Carlo Galli

The lecture begins with a definition of violence as contingency – i.e. corporeity and morality – considered as the essence of man and instrumental to it. It will be then pointed out how the relationship between violence and politics has been understood by the main tradition of modern thought: rationalism, dialectics and negative thought. Lastly, it will be shown that the main modern political institution – the State – is not able anymore to neutralize violence, and that the latter permeates through the whole social, economical and political body both in new and in old shapes.

Histological images convey more than just color and shape; they require a layered interpretive process to reveal their full meaning. This contribution argues that histological literacy rests on 3 intertwined modes of interpretation, following semiotic theory. First, the iconic mode helps learners build mental libraries by recognizing visual similarities in tissue architecture. Next, the indexical mode treats observed features as clues to underlying biological functions and pathologies. Finally, the symbolic mode integrates these observations into a shared vocabulary and diagnostic framework. Building on Peirce’s triad, Barthes’s denotation–connotation distinction, Goodman’s view of representation, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception, we show that understanding histology relies on learned visual codes and sensorimotor engagement. These insights inform pedagogical strategies—such as curated image sets, scaffolded inference tasks, explicit symbol teaching, and embodied exercises like gestural mapping and virtual reality—to guide students from initial confusion toward confident, fluent interpretation.

Disease, this essay contends, lives at the threshold where the felt immediacy of the lifeworld touches the measured abstractions of science, each continually shaping the other. Seen from that border, a lesion or lab value is never complete without its human resonance, and a story of pain or fear is never fully told until its biological underpinnings come into view. Every diagnostic exchange therefore pauses the flow of ordinary life, translates it into clinical language, and then returns it, changed, to the person who must carry it forward. The stakes of that translation grow sharper wherever social power skews who is heard and who is helped. A medicine that keeps faith with both sides of the threshold can investigate molecules without losing sight of meanings, meet suffering with knowledge as well as compassion, and in doing so open fresh paths for teaching, policy, and practice.