Writing a biography about Pessoa is a seemingly impossible task. The great Portuguese poet did not have just one life, but his existence virtually exploded in over a hundred different personalities. Only by placing oneself close to Pessoa, only by becoming almost one with him, is it possible to trace the life of this poet who was himself a multitude. José Paulo Cavalcanti has done such a thing, sewing together a path that runs through Pessoa's multiple voices and personalities, seamlessly moving in and out of the poet's work, daily habits and interactions. Following the great success of the Brazilian edition, "Pessoa. A quasi Memoir" is the first English translation of the book, and it provides new insights on the complex nature of the Portuguese poet.

During the last six years, a team of scholars, researchers and religious leaders in Europe and the USA worked tirelessly, organising over seventy discussion groups that included members of the local Muslim communities. The present volume presents for the first time the result of their work, developed in collaboration with the Anglican Observer to the United Nations. All discussions were designed to explore different views, rather than to reach a common position. The overall aim of the project is to provide a window on the rich and diverse world of Western Islam, by connecting directly with the everyday life of Muslim citizens in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the United States and Canada.

The revolt of the voters that exploded in 2016 represents a reaction to the effects of financial globalization, with economic discontent driving heightened political and cultural divisions. As populist parties grow across Europe, the common thread – on both left and right – is criticism of the economic policies embraced and enforced by the institutions of the European Union. To suggest that the answer is “more Europe” means putting the cart before the horse, and failing to address the substantive contradictions dogging the EU. As European nations look to the future, the goal must be to defend the well-being of the population as a whole, in a world where public institutions have too often been manipulated to the benefit of private interests.

The complex relationship between life and the arts has always been a crucial topic in philosophical discourse. The essays in this book discuss fundamental issues of modern and contemporary aesthetics, drawing upon the work of the French philosopher Jean- Pierre Cometti, a key figure in the studies of aesthetics, pragmatism, and Austrian philosophy. The volume covers a wide-range of topics, from the examination of fundamental principles of art and literary criticism to a new understanding of the Modernist notion of art. It proposes an anthropological aesthetics using Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or the analysis of literary characters such as Tolstoj’s Hadji Murat and Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a tool to cast light on themes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Editors Carla Carmona and Jerrold Levinson have brought together renowned voices in the field of philosophy to offer a window onto Cometti’s philosophical work, as well as an in-depth analysis of contemporary artistic and aesthetic practices, in an effort to overcome what can sometimes appear as a gulf between art and life.

Psychoanalysts of all schools have generally dismissed and sometimes openly disapproved feminism and its critique of male universalism. While other disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, have welcomed the contributions of feminist theory, psychoanalysis remains hindered by its own unconscious, which is patriarchal. This book wants to cast light on the unthought of Freudian and Lacanian theory by way of an analysis of the concept of femininity. The aim is to show how phallocentrism functions as a screen which obscures the real relations between the sexes, the meaning of desire and the understanding of sexual difference.

The first Manifesto of Futurism was published in Le Figaro on February 20th, 1909. It was to become the first avant-garde movement in art – it aimed to change the function of art within society, foster Italian culture beyond its provincial domains, and last but not least, to extend language as free expression of a new and forthcoming society of technology. Art in life was the ultimate aim of Marinetti’s poetry, which then expanded well beyond Italian borders and artistic expression, becoming an attitude for new society. The more that society was developing social constraints, the more that artistic expression would become free of canons to let imagination fluently overwhelm reality. The main topics proclaimed as crucial by Futurists are the contemporary most influential topics for social stability: politics, communication and technology as well as the major movers of social change. What can we still learn from the radical claims of avant-garde art?

The notion of contingency plays a central role in Althusser’s attempt to recast Marxist philosophy and to free the Marxist conception of history from notions such as teleology, necessity and origin. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished material, Stefano Pippa discusses how Althusser’s unfaltering commitment to contingency should encourage us to revisit our understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology, politics and materialism. As grounded on contingency, Althusser’s so-called ‘Structural Marxism’ originates in fact a ‘logic of interruption’ and a notion of structurally under-determined becoming; just like his theory of ideology is radically reinterpreted on the basis of his notion of ‘overinterpellation’. Though constant, Althusser’s relationship with contingency has not been monolithic throughout his career. As observed by Pippa, it is possible to distinguish a ‘political’ and a ‘philosophical’ moment in Althusser’s late materialism of contingency. Perhaps, as this volume suggests, the problematic coexistence of these two aspects might account for the unstable character of Althusser’s late philosophical project.

