Mattia Mossali | Dickinson College (original) (raw)
Papers by Mattia Mossali
Modern Language Review, 2023
This article centres on a close reading of Patrizia Valduga's Cento quartine (1997). The poet sta... more This article centres on a close reading of Patrizia Valduga's Cento quartine (1997). The poet stages an intense dialogue between a man and a woman in love, in an effort to render the compulsive nature that regulates the sexual act. The result is a sexually explicit text, with nothing left to be sublimated. Through comparison with Lacan's Encore, the article investigates how Cento quartine attempts to say something of that irreducible difference between two lovers: it is perhaps their very alterity that makes love possible. Thus, Valduga's text ultimately offers a praise of what may be termed the 'amorous failure'.
Comparatismi, 2022
This article sets out to examine Deserto rosso as the site where the main female character can be... more This article sets out to examine Deserto rosso as the site where the main female character can be said to destabilize the female identity quest that characterizes Antonioni's films of the tetralogy. I shall pursue a Lacanian reflection on the film, only to discuss how the hysteric responds to an identity she perceives as elusive either through the symptom, clearly aimed at an addressee, or through a series of virile identifications aiming to fill a lack of knowledge that she feels as her own. In this sense, Giuliana's gaze turns out to be dependent on that of the men to whom she relates, in a very peculiar manner. Giuliana, as a hysterical character, may be said to be working from within the cinematic aesthetic of the free indirect style only to disrupt it.
Enthymema , 2022
This article aims to discuss the marked turn that characterizes the final stage of Sylvia Plath’s... more This article aims to discuss the marked turn that characterizes the final
stage of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. By reading selected passages from Ariel, in the restored edition that corresponds to Plath’s meticulously conceived sequence, I will outline the coordinates of a project that echoes ancient cosmologies, as Plath attempts to give birth to a new and more intimate world, finally free of painful separations. Without any doubt, a sense of creation pervades Ariel, and yet, as Nadia Fusini has pointed out, what readers ultimately witness is a miracle of transubstantiation whereby Plath transforms her writing into a living organism. To elaborate on this assertion, the article argues that, in Ariel, Plath no longer shields herself behind her masterful technique: instead, creator and creature must now become the same thing. This is the beginning of a process that will lead her not only to become a Poet, but to embody poetry.
L'immagine riflessa. Testi, società, culture, 2020
This essay will explore the complex system of self-representation that Sylvia Plath employs for t... more This essay will explore the complex system of self-representation that Sylvia Plath employs for the composition of The Bell Jar. By way of a close reading of the novel, attentive to its relationship both to the Bildungsroman and to certain forms of (semi)autobiographical writing, the essay contends that, in Plath, writing acquires a symbolic function. The novel’s linguistic dimension, in fact, is not communicative, but rather poietic – a testament of the nascent vocation of writing to which Plath attributes a project of self-construction. By stressing the dialectic of birth, death and rebirth that permeates the novel, the essay attempts to reconstruct the stages of the battle that Plath fights to attain a more authentic subjectivity, a battle that takes the form of an ‘initiation rite’.
LEA. Lingue e letterature d'Oriente e d'Occidente, 2018
This article analyses the different forms that death and mourning take on in the making of Rossel... more This article analyses the different forms that death and mourning take on in the making of Rosselli and Plath's poetics. Starting from a shared biographical event-the death of their fathers-and through the analysis of a limited sample of poems (in particular "Perché il cielo divinasse la tua ansia di morire" by Rosselli and "Electra on Azalea Path" by Plath), our aim is to discuss, firstly, the different meaning that paternal loss takes on in their lives, and then, the divergent way in which their poetry constantly echoes this fundamental absence.
Comparatismi, 2018
• This essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the iden... more • This essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the identification processes that reading may involve, and how these processes affect the reader's experience and identity. When it is authentic, the act of reading cannot be considered as a moment of mirroring, but it includes a more profound identification experience to the extent that reading becomes a sort of event, a gesture that at times may alter the reader's perception of her identity since, through it, she can access the buried spaces of the unconscious. If it is true that every work demands an interpretation, at the same time the fruition of literary texts by readers is inextricably linked to their desire for personal knowledge. This is why reading is neither a cognitive nor a psychobiological experience, insofar as it involves a more complex and personal interpretative and intersubjective activity: reader and text become a sort of innovative enterprise through which connections are not only unmasked , but above all continuously created. For the purposes of the discussion and to illuminate better the point I want to make, I will implicate myself and my own personal experience as reader of Sylvia Plath.
