Pierpaolo Antonello

René Girard is one of the most divisive and striking intellectuals of the 20th century. Over the past forty years, his work has continued to exert an influence across literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences. Echoing the format of his early works, Evolution and Conversion brings Girard into dialogue with two sympathetic interviewers and allows him to speak candidly about the major tenets of his life and thought. Hailed by Michel Serres as "the Charles Darwin" of human sciences, Girard is in fact one of the few thinkers who has given full consideration to an evolutionary perspective to explain the emergence of culture and institutions. Evolution and Conversion draws out not only this aspect of his thought but also emphasises the centrality of religion to his work. Girard's reflection on the relationship between violence and religion is both original and persuasive and, given the urgency of this issue in our contemporary world, in need of a reappraisal.

... Los orígenes de la cultura: conversaciones con Pierpaolo Antonello y João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Información General. Autores: René Girard, Pierpaolo Antonello, João Cezar de Castro Rocha; Editores: Madrid : Trotta, 2006; Año de publicación: 2006; País: España; ...

No other European country experienced the disruption of political and everyday life suffered by Italy in the so-called 'years of lead' (1969-c.1983), when there were more than 12,000 incidents of terrorist violence. This experience affected all aspects of Italian cultural life, shaping political, judicial and everyday language as well as artistic representation of every kind. In this innovative and broad-ranging study, experts from the fields of philosophy, history, media, law, cinema, theatre and literary studies trace how the experience and legacies of terrorism have determined the form and content of Italian cultural production and shaped the country's way of thinking about such events.

"The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives.

Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence.

Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world."

The links between literature and science have been the subject of increasing interest in recent years, as writers and scientists have tried to bridge the gap between 'the two cultures'. In this volume dedicated to the work of Pat Boyde, the distinguished British Dantist, leading scholars from Britain, North America and Italy explore this interdisciplinary movement in Italian literature. The twelve chapters encompass four broad periods - Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment to Positivism, and the Twentieth Century - and examine new connections between the discourses of literature and science in the works of Italy's greatest writers, from Dante to Calvino.

Proceedings of a conference held in Falconara, Italy in 2006. It is a systematic appraisal of the explanatory power of the René Girard's interpretative framework as put forward in Mensonge romantique et verité romanesque, specifically in relation to one of the key European literary tradition. The book aims to show how many classic authors of Italian literature can be illuminated by Girard's mimetic theory. Contributions on Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Manzoni, Svevo, Pasolini, Sciascia, Morante.

The representation of violence in contemporary cinema analyzed through René Girard's theory of sacrifice and scapegoating. It includes essays by René Girard (The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson), Andrew McKenna (Federico Fellini), Diana Culbertson (Au revoir les enfants, Louis Malle), Edmund Arens (Dead man walking, Tim Robbins), Pierpaolo Antonello (Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino), Maria Stella Barberi (The Funeral, Abel Ferrara), Giuseppe Fornari (Eyes wide shut, Stanley Kubrik), Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Alessandro Castelli (Lars Von Trier), Marco Rovelli (Dogville, Lars Von Trier), Olivier Maurel (Zelig, Woody Allen)

"This book challenges widespread and largely negative assumptions about Italian postmodernism and postmodernism in general. It considers contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for pluriform struggles of an ethical or political kind, struggles which build upon, whilst rejecting the essentialist assumptions behind, conventional notions of artistic commitment, or impegno.
Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media - from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and the giallo; from feminism to pensiero debole; from theatrical performance to shared practices of cultural memory - the volume charts instances of ethical commitment and emancipatory social and political intervention in Italian culture within a post-ideological and post-hegemonic framework, siding with a more constructive and less 'apocalyptic' analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy. This balancing act is described by the contributors as 'postmodern impegno'. The authors, artists and thinkers discussed in the essays include, among others, Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Vattimo and Antonio Tabucchi."

This essay brings Michel Serres' «books of foundation» into a dialogue with René Girard's theory of the origin of culture, by extending Girard's insights about the foundational mechanism of cultural and social order on a spatial matrix, broadly defined. Foundational myths are predicated on ritualistic sacrificial practices that structure both the physical and the social spaces through principles of exclusion, which define physical limits and boundaries, but also the geometry of political order and societal structures.

