Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Aldo Schiavone sign a polemical and passionate book between history and politics, built through the experience and encounters of a journey, a reconnaissance of the places of an Italy today on the margins, but in which perhaps our common destiny is written.
Welcome to the rooms of an exhibition that does not exist: it is populated by 99 objects, rare and eccentric memorabilia, often never seen before. An unprecedented and visual foray into the artistic imagination, in the broadest sense, of one of the best-known and most translated writers on the contemporary Italian scene: Alessandro Baricco.
Through the analysis of extreme phenomena such as those concerning hikikomori, young people who shut themselves away at home, or cutters, young people who cut their skin, psychoanalyst Laura Pigozzi questions the continuity that exists between them and the “lifeless” status of contemporary adolescents.
Never before have the family models that surround us seemed to have expanded and become more dynamic, calling into question the very principle of the “natural” family and revealing its ideological nature. Yet, on closer analysis, even behind reconstituted, extended, single-parent, and same-sex parent families, there is an alarming image of the family conceived and preserved as an inclusive and exclusive nest: a closed entity, like a sort of uterine body, which believes it contains everything its members need.
What remains of a woman when motherhood occupies all her space, both intimate and social? Why, today as yesterday, is the reassuring figure of the mother still preferred to the more complex and uncomfortable one of a woman as a desiring subject? “A mother cannot be everything to a daughter or son without losing much of herself and without taking away a great deal from them,” writes the author. Yet, today more than ever, mothers are immersed in an idealizing narrative that exalts them precisely because they are sacrificial.
Only an intellectual and moral revolution can prevent the West from losing itself, reconnecting it instead with the best part of its history.
Laura Pigozzi, a leading figure in new psychoanalysis, explains how the hatred and love we experience in childhood determine the degree of independence and balance we will enjoy as adults, freeing us from the toxicity of many claustrophobic relationships.
While the United States is sounding the alarm about fentanyl, in Italy too, the spread of drugs among adolescents, from cannabis to psychotropic drugs used to get high, is triggering an epidemic of addiction. There have never been so many patients suffering from drug-related disorders as in recent years, and the age at which the first pathologies develop is now as low as pre-adolescence. Falling into the vicious circle of satisfaction-abstinence-craving is a dangerous and paradoxical game that pushes us to crave what is harmful to us.
Contemporary society has evolved from a smaller nucleus, which still constitutes its nerve center today: the family. In the past, families were the place where new citizens were formed thanks to the guiding role played by parents, in which a system of values was transmitted and dissent was exercised. The ability of young people to create their own identity in opposition to that of their parents and the need to find an impetus to move outward have always been fundamental steps in becoming responsible and aware adults.
“The Cold War is not over, and there is still some local bloodshed, but people are sheltered and view it as summer hailstorms on a sunny day,” wrote Italo Calvino in 1961, speaking of the perception of history in those years. If we wanted to describe the mood of the contemporary political scene in a nutshell today, we would have to say that the impression of being safe has completely disappeared.
Today, we have the opposite impression, that of being in the midst of a complex crisis, of which populism and cultural wars are the most visible aspects.