Barbara Carnevali

Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye?

In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people’s senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today’s most urgent critical tasks. 

See: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/social-appearances/9780231187077

Social life is effectively described by Bishop George Berkeley's witticism: "to be is to be perceived or perceive". The way in which we appear in public and the impression we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, tactile sensations and even flavours are discerned by others' senses and assessed according to their taste; and this helps shape our identity and the world in which we live. This book invites us to look at society as an aesthetic object, thus re-discovering the value of sensible appearance vis-à-vis the dualistic prejudice underlying Western tradition. Anchored in philosophy and borrowing from sociology, art history, and literature, this text explores the domain of everyday life, dominated by exposure, advertising, and seduction and at the heart of the illusion of prestige.

‘Be yourself’: this modern imperative is generally ascribed to Rousseau. Rousseau’s readers from the Romantic Age onward viewed his life and work as a paradigm for a new moral universe, one which celebrated originality, solitude, and the quest for a 'natural self' independent of inter-subjective relationships.
This book offers a different reading: it rediscovers the Rousseau of the ‘social self’. Through consideration of his two ‘histories of consciousness’, the Discourse on Inequality and the Confessions, this study uncovers a philosopher of recognition, conscious of the importance of mediation in the construction of identity; a psychologist of rivalry and mimicry; a sociologist of prestige; an ambitious commoner, the precursor of Julien Sorel and Lucien de Rubempré; a social dissenter, who skillfully staged his rebellion against the society of spectacle.
Rousseau's thought is riven by the tension between a Romantic impulse and a need for recognition, which he expresses ¬– in the moral language of the day – as an opposition between amour de soi and amour-propre. In this respect Rousseau reveals the central conflict of modern subjectivity: the opposition between the aspirations of the individual and the social demands of the human condition."

Questo volume presenta alcuni dei piú significativi saggi di Georg
Simmel, raccolti per la prima volta in un’edizione italiana unitaria
e in una nuova traduzione. Il filo che lega le riflessioni
di Simmel, nella prospettiva originale proposta dai curatori, è
quello dell’estetica sociale, ovvero lo studio dei fenomeni sociali
alla luce dei metodi attinti dall’estetica, intesa sia come teoria
della percezione sensibile sia come teoria dell’arte. Unendo l’interesse
per le costanti antropologiche a un piú sociologico «senso
intensissimo del presente», Simmel ci insegna a riconoscere
nell’estetica una dimensione costitutiva della società umana e
a distinguere le modificazioni storiche del sensorio promosse
dall’avvento del moderno stile di vita. Giochi di sguardi e di odori,
ornamenti e corteggiamenti, ponti e porte, manici e cornici,
mode e tipi urbani, fiere industriali e trasformazioni della sensibilità:
l’estetica sociale non è solo un capitolo imprescindibile
della filosofia di Simmel, ma un pensiero vivente, ancora valido
per esplorare la nostra estetica quotidiana e per comprendere le
trasformazioni della società contemporanea.

Sommario:
Introduzione. – Nota del traduttore. – i. Aisthesis e forma. ii. Il visibile e
l’invisibile. iii. Forme della reciprocità. iv. Oggetti teorici. v. Sensi moderni.
– Appendice. – Fonti. – Bibliografia. – Indice dei nomi.

A selection of essays in social philosophy. Edited and introduced by Barbara Carnevali
Table of contents:

Introduzione. Miseria e grandezza del sociale, di Barbara Carnevali

Parte prima: CRITICA
I. Patologie del sociale
II. Una critica ricostruttiva con riserva genealogica

Parte seconda: RICONOSCIMENTO
III. Ridistribuzione o riconoscimento?
IV. Invisibilità
V. Hegel: dal desiderio al riconoscimento
VI. L’Io nel Noi
VII. Riconoscimento come ideologia

Parte terza: LIBERTA'
VIII. Autonomia decentrata
IX. Freud: riappropriarsi della libertà
X. La normatività della vita etica
XI. Tre, e non due concetti di libertà

APPENDICE
XII. Bob Dylan e la sua epoca

Italian translation of WESTEND. NEUE ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR SOZIALFORSCHUNG
2/2015. Special issue on John Williams' novel, “Stoner – Ambivalenzen einer literarischen Sozialfigur”. http://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/westend/
With an introduction by Barbara Carnevali.

