Claudio Rozzoni

The sublime is a concept that has never ceased to attract and to fascinate scholars. In its classical formulation, it dates back to the eighteenth century, but some of the issues that characterize its origin – such as the border between representation and the unrepresentable, or between form and formless, pleasure and terror – return strongly in contemporary thinking. In this regard, opinions are divided. Is the sublime an already outdated notion that can only be discussed from a historical point of view? Or does it also contain important elements for the current philosophical debate? Moreover, have the transformations that the sublime has undergone in the contemporary world substantially distorted it, or have they instead brought to light some new possible implications of this concept? This issue of "Itinera" is dedicated to these and other similar questions, starting from the traditional definitions of the sublime between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until its most recent interpretations.

Autour d’une question ‘inédite’ de Merleau-Ponty : Proust philosophe?Le présent essai tentera d’approfondir certains des aspects les plus significatifs des pages, toutes encore inédites, que Merleau-Ponty avait écrites en vue du Cours du jeudi de 1953-1954 au Collège de France sur Le problème de la parole. Il se concentrera en particulier sur la partie du cours dans laquelle Merleau-Ponty formule une question importante concernant l’auteur de la Recherche, ou plutôt là où il se demande si Proust est un philosophe. Il cherche à comprendre comment Merleau-Ponty répond à cette question, développant des aspects de sa propre pensée qu’on retrouvera de manière prépondérante dans l’oeuvre future. Les questions du «platonisme de Proust», du statut des «essences alogiques», de l’«entrelacement des choses et de notre vie» – pour en citer quelques-unes – enrichissent ces pages et contribuent à reproblématiser tant les articulations de réfl exions qui jouent un rôle décisif dans la constellation merleaupontienne que l’approche de la lecture du chef-d’oeuvre proustien. La Recherche du temps perdu, en effet, comme le suggèrent ces écrits merleau-pontiens peut être vue comme une «recherche de la vérité». Une recherche de la vérité qui se décline ici, précisément pour dégager les pouvoirs de la parole, en une «reconquête de l’espace».About a Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Inedited’ Question : Is Proust a Philosopher?The present essay will attempt to deepen some of the most significant aspects of pages, still all unpublished, that Merleau-Ponty had written for the 1953-54 Thursday course at the Collège de France on The Problem of Speech. This essay will concentrate in particular on the part of the course in which Merleau-Ponty expresses an important question concerning the author of the Remembrance of Things Past, or rather where Merleau-Ponty wonders if Proust is a philosopher. This essay tries to understand how Merleau-Ponty responds to this question, developing aspects of his own thought which one will find in a predominant way in the future work. The questions of “Proust’s Platonism,” the status of “a-logical essences,” the “interlacing of things with our life” – in order to mention a few – enriches these pages and contributes to a reproblematization of the reflective articulations which play a decisive role in Merleau-Ponty’s constellation that the reading of Proust’s masterpiece approaches. Remembrance of Things Past, as indeed, these Merleau-Ponty writings suggest, may be viewed as a “search for truth.” This is a search for truth that develops into, in order precisely to present the powers of speech, a “reconquest of space”.

This monographic section of “Itinera” develops some of the questions which were raised at the summer school “Aesthetics, Technique and Emotion”, held in June 2020 at the Lake Como School of Advanced Studies (https://aeat.lakecomoschool.org/). The summer school was organized by the University of Milan in collaboration with the European Seminar of Aesthetics (https://sites.unimi.it/eu_aesthetics/). The aim of the school was to investigate the meaning of aesthetics today, in light of the different changes that are occurring in our aesthetic perception of the world. How is technology transforming the way we view the world and art, and what role do emotions still play in this context? What is the value of the performing arts in facing these new challenges, and how is aesthetic experience related to the current issues of morality and politics? These are some of the problems that were raised at the school and this issue seeks to develop them further.

Starting from Arthur Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, we take into consideration two works of art – Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box – where the notion of interpretation, according to the American philosopher, plays a prominent role in the process of creation. By focusing on the legacy of Duchamp’s and Warhol’s works, in the light of the Deleuzian notions of Humor and Irony, this paper shows that the two artists can be considered as the first promoters of the “aesthetics of surfaces”. Particularly, Warhol seems to listen to the “superficial claim” of the artificial, that is to say a copy of a copy, that can be brought «to the point where is reversed into the simulacrum».

The œuvreof Portuguese photographer Jorge Molder can be construed as a series of series. These series are filled with a wealth of absent presences, of possibilities that arise and fade without ever reaching actualization or confirmation, thereby contributing to create a ‘detective-story’ atmosphere. This also proves to be true as regards Molder’s own body. Indeed, his face, his hands are recurrent “subjects” running through his 40 years of work. Even so, when we ask who the man is that we see in Molder’s series, the answer is problematic. On the one hand, we know it is “him”, insofar as he himself is the model for his iconic “constructions”. On the other hand, Molder’s images are not “self-portraits” aiming to reveal the essence of his self, but rather “self-representations” creating a peculiar “character” who is and yet is not him: a double.