Tropos

Gioco e Unbekümmertheit. Una logica semantica di costituzione dell’oggetto “disinvolta” 
Giovanni Tidona

Abstract
The central issue of this essay is the notion of Unbekümmertheit. In modern German, this word describes a “light–heartedness”, an “ease”, or a somewhat “carefree–mind” and has been reinterpreted and re–used with a new significance in the linguistic and psychological theory of Clara and William Stern. Here, the notion denotes a child’s ability to change the meaning and use of the same objects involved in his playtime–activities, which are then subjected to different and sometimes disparate predications. In the gestalt — psychological line from Kurt Lewin and Kurt Koffka to James Gibson — due to Stern’s Kindersprache, Martinus Langeveld´s Aufforderungscharakter and the phenomenological reconsideration of Unbekümmertheit by Aron Gurwitsch — it is possible to demonstrate a philosophical exploitation of the Unbekümmertheit —phenomenon with regard to the spheres of realism and relativism. In its final section, this paper will show a development of social ontology by pointing out how Unbekümmerheit plays a preponderant role in the plural games characterized by the link between affordances and social use and how it thus provides a new interpretation of human community which is supported by a specific constructivist thing–concept.

Keywords
Olehermeneutics, relativism, realism, Gestalttheorie, epistemology, child language, social ontology, affordance, Unbekümmertheit.

Immagini e morte. Il tempo della fotografia
Thomas Macho

Abstract
In the present contribution we analyze the photographical medium from the starting point of his relationship with death. Through a close examination of classic texts and authors (Barthes, Sontag, Ariès, Belting) who have analyzed the relationship between representation, image and death, we propose a theory of the thanatological value of representation through an aesthetic–artistic medium.

Keywords
Death, Photography, Double, Cultural Studies, Culture

Digital Death. Come si narra la morte con l’avvento del web
Davide Sisto

Abstract
Taking the cue from some reflections byWalter Benjamin and Eugéne Minkowski, the present paper wants to analyze the relationship between death and narration in the age of digital culture. In fact, the so–called “Digital Death” revolutionizes our bond with death, with the traditional thought of immortality and with the Geisterwelt. Once the author has defined the “Digital Death”, this paper firstly describes some current forms of digital communication (Eterni.me, Eter9) that try to get rid of death, impoverishing narrations and handed–down knowledge. Secondly, it describes other forms (Facebook and social networks in general) that, on the contrary, offer new resources through which we can enrich our memory of the dead, thus reinvigorating the role of death as an authority from which all narrated stories stem.

Keywords
Digital Death, Immortality, Narration, Social Network, End–Life.

Killing Death/Sharing Life
Michael Hauskeller

Abstract
It has been claimed, most emphatically by transhumanists, that individual death is the greatest evil and that we therefore need to do everything we can to defeat the disease of human senescence and mortality. In other words, we need to kill death. I have argued elsewhere that we actually benefit from death and that death is, all things considered, not an evil at all. However, in this paper, I am not disputing the claim that death is an evil. Instead, I suggest that it can only be an evil for us if we understand our existence as separate from all other existence, which is by no means inevitable. The independent, autonomous self whose annihilation we fear is the product of a particular self–conception, a particular way of seeing ourselves in relation to others. There is an alternative. If we understand our own lives as prolonged and extended in the life that surrounds us, then our own individual death loses its significance. When life is shared and being understood as shared, then there is no need to kill death.

Keywords
Death, Ageing, Life Extension, Temporal Immortality, Transhumanism, Autonomy

Morte e immortalità nell’epoca del post-umano

Giuseppe O. Longo

Abstract

The progress of medicine and biology offers us longevity and deludes us with the promise of immortality, thus rekindling an ancient dream. After illustrating how death is confronted, or not confronted, today, we analyze the perspectives offered by post–human technologies in view of immortality: hybridization with machines, transfer of the mind in computer progammes, merging or substitution of the human intelligence with the artificial intelligence. This is a surrogate and dislocated immortality, that favours the cognitive aspects and tends to neglect the ethical and social ones.

