Enea Bianchi

At what point does a sporting practice cease to be a game and become a mere procedure? This paper examines traditional archery as a case study in the gradual erosion of the lusory attitude – the voluntary acceptance of inefficiency that constitutes a game as something more than a technique for producing outcomes. This erosion unfolds along three dimensions: standardizing competition formats; traditional equipment incorporating modern designs; and regulatory loophole exploitation. The result is a lusory chasm – a middle ground that imitates Olympic archery’s quantitative logic while relinquishing the qualitative complexity that gave the practice its value. The paper concludes by proposing an operational criterion for evaluating whether a given change is congruent with a practice’s constitutive values – with implications for any discipline where the quantitative logic risks absorbing the qualitative.

While instinctive archery is commonly portrayed as natural, primal, and pre-technological, this study argues that it is a cultivated, artificial and posthuman practice that unsettles the prescriptive and identitarian force of language. Drawing from sport philosophy, neuroscience, ethology, and psychoanalysis, as well as philosophical contributions by Felice Cimatti and Gilles Deleuze, the article investigates the paradoxical nature of instinctive archery, focusing on the relationship between instinct and language.The central claim is that so-called ’instinctive“ performance does not imply a pre-linguistic or pre-human state, but rather destabilizes humanist assumptions by enacting a sportive performance that resists representation and categorization. In contrast, modern target archery—rooted generally in non-instinctive methods—mirrors the analytical, representational and discretizing frameworks of language and cognition.Engaging with philosophical debates on athletic expertise, the article also contrasts Hubert Dreyfus’s notion of ”absorbed coping“ with Gunnar Breivik’s emphasis on hyper-awareness. It aligns instinctive archery with enactive accounts of performance articulated by Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza and Kevin Krein, especially the concepts of ”mushin“ and flow. However, unlike the Western sporting paradigm where flow typically emerges as a byproduct of competition, instinctive archery treats flow as its primary aim—even within competitive contexts—thus inverting the usual logic of process and outcome. Rather than proposing a new term to replace ‘instinct’, the article argues for a fundamental shift in how language itself is deployed: ceasing to use words as police reports that assign fixed identities and roles to the world. In instinctive archery, it is not about enunciating or naming the world, but about becoming a conduit through which the world resonates; not about reinforcing the ego through analytical, representational, and metric frameworks, but rather surrendering to this world, engaging in an experience of becoming-world and, ultimately, becoming-arrow.

This article examines apocalyptic scenarios and their philosophical implications through the lens of Italian philosophy, game and literary studies. Through Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘inoperativity’ and ‘technologia sacra’, the study critiques various proposed responses to global crises, from technological utopianism to primitivist returns to nature, highlighting possible issues and limitations. Central to the discussion is the relationship between human and non-human entities, culture and nature, and the potential for a post-anthropocentric worldview. In the last section, the article proposes that the viral perspective presented in the video game The Last of Us offers a provocative model for reimagining human subjectivity and our relationship to the world, suggesting new ways of conceptualizing agency, intentionality, and ethics in the Anthropocene, emphasizing the entanglement of all forms of life and matter.

This article explores the concept of “excessive contingency” through an analysis of the Situationist International’s practice of the dérive and Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of exposition. It argues that contingency, rooted in our fundamental being-with-others, exceeds traditional subject-object divisions. In line with Improvisation Studies scholars Dan DiPiero and Alessandro Bertinetto, Situationist dérive is examined as a “deliberate” engagement with urban contingency that subverts functionalist approaches to space. Nancy’s ontology of exposition further illuminates how contingency is integral to our relational existence. By bringing these perspectives together, the article develops an expanded understanding of contingency as fundamentally tied to our exposition to and entanglement with the world. This “excessive contingency” moves beyond binary oppositions to reveal the inherently relational and open-ended nature of experience. The analysis offers new insights into urban practices, social relations, and the ontological significance of contingency, proposing a reimagining of our relationship to urban spaces, others, and the unfolding of contingent experience itself.

The moment we live in is a moment of multiple crisis – environmental, political, economic, and viral – a moment, that is, where the reality of damage, fallibility and faultiness, and the ensuing fear, anxiety, rage, trauma, protest, and mobilisation have reached a critical point. Past and present narratives of crisis and trauma can help navigate this process. In this article we have chosen to focus on Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923) and Hideo Kojima’s videogame Death Stranding (2019) for several reasons. The most important of all are Svevo’s and Kojima’s choices to deal with the trauma of crisis by emphasising and investigating the process leading to crisis, and of focusing on the zone in-between the ‘normal’ and the unknown. In so doing both narratives underscore the significance of ruins, desolation and the broken as a backdrop for rediscovering everyday life and forging meaningful connections in a fragmented world.

This article discusses the relationship between archery and aesthetics, developing two central claims. First, in order to deliver successful results, the archer should attend not only to efficiency, technique and equipment tuning but also to the aesthetic experience; second, archery shooting methods embody and express ‘life-issue’ statements and desires concerning our relationship with the world. Depending on the archer’s shooting style, i.e., depending on the way in which a shot is executed and performed, the archer’s ‘sportive philosophy’ is, so to speak, unfolded and made apparent. Specifically, I will argue that instinctive archery strives for flexibility and versatility toward the environment and with respect to one’s own body, whereas non-instinctive approaches sharpen effectuality and results by flattening the surroundings and limiting one’s own performative freedom. Exploring this idea, I will discuss the aesthetic underpinnings of archery, also showing in which ways different shooting methods lay the ground for irreducible aesthetic experiences of self-expression.

