected book. 4.

biancaWell, this was not exactly randomly selected. But it was not me who picked it out. A friend of mine brought it to me, just for fun…or not?

If you know me a little you might find it difficult to believe it, but I have just finished reading He’s just not that into you, a celebrated self-help manual from the authors of Sex and the City. Surely, I like the idea of having casually happened to read it, because I am too picky and proud to buy a book like this. But I must admit that I really enjoyed reading it.

So, here are a few excerpts that might give you an idea of why I liked it (and, maybe, a reason to read it).

Hey. I  know that guy you’re dating. Yeah, I do. He’s that guy that so tired from work, so stressed about the project he’s working on. He’s just been through an awful breakup and it’s really hitting him hard. His parents’ divorce has scarred him and he has trust issues. Right now he has to focus on his career. He can’t get involved with anyone until he knows what his life is about. … God he’s so complicated. He is a man made up entirely of your excuses. And the minute you stop making excuses for him he will completely disappear from your life. … A man would rather be trampled by elephants that are on fire than tell you that he’s just not that into you. That’s why we have written this book.

I know a couple who date for many years and then broke up. They had a lot of mutual friends and everyone took it very hard. Five years later, they got back together again and are now happily married. During the time apart, there were no dates or phone calls or being chums. They didn’t torture, confuse, or hurt each other in the process. They moved on with their lives, grew up separately,  and only then realized, much later, that they could be together again.

Hmmm, that’s enough. I am not even sure that those citations work. But tonight I have the feeling that the book has worked for me. And I hope such feeling won’t last tomorrow.


Notes from a randomly selected book. 3.

P1010377 copia

A Short Film

It was not meant to hurt

It had been made for happy remembering

By people who were still too young

To have learned about memory.

Now it is a dangerous weapon, a time-bomb,

Which is a kind of body-bomb, long term, too.

Only film, a few frames of you skipping, a few seconds,

You aged about ten there, skipping and still skipping.

Not very clear grey, made out of mist and smudge,

This thing has a fine fuse, less a fuse

Than a wavelenght attuned, an electronic detonator

To what lies in your grave inside us.

And how that explosion would hurt

Is not just an idea of horror but a flesh of fine sweat

Over the skin-surface, a bracing of nerves

For something that has already happened.

From: Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (1998).


Notes from a randomly selected book. 2.

Gli dei ci danno per ogni cosa buona due cattive

e gli uomini che sono ancora bambini se la prendono a male.

Ma gli uomini maturi sono capaci di portare questo peso

e fanno emergere il lato positivo delle cose.

Pindaro, Pit. III, 145 (trad. mia)

The gods give us for every good thing two evil ones

and men who are children take this badly.

But the manly ones bear it,

turning the brightness outward.

Pyndar, Pyth. III, 145

Pindaro di Giovanni Pietro Bellori

Giovanni Pietro Bellori - Pindaro (1685)


Notes from a randomly selected book. 1.

Francis Bacon - Study from a human body (1949)

Francis Bacon - Study from a human body (1949)

From Jacques Barzun’s ‘Art in The Vacuum of Belief’ in The Use and Abuse of Art (1973), about the status of contemporary art:

Art is largely devoted to show the contemptibilty of the human animal or, by pointedly neglecting him, his irrelevance and superfluity.

Nor is this repudiation directed at the single specimen or type. Art fights just as relentlessly against the large gropus, classes, masses, nations and their institutions.

As Vladimir Nabokov, at the launching of a new book, said to a reporter: ‘I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine’. This hardly improvised verdict on himself can cause no surprise; we acquiesce in the artist’s boasting of madness and lucidity together.

But more important in the paradox is the fear behind the pose, the fear of being caught in a belief. Any degree of self-acceptnace would be an acknowledgement of the power of life, with all the risks involved. … This shuffling stance is not new, and judging from its frequence among our aristoi, not easily avoidable. It marks the supreme degree of self-consciousness, which has become the ruling passion: the mind automatically rejects anything that might imply confidence, much less self-confidence. Now confidence is a word built on the root meaning faith; absence of faith, its studied rejection, is the warrant for my calling our peculiar situation a vacuum of belief. It differs radically from the old sorrow at the loss of a common underlying belief; it is not the distress if facing a chaos of warring beliefs; it is not a painful skepticism about a remnant of strong beliefs; it is the inbred avoidance od the risks inherent in any belief; it is a flight from the sensation of belief – and therefore from life itself.

I don’t know whether I agree or not with this. Surely, it is a very broad claim, and I am deliberately suspicious of any broad claim. Though, it resonates in me.


Poesia postuma

Un giorno d’estate

un giorno d’estate

incontro te.

Sognando gelati e caramelle

si va, si va.

Noi sogniamo voi

voi sognate noi…

 

E’ probabile che il 1987 sarà ricordato negli annali di F. L.* per l’unica pubblicazione con un grande gruppo editoriale: una poesia sul giornalino “Poochie e i suoi allegri amici”, edito da Mondadori. La poesia è un esercizio anacronista-citazionista, in accordo con la moda letteraria del tempo. E’ anche un esempio di poesia postuma (non di pubblicazione postuma, si noti), dal momento che il suo significato qua creazione letteraria si è chiarito all’autrice solo molti anni dopo il componimento e la pubblicazione dell’opera stessa.

I primi due versi richiamano il titolo di un’opera teatrale di Jon Fosse, il celebre drammaturgo norvegese contemporaneo: “Un giorno d’estate”, appunto, opera che ha visto la luce nel 1999.

Il terzo verso è il recipiente del messaggio poetico della giovane autrice, qui enunciato in tutta la sua nuda semplicità.

Il quarto verso estende la trama delle citazioni dall’ambito del testo scritto a quello del testo raffigurato, poiché intende richiamare la copertina di un numero dello stesso settimanale “Poochie e i suoi allegri amici”, pubblicato nel giugno 1989 (vedi fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

 

 

Nel quinto verso la ripetizione della coppia di monosillabi apre il discorso poetico, nella sua musicalità quasi minimalista – un’anticipazione di tendenze che andranno affermandosi potentemente nel decennio successivo – dalla dimensione individuale a quella plurale, più specificamente impersonale.

Il sesto e il settimo verso, infine, connotano la dimensione plurale in senso marcatamente personalistico: il “si” è qui un “noi” e un “voi”: sono chiari l’assunzione di responsabilità da parte della giovane autrice e insieme l’appello ai suoi giovani lettori (e non). Non esiterei a definire questa coppia di versi come una vera e propria “meditazione grammaticale”: se letti di fila essi appaiono come la coniugazione della prima e seconda persona plurale del presente indicativo del verbo “sognare”, più la ripetizione della prima persona plurale, “noi”. E’ così che il soggetto sognante si trasforma in oggetto sognato: ciò accade sia al “noi”, comprensivo della figura della giovane autrice, che al “voi” degli interlocutori, degli “altri”. Il breve componimento si conclude in un gioco di specchi che ne prolunga eternamente il messaggio: ciò che fu un incontro è diventato un sogno, l’esperienza che facciamo al presente (“incontro te”) un attimo dopo è già ricordo, e torna ad abitare il territorio del sogno, dove l’identità del sognante è costante terreno di scambio.

Un talento sprecato, si dirà.

 

* I miei annali [N.d.R.]


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