Articles by: Axel Honneth, Barbara Carnevali, Eva Illouz, Julika Griem, Frieder Vogelmann.

- An Introduction
Barbara Carnevali and Gianni Paganini


1) Cynicism Then and Now
John Christian Laursen

Abstract

Ancient cynicism was a moralistic school of ascetic and anti-materialistic gadflies and critics. Modern cynicism is generally understood as amoral, selfish, and manipulative. This article explores the change in meaning that led from one to the other, and what each kind of cynicism could mean for contemporary life. It is very unlikely that most people would ever adopt the values and ways of the ancient cynics, but there may still be something to be gained from the few who might engage in this mode of life: possibly more environmentalism, and if nothing else, more humor in our lives. Modern cynicism may have little of positive value to contribute to life and politics, although at least it undermines the self-righteous moralists. In any case, it is worth understanding in order to cope with it. Along the way, we learn that since Diogenes of Sinope a wide variety of thinkers from Socrates, Machiavelli, and Spinoza through Rousseau and Nietzsche to Wittgenstein have been credited with cynicism. That suggests that it may be more important to our intellectual life than many of us realize.

2) Epicureanism – Yesterday and Today
Olivier Bloch

Abstract

This article presents a brief survey of the Epicurean doctrine, its general purpose, and its different aspects, and argues that, for all the historical differences involved, it still remains useful, relevant, and even necessary, in many respects for us today: the wholly immanent nature of Epicurean ideals (“the fourfold remedy”) and the materialism for which it provides a convincing model, even with its paradoxical “theology,” can serve as a means of resistance to the current “return of the religious” and the growth of irrationalism, as a support for a contemporary atheism which attempts to safeguard purely human values, and for the emphatic recognition that human beings form part of and belong to nature and its processes. The demand for human freedom within this perspective, symbolised by the doctrine of the “clinamen,” the immanent character of the Epicurean criteria for choosing and evaluating acts and decisions with reference to pleasure and pain, the self-limitation of the pursuit of pleasure by eliminating all desires that are neither natural nor necessary, all this can help to counter the anxieties, reactions and rejections produced today by the damage inflicted by supposed “development,” especially its catastrophic ecological consequences, and by the growth of artificially generated needs that serve nothing but the demand for commercial profit.

3) Stoicism Today
Jean-Baptiste Gourinat

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the meaning of Stoicism today. First, it roughly sketches Stoicism as a philosophical system, namely its logic, physics and ethics. It argues that many aspects of its logic and physics are outdated but that the general Stoic approach to these disciplines may still be relevant to modern philosophers. Moreover, the more persuasive part of Stoicism is ethics: Stoic ethics is naturalistic and intellectualist. Stoics argue that virtue is the only good, and attempt to force us to give up emotions and affections. These aspects of the Stoic approach frequently seem intolerable, but the strength of Stoicism depends on this intellectualism. One of the distinctive features of Stoicism, as well as of most ancient philosophies, is that philosophy is not only a theoretical system but a “way of Life.” In that respect, it is clear that Stoicism is still a living philosophy, as may be shown from the celebrated figure of J. Stockdale, the “philosophical fighter pilot.” Moreover, given its intellectualist approach, the Stoic theory of passions is obviously opposed to the psychoanalytic approach and its emphasis on unconscious processes. The theories known as “cognitive therapies” have close affinities with Stoicism, as they frequently proclaim. Therefore, Stoicism in more ways than one is a living philosophy.

4) The Ways of Scepticism (Then and Now)
Renato Lessa

Abstract

The following essay outlines the principal arguments presented by the sceptical tradition, from its explicit beginnings in Greek philosophy down to a variety of contemporary forms of scepticism. The discussion takes its point of departure from an analysis of the original sceptical tropes that were directed against the “Dogmatists,” focussing particularly on the “Modes” of Aenesidemus and Agrippa. The principal part of the essay is dedicated to an elucidation of the nature and status of “beliefs” with a view to comparing ancient, modern, and contemporary types of scepticism. Far from re-endorsing the ideal of a life without beliefs as a model for human happiness, modern and contemporary varieties of scepticism offer a description of human historical experience that is indeed based on beliefs. From this point onwards, the actual power of scepticism – represented by a lineage that includes Montaigne, Hume, Goodman, and Primo Levi – derives from its attempt to combine two perspectives that appear formally incompatible with one another: (i) the desire for a permanent order of things in the context of a predictable and meaningful shared world, and (ii) a profound admiration for the human variety that is enshrined in different acts and kinds of belief.