estetica. studi e ricerche, 2018
This article considers the photographic work of Francesca Woodman in terms of «conflicting greatn... more This article considers the photographic work of Francesca Woodman in terms of «conflicting greatness», by investigating the different perspectives from which her photographs deal with conflictuality. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s argumentation about the origin of the work of art, this contribution will seek first to problematize the traditional feminist reception of Woodman’s work, in order to demonstrate the impossibility of circumscribing her artistic production in terms of a definite contextual label. Secondly, by way of a comparison with Cindy Sherman, this article intends to explicate the peculiar search for self staged by Woodman, her attempt to reach this knowledge which is, in the end, impossible to achieve unless in relation with an other, through a reciprocal exchange of gazes, from inside and outside.
Elephant&Castle, 2016
Before Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley published an interesting book emblematically titled Eye ... more Before Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley published an interesting book emblematically titled Eye Rhymes. Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual, the impact of visual art in the development of Plath’s poetics was scarcely known. As a matter of facts, also today many people ignore that Sylvia Plath in her childhood and during her school education, moved between writing and drawing constantly; only after the age of twenty – and also when the opinions expressed by the critics and teachers to whom she used to submit her drawings began to express some doubts about their artistic value – Plath decided to dedicate herself professionally only to writing. However, she didn’t abandon her interest in art because it merged into her poetic according to an idea of “ekfrastic coexistence”, which incorporates a double creative force, images and words which together can create art poems, directly into dialogue with the paintings of Rousseau, Gauguin, Klee, de Chirico; the "primitives", as Plath used to call them. After individuating three main periods in Plath’s production – as Fan Jinghua suggested – this contribution aims to investigate the peculiar role of visual imagery in the poetics of the poetess from Boston and to discuss its evolution, from an initial technical-formal concern through which she tried to put in words her preferred artists’ works of art, to its mutation in morphogen scenario, a pathological situation where the referents cannot be found into the reality but only in Plath’s psychic Real.
Enthymema, 2016
Marcelle Sauvageot's Commentaire, although its indisputable literary value, has struggled to esta... more Marcelle Sauvageot's Commentaire, although its indisputable literary value, has struggled to establish itself as a great literary classic and still lacks an analysis that knows how to highlight its uniqueness and, above all, the uniqueness of this genre. In the rare literary analysis of our knowledge, Commentaire seems to have been read too hastily, concentrating the attention only on its most obvious feature, that is establishing a direct relationship between this kind of writing and the author's sexual gender. For this reason, it was simplistically counted among the examples of «women's writing». On the contrary, this article proposes a different prospective, which sees in Sauvageot's pages not only the desperate shout of a woman denouncing the weakness and meanness of the male world but, at a deeper level of analysis, a refined and more general speculation around love, a reflection that, proceeding beyond the feminist point of view, investigates the consequences caused by the abandonment and the betrayal of the Other, to which the subject had thought to inextricably tie his/her existence.
AG. About Gender. International Journal of Gender Studies, 2015
While the traditional approaches toward sexuality persist in considering the sexual identity star... more While the traditional approaches toward sexuality persist in considering the sexual identity starting from the evidence of our body as a naturally sexual object (Essentialiam) or considering it as the result of Power discourses (Culturalism), the literary and visual imaginary promotes a reflection on human subjectivity in terms of complicated and conflicted self-construction, connected with the most innovative philosophical and psychoanalytic thought (from Heidegger to Lacan). In particular, this essay aims to reconsider the concept of femininity that, far from being a natural condition, could be synonym of exception, ineffable category, courageous choice, a way to assert the primacy of human singularity against the mass categorization. To do this, it will be necessary to go beyond the essentialist view on gender and prefer a more complex ethical prospective in which also the artistic sublimation plays a crucial role.
Books by Mattia Mossali
Mimesis Edizioni, Milano-Udine, 2020
Qual è il senso, se un senso esiste, della melanconia? Si tratta forse di un dolore interminabile... more Qual è il senso, se un senso esiste, della melanconia? Si tratta forse di un dolore interminabile, devastante, senza alcuna possibilità di significazione? In questo libro, che procede in bilico tra rigorosa riflessione teorica e piacere della sorpresa narrativa, l’autore compie un viaggio attraverso la psicoanalisi, l’estetica letteraria e la filosofia con l’obiettivo di comprendere che cosa dica il sentimento melanconico dell’esistenza umana, quale posto occupino il dolore e la sofferenza nella costante costruzione della soggettività e come possa tale dolore essere attraversato, se non anche trasformato. Una via d’uscita possibile, a lungo trascurata anche dalla psicoanalisi, viene rintracciata nel perdono, qui discusso nei termini di un processo alternativo a quello del lutto e da cui può emergere il lato inedito e combattivo dell’afflizione melanconica.
