Alice Barale

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.

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 Is the sublime an already outdated notion that can only be discussed from a historical point of view?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.

Calderon and Shakespeare are the two main authors that lie behind Benjamin’s examination of the German baroque drama. This paper addresses the importance of Shakespeare in his difference from the other big European cousin, Calderon. This does not mean that, according to Benjamin, Shakespeare is more important than Calderon, but rather that the English author brings to light an element that in Calderon is in some way missing. This is what Benjamin in some critical texts from the period of the Trauerpielbuch calls the «dramatic». Why does Benjamin say here that the dramatic precedes the tragic? And what does this have to do with the two Shakespearian characters he refers to in a letter of the same year, Caliban and Ariel? Moreover, is the interpretation of The Tempest that this passage implies the same as the one that he suggested in his previous essay on As you like it? These questions will lead to a few passages of the Trauerspielbuch that were particularly difficult to translate and that can shed light on some important aspects of the book itself. In this context, another Shakespearian character will come to the aid, the Jacques of As you like it, with his Greek invocation «to call fools into a circle».

This essay examines two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1918, during his period in Bern, on Shakespeare’s comedy As you like it and on Le malade imaginaire by Molière When these texts are considered together, a question arises. What is the role of the comic inside Benjamin’s philosophy, in this period and also in the years to follow? Is the comic really only the other side of mourning, as Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, or does it also have another significance, a significance of its own? Moreover, why should Shakespeare’s comedy be the opposite of Molière’s comedy, as Benjamin writes in the paper on Molière? In order to answer, we are going to set a connection between Shakespeare’s «unarmed eye» and the «innocence» that Molière’s comedy indicates. This will also lead us to another text that was of much significance to Benjamin, Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. Here too, as in As you like it, there is an innocent protagonist trying to escape from the evil of a court. Yet Shakespeare’s As you like it ends with the reconstruction of a court. What does Benjamin mean, then, when he states that in As you like it «everything ends in loneliness»? The answer will provide a point of convergence between Shakespeare’s and Molière’s comedy. Benjamin’s idea of «Weltlichkeit», of which comedy is a necessary part, will prove to be an alternative to the “armed” character of the court.

The paper focuses on the quite famous but also still quite mysterious idea of “immaterial similarity” by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin argues that the production of an immaterial similarity is in some way an act of magic. But it is also at the same time an overcoming of magic itself. And the reason is that the “immaterial similarity” can open the way to a “materialistic perspective”. How can that be? In order to answer, we’ll consider Benjamin’s idea of “matter”. In Benjamin’s early writings matter appears, as we shall see, as something magic. But there is another idea, which is quite near to matter but is not exactly the same: the idea of “stuff”. The stuff is the “material” things are made of. If we search for a definition of it, we can find that it is “the mute, soft and flocky element that – like the snow in the snow globes – clouds over inside the core of things”. We are going to examine this problematic definition. We’ll discover that way that the idea of stuff marks, in comparison to matter, a possibility. A possibility that has to be seized, before it “flits past.

Born in 1947, Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He worked first on literary criticism, then on the question of realism and antirealism in philosophy, on Derrida and deconstructionism and, more recently, on the philosophy of science. In the past few years he has also authored several philosophical poems. In this issue we present two poems he wrote that are dedicated to color. Color is a recurrent theme in Norris’ poetry. Why? And why does Norris choose, for nearly ten years past, to mainly use poems for his philosophical investigations? Is there a link between his interest on color and this choice he has made? Moreover: Norris was always a strong adversary of antirealism and the extreme consequences of the “linguistic turn”. Isn’t there a contradiction between this philosophical position and the importance he gives to poetry? Perhaps color can give us a key.

Things are not the same when, even remaining the same, they are placed on the right or on the left, above or below, in front or behind. In the concrete space of our daily experience, in the space of myths and religions, we are not confronted with a neutral, homogeneous, infinite and isotropic spatiality, indifferent to directions. On the contrary, the possibility of a meaningful movement in space, rooted in my own body and in its praxis (as Kant shows in his pre-critical and critical essays devoted to the space regions and to orientation), is assigned to the three main axes (above/below, right/left, front/behind) and their correspondent differences. The same applies for the space of images and pictures. The present issue of “Aisthesis” aims at exploring how the articulations above/below, right/left, front/behind produce a difference – syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and symbolic – in the iconic domain, and at investigating what theoretical models can be employed in order to understand such difference

The starting point of this paper is a statement that Benjamin makes in a group of notes he writes for his project of a detective novel. Benjamin writes here that «criminal and detective could be so friends [so befreundet sein] as Sherlock Holmes and Watson». We’ll try to understand the meaning of this statement through the investigation of the detective topic in two moments of its fore and afterlife: its fore life in Benjamin’s meditation on the baroque and its after life in Sherlock Holmes’s most recent apparition, in the BBC series Sherlock. One of the most interesting elements of this series is in fact the relationship – which is barely sketched in Conan Doyle’s stories – between Sherlock Holmes and his antagonist, the maths professor Jim Moriarty. We’ll see that in Benjamin’s notes for a detective novel the criminal is not a maths professor but a psychoanalyst. What is the difference, anyway, between professor Moriarty’s knowledge and Sherlock’s knowledge? In fact, we will find out that criminal and detective are closer to one other than what we may be induced to think – close but not coincident.

«The ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him, but the philosopher, who speaks of colour only in a general way, begins to rave». This is still true now: the philosophical discussion on colour is very lively. There is a debate within Anglo-American philosophy that has been going on for the past fifty years, and is still going on today, as is demonstrated by the imminent publication of the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, which we are happy to announce in this issue. Colour is something very familiar but, nevertheless, it is also a subject on which philosophers never cease to raise questions. Why?