Che rapporto c'è fra gli scrittori veneti e il loro paesaggio? Come è stato visto e raccontato questo territorio dalla narrativa e dalla poesia contemporanee, soprattutto in quel cruciale passaggio storico tra una ruralità arcaica proprio della prima metà del secolo, alla ...

In an interview with Gabriella Poli in 1976, Primo Levi explained that all his books had been born in pairs, as twins: two books on his Lager experience - If This is a Man ( Se questo e un uomo , 1947) and The Truce ( La tregua , 1963) - were followed by two collections of science-fiction short-stories - Storie naturali ('Natural Histories', 1966) and Vizio di forma ('Formal Defect', 1971) (partly collected in a single volume in English, The Sixth Day ). The unconventional and heterogeneous (auto)biography of an inorganic chemist, The Periodic Table ( Il sistema periodico , 1975) was planned to be paired with a book on the trade of an organic chemist, with the working title of Il doppio legame ('The Double Bond'). Levi never completed this book; instead he paired The Periodic Table with the fourteen stories of The Wrench ( La chiave a stella , 1978), centred on a highly skilled Piedmontese master rigger, Libertino Faussone. This particular coupling might look looser than the others, but it has striking significance for our understanding of Levi's work. Its prime effect is to underscore the challenge Levi presents to abstract, systematic notions of scientific knowledge (implicit in the image and concept of the ' sistema periodico'), in favour of the technical, applied skills common to both the (inorganic) chemist and the rigger. At the centre of Levi's concerns in these two books, in other words, is the idea of knowledge as being both a material and existential construction rather than a purely abstract or theoretical one, as well as a notion of the unity of art (as craft) and technology, at both the experimental and manual levels. Taken together, the diptych of The Periodic Table and The Wrench offers one of the most interesting of modern representations - in philosophical, epistemological, aesthetic and ethical terms - of what Levi would call the homo faber , man as maker or tool-maker, the fabricator and artist who works upon hard material such as stone or wood.

Il Divo: A discussion Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008) is, indisputably, one of the key films of recent years, and it has already generated a large amount of analysis and debate. We present this batch of four papers (an interpretation, two responses and a reply to these responses) as a contribution to this debate. We hope to reprise this model of discussion in relation to key films (new or old) and key themes in future issues.

This essay is a general discussion on the possible contours taken by the the notion of impegno in the contemporary Italian context, seen from the point of view of critical and academic practices, particularly in the light of contextual socio-economic, technological and disciplinary changes. While an alignment with the  paradigmatic shift occurred at the international level where a number of studies have been discussing the emancipatory role of literature, cinema, and the media from the point of view of readers and audiences is felt much needed, a paradigmatic refashioning of the critical debate and of the public sphere is currently occurring, which gives rise of new possibilities for critical engagement facilitated by the so-called Web 3.0. This new media-ecology provides fora by which the critical practice is much more horizontal and democratic in nature, while authorship and readership present a more dynamic cross-fertilisation

Taking as its point of departure the existing critical literature on the intersections between René Girard’s and Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenetic theories, this essay aims to add further considerations to the debate by discussing some of Agamben’s intuitions within a Girardian paradigmatic explanatory framework. I show how by regressing the archeological analysis to a pre-institutional and pre-legal moment, and by re-examining the antinomic structure of the sacred in its genetic organizing form (so briskly dismissed by Agamben in Homo Sacer), one can account more cogently for certain key issues relevant to Agamben’s theoretical project, such as the “paradox of sovereignty,” the nature of the “state of exception,” and the dissociation between culpa and individual responsibility in archaic law, as recently discussed in Karman. I also put forward arguments concerning the limitations of Agamben’s immanent ontology to account for the zoe/bios distinction as a key structural element of h...