The objective of this paper is to explore Mario Perniola’s perspective on art between the years 1966 and 1972. During this six-year period Perniola elaborates – mainly influenced by his closeness to revolutionary and protest movements such as the Situationist International and Ludd – a political and militant theory based on the dialectic overcoming of art. The year 1972, with the last issue of the journal Agar-Agar, marks the beginning of a theoretical rearrangement regarding art theory for the Italian philosopher. Whereas several scholars have recently focused on the later phase of Perniola’s thought on art, this paper wishes to draw the attention on a less investigated area of his researches. Specifically, I will develop his claims on the identity of art and revolution and his idea of an “artistic alienation” which originated in Western society.

This article develops the concept of “agnotology”, a term coined by the historian of science Robert N. Proctor and the linguist Ian Bolas. Agnotology implies the study of ignorance, especially how ignorance and doubt are strategically induced by specific agents through misinformation, misleading research and inaccurate scientific data. The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand it summarizes the main objectives of the agnotological area of study, taking into account the state of the art over the subject matter. On the other hand it criticizes agnotology from a philosophical perspective. In fact, agnotology is heir to a metaphysical conception of reality grounded upon polar oppositions such as true/false, appearance/substance, good/evil. My claim is that agnotology’s efforts in studying the spread of ignorance remain entangled in a mindset, typical of conspiracy theories, which debases the complexity of reality into a two sided clash of ideologies.

The aim of this paper is to show in what terms reality can be considered as a stratification of surfaces by developing Mario Perniola's philosophy of transit. The first part will deal with the etymology of the word transit, in order to explain its meanings and uses. As it will be clarified, the development of the notion of transit goes together with the conception of reality as deep in the sense of full, available, rich, as the realm of "difference" and "enigmas". The second part will explain the particular conception of temporality implied in the transit. Together with Perniola's analysis, Nietzschean and Deleuzian reflections about "amor fati" and "eternal return" will be further explored. This concept is crucial to understand not only Perniola's overall philosophy by clarifying his position against postmodern thinkers; it also provides a theoretical framework from which the task and the challenge of the philosopher in the contemporary world emerge.

Il 2021 segna gli ottant’anni dalla nascita di Mario Perniola, uno dei massimi filosofi italiani del secondo dopoguerra. Questo volume raccoglie interventi che esplorano la sua opera mostrandone la fertilità e sottolineando al tempo stesso la prossimità delle sue idee con le principali sfide del nostro tempo. Dall’Italia al Brasile, passando per gli Stati Uniti, l’Irlanda, la Francia, il Belgio, il Messico e la Cina, gli autori si soffermano su temi che comprendono l’estetica, la politica, la teoria della comunicazione, i queer studies, il pensiero rituale e religioso, la sessualità e la letteratura, restituendo la plurivocità e l’originalità di un filosofo di respiro internazionale e più che mai attuale.

This paper explores the concept of "inorganic sexuality" in the work of Italian writer and philosopher Mario Perniola. The main objective is to develop the controversial and original aspects of Perniola's thought within his aesthetic theory of feeling. Perniola elaborates the so-called "thing that feels", namely a feeling in which the neutral and impersonal dimensions of the things flow into organic life and vice versa. This perspective, as will be clarified, by dissolving the vitalist and spiritualist drives of the subject, enlarges the horizon of aesthetic feeling by welcoming what is commonly left outside of it: the inorganic and material world, in its surprising aspects, but also in its uncanny and disturbing ones. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to show the significance and the value of neutral sexuality, which opens up a space of experiences beyond the traditional metaphysical oppositions such as masculine/feminine, organic/inorganic, alive/dead, real/virtual, gender/sex.

Several scholars (Bartoloni 2019, Bukdahl 2017, Vogt 2019) focused on Mario Perniola's perspective on art, post-human sexuality and political theory. Yet little has been written on the philosophical and literary sources - specifically Stoicism, the Baroque and the Avant-Gardes - which influenced his standpoint. The objective of this paper is to develop Perniola's conception of a strategically oriented beauty, which implies a connection between the aesthetic element and the political-effectual one.

This article investigates how different philosophical traditions and schools of thought have understood the practice and the discipline of archery. Whereas the scholarly literature on the history, the techniques and the uses of bows and arrows is diverse and extensive, my aim is to contribute to the less developed research on the relationship between philosophy and archery. Specifically, I will explore in what terms philosophers have employed the bow as a metaphor for both their standpoints and, more generally, significant aspects of everyday life.

Against the Artists. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and the Man of Art. This essay explores the concepts of "art" (gei) and "man of art" (geinin) in Tanizaki's works. These two notions belong to an ancient Japanese aesthetic tradition. The concept of 'gei' means "realization", "skill", but also "technique" and "ability". Traditional stage performances such as 'nō', 'kyōgen', 'bunraku', 'kabuki', are typical examples of 'gei'. On the other hand the concept of 'geinin' implies three pivotal aspects: 1) a strict and harsh aesthetic education; 2) an environment suitable to develop the man of art's sensitivity; 3) a long process of emotional maturation. This perspective, according to this paper, sheds light on the peculiar Japanese aesthetic "difference" in relation to the concepts of art and artist developed - on the contrary - in Western tradition.