Dopo un’attenta lettura del saggio Lutto e melanconia di Freud, per evidenziarne i pregi ma anche le possibilità di espansione, l’itinerario procede con l’analisi di storie letterarie in cui il perdono viene evocato nelle sue molteplici sfumature, che l’autore analizza a partire dalle nuove modalità di narrazione del discorso amoroso inscenate nella letteratura americana contemporanea (da Jeffrey Eugenides a Siri Hustvedt), passando dai romanzi intimisti di Anaïs Nin e Simone de Beauvoir fino ai versi che Ted Hughes ha dedicato a Sylvia Plath. Una sorta di autentico corpo a corpo con ciò che la letteratura dice del perdono, alla ricerca di una piega inaspettata. Una riflessione sul dolore e sulla perdita, ma anche su un’idea di perdono come scommessa di rinascita, come ricostruzione di una soggettività ridotta in frantumi.
Edizioni Ripostes, Salerno, 2015
L’esito tragico della vita di Sylvia Plath ci ricorda che la flessibilità (che nella sua accezion... more L’esito tragico della vita di Sylvia Plath ci ricorda che la flessibilità (che nella sua accezione eminente equivale alla non-coincidenza con se stessi, e non va intesa banalmente come una proprietà o una disposizione) è più femminile che maschile: nella sua inquietante duplicità, perché rende le donne più ricche e più fragili. La via della ricerca resta aperta evidentemente sulla femminilità, nella misura in cui si è costretti ad affrontare il paradosso di dovere indicare un tratto universale, che valga per tutte le donne, nel momento stesso in cui si intende rovesciare l’universalità a favore dell’unicità e dell’eccezione, e su quella unicità che è stata Sylvia.
Conference Presentations by Mattia Mossali
Modern Language Review, 2023
This article centres on a close reading of Patrizia Valduga's Cento quartine (1997). The poet sta... more This article centres on a close reading of Patrizia Valduga's Cento quartine (1997). The poet stages an intense dialogue between a man and a woman in love, in an effort to render the compulsive nature that regulates the sexual act. The result is a sexually explicit text, with nothing left to be sublimated. Through comparison with Lacan's Encore, the article investigates how Cento quartine attempts to say something of that irreducible difference between two lovers: it is perhaps their very alterity that makes love possible. Thus, Valduga's text ultimately offers a praise of what may be termed the 'amorous failure'.
Comparatismi, 2022
This article sets out to examine Deserto rosso as the site where the main female character can be... more This article sets out to examine Deserto rosso as the site where the main female character can be said to destabilize the female identity quest that characterizes Antonioni's films of the tetralogy. I shall pursue a Lacanian reflection on the film, only to discuss how the hysteric responds to an identity she perceives as elusive either through the symptom, clearly aimed at an addressee, or through a series of virile identifications aiming to fill a lack of knowledge that she feels as her own. In this sense, Giuliana's gaze turns out to be dependent on that of the men to whom she relates, in a very peculiar manner. Giuliana, as a hysterical character, may be said to be working from within the cinematic aesthetic of the free indirect style only to disrupt it.
Enthymema , 2022
This article aims to discuss the marked turn that characterizes the final stage of Sylvia Plath’s... more This article aims to discuss the marked turn that characterizes the final
stage of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. By reading selected passages from Ariel, in the restored edition that corresponds to Plath’s meticulously conceived sequence, I will outline the coordinates of a project that echoes ancient cosmologies, as Plath attempts to give birth to a new and more intimate world, finally free of painful separations. Without any doubt, a sense of creation pervades Ariel, and yet, as Nadia Fusini has pointed out, what readers ultimately witness is a miracle of transubstantiation whereby Plath transforms her writing into a living organism. To elaborate on this assertion, the article argues that, in Ariel, Plath no longer shields herself behind her masterful technique: instead, creator and creature must now become the same thing. This is the beginning of a process that will lead her not only to become a Poet, but to embody poetry.