ABSTRACT This conversation was held in Pordenone, Italy, in September 2008, during a major cultural event that takes place every year. What follows is an expanded version of our conversation, including a few questions she received from the public and a few more questions that Judith Butler kindly took from us after the event. As she writes on contemporary politics, literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminism, our interview was conducted with little regard for academic boundaries. Butler’s work is sliced by problem, not by discipline, and she masters different languages which, once specialized and authoritative within a given field, can be merged and applied to the discussion of such issues as the American wars, the nature of democracy, the Israeli/Palestinian schism, and the politics of gender. The authors of this interview—a literary theorist and a political theorist—prepared their questions so that realms could be straddled, boundaries dissolved, and theory restored to its original architectonic task. The choice of the topics to be discussed offers a biased and selected view, and our conversation remained focused on issues that Butler has critically explored in her recent writings: war, precarious life, and the subject(s) of responsibility. We would like to go right away in medias res and ask you something about where you locate yourself intellectually. You engage with a number of European thinkers, especially in your recent work. For example, in Giving an Account of Oneself, you dialogue with such figures as Levinas, Hegel, Adorno, Cavarero, Laplanche, Foucault, etc. You studied with Gadamer in Germany and visit regularly European academic institutions. Is it correct (or does it make any sense) to call you an American philosopher? It is true, though, that I studied European philosophy but I don’t know whether I could describe my thinking as belonging to a nationality. Of course, I am a US citizen, and that accounts for many things, including my mobility and privilege. But even the notion of “America” is problematic for many reasons, as it includes Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, and because it does not describe very well the differences it includes and effaces. So, I am not sure that I would choose nationality as a way to describing my thinking. Others may well describe me in that way, and that is their prerogative. It is true though that as I trained in philosophy in the US, I can surely make use of European philosophy in a freer way. I can and do work on Foucault without being a Foucaultian, I worked with Gadamer without becoming a Gadamerian, I could bring Adriana Cavarero together with Levinas. Because the link is productive for me. So, for some, it might be a kind of intellectual promiscuity that characterizes some kind of thinking in America, but let us not call it “American” thinking. Although my own formation is in European philosophy, the foci of my political analyses tend to be U.S. and this affects the lexicon that I use. Maybe it is the conjunction of the two that characterizes what I do, but these terms are too large for me, and get easily lost here. Some people (in America) have argued that many American intellectuals visit (figuratively) the graves of the European ‘mighty dead’ because they need to ‘romanticize’ their intellectual outlook. Rorty, for one, thought that the American philosophical discourse had become just too academic, too dryly professional… I don’t think I’ve dug up the mighty European dead from their graves. And it is not that I want to live in the shadow of a certain patriarchal lineage of thought; rather, I want to mobilize some of the resources that we might find, say, in German Idealism for the purposes of thinking politics and culture in new ways. Maybe Rorty was thinking about a certain masculine club, but I do not seek entrance there. Indeed, the most important question for me is transposition and translation, in effect, how to bring certain intellectual traditions into the present, or how to discover their active traces there. For instance, I do think that some European traditions, some traditions of French thought, including some traditions of structuralism and post-structuralism, allow for a...

... It was written by a relatively unknown writer, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), an Egyptian-born Italian poet, living at the ... Giusi Baldissone, “Beatrice e Marinetti: Da Dante a 'Venezianella,'” in Il personaggio nelle arti della narrazione, ed. Franco Marenco (Rome: Edizioni ...

What I am going to suggest is that Cosmicomics, as well as being allegorical or imaginative revisitations of sterile scientific theories, represents the natural development of the “rough” materials that constitute scientific theories themselves. In his writings, Calvino tests the poietic faculty of scientific ...

Imagine a world without things. It would be not so much an empty world as a blurry, frictionless one: no sharp outlines would separate one part of the uniform plenum from the other; there would be no resistance against which to stumb a toe or test a theory or struggle stalwartly. No ...

This chapter discusses the role of sacrifice and sacrificial rituals in the development of human consciousness, both in terms of self-awareness and of moral outlook. The articulation of a theory of the evolution of consciousness from an archeological reading of the sacrificial matrix would help to chart a cluster of behavioral structures and cognitive elements which may have contributed to the development of proto-consciousness and conscience. This would include the attention-grabbing and strong emotional response elicited by ritual sacrifice; the cognitive and mnemonic reinforcements provided by repetition and ritualization; the employment of ecstatic practices and transcendental experiences; the emergence of symbolism and the “mythical” mind; the capacity to subvert kin affiliation and the emergence of codes of practice (morality) which overrun solidarity and personal attachments; and the later crystallization of mechanisms for “sacrificial creations of subjectivity” in the form o...

