Di solito non riflettiamo su come gli oggetti si presentano alla nostra coscienza. Né su come gli atti di coscienza si danno alla nostra riflessione. Eppure è proprio questa relazione a farci familiarizzare con le cose, a farci sintonizzare con gli altri, a tracciare una linea di continuità tra presente e passato. È un’esperienza primaria su cui la riflessione può influire solo minimamente. READ MORE
The extremes of consciousness
What does the word subject designate? A name inevitably involves choosing between one statement of reality and another. In identifying with it we allude ourselves that we are subtracting it from the mutability of time. What is that fixed, atemporal image of ourselves that we call I? What is its semantic value and how can we come to know it? Again, who am I referring to when I say I? And lastly, who is speaking in my voice? READ MORE
An inexplicable and surprising happiness
Surely the exceptional nature of consciousness has never been more effectively evoked than in Proust’s recollections of madeleines. The echo of a far-off sensation generates in Marcel a stunning sensorial kaleidoscope. Fragments of experience, relegated to the archives of his memory, are brought back to life. Mnemosyne does not merely rescue Marcel from a sense of guilt, from anxieties and the contingency of the present. The ecstatic recollection provides a release from the extreme struggle between life and death. It does away with the filter between past and present.READ MORE
A constantly changing chimera
More than a century ago psychoanalysis set neurology and psychiatry an unprecedented challenge by revealing that the effects of the unconscious are more potent than those of consciousness, and that unconscious drives are constantly trying to surface in conscious life.READ MORE