L’ultima lettura di Freud, o patologia della vita sociale

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i5.8773

Keywords:

semiotics, identity, symptom, psychoanalysis, myth

Abstract

The article starts with the observation that in Freud, as in Balzac, there is a theory of signs which is related to the ties among thought, will, and movement in human beings. More in general, works like The Psychopathology of Everyday Life or Pathologie de la vie sociale assert, within the development of a global semiotics of everyday life, that it is possible to connect the most insignificant everyday speech acts and gestures to their deeper meanings, considering them as symptoms. Nevertheless, Balzac’s and Freud’s theories end up transcending all rationally based semiotics. Their claimed total understanding of gestures and unconscious acts cannot be contained within a mere exercise of immediate observation; it goes beyond this, entailing the consideration of mythical and figural instances running below the threshold of human perception. Thus, such an ambitious and all-encompassing semiotics entails an ineliminable hallucinatory component. And this is not unlike the universe of social and psychological symptomatic manifestations which it claims can be given a rational order.

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Author Biography

Peter Brooks, Yale University

Peter Brooks received two degrees from Harvard University, and also studied at University College, London and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at the University of Virginia, University of Austin, University of Copenhagen, University of Bologna, and the Georgetown University Law Center. He was also a professor at Yale University, where he founded the Whitney Humanities Center and was the Chairman of the French Literature Department. He contributes to a number of magazines, including The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. He received a degree honoris causa from the École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991 and the American Philosophical Society in 2003.
Among his most recent publications are: Enigmas of Identity, Princeton University Press, 2011; Henry James Goes to Paris, Princeton University Press, 2007; Realist Vision, Yale University Press, 2005.

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Published

2021-12-20

How to Cite

Brooks, P., & Tortonese, P. (2021). L’ultima lettura di Freud, o patologia della vita sociale. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (5), 451–468. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i5.8773

Issue

No. 5 (2021): Historical event, collective trauma and spatiality in contemporary literature and arts

Section

Dalla Biblioteca Malatesta

License

SigMa Journal is an open access, online publication, with licence:

cc-by-80x15_80

 CCPL Creative Commons Attribution

The author retains the copyright of his work whilst granting anyone the possibility “to reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate, publicly exhibit, display, perform and recite the work”, provided that the author and the title of the journal are cited correctly. When submitting the text for publication the author is furthermore required to declare that the contents and the structure of the work are original and that it does not by any means compromise the rights of third parties nor the obligations connected to the safeguard of the moral and economic rights of other authors or other right holders, both for texts, images, photographs, tables, as well as for other parts which compose the contribution. The author furthermore declares that he/she is conscious of the  sanctions prescribed by the penal code and by the Italian Criminal and Special Laws for false documents and the use false documents, and that therefore Reti Medievali is not liable to responsibilities of any nature, civil, administrative or penal, and that the author agrees to indemnify and hold Reti Medievali harmless from all requests and claims by third parties.

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