Introduction

The relationship between the concepts of form and function goes through the history of western thinking and continues to be a stimulus and a theoretical constraint of great significance. This volume allows us to rethink this topic in a highly innovative perspective, focusing on the aesthetic dimension of contemporary research, and extensively investigating a variety of research approaches, from the history of art and its foundations up to anthropology, from the study of ancient and modern material culture, up to design and architecture.

Verkörperung: Bild und Experiment bei Edgar Wind und die aktuelle Lage der morphologischen Forschung

Edgar Wind’s The Experiment and Metaphysics examines, in the sense of Goethe’s morphological project, the common structures of scientific and artistic thinking in the light of the reflective value of the image and the technological processes of research and construction of reality. In Wind’s philosophy of em- bodiment the image plays a role in the artistic field comparable to the function of experiments in science. The picture is neither a ‘copy’ nor just a ‘part’ of reality, but rather an ‘embodiment’: at the same time the ‘result’ of human activity and a ‘condition’ for all interpretation of the world. It opens up as an embodiment to a temporality which is not just linear but ‘configured’…

Intermedialità come Gesamtkunstwerk critico. Appunti sul visuale nella scrittura di W.G. Sebald

Nell’universo assai articolato e fittamente popolato dei visual studies contemporanei , una rubrica di dimensioni ragguardevoli è senz’altro costituita dagli studi dedicati a quei fenomeni che possono essere classificati sotto la categoria degli iconotesti o dei foto-testi, e dall’enumerazione e ricognizione della loro complessa tipologia e genealogia teorica. Il contributo studia la rilevanza della categoria in un testo di W.G. Sebald.

ПреДислОВие к итальянскОму ПереВОДу «Эстетики» а.Г. БаумГартена

Prefazione all'edizione russa di A.G. Baumgarten, Estetica

Arti e neoestetica

La riflessione sulle arti di Luigi Russo e il dibattito contemporaneo

“Tutta la memoria del mondo”. Alain Resnais, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Browne e il generale Stumm von Bordwehr

Il saggio sviluppa una lettura incrociata tra il romanzo di Robert Musil (L’uomo senza qualità), quello di W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz) e il film Toute la memoire du monde (1956) di Alain Resnais per riflettere sulla biblioteca come “luogo fisico della memoria”. Questo spazio si materializza nella Biblioteca Nazionale di Francia che, nel passaggio dal vecchio al nuovo edificio, determina un processo di seppellimento del passato e cancellazione della memoria, ergendosi al posto del vec- chio deposito in cui i nazisti ammassavano i beni sottratti agli Ebrei.

Autometamorfosi dell’umano. Tecnica e umanesimo in Edgar Wind

Analisi del pensiero morfologico di Edgar Wind

Fuoco pallido. W.G. Sebald: l'arte della trasformazione

Questo libro nasce dal bisogno, comune a molti lettori di W.G. Sebald, di ritor-nare circostanziatamente su alcuni passi della sua opera poetica e critica, per riprendere a seguirne i percorsi, per scorgere ulteriori strati, ulteriori tempi che vi sono custoditi. Si sarebbe forse tentati per questo aspetto di rinviare addirit- tura alle “idee estetiche” kantiane, a quelle rappresentazioni dell’immaginazio- ne che danno molto da pensare, senza che alcun concetto determinato sia ad esse adeguato, se non fosse per il netto tenore cosale che in generale domina tali passi, per l’ostinazione con cui le venature materiali vi vengono messe in risalto, e reiterate, e disposte come pietre segnaletich…

Meta-Identität/ Unstable Identities: Towards a plastic Morphology

The essay aims to investigate some developments in W.G. Sebald’s poetics, explain- ing the foundations of a morphology starting from the relationship with the theories of Viktor von Weizsäcker and Rudolf Bilz. The anthropological model elaborated by Rudolf Bilz, between the study of the origin of mythologemes and the investigation of unstable identities, allows us to investigate the presence in Sebald’s work of some decisive authors of modernity. In this way the proposal of a plastic morphology is outlined in its relationships with an unstable and multiple concept of identity, and in the very original resumption by Sebald of some mythological themes that finds expression in it.

Die Ästhetik und das Lebendige: Biologischer Akt, Bürde und Verantwortung

Wenn es wahr ist, dass dem Projekt der Morphologie im Laufe des 20. Jahrhunderts eine wirkliche Verfinsterung zuteil wird, die seine heuristische Fähigkeit sowohl im Bereich der Lebenswissenschaften als auch in der ästhetischen und historisch-künstlerischen Reflexion zu verdunkeln scheint, dann wird nur in dieser neuen Situation der produktiven Marginalität Raum geboten, um einige Konzepte zu diskutieren, die heute in der Lage sein können, eine Brücke zwischen den Wissensbereichen zu schlagen und eine neue disziplinäre Synthese zutage zu fördern. Dazu gehören das Konzept des „Biologischen Aktes“, das die Einheit von Handlung und Leiden des Lebewesens postulieren soll, und die gegensätzliche…

Esclusione, parola, silenzio: Mariella Mehr

The essay aims to present the poetic and narrative work of Mariella Mehr, an extraordinary witness of our time and one of the most significant poetic voices of contemporary German language literature. If the density of poetic language and the thematic choice bring Mehr clos- er to the very high examples of Celan, Sachs, Levi, the peculiar quality of writing, its rough perfection and the fiery temperature of the imagination make it unique in the prose of our time.

Theorie vom Ruinenwert: polarità delle strategie identitarie e asincronie della storia

Costruzione di un'estetica delle rovine, con riferimento a Speer e Kiefer

Postfazione

Glossary of Morphology

This book is a significant novelty in the scientific and editorial landscape. Morphology is both an ancient and a new discipline that rests on Goethe's heritage and re-forms it in the present through the concepts of form and image. The latter are to be understood as structural elements of a new cultural grammar able to make the late modern world intelligible. In particular, compared to the original Goethean project, but also to C.P. Snow's idea of unifying the “two cultures”, the fields of morphological culture that are the object of this glossary have profoundly changed. The ever-increasing importance of the image as a polysemic form has made the two concepts absolutely transitive, so to s…

Morphology, Plasticity and Transformation between Philosophy and Biology

The essay aims to investigate some developments in W.G. Sebald’s poetics, explain- ing the foundations of a morphology starting from the relationship with the theories of Viktor von Weizsäcker and Rudolf Bilz. The anthropological model elaborated by Rudolf Bilz, between the study of the origin of mythologemes and the investigation of unstable identities, allows us to investigate the presence in Sebald’s work of some decisive authors of modernity. In this way the proposal of a plastic morphology is outlined in its relationships with an unstable and multiple concept of identity, and in the very original resumption by Sebald of some mythological themes that finds expression in it.