Orizzonti – saggi – n.10

 Abstract 

In che modo possiamo intendere la personificazione dell’eloquenza come adulta virgo che Cicerone inserisce in Brutus 330? In questo saggio intendiamo ripercorrere e documentare ascendenze e ricorrenze di questa figura, sia come contributo utile a mostrare che non era intento di Cicerone celebrare, in quest’opera, la fine della parola pubblica, sia come recupero storicamente attento della serie di valori che la cultura romana legava a determinate caratteristiche biologiche e di età della figura femminile. In conclusione, proponiamo qualche riflessione sulle opportunità che l’interpretazione di testi importanti, ma talvolta ingombranti per i (fastidiosi) modelli culturali che trasmettono, offre al rinnovamento critico dello studio e dell’insegnamento della letteratura di Roma antica.

 Abstract 

Whereas in the past, Book VII of The Natural History was read as a chaotic accumulation of data, this contribution seeks instead to identify an underlying logic in Elder Pliny’s “fabrication” of the human. In this context, the aim of the Roman author seems not so much to define an ousia as to outline an anti-essentialist anthropology, far removed from the dictates of Aristotelian finalism and defined by the perimeter delineated by the primates, excesses, and exceptions that show Nature’s prodigious creativity and multiplicity.

 Abstract 

On the basis of a historically fluid definition, this paper focuses on terms, forms, rituals and poetics of the obscene, an incoercible dimension of the human, which entails a continuous, non-conformist solicitation of the ‘common sense of decency’. In this way, historical connections and entanglements emerge between the obscene ritual, its dramatisation on the stage of Old Comedy, and the desecrating and cathartic function of laughter. In short, dealing with the obscene to represent its complex functions – anthropological, aesthetic, social, and above all political – that have traditionally found expression in the biting and denigrating tones of invective and obscene language, of public ridicule of the powerful and the supreme authority. From the archaic iambic poets and Aristophanes, via Dante, de Sade, Belli, Bataille, Bianciardi and many others, to the new frontiers of the obscene: the word has now been replaced by the image, the verbal by the digital, the obscene by the pornographically voyeuristic, the ancient rhapsody by the contemporary rap, in a tourbillon of true and false poets competing in overcoming the limit of what, on stage and above all off it, is sayable and representable.