This article retraces and discusses the philosophical itinerary of Axel
Honneth, from the groundbreaking book "Struggle for recognition” up to the recent essays “Freedom’s Right” and “The Idea of Socialism”. In the first section, I examine Honneth’s programmatic concept of social pathology in relation with Ernst Cassirer’s idea of the secularization of theodicy (i.e. the attribution of responsibility for human suffering to society) and with the enlightenment legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the second section, after assessing Honneth’s position in the tradition of critical theory, I analyse his philosophical views. I identify two different theoretical frameworks in Honneth’s work: on one hand, the theory of the struggle for recognition; on the other hand, the recent theory of social freedom. While the first is grounded in a formal and allegedly universal anthropology, the second draws on the Hegelian doctrine of the ethical life and develops a historicist and internalist model of reconstructive social criticism.
Finally, in the third section, I critically address the “divinization of the social” entailed in Honneth’s project of social pathologies’ critique, and argue that Honneth’s trust in the normative power of intersubjectivity might be excessive.
This article is available in English on Cairn International:  https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_RMM_201_0085--the-greatness-and-limits-of-the-social.htm#xd_co_f=OTE2ZTNmZjAtMzY3MS00NWVjLTg3MGQtYTJhY2VjYmVkNjRm~

This short article presents some ideas from my new research project for the French National Research Council magazine.

The role of design becomes central to modernity, characterized by increasingly urban, artificial settings. For this reason, design can be considered as one the most social-aesthetic practices, responsible for the aesthetical construction of our common world. Why are social forms are so strictly intertwined with aesthetic forms?

This philosophy of design has a critical purpose. It reconsiders some basic ideas the Modern Movement in the light of a specific historical Italian experience: during the 1950s and 1960s, Italian designers gave birth to new social-aesthetic ideals based on collaborations with progressive industry (the Olivetti utopian project is one of the most successful examples of these collaborations).
My case study is dedicated to Milan’s first subway line, inaugurated in 1964, the so-called M1 or Linea rossa (the “Red Line”). The subject of this study is also the city of Milan, for which the Red Line is a substantive symbol
I claim that this project deserves to be reexamined and reinterpreted today as part of a critical dialogue with contemporary aesthetics and social-political philosophy.

In this article, I draw inspiration liberally from the notion of “eccentric positionality” elaborated by Helmuth Plessner to lay the groundwork for the philosophical project of a “social aesthetic”: a theory of the representation in a sensible form of the “persona”.
According to Plessner, individuals as the first spectators of themselves, by virtue of the double relationship they maintain with their own bodies. This endogenous, aesthetic reflexivity interacts with the reflexivity produced by the social gaze, intertwining with it and multiplying its mediations and effects.
While the romantic tradition associated reflexivity with alienation and dispossession (vividly illustrated in Beckett’s Film), in Plessner the structure of reflexivity is ambivalent and finds its powerful mise en abyme in the “anthropology of the actor”. Play-acting makes the aesthetic structure of the human condition transparent. This is not only owing to the reasons traditionally mentioned by Hannah Arendt or Erving Goffman, etc. —the self-display of the human being in the world through the intermediary of appearances, as well as the theatrical structure of the public sphere—but also because of the inwardly fictional dialectic of the self. All human life ends up appearing as a “staging of itself”—an infinite play between expression and distancing constantly subject to the possibility of reinvention and adjustment thanks to the critical potential of self-reflection.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”: the fourth aphorism of The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967, paraphrases Marx’s well-known analysis of commodities in Capital. With this analogy, which would become the leitmotiv of his entire work, Debord gave life to the most important form of contemporary social romanticism. Its specificity lies in its grafting of the Rousseauian moral metaphysics of transparency and authenticity onto the Marxist critique of capitalism. This synthesis, which blends the two most powerful critical paradigms of modernity, is an ideal embodiment of the contemporary “pathological” approach to the issue of social appearances. It proceeds by mobilizing a whole arsenal of polemical arguments, both ancient and modern: the atavistic Platonic-Christian condemnation of the mask fuses with the “absolument moderne” suspicion of the market, media, and phenomena of consumption Partly owing to this layered rootedness in the moral and political imagination of the West and its evocative power, Debord’s work is an obligatory reference point for examining the peculiar relationship that capitalist society entertains with images. For this reason, it deserves careful and thorough review.

