Intersezioni | 2022 | N. 2

In the street literature of sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, in which an important role was played by the births of children born with appalling congenital deformities, the fascination produced by the malformed body built ties with the problem of its origin, and with the role that organic chaos had (or had not) in the genesis of the cosmos. Was the monster a divergence from the original project of creation? Or had deformity been part of the order of nature since its inception? Starting from the close reading of three early modern English pamphlets, the essay aims at investigating the dissemination of three different epistemological paradigms concerning physical malformation. In a kind of «street theology», the justification of the out-of-norm body was inevitably intermingled with the search for its moral meaning, while the debate on the genesis of the monstrous was intertwined with the narration of the origins of the world.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the reception of Renaissance culture experienced an extraordinary flourishing in Russia. The main philosophical and aesthetic principles of the Italian Renaissance were at the centre of attention of several chief representatives of Russian philosophy. The paper discusses some accounts on the Renaissance, from the Russian Silver Age and throughout the 20th century. The author shows how the key topics of Renaissance authors (creativity, renewal, virtue, activism) resonated profoundly with Russian intellectuals of the fin-de-siècle generation, that was marked by a particular religious-philosophical attitude to history, society, personal transformation and spiritual growth. The paper also examines how the secularism, individualism, and rationalism of the Renaissance were severely criticised in Russian religious philosophy. In order to demonstrate the different attitudes to the Renaissance in Russian culture, the author focuses on three cases: the downright hostile anti-Renaissance views of Pavel Florensky, Aleksei Losev’s criticism of the Renaissance in his early works in contrast to his more positive, ambivalent view in The Aesthetics of the Renaissance, and Vladimir Bibichin’s apologetical overturning of the accusations against the Renaissance in Russian philosophical culture. The author highlights that Bibichin sought to draw attention to the lessons of the Renaissance epoch that could help break multiple dead ends in post-Soviet historical and cultural development.

Starting from the analysis of Proust’s philosophical background, the article aims to show the importance of the association of ideas in À la recherche du temps perdu. It is a theme that has been relatively little addressed so far, with the exception of Groen’s (2012) article and a few pages of Fraisse’s (2013) volume. The first part, referencing Cahiers X. Léon and the university textbook of philosophy used by Proust, confronts the question of a possible influence on Proust by the empiricism of Hume and his successors. The second part focuses on the role that the association of ideas plays in the construction of the Recherche. Considering the explicit reflections contained in the text, the article proposes to recognise the association of ideas as one of the regulating forces of Proustian thought.

The present paper focuses on Ortega y Gasset’s view on love. Although it is not possible to refer to Ortega y Gasset’s view as a complete theory of love, the paper shows that it is still possible to follow a line of reasoning in his thought on the theme. After initially outlining the origin of his interest in the topic, the paper pinpoints that the central qualities that Ortega y Gasset finds in love evolved from his early writing. In describing the analytical differences between desire and love, and love and hatred, the paper shows, on the one hand, that Lacan’s view on desire- as-lack echoes Ortega y Gasset’s position and, on the other hand, that Ortega y Gasset’s view on love resonates with that of Scheler. The paper concludes that Ortega y Gasset’s asystematic view of love still shows flawless development, continuity and consistency, despite his definition of love as ambiguous and confusing.

Starting from the common idea of distraction being a negative attitude, this article takes a cue from a recent analysis made by Alessandra Aloisi to redeem its meaning. Referencing the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, we want to prove how distraction happens to be a consequence of boredom and defines what Oskar Becker called adventure, a condition that merges the concept of being-toward-death with what we will refer to as being-toward-life. Thus, we want to prove that the vision of a distracted human being is more profound and pointed than a solely comprehensive vision, since it permits what Giorgio Agamben calls profanation. Finally, we will show how distraction is responsible for the opening of the landscape, the overcoming of the animal environment and the human world.

The historiographical rediscovery of Averroes’ thought in the 19th century coincided with its reading in a materialistic sense. From Renan to Bloch, via Lange and Gentile, this interpretation has been widespread, making the Arab thinker a precursor of modern rationalism and immanentism. Although in the 20th century more philologically accurate research has challenged this long-standing image of Averroes, it continues to persist in current debates, at the risk of some misrepresentation. This article attempts a critical assessment of such interpretations in light of the more recent tendency to focus on «historical» Averroes, assuming that this may contribute to the debate on the meaning of Averroism in the history of Western ideas.

The act of reading, a seemingly retiring activity, turns out to be a matter of power. Through an analysis of some theoretical reflections, we will try to account for a certain undisciplined and even savage power inherent in the act of reading. What made the reader a political subject? What were the forms of control and what the forms of indiscipline? In this article, we will attempt at sketching out at least some answers to these questions. We will consider reflections coming from different disciplinary fields relating to the history and sociology of reading, theories of literature and psychoanalysis. We will also try to show how the main event of recent decades, that is the «perversion» of reading, can be interpreted as the decoupling of this practice from the essential link with the alphabet.