Fabio Camilletti

Fantasmagoriana

Martin Doll

Rupert Gaderer

Jan Niklas Howe

Nach mehr als neunzig Jahren spukt das »Unheimliche« noch immer. Quer über verschiedene wissenschaftliche Disziplinen gehört es zu den schillerndsten Termini gegenwärtiger Theoriebildung. Es bezeichnet eine seltsame Nähe zwischen Wissen und Nichtwissen, erscheint als etwas Vertrautes in fremder Gestalt oder als etwas Fremdes mit vertrauten Eigenschaften. »Phantasmata. Techniken des Unheimlichen« setzt bei Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytischem Modell an, verfolgt seine historische Genese und zeichnet seine heterogene Entwicklung nach. Der besondere Fokus liegt auf der Verschränkung des »Unheimlichen« mit »Techniken«: Zum einen werden literarische, mediale und soziale Praktiken der Evokation des Unheimlichen untersucht; zum anderen wird gefragt, inwiefern diese Techniken wiederum als Denkfiguren zum Verständnis epistemologischer, ästhetischer und politisch-sozialer Bedingungen des Unheimlichen beitragen können. Im Zentrum stehen dabei die markierten Spannungen zwischen dem Gewohnten und dem Ungewohnten, Vertrauten und Unvertrauten, Bekannten und Unbekannten. Unter diesen Aspekten versammelt der Band Forschungsbeiträge aus Medien-, Literatur-, Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Philosophie, Psychoanalyse und Soziologie.

Techniken des Unheimlichen

Phantasmata

Alessandra Aloisi

In reconstructing the birth and development of the notion of ‘unconscious’, historians of ideas have heavily relied on the Freudian concept of Unbewussten, retroactively projecting the psychoanalytic unconscious over a constellation of diverse cultural experiences taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between France and Germany. Archaeology of the Unconscious aims to challenge this perspective by adopting an unusual and thought-provoking viewpoint as the one offered by the Italian case from the 1770s to the immediate aftermath of WWI, when Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno provides Italy with the first example of a ‘psychoanalytic novel’. Italy’s vibrant culture of the long nineteenth century, characterised by the sedimentation, circulation, intersection, and synergy of different cultural, philosophical, and literary traditions, proves itself to be a privileged object of inquiry for an archaeological study of the unconscious; a study whose object is not the alleged ‘origin’ of a pre-made theoretical construct, but rather the stratifications by which that specific construct was assembled. In line with Michel Foucault’s Archéologie du savoir (1969), this volume will analyze the formation and the circulation, across different authors and texts, of a network of ideas and discourses on interconnected themes, including dreams, memory, recollection, desire, imagination, fantasy, madness, creativity, inspiration, magnetism, and somnambulism. Alongside questioning pre-given narratives of the ‘history of the unconscious’, this book will employ the Italian ‘difference’ as a powerful perspective from whence to address the undeveloped potentialities of the pre-Freudian unconscious, beyond uniquely psychoanalytical viewpoints.

Italian Perspectives

Archaeology of the Unconscious

The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait—Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives—is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti—and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England—takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.

Dante, D. G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady

Portrait of Beatrice

Fabian Lampart

Manuele Gragnolati

After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf.

Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Metamorphosing Dante

Fabio Camilletti

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