L'immagine riflessa. Testi, società, culture, 2020
This essay will explore the complex system of self-representation that Sylvia Plath employs for t... more This essay will explore the complex system of self-representation that Sylvia Plath employs for the composition of The Bell Jar. By way of a close reading of the novel, attentive to its relationship both to the Bildungsroman and to certain forms of (semi)autobiographical writing, the essay contends that, in Plath, writing acquires a symbolic function. The novel’s linguistic dimension, in fact, is not communicative, but rather poietic – a testament of the nascent vocation of writing to which Plath attributes a project of self-construction. By stressing the dialectic of birth, death and rebirth that permeates the novel, the essay attempts to reconstruct the stages of the battle that Plath fights to attain a more authentic subjectivity, a battle that takes the form of an ‘initiation rite’.
LEA. Lingue e letterature d'Oriente e d'Occidente, 2018
This article analyses the different forms that death and mourning take on in the making of Rossel... more This article analyses the different forms that death and mourning take on in the making of Rosselli and Plath's poetics. Starting from a shared biographical event-the death of their fathers-and through the analysis of a limited sample of poems (in particular "Perché il cielo divinasse la tua ansia di morire" by Rosselli and "Electra on Azalea Path" by Plath), our aim is to discuss, firstly, the different meaning that paternal loss takes on in their lives, and then, the divergent way in which their poetry constantly echoes this fundamental absence.
Comparatismi, 2018
• This essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the iden... more • This essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the identification processes that reading may involve, and how these processes affect the reader's experience and identity. When it is authentic, the act of reading cannot be considered as a moment of mirroring, but it includes a more profound identification experience to the extent that reading becomes a sort of event, a gesture that at times may alter the reader's perception of her identity since, through it, she can access the buried spaces of the unconscious. If it is true that every work demands an interpretation, at the same time the fruition of literary texts by readers is inextricably linked to their desire for personal knowledge. This is why reading is neither a cognitive nor a psychobiological experience, insofar as it involves a more complex and personal interpretative and intersubjective activity: reader and text become a sort of innovative enterprise through which connections are not only unmasked , but above all continuously created. For the purposes of the discussion and to illuminate better the point I want to make, I will implicate myself and my own personal experience as reader of Sylvia Plath.
estetica. studi e ricerche, 2018
This article considers the photographic work of Francesca Woodman in terms of «conflicting greatn... more This article considers the photographic work of Francesca Woodman in terms of «conflicting greatness», by investigating the different perspectives from which her photographs deal with conflictuality. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s argumentation about the origin of the work of art, this contribution will seek first to problematize the traditional feminist reception of Woodman’s work, in order to demonstrate the impossibility of circumscribing her artistic production in terms of a definite contextual label. Secondly, by way of a comparison with Cindy Sherman, this article intends to explicate the peculiar search for self staged by Woodman, her attempt to reach this knowledge which is, in the end, impossible to achieve unless in relation with an other, through a reciprocal exchange of gazes, from inside and outside.
Elephant&Castle, 2016
Before Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley published an interesting book emblematically titled Eye ... more Before Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley published an interesting book emblematically titled Eye Rhymes. Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual, the impact of visual art in the development of Plath’s poetics was scarcely known. As a matter of facts, also today many people ignore that Sylvia Plath in her childhood and during her school education, moved between writing and drawing constantly; only after the age of twenty – and also when the opinions expressed by the critics and teachers to whom she used to submit her drawings began to express some doubts about their artistic value – Plath decided to dedicate herself professionally only to writing. However, she didn’t abandon her interest in art because it merged into her poetic according to an idea of “ekfrastic coexistence”, which incorporates a double creative force, images and words which together can create art poems, directly into dialogue with the paintings of Rousseau, Gauguin, Klee, de Chirico; the "primitives", as Plath used to call them. After individuating three main periods in Plath’s production – as Fan Jinghua suggested – this contribution aims to investigate the peculiar role of visual imagery in the poetics of the poetess from Boston and to discuss its evolution, from an initial technical-formal concern through which she tried to put in words her preferred artists’ works of art, to its mutation in morphogen scenario, a pathological situation where the referents cannot be found into the reality but only in Plath’s psychic Real.
Enthymema, 2016
Marcelle Sauvageot's Commentaire, although its indisputable literary value, has struggled to esta... more Marcelle Sauvageot's Commentaire, although its indisputable literary value, has struggled to establish itself as a great literary classic and still lacks an analysis that knows how to highlight its uniqueness and, above all, the uniqueness of this genre. In the rare literary analysis of our knowledge, Commentaire seems to have been read too hastily, concentrating the attention only on its most obvious feature, that is establishing a direct relationship between this kind of writing and the author's sexual gender. For this reason, it was simplistically counted among the examples of «women's writing». On the contrary, this article proposes a different prospective, which sees in Sauvageot's pages not only the desperate shout of a woman denouncing the weakness and meanness of the male world but, at a deeper level of analysis, a refined and more general speculation around love, a reflection that, proceeding beyond the feminist point of view, investigates the consequences caused by the abandonment and the betrayal of the Other, to which the subject had thought to inextricably tie his/her existence.
