"The ‘modernity’ through the image of food and digestion.” This is the task and the agenda of the physiological and psychological genealogy clearly identified by Nietzsche in a fragment of the autumn of 1888 and uncompromising pursued in all his work. Diagnosis is implacable and made possible by a widespread use of gastrological metaphor, applied to all fields of experience and language by a reckless writing of history. As Valéry and Péguy also illustrate, the experience of contemporary men is in fact poor and sick, characterized by a radical duplicity and a contradiction without synthesis. Not only things, as Marx also shows analysing the goods as the new hieroglyphs marking the saturated space of the metropolis, but also man is double, and his embodied, deeply physiological economy too. His hungry stomach is twofold, because it takes everything but does not nourish at all, it cries of various and heterogeneous excitements, not of real food to be absorbed and transformed, in short it lives by an instant without past or future. The opposite of this logic of illness and insensitivity for too many sensations and sensational choc, and the reverse of this oblivion for too much rapidity, is an extreme being anti- or even pre-modern. In modern times, the training of a genuine clinic criticism about prejudices and supposed self-knowledge involves a regression and an alteration of own historical identities, believes and values. Finally, as Benjamin and Warburg revealed, criticism is like to become again animal and interpretation is like to regain the slowness and melancholy of endless chewing, as a dog or a cow.
El vientre de los modernos. Psicología, fisiologia y filologia de la consciencia historíca
FIMIANI, Filippo
2017-01-01
Abstract
"The ‘modernity’ through the image of food and digestion.” This is the task and the agenda of the physiological and psychological genealogy clearly identified by Nietzsche in a fragment of the autumn of 1888 and uncompromising pursued in all his work. Diagnosis is implacable and made possible by a widespread use of gastrological metaphor, applied to all fields of experience and language by a reckless writing of history. As Valéry and Péguy also illustrate, the experience of contemporary men is in fact poor and sick, characterized by a radical duplicity and a contradiction without synthesis. Not only things, as Marx also shows analysing the goods as the new hieroglyphs marking the saturated space of the metropolis, but also man is double, and his embodied, deeply physiological economy too. His hungry stomach is twofold, because it takes everything but does not nourish at all, it cries of various and heterogeneous excitements, not of real food to be absorbed and transformed, in short it lives by an instant without past or future. The opposite of this logic of illness and insensitivity for too many sensations and sensational choc, and the reverse of this oblivion for too much rapidity, is an extreme being anti- or even pre-modern. In modern times, the training of a genuine clinic criticism about prejudices and supposed self-knowledge involves a regression and an alteration of own historical identities, believes and values. Finally, as Benjamin and Warburg revealed, criticism is like to become again animal and interpretation is like to regain the slowness and melancholy of endless chewing, as a dog or a cow.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
