Metabasis N. 13
digital edition
peer review
Each essay of this journal is reviewed by two anonymous referees and their comments are sent to the authors .
Time, imagination and power
(science, art and politics)
May 2012 - Year VII - Number 13
Philosophical Horizons
Violence, collective imaginary and social practices
Paolo Bellini
This paper adresses the relationship between violence and collective imaginary. The swift development of technological civilization changes the forms of the social control of violence. In the contemporary age violence is not merely referable to its empirical dimension, but it needs a different understanding, based on the knowledge of collective imaginary and its rules. In this essay, in particular, the phenomenona related to violence have been interpreted through the Orwellian category of doublethink.
Urbs and civitas. Architecture and architecture of institutions
Daniela Cardone
Urban spaces are the image of collective will and political institution; so urbs and civitas are each aesthetic representation of the other. If the city’s iconography reflects, in the mirror, the architectonic structure and origin of the political institution; will, freedom, rights, ownership, membership, dependence, are civitas foundation and, at the same time, ‘visibile’ in its architecture.
So we can talk about geometry of urban paces and geometry of civitas and we can see constitution and political idea of civitas in a building, a square, in a time wich is time of history, or time of political power, of an Ideal city too.
‘Vested Interests’: the impact of clothing in the mapping and (re)fashioning of American women’s identity.
Elodie Chazalon
This article applies Gilbert Durand’s theory of “bassin sémantique du mythe” to a collection of articles pub-lished between 1945 and 1970 in the American middlebrow press, in order to show how the deviant repre-sentations of femininity (e.g. the vamp, the working girl, the masculine woman…) tend to be a foil to the Mother and to the Victorian, male-biased conception of femininity. One may possibly argue that the dis-course on clothes, on the one hand, and clothes as a language, on the other hand, can be seen as both a means to reactivate the division between the sexes and as a tool for subverting male supremacy and for fashioning women’s emancipation.
Time, the seed of discord between philosophy and science
Emanuela Civilini
On 6 April 1922 took place in Paris, at Société française de Philosophie, a historic meeting between Ein-stein, Bergson, and other distinguished thinkers who have given birth to a famous debate about the nature of time. In this circumstance are many differences emerged between the philosophy of Bergson and Einstein’s scientific thinking, however, in this brief essay, we will try to highlight some concepts that we believe are related to the two thinkers and also complementary.
Freedom of the Press versus Independence of the Press
Stefano Colloca
This paper aims to solve some conceptual problems in the ethics and deontology of information through the distinction between two concepts: freedom of the press and independence of the press. While independence of the press must not be limited (and its expansion can only cause improvements in the media and society), freedom of the press (if conceived as complete absence of regulations) should be limited, in order to protect some rights as dignity of the person, privacy, and presumption of innocence, which we would not accept to waive.
Movies and symbol: the power of moving image
Luisella Ferrario
This short paper aims to examine the symbolic power of the film image. Power given to it by the dual nature of mimesis, which approaches and simultaneously removes the image from the original model. First, referring to the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, we traced the similarities between the optical phenomenon of anamorphosis and the symbolic dynamics. Then we identified the similarities between the filmic perception, the dream manifestations and the archetypes of the collective unconscious.
Cyborgs and vampires. The monster’s body from the prodigious power of imagination to the naturalization of differences
Emma Palese
The monster is a symbol of wholeness: an expression of the teratological wonder and of the prodigious power of imagination. But, from the modern project of social order, the monster is identified with “the different” so the normal human can trace a perfect match with the one that G. Canguilhem calls the “zero degree of monstrosity”. However, the Foucaultian time, eager to clean the society from the different, the exceeding, the misfits, it seems - today - to give way to the era of “new monsters”. Not only cyborgs, but - above all - insatiable vampires constantly searching for their identity, the excessive purchase of objects and “bodies” fit to respond to fashion update required to be “normal”.
The transformative power of imagination. Ontology of visions.
Paola Russo
This paper focuses on imagination and its power of transforming ourselves and the surrounding world. Imagination is a prominent activity of the soul, the only capable of a complexio oppositorum. The guiding aim here is to combine different voices in a mixed choir: imaginal visions, archetypal visions of ourselves, visions of the universal and the relative, visions of the scientific and the religious world. The goal of putting these visions into the same perspective is that of using imagination in a consistent way, on the horizon of a transcendence of opposites.
Metabasis N. 13
digital edition
peer review
Each essay of this journal is reviewed by two anonymous referees and their comments are sent to the authors .