AG. About Gender. International Journal of Gender Studies, 2015
While the traditional approaches toward sexuality persist in considering the sexual identity star... more While the traditional approaches toward sexuality persist in considering the sexual identity starting from the evidence of our body as a naturally sexual object (Essentialiam) or considering it as the result of Power discourses (Culturalism), the literary and visual imaginary promotes a reflection on human subjectivity in terms of complicated and conflicted self-construction, connected with the most innovative philosophical and psychoanalytic thought (from Heidegger to Lacan). In particular, this essay aims to reconsider the concept of femininity that, far from being a natural condition, could be synonym of exception, ineffable category, courageous choice, a way to assert the primacy of human singularity against the mass categorization. To do this, it will be necessary to go beyond the essentialist view on gender and prefer a more complex ethical prospective in which also the artistic sublimation plays a crucial role.
Mimesis Edizioni, Milano-Udine, 2020
Qual è il senso, se un senso esiste, della melanconia? Si tratta forse di un dolore interminabile... more Qual è il senso, se un senso esiste, della melanconia? Si tratta forse di un dolore interminabile, devastante, senza alcuna possibilità di significazione? In questo libro, che procede in bilico tra rigorosa riflessione teorica e piacere della sorpresa narrativa, l’autore compie un viaggio attraverso la psicoanalisi, l’estetica letteraria e la filosofia con l’obiettivo di comprendere che cosa dica il sentimento melanconico dell’esistenza umana, quale posto occupino il dolore e la sofferenza nella costante costruzione della soggettività e come possa tale dolore essere attraversato, se non anche trasformato. Una via d’uscita possibile, a lungo trascurata anche dalla psicoanalisi, viene rintracciata nel perdono, qui discusso nei termini di un processo alternativo a quello del lutto e da cui può emergere il lato inedito e combattivo dell’afflizione melanconica.
Dopo un’attenta lettura del saggio Lutto e melanconia di Freud, per evidenziarne i pregi ma anche le possibilità di espansione, l’itinerario procede con l’analisi di storie letterarie in cui il perdono viene evocato nelle sue molteplici sfumature, che l’autore analizza a partire dalle nuove modalità di narrazione del discorso amoroso inscenate nella letteratura americana contemporanea (da Jeffrey Eugenides a Siri Hustvedt), passando dai romanzi intimisti di Anaïs Nin e Simone de Beauvoir fino ai versi che Ted Hughes ha dedicato a Sylvia Plath. Una sorta di autentico corpo a corpo con ciò che la letteratura dice del perdono, alla ricerca di una piega inaspettata. Una riflessione sul dolore e sulla perdita, ma anche su un’idea di perdono come scommessa di rinascita, come ricostruzione di una soggettività ridotta in frantumi.
Edizioni Ripostes, Salerno, 2015
L’esito tragico della vita di Sylvia Plath ci ricorda che la flessibilità (che nella sua accezion... more L’esito tragico della vita di Sylvia Plath ci ricorda che la flessibilità (che nella sua accezione eminente equivale alla non-coincidenza con se stessi, e non va intesa banalmente come una proprietà o una disposizione) è più femminile che maschile: nella sua inquietante duplicità, perché rende le donne più ricche e più fragili. La via della ricerca resta aperta evidentemente sulla femminilità, nella misura in cui si è costretti ad affrontare il paradosso di dovere indicare un tratto universale, che valga per tutte le donne, nel momento stesso in cui si intende rovesciare l’universalità a favore dell’unicità e dell’eccezione, e su quella unicità che è stata Sylvia.
In a 1980 letter to Schloss, Francesca Woodman offers an insight about the complexity inscribed i... more In a 1980 letter to Schloss, Francesca Woodman offers an insight about the complexity inscribed in her works: «I want my photographs to condense experience into small images that contain all the mystery of fear or whatever it is that’s latent in the eyes of the viewer, and bring it out as though it were her own experience». By virtue of these words (and through the methodological tools the psychoanalysis offers) this paper aims at discussing how, when we come to Woodman’s pictures, they are able to open a gap through which the observer is invited to go beyond the female body apparently entrapped in a masculine system of signifiers, and to look at the contradictions that animate the self, the courageous attempt to search for an authentic and finally singular expression. In this sense, Woodman’s shots cannot be considered as passive objects in front of which stands the viewer as active subject of the gazing process: these photographs invert the direction of the gaze, of our perception and, thus, they question our identity.