Since the 1960's, developing countries in Latin America started a complex journey towards establishing new values, the ones of modernity. This volume considers the work of renowned Italian-Argentine sociologist Gino Germani, who more than anyone else has been able to outline the process of modernization from this particular aspect. The author highlights Germani’s idea of ‘freedom’ as a crucial and unavoidable concept at the core of the “modern” way of being persons, subjects, social actors and active participants within a social system. Germani also refers to the opposite direction, that of social marginality, and suggests that a ‘free’ human being is somebody who is responsible for his or her actions. Within this context, every human being is the bearer of rights insofar as he or she is capable of making choices, taking responsibilities and, able to identify – on equal footing with everyone else – the right and duty to be free. Bringing a new light to the great 20th century sociologist’s thought, this book aims to trace the path of modernization and the timely issues of freedom, marginality, and participation that still profoundly defines our social structure.

In April 1994, two as-yet-unreleased letters by Sartre and one by Merleau-Ponty were published in the "Magazine Littéraire". Their publication sparked new interpretative hypotheses on the political and philosophical motivations behind the break of the relationship of mutual esteem, friendship, and fruitful intellectual collaboration between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. The bright tone of their personal contrasts testified the profound theoretical differences between the two thinkers, both at philosophical level and political praxis. This volume covers the period between the launch of the magazine "Les Temps Moderns" in 1945 and Sartre’s decision to no longer accept Merleau-Ponty’s contributions in 1953, offering a detailed analysis of the respective position of the two philosophers and of an irreducible intellectual distance between them.

At the end of the last century, the so-called "new technologies" started to question the process of design, production, sales and consumption through a radical change, which today re-defines many concepts both in industry and every-day life. The notion of "size" – a cross-cutting term in the cultural and creative sector – has gone through a phase of crisis from which it is now re-emerging, enriched with new meanings and possibilities. To re-define this complex term, the authors of the book have observed the path of audiovisual products and social media, fashion, everyday objects, architectures and cities, and identified in each of these fields elements of continuity, breaking points with the past as well as future alternatives. In this collection of essays, the authors adopt an interdisciplinary approach overcoming the boundaries of their discipline. Through different perspectives this volume presents and develops new paradigms that explain the complexities of the contemporary era and its new "sizes".

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 concept of memory has always been a crucial topic in philosophical discourse. This book re-traces the thought of major philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, William James, José Luis Borges and Sigmund Freud to provide an indepth exploration around several aspects of this timely issue. How is a memory formed? How can we bring into existence what has sunk into oblivion? What is the role of our instincts and inner drives in the constitution of memory? What is the connection between memory and forgetfulness, as well as that between mercy and remembrance? Focusing on these fundamental questions, the author presents a rich interconnection of concepts and ideas that build a signifi cant work on the great theme of memory.

For most early pragmatists, including the founder C.S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce’s original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, visual art has displayed an ambivalent nature, torn between the poles of abstractionism and realism, conceptual and postmodern, classicist nostalgia and the violent provocation for its own sake. This essay builds an argument in favour of tracing a different path for the visual arts, in which art might be able to recover its fullness and universality. The artists analysed in this volume – starting with Hopper and Balthus, singled out as precursors – appear to be following this shared path, even though they belong to different generations. Perhaps for this reason, they have for the most part been misunderstood by their contemporary critics. As in the art of Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages abstract tensions that intensify the visual field can bring simple figures to life, radically changing their meaning. This is a “sunniness” that is akin to the Claritas with which Medieval scholastics indicated the splendour of the works of their times. We’ll have to undertake a tireless process of exercising our perceptions, if we wish to be able to grasp its basic aesthetic quality.

This special issue of Cinéma & Cie explores the cultural dynamics, ideological aporias and political struggles that characterize the relationship between Maoism and national cinemas, from the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution to the present day. All the articles included in the special issue highlight the complexity of the process of translation and ‘reinvention’ of Maoism in different cultural contexts, focusing on subjects and historical episodes that have been suppressed in public debates and in traditional film history books.

The relationship between East and West remains a topic of burning timeliness, particularly in its political dimension. Yet, we can gain a complete understanding of the current tensions only if we consider them within a broader historical framework, spanning from art to diplomacy, from religion to ethnography. The present volume tackles precisely this complex task, offering its reader a rich mosaic of case studies and scholarly research, relating to the mutual approaches between the Euro-American ‘West’, and the Sino-Japanese ‘East’. In the first part of the book, art historian Marco Musillo uses the depictions of Tartars in fourteenth-century Italian frescoes as the starting point of a trajectory leading to eighteenth-century European literature on China. In the second part, the reader is introduced to two cases of diplomatic encounter, one in sixteenth-century Italy between Japanese subjects and local courts, and the other one between Qing China and twentieth-century United States, in the space of the universal exhibition in St. Louis. Finally, the last section proposes three interconnected art historical explorations: the screen design of Chinese origin in colonial Mexico, Medieval Christian tombstones in China, and early-modern Filipino sacred sculpture.