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In December 1960 the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York displayed a series of thirty-four illustrations of the "Inferno" by the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had developed this project over the previous two years, working on it almost exclusively, first in New York City, and then in an isolated storage room in Treasure Island, Florida, where he retreated to concentrate on the last half of the cycle. [...] Whatever the spark that set the project in motion, we find Rauschenberg's reply to his detractors here: the refuse that crowded his "Combines" was no joke, nor was it there to undermine or deride high art in the spirit of Dada. With his collection of things, he was composing a new language, turning fragments - the ruins of his environment and culture - into emblems. And what is an emblem if not a composite figure, an assemblage of diverse fragments into a new unity and order? As such, it is an elusive visual allegory whose pictorial image tends to lose its consistency and become a sign open to interpretations; in it, the different narratives springing from its multiple nature come together and give birth to a polysemic language. It is with this language, abstract and referential at the same time, that Rauschenberg translates Dante's poem and makes it new by linking it to something in existence, present in the viewer’s reality of mechanically reproduced images. By choosing 'to ennoble the ordinary', he, perhaps unconsciously, became the hermeneutist of his age and gave durability to what was trivial and precarious.
The article sketches a critical paradigm for interdisciplinary work that is centred on tension as a highly ambiguous and ultimately deeply paradoxical notion. It highlights that a unifying account of what tension is or a systematic classification of its diverse meanings would risk resolving tensions between different approaches and privileging a particular mode of doing so. Successively focussing on aesthetic, socio-political, and physical tensions, the essay articulates tension rather as a broad umbrella term that is stretched by multi-perspectival articulations, unified through its intensive surface tension, and at the same time full of transformative and generative potentials. In particular, it proposes that tensions between different cultural or disciplinary fields can be made productive by inducing tensions within each field so that different fields can be related to each other on the basis of tension rather than some substantial commonality.
Pasolini's literature, film, theatre, and essays engaged with Classical tragedy from the mid-1960s onwards. As Bernhard Groß shows in his paper 'Reconciliation and Stark Incompatibility: Pasolini's "Africa" and Greek Tragedy', this engagement forms a modality in Pasolini's politics of aesthetics that seeks to grasp the fundamental transformation from a rural-proletarian to a petit-bourgeois Italy. Since the mid-'60s, Pasolini was concerned with the bourgeoisie and its utopian potentials, which he sought to make productive by reading Classical tragedy as a possibility to make contradictions visible. Pasolini realized his reading of the Classical tragedy by having 'Africa' and 'Europe' - as he understood them - confront one another without mediation. By means of film analyses and film theory, Groß argues that this confrontation, especially in the films on the ancient world, generates an aesthetic place where the incompatible can unfold in the spectators' experience.
The article compares the aesthetic notions of the "je ne sais quoi" (as it emerges in the Renaissance and is widely debated in the eighteenth century) and of the 'uncanny' as theorized by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Its hypothesis is that both notions, in situating aesthetic experience in a liminal space between pleasure and trouble, can be considered after-images of non-aesthetical notions - notions that belong to the domain of the sacred and have metamorphosed as forms of aesthetic undecidability through the paradigmatic fracture of early modernity. The article focuses on depictions of female figures directing their gaze upward - in the iconography of Sade's Justine, in popular imagery connected with Lourdes apparitions (1858), in medium photography, and in the images taken by Charcot of his hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière - and argues that they become a Warburgian Pathosformel indicating a space of undecidability and 'nonsense' between the subject and otherness.
Introduction
(2014)
The experience of multistable figures or so-called Kippbilder - the sudden and repeated 'kippen' of perception as the same object is seen under different aspects - is fascinating in its own right. However, what animated the year-long discussion leading to this volume was a critical exploration of the proposition that such figures may offer a helpful model for thinking through the intercultural and interdisciplinary effort of productively negotiating between conflicting positions.
The de-constitution of the 'I' is at the centre of Manuele Gragnolati's essay 'Differently Queer: Temporality, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Petrolio" and Elsa Morante's "Aracoeli"'. The essay explores the relationship between temporality, aesthetics, and sexuality in the final novels of two twentieth-century Italian authors: Pasolini's "Petrolio" (1972–75) and Morante's "Aracoeli" (1982). Both novels mobilize a form of temporality that resists a sense of linear and teleological development and that instead appears contorted, inverted, and suspended. The article argues that both novels thereby allow for the articulation of queer desires and pleasures that cannot be inscribed in normative logics of completion, progression, or productivity. It shows how the aesthetics of Pasolini's and Morante's texts replicate the movement of queer subjectivity and dismantle the traditional structure of the novel but do so differently. The fractured and dilated movement of "Petrolio's" textuality corresponds to a post-Oedipal and fully formed subject who is haunted by his complicity with bourgeois power and wants to shatter and annihilate himself by replicating the paradoxical pleasure of non-domesticated sexuality. "Aracoeli", by contrast, has a 'formless form' ('forma senza forma') that corresponds to the position of never completing the process of subject formation by adapting to the symbolic order. The poetic operation of Morante's novel consists in staging an interior journey, backwards along the traces of memory and the body and at the same time forward towards embracing the partiality and fluidity of an inter-subjectivity that is always in the process of becoming.