Keywords

Death, Immortality, Amortality, Homo technologicus, Post–human

Etica del “memento mori” tra rappresentazioni ontologiche della morte, terrore e terrorismo
Ines Testoni

Abstract
Since the borders between natural life and death have been blurred by technique, inWestern societies discussions and practices regarding death have become very significant. The studies in this area include all the most important topics of any psychological discipline. Indeed, research developed some important theories especially on death and dying, loss and grief, and terror of death. However, they latently adopt implicit basic ontological assumptions, which carry specific representations of death. As this theoretical condition causes many important effects in the clinical work, it is necessary to open a wider epistemological area of discussion on this issues between philosophy and psychology. The article highlights the importance of the Severino’s contribute in this new territory of studies.

Keywords
Death Studies, Death Education, Philosophy and Psychology Relationships, Anguish of Death, Emanuele Severino

Metafore della non-morte. Riflessioni culturologiche sul potenziale metaforico della figura dello zombie
Antonio Lucci

Abstract
The present essay wants to analyze the zombie as a metaphor. According to the author, the zombie is used to represent some topics that are particularly present inside some societies, but that cannot find expression in the usual ways those societies use to represent themselves: religion, rituals, politics or law. As a character that embodies marginalization, the zombie changes its features depending on the societies where it is “used” as means of expression. The present contribution analyzes the Haitian zombie as an expression of a society that supports slavery, the one represented in Romero‘s The Night of The Living Dead as the expression of a society that removes death from everyday life, up to the modern representations of the zombie (after 2002), describing them as the expression of an imagination that medicalizes society.

Keywords
Zombies, Undead, Death, Romero, Cultural Studies

Imagination and Mediation. Is There a Unity Beyond Synthesis?
Kristupas Sabolius

Abstract
The article addresses a problem of mediation through the lens of imagination. An idea of “intermedial imagination”—a critical faculty that bears witness to the world’s out–of–jointness — proposed by Pietro Montani is analysed and brought in the context of Bernard Stiegler’, Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Derrida’s thinking. In this way, imagination is associated with various functions of montage, rather than synthesis, as well as revealed as the power of overcoming clichéd forms and fetishes through its shape–shifting and unprecedented transformations. The article also offers an analyses of exhibitions by Raimundas Malašauskas (Photo Finish in Vilnius, and the Lithuania/Cyprus “oO/Oo” Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale) and the avant–garde performances of Romeo Castellucci.

Keywords
Imagination, Mediation, Intermedial Imagination, Montage, Incommensurability

L’opera d’arte dell’anima. Corpo, tecnica e medialità nell’Antropologia di Hegel
Alessandro de Cesaris

Abstract
In the section of the Encyclopedia dedicated to Anthropology Hegel endorses a technological and mediological conception of body. In order to grant to the Soul access to the external world, body has to be turned into an instrument. Through repeated exercise it becomes a middle term between the Soul and the World, and only thanks to its medial nature is it possible for consciousness to awaken. This peculiar relationship between inner Self and body plays a pivotal role for the whole development of Spirit: the technological approach to body becomes the model for any further contact with the external world. Thus, the Anthropology lays the foundation of Hegel’s whole conception of finite Spirit as a medial dimension: man is a self–productive being whose nature is always a second nature, a form of immediacy that is nevertheless produced (mediated) by his own activity. According to this view body is a proto–medium, and Hegel’s account of technology can be interpreted as a theory of the extended body (in the Anthropology) as well as a theory of extended mind (in the Philosophy of Objective Spirit).

Keywords
Anthropology, Body, Media, Second Nature, Technology

In Defence of a Hermeneutic Ontology of Art
Georg Bertram

Abstract
The paper analyses Gianni Vattimo’s hermeneutic conception of art. It primarily focuses on the claim that art should be understood as a happening of truth (Heidegger) and thus as a practice of transformation. It argues that the claim has important ontological consequences, supporting this argument with references to Heidegger and Gadamer. In turn, this argument prompts an ontological investigation of art. The proposed ontology has at least four elements: first, works of art, which challenge producers and recipients; second, interpretive activities performed by those who engage with works of art in order to follow the configurations actualized by artworks; third, everyday activities that are transformed through the interpretative activities in question; and fourth, activities of art criticism that recipients use to evaluate the impulses they get from works of art. The being of art is constituted by a practice that brings together these elements in their relations to one another.

Keywords
Art, artworks, art criticism, interpretation, transformation