This special issue of Cinéma& Cie focuses the topic of post-cinema taking for granted the background of this notion that animated the recent debate revolving around it. The aim of the volume is thus rather to ask which ontologies, if any can, do the moving image justice in a situation in which the cinema is merely one of many configurations of film, which other theoretical frameworks may be appropriate and which modes of temporality, and of historiography and analysis can account for the steady transformation of film’s varying configurations. While the most productive accounts of post-cinema rarely trace this filiation in an explicit fashion, the label is closely related to the concept of post-media as developed by Félix Guattari in the early 1990s, later adapted into art, media theory, new and screen media. Highlighting the importance of bridging post-cinema and post-media, the volume addresses the post-what and post-when of post-cinema providing original arguments and categories enabling to envisage the next step to be taken in film theory.

History of Cinema Without Names is an editorial project which gathers research papers presented at Gorizia Conference. It promotes a new research perspective on the notions of film authorship, style, and genre, with the aim of re-articulating their theoretical definition.

The volume is devoted to images in painting, photography and cinema invented by literature. At the same time it intends to question, through this perspective, the relationship between text and image, between verbal and visual in modern and contemporary literature. The authors involved study the mutual boundaries between literature and arts from the point of view of aesthetics, visual culture and literary theory, trying to build a map of the notional ekphrasis, a description which constitutes the work of art while telling it.

How is one to learn in a time of globalization? And in particular: how is one to learn if the research “object” is a non-European culture, such as that of Japan? What are the methodologies appropriate for working in the field of “Nippon/Japan” in a bi-directional approach from West to East and from East to West? Based on an interdisciplinary and intercultural orientation, specialists from Europe and Japan analyze topics focusing on History, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Literature, Linguistics, Sociology, Economics and Religious Studies.

The cohabitation of different cultures and the rise of new cultural and social clashes in more or less wide contexts (nation-states, macro- areas, civilizations) has pushed human sciences to examine themselves through an interdisciplinary point of view and to develop new categories in order to define the Other. Since the development of a multicultural approach to otherness was born in Early Modern culture, the book’s main goal is to research such a historical process, beginning from the specific point of view developed by Jesuits between the 17th and 18th centuries. A specific focus will also be devoted to the discussion of today’s intercultural and religious clashes in the Islamic world and in the Far East: in fact, in these contexts, religious movements have given a decisive contribution to the spread of strong paradigms, useful in representing the Other. Three chapters (those by M. Catto, E. Colombo and P. Broggio) will analyse the Jesuits’ missionary strategies; P. Pizzo will give an overview on the Islamic world, and S. Picciaredda will study the debate on Otherness within the Catholic culture during the 20th century.

In 1995, in Chicago, Mary Jacob curated “Culture in action”, an experience of participatory Public Art which left a mark on the contemporary artistic research and criticism. Over the last twenty years, this “new genre of public art” (Lacy 1995) has developed. In these “dialogical” and “connective” aesthetics (Kester 1999, Gablik 1992), public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. The book moves from the first outcomes of a two-year interdisciplinary research programme on the Italian contemporary Public Art, funded by the Sardinia Region (Italy). Moving beyond the traditional ladders of formal citizen participation to territory governance, the research investigates how public artists have involved citizens in creative performances that aim to modify citizens’ perceptions of the places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. A book particularly useful to international students who have strong interests in the ongoing debates on political participation and communication from a multidisciplinary perspective, Performative Citizenship is the product of extensive teaching experience in the field of political participation and communication, and stems from continuous comparisons between students of sociology, cultural and media studies, political sciences, arts, architecture, and urban planning.

The book addresses Merleau-Ponty’s so-called ontology of the flesh, a rather obscure expression that the book explains in depth by drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s lecture courses, published in the last years. In light of these publications, the book shows the importance and the novelty of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy, which until recently has been seldom addressed in its entirety. Thanks to the knowledge of the whole range of Merleau-Ponty’s now published body of work and of the as yet unpublished texts, as well as a scholarship acquired through more than 20 years spent working on these themes, the author of the book is able to offer a ground-breaking interpretation of one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, whose philosophical relevance is now widely acknowledged both in Europe and the USA, and whose scholarship is fast growing, while at the same time still lacking an overall systematic assessment, which this book aims to provide.

With this volume, we present a collection of writings, each offering their own novel perspective regarding the question of realism. Realism has undoubtedly attracted a lot of attention during recent philosophical debates, and one of its characteristic aspects that has made the most notable impact is the way it challenges rigid traditional demarcations between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy. We maintain that there is still much more to be said on the matter and that a renewal of the discussion on realism is necessary and should bypass old divisions. Therefore, this volume offers a contribution to some of the many discussions on the subject without entirely departing from the “old” realism and without treating its object of study as something that can be created ex nihilo. Instead, this work is based on the broadly shared conviction that a certain historicism cannot be left out of the picture if we are to reposition realism and see its present or future as yet to be determined rather than set in stone.