"Bruno Munari (1907-1998) played a pioneering role in the evolution of twentieth-century art and design, his work exerting an influence that stretched far beyond the borders of Italy. Munari described the roots of his work as his ‘Futurist past’, but his influences were extremely varied, also reflecting the aesthetics and sensibilities of Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism. This exhibition will reveal the richness of Munari’s artistic research between 1927 and 1950, spanning the artist’s Futurist phase and early investigation of the possibilities of kinetic sculpture, the immediate post-war years during which he became a leading figure of abstract painting and his subsequent experiments with projected light and installation-based work. Curated by Miroslava Hajek in collaboration with Luca Zaffarano and the Massimo & Sonia Cirulli Archive, this exhibition will reveal the full richness of Munari’s playful, irreverent and endlessly creative career. The accompanying catalogue includes scholarly texts by Pierpaolo Antonello (University of Cambridge) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Harvard University) as well as a text by Alberto Munari (University of Padua)" -- Publisher's web site.

ABSTRACT Questo saggio sostiene che c’è stato un abuso della nozione di ‘crisi’ nel contesto critico italiano, il quale ha spesso trascurato aspetti cruciali inerenti la produzione cinematografica e proponendo analisi alquanto schematiche, spesso fortemente ideologizzate, rispetto al rapporto tra estetica e politica. Il saggio critica inoltre il legame causale, proposto da alcuni critici italiani, tra la comparsa di un’estetica postmoderna nel cinema italiano e un generale declino delle strategie politiche emancipatorie nell’arte. Una breve panoramica sulla produzione cinematografica recente dimostra la necessità di non dissociare il giudizio di ‘valore’ di un determinato periodo della storia cinematografica nazionale dal suo particolare contesto di produzione; in termini estetici concetti quali ‘realismo’ o ‘postmodernismo’ dovrebbero essere intesi come ‘modi’ narrativi che possono essere più o meno efficaci in termini politici secondo i diversi contesti storici di ricezione. Come verrà dimostrato attraverso una breve analisi di Palombella rossa di Nanni Moretti, Gomorra di Matteo Garrone e Il divo di Paolo Sorrentino, da una parte queste due modalità possono coesistere nella stessa opera; dall’altra una particolare idea di impegno politico emerge evidente in film in cui la modalità narrativa dominante è proprio quella auto-referenziale, metanarrativa e postmoderna.

Taking as its point of departure the existing critical literature on the intersections between René Girard’s and Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenetic theories, this essay aims to add further considerations to the debate by discussing some of Agamben’s intuitions within a Girardian paradigmatic explanatory framework. I show how by regressing the archeological analysis to a pre-institutional and pre-legal moment, and by re-examining the antinomic structure of the sacred in its genetic organizing form (so briskly dismissed by Agamben in Homo Sacer), one can account more cogently for certain key issues relevant to Agamben’s theoretical project, such as the “paradox of sovereignty,” the nature of the “state of exception,” and the dissociation between culpa and individual responsibility in archaic law, as recently discussed in Karman. I also put forward arguments concerning the limitations of Agamben’s immanent ontology to account for the zoe/bios distinction as a key structural element of his particular take on biopolitics, viewing this specifically in the light of Girard’s anti-sacrificial interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.

This essay examines Bruno Munari’s innovative picture books within the broader context of his ‘major’ artistic work. Specifically, it illustrates and discusses how Munari’s production that is linked to Futurism, Abstractionism, or Concrete art, has been remediated in his books and activities for children. Munari’s work is on this score an unparalleled example of the ways the visual language of experimental art could be translated into effective and meaningful visual experiences for lay people, including children.

This essay examines three exemplar cases of Italian industrial cinema, a genre that experienced a particular and extended apogee during the decades of Italy’s economic boom: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Sette canne, un vestito (1948), Ermanno Olmi’s Costruzioni meccaniche Riva (1956), and Vittorio De Seta and Franco Dodi’s Gela 1959: pozzi a mare (1960). Aims of this analysis are to tease out some ideological and aesthetic tensions that could appear to point, on the one hand, to some formal and thematic continuity between pre-World War II output and that of later years; and, on the other, to the particular role played by technology in shaping a specific formalistic vocabulary in these films.