Presentation

Abstract

The project for this issue was conceived in the year of the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s Liberation from Nazi-Fascism, understood as a historical caesura: an event that interrupts a political and symbolic order and, at the same time, inaugurates a public lexicon, a weave of memories, a possibility of future.

Numerous literary and philosophical texts have helped to keep this condensation of meanings active, reinventing the symbolic force of the passage: in Cesare Pavese and Fulvio Papi, liberation coincides with the transformation of the mythical time of adolescence into a time of fidelity to ideals; in W. G. Sebald, it is bound to the possibility of restoring and reassembling memory. The idea of liberation intertwines with the conception of the autonomy of art defended by Antonio Banfi, a central reference for “Corrente”. In Per la vita dell’arte (1939) Banfi states that «art wants to live and life is one thing with freedom: an inner freedom of development […] from this absolute freedom of art depends the possibility of discovering and consecrating in it the poetic quality of our life». The «freedom of art», understood as the faculty to define itself and to express the poetic quality of existence, becomes within this horizon a form of resistance: the determination of the individual, ethical commitment, the refusal of instrumental reduction.

The theme of liberation, written here with a lowercase letter, is therefore understood as an object to be investigated through plural perspectives and competences. On the one hand, one may trace its echoes in creative making: Aristotelian poiesis, deliberately declined here in the plural, as a field of practices in which experience takes form. On the other, liberation acts as a transformative force that redraws individual and communal spaces, modifying modes of feeling and acting within the social fabric. To speak of poetics of the «liberation» thus means restoring to the term «event» historical depth and symbolic density, subtracting it from spectacular reduction and reopening its scope as an aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, artistic, and civic caesura. On this double register – the Liberation as historical caesura and as a space of aesthetic, political, and cultural redefinition – unfold the Conversazioni di estetica held at the Fondazione Corrente, published here, and the contributions selected through the call for papers, composing, in keeping with the journal’s editorial line, a traversal of knowledges and fields: from philosophy to the visual arts, from literature to music, and on to architecture.