Philosophy

The volume is conceived as an extended image commentary. The reference image: Anselm Kiefer “ The Seven Heavenly Palaces” (Pirelli Hangar Bicocca)

Translation rights: Bollati Boringhieri

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world. How many of your friends on the social network are not around anymore? How did the perception of death change with the arrival of the digital world?

Mastering semiotics means not surrendering to the evidence, being able to reverse the point of view, deconstructing and reconstructing the mechanisms on which much of what we live and think, desire or undergo - and thus everything to which, precisely, we give meaning and value - is based. This First Lesson in Semiotics outlines the assumptions of the science of languages and signification, its multiple disciplinary ancestry, and its progressive compacting toward a strong hypothesis of theory and critical analysis of different human and social cultures.

The notion of text is perhaps the most used and discussed within social and human sciences. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly one of the worst defined. Philology and Linguistics, Literary Criticism and Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics, Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Semiotics: all these disciplines refer in various ways to the “text”, to make of it the basic object of their analysis or to measure the distance they keep from it. So what does “text” mean? What genealogy does this concept have? Why is there “salvation outside the text”?

This books aims to demonstrate how semiotic models of textual analysis can be used to study any social reality or cultural process. In addition, it shows how semiotic models work by using examples from everyday life and social praxis, communicative processes and modes of consumption, online interactions and cross-media procedures, political experiences and scientific universes.

Gastromania – the mania for gastronomy – now pervades the most intimate areas of our life. In some ways it is a fashion, and, like all fashions, is destined to perish. In other ways it is a wide-ranging, complex social phenomenon on which we must stop to reflect.

Say goodbye to nature is the best way to save it. Running counter to the prevalent idea of nature in contemporary culture means adopting a relaxed attitude towards the ecological policies and philosophies that should underlie them. This is essential for critical reflection on the contemporary world, which finds it increasingly difficult to find adequate spaces for inquiry, and even a raison d’être for itself.

The ambivalent connection between the two parts of this book (the first dedicated to Machiavelli, the second to Pascal) is embodied by the comma (,) in its subtitle. Is this comma a conjunction or a disjunction? In fact, both.