A simulacrum of philosophy has risen in university departments all over the world: theory, fake philosophy for non-philosophers. We are not talking of the theories of some great author, since, among the most acclaimed " theorists " there are, too, philosophers in the proper sense, and even in the philosophical school, which has taken for itself the name of " Critical Theory: " but of a sort of collective thinking, of a koine, well-known to anyone who teaches in a field of the humanities at a university: a mix of ideas and phrases coming from varied disciplines (mainly philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology), refer to a canon of authors disparate but grouped under a generic " radical " tension (Marx, Nietzsche, omnipresent Benjamin, the newcomer, Latour) blended into one melting pot, in varying doses and combinations. Formed in a DIY fashion inside a limited thematic agenda—power, gender, desire, the subject and the multitudes, the dominated-dominating couple—theory is defined and recognized mainly by its pragmatic use. Those who cultivate it, coming from other disciplinary sectors—mostly comparative literature, art theory and criticism, and cultural studies—seek to justify their own research inside a wider and more " committed " framework, that is programmatically turned towards the challenge of the present. The success of the line of thought called " biopolitics " highlights clearly this phenomenon. The notion which, in Foucault, had a fully philosophical dimension, has become a marketing product, designed for American and European departments of comparative literature. Differently from philosophy, which functions under long, frustrating timings, and very rarely reaches any certainty, theory is quick, voracious, sharp, and superficial: its model is the " reader, " a book made to help people make quotations from books that are not read. Exactly for that reason, it functions as a common language and a ground for transdisciplinary aggregation. Those who teach risky subjects such as aesthetics and political philosophy have begun to worry a long time ago. Let me clarify something: when defining theory as " fake philosophy for non-philosophers, " I do not intend to suggest a snobbish argument against the extra-disciplinary uses of philosophy. Quite the opposite: nothing would be more beneficial today than a dialogue between philosophy and the other forms of knowledge: this dialogue would not only remedy, in Simmel's words, to the tragedy of a fragmented and parceled culture, always more autonomous and removed from the very life-world which generated it, and which, only, can give it back a direction and a purpose; but it would also accomplish the irreducible mission of philosophy at the time of scientific specialization, that is the ability of keeping the memory and the nostalgia of totality. The complementary, legitimate demands of the student of the

The aim of the paper is to explore the cognitive value of certain literary works through the notion of " ethopoeia " (moral mimesis or a portrait based on custom and behavior). Originally a rhetorical notion, ethopoeia can be expanded to signify an interdisciplinary literary genre, situated at the ideal interface between literature and knowledge. It can be practiced by any of the " moral sciences " (history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.) and approaches human reality through the phenomenological representation of ethos (character/custom/ morality, both individual and collective). Having outlined the theoretical framework of ethopoiia, we retrace its development though several milestones of the Western " moral " tradition, from Aristotle and Theophrastus to the realist novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, we emphasize the continuities and discontinuities that characterize the tradition, as well as the relationships between literature and the human and social sciences. Mimetic representation often appears more suited to the understanding of the phenomena of human reality than other more abstract forms of knowledge. It is often the case that a precise description of a certain human behavior, illustrated both by examples and anecdotes, constitutes an act of autonomous understanding that is not only an essential addition to any attempts at conceptual definition, but may also stand in its stead.

