The immemorial : the subject and its doubles /
A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity. Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Language Notes: | Translated from the Italian. |
| Published: |
London ; New York :
Seagull Books,
2025.
|
| Series: | Italian list.
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity. Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject has appeared, a second “I” has now supplanted the first. Andrea Cavalletti carefully registers the disquieting appearances of this second “I” in the literature and psychology of the past two centuries. In a context dominated by amnesia and somnambulism, hallucinations and wakeful dreams, the bourgeois subject, whose identity seemed so stable, turns out to be inhabited by masks that elude every grasp, at the mercy of a doubling that can no longer be recomposed. Personalities multiply and do battle, as even life and death exchange roles. And, ultimately, the identity of the Western subject reveals itself as a shade-like, constitutively double figure, that only lives in its weakness and forgetting, in its losses and distractions. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 186 pages ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 178-186). |
| ISBN: | 9781803095288 1803095288 9781803095295 1803095296 |