This study is led by the overarching idea that a precise metalanguage should be required when intending to critically talk about translations as texts. Due to the lack of communication between the translation industry and academic research, on the one hand, the notions heralded by Translation Studies are regarded as “parochial,” “too technical” and “academic” by professionals (a category that includes editors, proof-readers, translation agencies and all the other figures working in the translation industry), who oftentimes prefer to rely exclusively on their own experience; on the other hand, scholars sometimes fail to make their findings accessible to whole community of practitioners. This book intends to provide a practical, flexible and accurate model to be used when discussing translations. The model will be tested against a case study, i.e. the translations of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer into Italian, which also provides an interesting overview of translation practices in Italy from the 1940s onwards.

Publication trilingue atour de la pensée de Merleau-PontyTrilingual studies concerning the thought of Merleau-PontyPubblicazione trilingue intorno al pensiero di Merleau-Ponty

Peter Eisenman (Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Eisenman Architects, New York, USA) discusses with architects and philosophers: Jörg H. Gleiter (Germany), Kim Förster (Switzerland), Preston Scott Cohen (USA), Emmanuel Petit (USA), Mario Carpo (USA), Sarah M. Whiting (USA), Manuel Orazi (Italy), John McMorrough (USA), Gabriele Mastrigli (Italy), Panayotis Pangalos (Greece), Cynthia Davidson (USA), Ingeborg M. Rocker (USA), Alejandro Zaera-Polo (USA), Djordje Stojanović (Serbia), Greg Lynn (USA) performing on the stage for two days in Belgrade.

Don Giovanni chooses a piazza as a place for a lover’s tryst: a piazza that was once, in other times, a theatre of torture and death. The recurring vision of a wooden monument in flames, erected in the great piazza in memory of a man of free thought, is a source of constant disquiet for Don Giovanni, a frightfully terrible trial that evokes fear, anxiety, terror and horror. The image of the wooden monument burning keeps coming back to Don Giovanni’s mind, to the extent that it becomes an obsession, which in the end the great personage realises it somehow represents the inexorable tragic epilogue of his own life. A group of ten people, men and women, persecute Don Giovanni, the loathed seducer, manifestly seeking revenge. Again and again they scorn and sully his senses, the source of his faculty of love, with the aim of crippling his sense of taste, hearing, smell, touch and sight. Deformed in body and humiliated in thought, Don Giovanni wanders the capitals of the world, desperate, now incapable of loving, doomed to die.

If we think of the beginnings of psychoanalysis, we certainly recognise that it overturned the vision human beings had of themselves, the illusion of ownership of their thoughts and actions. And in reality it still remains a way of reading the world, both inside and outside, that is admittedly disorienting. However, especially in recent years, the principles on which psychoanalysis was founded have been subjected to considerable pressure from the outside that forces psychoanalysis to problematise still more its vision of humankind and to abandon everything connected with prejudice toward the culture and history it was born out of, i. e. Western, in order to recognize the link between individual and social boundaries and the differences of various cultures. It is at this intersection between individual horizon and collective sphere that the psychoanalysis could be a galvanising force for knowledge and social growth. The book poses these questions and brings together the different experiences of psychoanalysts living and working in a variety of realities and cultures.

The emergence and spread of new images - photography, film, television and audiovisual - have established an important epistemological revolution oriented contemporary man to take on a confident attitude not only towards the image but also to the real. The modern knowledge, that made explode man’s certainties in hundreds of relative truth, has been removed; the perfect double of reality offered by the new media has quietly deleted the doubt to the faithful restitution of reality into images, and, consequently, to the events of the outside world. To counter this credulity, this mental breakdown, so defined by Joseph Conrad, became widespread in contemporary society, we will need to recover the principles and themes of modern thought born in the seventeenth century. A recovery, this, that will serve not only to oppose the illusions and deceit, but also to better understand the nature of the new images.

The main objective of this edited collection is to examine the ways in which religion, culture and politics converge in configuring the contradictions of a post-war Italy’s cultural history. Starting from the assumption that to conduct a critical reflection on Italian post-war visual culture one must investigate the inevitable impact of Catholic religion on everyday life and its social, political and cultural dimensions, the volume employs the vantage point of cinema to propose a critique and exploration of religion’s influence on the Italian cultural landscape. The edited anthology thus seeks to examine how religion is lived, performed, criticized and represented from various methodological perspectives (historical, philological, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, popular studies etc), through four main sections: ‘Propaganda and Censorship’, ‘Auteurial Voices’, ‘Religion in Popular Italian Cinema’, ‘Modern rituals, Ancient myths’.

The seven chapters of this book cover a variety of concepts (liberalism, freedom, Marxism) and classic thinkers (Mill, Marx, Hayek, Popper) in order to disclose several myths we’ve become accustomed to taking for granted in the West. It posits that exploration of these myths is crucial to understanding the essence of the West or, better, to seeing what has been “removed” from the West as the title of this book implies. What emerges is a rigorous and surprising counter-history of our civilization.