"Cet article vise à expliquer la valeur cognitive de certaines œuvres littéraires grâce au concept d’« éthopée » (mimesis morale, peinture de mœurs). Cette notion d’origine rhétorique peut être élargie pour indiquer un genre transversal qui se situe au point d’intersection idéal entre littérature et connaissance, et qui peut être pratiqué par toutes les « sciences morales » – l’histoire, l’anthropologie, la sociologie, la psychologie, etc. – se rapportant à la réalité humaine par le biais d’une représentation phénoménologique de l’ethos (caractère/ mœurs au double sens individuel et collectif). On présentera donc cette conception de l’éthopée, dont on retracera la fortune à travers quelques jalons marquants de la tradition « moraliste » occidentale, d’Aristote et Théophraste aux romanciers réalistes modernes, en soulignant les continuités et les discontinuités qui ont caractérisé cette tradition, ainsi que les relations entre littérature et sciences humaines.


The aim of the article is to explore the cognitive value of certain literary works through the notion of “ethopoiia” (moral mimesis). Originally a rhetorical notion, “ethopoiia” may be developed into a transversal literary genre, ideally situated at the crossroads between literature and knowledge, which may be practiced by any of the “moral sciences”–history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.–which approach human reality through the phenomenological representation of ethos (character/custom, either individual or collective). Having illustrated the theoretical framework of Ethopoiia, I will discuss the development of this long-standing “moralistic” tradition through a number of significant examples from the Western canon, from Aristotle and Theophrastus down to the realist novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stressing continuities and discontinuities, and focusing on the relationship between literature and the human sciences."

David Bowie, artiste radicalement queer, séduisant, courtisan et dandy, va d’un
masque et d’une apparence à l’autre, sans jamais revendiquer une identité
propre et fixe. À partir d’une lecture du livre de Simon Critchley, Bowie.
Philosophie intime (La Découverte, coll. « Culture sonore », 2015), cet article
retrace les racines philosophiques de ce nouveau « cynisme » et en dégage la
force subversive.

This article deals with the issue of social esteem through a rereading of Simmel’s sociology. The originality of Simmel’s view is to be found in the aesthetic dimension of Schätzung – a concept which has a double meaning of « esteem », the value and positive assessment of another person, and « estimation », the act of determining the value of a thing or a person. According to Simmel, esteem has an aesthetic dimension explained by the fact that the genesis of social assessment is grounded in the phenomenon of aisthesis, or mutual social perception, and in the related feelings of pleasure or displeasure, emotional states, likes and dislikes. This makes the determination of a person’s social value of another person a matter of « taste ». This insight unfolds through a series of phenomenological analyses based on categories of « atmosphere », Stimmung, Oralsinn, and concludes with a reflection on the need to continue the investigation of the aesthetic side of recognition through a critical dialogue between Simmel and Bourdieu.

This paper investigates relations between philosophy and social science in the field of social aesthetics, which brings together such disciplines as sociology, literature, and art history, from a philosophical prospective. The main problems of social aesthetics are illustrated by a series of social and aesthetic phenomena (such as lifestyle, prestige, and luxury) at the intersection of social science and aesthetics (interpreted both as theory of perception and theory of arts). Social aesthetics is defined as the study of appearance in the society. The paper investigates the knowledge model and theoretical foundations of this interdisciplinary field. Respecting legitimacy and disciplinary boundaries of social science, the papers reminds us that the domain of philosophy is synthesis, ability to bring together and to give a coherent structure to empirical knowledge derived from social science. Philosophy is concerned with problematisation, homogenisation, and articulation, and also with history and genealogy: these domains are illustrated by a history of the divide between aesthetics and economy, which dates back to the 18th century. The example demonstrates critical potential of philosophy, since it allows us to question several a priori concepts that frame our idea of knowledge (such as opposition between useful and useless, necessary and gratuitous), to connect, and to find analogies between seemingly distant spheres of reality.

This article offers a counter-reading of Proust, on the basis of a critique of René
Girard’s famous hermeneutics in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque.
Observing the bases and implications of « mimetic » anthropology and of Girard’s
dark vision of desire, conceived as an alienation or degradation of the self (thus
mistaken for « envy »), it aims to shift the perspective and adopt a sympathetic view
to explore the desire for another life manifested by characters in the Recherche. It also
aims to rehabilitate through sustained philosophical analysis three often devalued
components of human experience: love, hope, and snobbery.

Keywords : Proust, René Girard, desire, snobbery, novel
Mots clés : Proust, René Girard, désir, snobisme, roman