Woodman seems to create a peculiar space invested with intimacy and alienation, proximity and distance, declining itself as an invitation for the viewer to investigate his own condition. Woodman’s photographs echo the deceits – to quote directly the title of her well-known series – of self-knowledge, and allow the viewer to experience this intimate process of subjectification through the protection of an aesthetic illusion.
In other words, Woodman’s photographs orchestrate a form of mostly unconscious mirroring, such that the viewer has the chance to glimpse something of himself in those shots. By reflecting themselves in the other, spectators are involved in the dynamic and dialectical nature of the self, which is in the end the truth of human existence.
In January of 1998, thirty-five years after his wife’s suicide, Ted Hughes returned to talk about... more In January of 1998, thirty-five years after his wife’s suicide, Ted Hughes returned to talk about the poetess Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters, the latest book he published before dying.
Starting from the reading of Plath’s main poems which he quotes explicitly, Hughes speaks about his difficult love for the American poetess; he seems to answer directly to some Plath’s poems (Pursuit, Event, Ariel) by picking up her main lines, a poetical decision which earned him the criticism of those who read Birthday Letters as an example of “literary usurpation”.
On the contrary, this contribution aims to present a more in-depth textual analysis: from our prospective, Birthday Letters may be read as the story of Hughes and Plath’s poetic initiation, the influence they exerted on each other’s writing. More in detail, Birthday Letters is the story of how Sylvia Plath initiated Ted Hughes to poetry, by embodying in his eyes the Gravesian White Goddess. Sylvia Plath was the one who allowed Hughes to understand the sacrifice of a life not only devoted to poetry, but which declines itself as “poetry”. «All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, / From me»: these are the words Sylvia Plath wrote in The Soliloquy of the Solipsist, which underline Plath’s role in Hughes’s writing. We could say that the White Goddess Sylvia Plath was able to give a new direction to Hughes’s creative flow: through Birthday Letters, Hughes tried to exchange the gift Plath offered him, by exalting her poetic greatness.
On a second level of analysis, this contribution aims also to bring to light the fascinating misunderstandings in their love and poetic relationship, which are perfectly understandable by reading the very last Hughes’s poems. During a radio interview, the Poet Laureate stated that they used to work starting from «a single shared mind»; however, when they wrote about the same topic, they always approached it differently. This is the proof not only of a compositional autonomy, but also of a fundamental difference which will prove to be fatal for their entire relationship: as a matter of facts, while Hughes was looking for the White Goddess in his wife, Sylvia Plath, faithful to a no less demanding worship, hoped to find her dead father in her husband.
This contribution aims to demonstrate how the awareness of both the reciprocal influence and the structural distance among them is emblematically expressed in Hughes’s Birthday Letters.
Every time that we have to determine an object, we are obliged to use terms (such as nouns or adj... more Every time that we have to determine an object, we are obliged to use terms (such as nouns or adjectives) able to indicate its main characteristics. One of the most representative examples of definition is that offered by Aristotle: “Man is a rational animal”. ‘Animal’ and ‘rational’ are the two properties that allow us to collocate “man” into a precise category, containing all the other beings definite by the same essential properties.
The primary goal of philosophy is consisted in individuating these determinations, but also in reconsidering their status: do the categories have an ontological value, or are they mere determinations thank to which our mind can build, classify and especially control the reality?
The contemporary debate on gender is undeniably connected with the process of categorization.
My prospective moves towards a specific evidence: the academic approach, that puts its stress on the necessity to complete a categories list able to include all the aspects of the reality, seems to privilege only the general and superficial features; consequently it disregards the peculiar connotations which define an individual in his/her irreducibility to roles and stereotypes. Whether the goal of the linguistic categorization is to built general classes, the humanities and, in particular, the psychoanalysis, have claimed the right of the single individual.
From the above, this paper aims to discuss the traditional process of categorization, trying to put in evidence the limits involved in the classical definition of category, in order to move toward a new prospective that will be the basis for a richer theory of singularity. After discussing the principal approaches to sexuality and their limits (from Essentialism to Constructivism and Queer movements), the essay will conclude with the most prolific psychoanalytic thought (in particular the Lacanian concept of sessuation) in order to demonstrate that, far from being only a gene or a social construction, the sexual identity always includes the subject’s mediation.