Francesco Gori | Università degli Studi di Palermo (original) (raw)

Papers by Francesco Gori

Tesi di laurea magistrale sull'archeologia del sapere di Foucault come critica delle segnature a ... more Tesi di laurea magistrale sull'archeologia del sapere di Foucault come critica delle segnature a partire dall'ontologia negativa del segno e il paradosso della significazione nella linguistica generale (Saussure, Benveniste)

Verso un'iconologia del presente «Ce la caveremo, vero, papà? Sí. Ce la caveremo. E non ci succed... more Verso un'iconologia del presente «Ce la caveremo, vero, papà? Sí. Ce la caveremo. E non ci succederà niente di male. Esatto. Perché noi portiamo il fuoco. Sí. Perché noi portiamo il fuoco».

and the one of the Twin Towers (9/11/2001) are the two "falls" that, at inverted dates, have unma... more and the one of the Twin Towers (9/11/2001) are the two "falls" that, at inverted dates, have unmade and remade the world where we live in the twinkle of two decades. In a famous interview issued to Giovanna Borradori a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attack, Jacques Derrida argued that "in many respects, it was a delayed effect of the Cold War" 2 . Starting from this suggestion, this article will attempt to outline a genealogy of our present time, from the "balance of terror" of the Cold War to the current "time of terror", not only by identifying the deep connections between those two epochs, but also by stressing their historical differences. Hence, by asking "if 9/11 was 11/9?" we are really posing the question: which are the continuities and which the fractures in our recent history? What did remain the same, and what has changed from the Cold War to the present? In order to make such a question useful for the social sciences, however, it's necessary to relate it to a defined framework, with the intent to find a common ground of comparison. This is the reason why I decided to work on the notion of spectacle, in which Guy Debord recognized at the end of the Sixties the very essence of post-industrial societies, ruled by the twin idols of consumption and telecommunication. The notion of "spectacle" doesn't designate any kind of object, but rather a kind of relationship: "the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images" 3 . The point of this thesis, as Debord himself underlines, doesn't reside in the concept of image, but more properly in the one of mediation: since an "image" is whatever representation supported by a medium, the society of the spectacle, then, is far more a "society of the media" (supporting a complex of discourses, music, conversations, pictures, videos etc.) than simply a "society of the images". The relationship between people mediated by the complex of discourses and pictures of the spectacle, however, is rooted in a more fundamental relation that has existed long before the appearance of the interconnected system of mass media. This relationship is the one between the facts and their representation, or between the events and the words and pictures through which they are depicted. From this point of view, we could set the birth and development of the Society of the spectacle as a stage in the long-term history of such relationship, namely as the form it has taken in the age of electricity and global media 4 . As WJT Mitchell points out, in fact, what remains invariable across the ages is that: 1 Der Feind ist deine eigene

Tesi di laurea magistrale sull'archeologia del sapere di Foucault come critica delle segnature a ... more Tesi di laurea magistrale sull'archeologia del sapere di Foucault come critica delle segnature a partire dall'ontologia negativa del segno e il paradosso della significazione nella linguistica generale (Saussure, Benveniste)

Verso un'iconologia del presente «Ce la caveremo, vero, papà? Sí. Ce la caveremo. E non ci succed... more Verso un'iconologia del presente «Ce la caveremo, vero, papà? Sí. Ce la caveremo. E non ci succederà niente di male. Esatto. Perché noi portiamo il fuoco. Sí. Perché noi portiamo il fuoco».

and the one of the Twin Towers (9/11/2001) are the two "falls" that, at inverted dates, have unma... more and the one of the Twin Towers (9/11/2001) are the two "falls" that, at inverted dates, have unmade and remade the world where we live in the twinkle of two decades. In a famous interview issued to Giovanna Borradori a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attack, Jacques Derrida argued that "in many respects, it was a delayed effect of the Cold War" 2 . Starting from this suggestion, this article will attempt to outline a genealogy of our present time, from the "balance of terror" of the Cold War to the current "time of terror", not only by identifying the deep connections between those two epochs, but also by stressing their historical differences. Hence, by asking "if 9/11 was 11/9?" we are really posing the question: which are the continuities and which the fractures in our recent history? What did remain the same, and what has changed from the Cold War to the present? In order to make such a question useful for the social sciences, however, it's necessary to relate it to a defined framework, with the intent to find a common ground of comparison. This is the reason why I decided to work on the notion of spectacle, in which Guy Debord recognized at the end of the Sixties the very essence of post-industrial societies, ruled by the twin idols of consumption and telecommunication. The notion of "spectacle" doesn't designate any kind of object, but rather a kind of relationship: "the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images" 3 . The point of this thesis, as Debord himself underlines, doesn't reside in the concept of image, but more properly in the one of mediation: since an "image" is whatever representation supported by a medium, the society of the spectacle, then, is far more a "society of the media" (supporting a complex of discourses, music, conversations, pictures, videos etc.) than simply a "society of the images". The relationship between people mediated by the complex of discourses and pictures of the spectacle, however, is rooted in a more fundamental relation that has existed long before the appearance of the interconnected system of mass media. This relationship is the one between the facts and their representation, or between the events and the words and pictures through which they are depicted. From this point of view, we could set the birth and development of the Society of the spectacle as a stage in the long-term history of such relationship, namely as the form it has taken in the age of electricity and global media 4 . As WJT Mitchell points out, in fact, what remains invariable across the ages is that: 1 Der Feind ist deine eigene