Intersezioni | 2024 | N. 1

Far from negating former structuralist purposes, Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (1970) is an attempt to better understand general semiotic functioning thanks to the Alterity quotient provided by the Japanese setting. Drawing on the concept of Japanese unity, Barthes engages in a series of reading exercises of daily life aspects as if they were texts. He finds the breaking point of signs’ efficiency where the symbolization is reduced at its minimum (food, bowing) or the sign refuses to conform to the expected function (packets). In this, Barthes’ operation aligns with the common purposes of the French Theory of his period (Bourdieu, Foucault), aiming to demystify the constructed origin of what is presented as nature.

This article considers the multifaceted world of the phenomena of globalization from the perspective of the languages of twentieth-century art music. In particular, it analyses Claude Debussy’s Pagodes, Stockhausen’s Inori and Telemusik, and Steve Reich’s Drumming as vehicles of encounter with a multiplicity of non-Western civilizations, reconstructing their respective generative contexts and the complex interplay of interfaces that underlie them.

This is the first comparative study of Pasolini’s references to Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin (BWV 1004). Starting from a linguistic reading of his youthful Studies on Bach’s Style (1944-45), this essay puts forward the hypothesis that the Chaconne provides a model of writing that Pasolini develops with his semiological theory and explores through different expressive means. On a thematic level, the writer’s solitude emerges with a new compositional and critical, dialogical and choral sense.

This essay aims to investigate the paradoxical architecture of ideal structures in the thought of Robert Musil and Nicolai Hartmann. In opposition to the primacy of the concept of function established by Ernst Mach and the Neo-Kantian school, it is emphasized how Musil and Hartmann shared the need to reintroduce the concept of causality into their epistemological reflection. In this regard, the modal declination of the concept of causality emerges. Following Musil, causality implies the symmetrical opening of a set of equiprobable cases. According to Hartmann, the investigation of causality must justify the univocal and necessary correlation between cause and its singular effect. The paradoxical character of ideal structures thus emerges in the context of a reflection regarding the concept of possibility, which in Musil is declined through the use of statistical method, whereas according to Hartmann it takes on the sense of irrevocable determinism.

The essay addresses the question of the philosophical anthropology of the partisan subject – as manifested in the Nazi-fascist struggle – by highlighting its two dimensions: the subjective and the objective. The two dimensions are intertwined by emphasising how the resisting subject is the product, and not the cause, of a modification of the ontological texture of the historical situation imposed by an event. This event, following J. Starobinski’s indications and A. Badiou’s philosophical reflection, is traced by the introduction into the historical dimension of the concept of choice and its intrinsic ethical-political difficulties. The resistant subject is then analysed as the product of fidelity to this choice – which is expressed in choosing to choose in the tragedy of action – in which not the ontological nature of the new anthropology is made explicit, but its practical-political nature.

During the modern age, several artists devoted their work to the myth of Prometheus. Among them, is Guercino. The present essay aims to analyze for the first time the 17th-century Guercino’s fresco by resorting to the tools of the semiotics of the visible. Through the application of interdisciplinary analytical categories and some outils of the semiotic method, the paper delivers a new interpretation of this little-known work by the very young Emilian painter.