Itinerari

The burrow. The external space of the intimate

Virgilio Cesarone — 2024-03-05

The territorial anguish and the burrow of the Modern

Virgilio Cesarone — 2024-03-05

Starting from the habit of a tribe in Australia, the contribution illustrates the characteristics of the organisation of space, public and private, in use in populations characterised by a religious vision. Juxtaposed to this attitude of living, the description of the burrow in Kafka’s short story is taken as a modern paradigm. To the openness between the various levels of the spatial realms of religious man, modern man contrasts his enclosure in a securitarian isolation. And yet the passivity of such a subject could provide a liberating way out.

Elsewhere. Ontology and ethics between Kafka and Levinas

Sergio Labate — 2024-03-05

There could be no Burrow if there were no elsewhere. Everything in the burrow starts with life, but life simply isn’t there. The burrow is precisely this: the effort to give a form of space to the life that is elsewhere. As also happens in the house of Levinas: another attempt to give a form of space to the radical separation between ontology and ethics. With a fundamental difference: in Kafka the burrow is formed starting from a primacy of thought, in Levinas starting from the primacy of the sensible.

“The borrow”: Kafkaesque challenges for the phenomenology of inhabiting

Roberto Rubio — 2024-03-05

Dwelling is one of the main human experiences. According to phenomenology, the relevance of such an experience consists in the fact that it intersubjectively configures one’s own world as a home world (Heimwelt) and distinguishes it from the alien world (Fremdwelt). To dwell is to build the home as such. Home building, for its part, has been considered phenomenologically from two opposing possibilities: on the one hand, calculating thinking and the uncritical realization of technical potentialities; on the other hand, a meditative thinking, characterized by the depowering of the calculating reason and the orientation towards a poetic way of dwelling.
Now, a particularly influential description of home building is offered by Kafka’s text posthumously entitled “Der Bau”, which was diversely entitled in Spanish: la construcción (the building), la obra (the work), la guarida (the burrow), la madriguera (the den).
In the present paper, I will try to contrast Kafka’s description with the phenomenological approach to dwelling, considered especially regarding Husserl and Heidegger. I will carry out this contrast in two steps: first, I will highlight descriptions contained in Kafka’s tale that call into question central propositions and premises of the phenomenological approach. Second, I will outline possible lines of response, from phenomenology to Kafka’s challenges.

The burrow

Enrico Alleva — 2024-03-05

Burrows, dens, recovery sites are briefly reviewed in Vertebrates, particularly Mammals. Ethologically, they host complex phenomena (early experience; imprinting; onset sensory-motor capabilities; steps of emotional and cognitive performances; etc.).
The area immediately surrounding the burrow is the critical scenario where offspring survival strategies are socially implemented.
The wider area around the burrow is marked/defended by conspecifics competing for trophic resources.

Inhabiting the extimacy. The home, the burrow, the zone

Alessandro Calefati — 2024-03-05

The present paper analyzes three different models of organization of the living space – home, burrow and zone – through the two interconnected operation of inclusion/exclusion on one side, and the relationship between human and non-human on the other side. The main thesis of the paper is that each of these models is co-present with respect to the others, despite the fact that one or the other emerges from time to time, through thresholds of in-differentiation.

The art of inhabiting as a technique for subjectification

Marco Assennato — 2024-03-05

The aim of the article is a radical rethinking of the relationship between architecture and dwelling, starting with a critique of the famous lecture Martin Heidegger gave in Darmstadt in 1956. In the foreground comes the question – central to architecture – of the technical modification of the environment and thus of our ability to inhabit the planet.

Sittlichkeit and Baukunst “as” second nature. The philosophy of Hegelian architecture and the building as external interiority of an ethical bond

Matteo Cavalleri — 2024-03-05

The essay draws a relationship between the dwelling dimension of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and the philosophy of architecture presented in the Aesthetics, both of which are seen as spiritual expressions of second nature. Central to the analysis is the consideration of the building – analysed in its historical conceptual evolution – as a place of self-knowledge for the spirit, which is expressed through a continuous modification of the relationship between internality and externality. A topicality within which the aesthetic representation of an ethical bond that supports the emergence of Einzelheit is highlighted.

The burrow – den-world Europe

Mariateresa Giammetti — 2024-03-05

Thinking of the den as a concept declined as an architectural archetype can be representative of an idea of living associated with the image of a safe, intimate and protective place. At the same time, the den can represent the starting point from which human beings are able to draw the lines of a meaningful cartography that can guide their movement in the world. The den-world expands its temenos, shifts its thresholds forward: it no longer houses just one single human being, but entire cities, pieces of continents, and whole continents. But what happens to the symbolic forms of architectural space when a den-world is forced to contract its temenos to withdraw its thresholds until it itself becomes a threshold space? The article will try to delineate the threshold places of the den-world Europe of today and the possible spatial strategies that could consolidate the architecture, understood as one of the most integral cultural techniques shaping our lives.

Inside/Outside. Sceneries of an inhabiting to-come

Micol Rispoli — 2024-03-05

There are various ways of approaching the design of inhabiting. Many have to do with one idea of architecture abstracted from the specific conditions in which it is set, and another that instead uses precisely these conditions, les moyens du bord, as the tools of construction, as does the bricoleur. This applies to dwellings, cities and what we still call territories. The climate crisis requires us, now more than ever, to follow Isabelle Stengers’ (2018; tr. it. 2021, p. 61) indication: to engage with and for the world in which we live.

The burrow. A provocation for the politician

Luca Alici — 2024-03-05

Starting from the provocation of the burrow, this paper focuses on the ethical-political scope of three suggestions: mediation (in the time of his fatigue), intimacy (in the time of his extroversion), interest (in the time of his possessive declination). In order to do, it draws on Paul Ricoeur’s reflection on living, it deals two modern age provocations in Hobbes and Rousseau and finally it explains some consequences about politics.

On shelters and boundaries. Some interpretative paradigms

Daniela Calabrò — 2024-03-05

The theme of the essay is linked to some interpretative paradigms on the concepts of ‘refuge’ and ‘borders’ in a geo-philosophical perspective. Through the analysis of the notion of xenos, elaborated by Plato in the Laws, the proposed text continues by investigating the concept of “humanity” in Edmund Husserl and the concept of “errant values” in Albert Camus, to then conclude with the concept of hostes/hospis elaborated by Derrida and “borderline” according to Jean-Luc Nancy. The foreigner, far from being understood as an inaccessible “other” to be annihilated, is here identified as a correlative to one’s own ego.

Of boundaries, orders, and security. Starting from Der Bau

Carla Danani — 2024-03-05

The text is developed in three passages. Firstly, it highlights, in Kafka’s text Der Bau, a provocative invitation to decentralise, to put oneself in a place other than the one in which one is settled. Taking it up means the effort of practising a “jutting out”, the risk of exercising a divestment of the obvious, the habitual, the taken for granted. In such a way, one then accesses what is familiar by understanding that it is not for this reason also known – as Hegel said (weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt). It must, therefore, still be questioned. This is precisely the case with building. A second passage then considers the perspective of building as a search for security, while a third finally delves into the horizons of meaning, exploring the complex dynamic between order and extraneousness. The result is the subversion of customary and reassuring binarisms but, at the same time, also the suggestion, admittedly risky, of alternative generous possibilities.

"Arranging Life": The Immunitarian Building and its Openness to the world

Annette Hilt — 2024-03-05

If community, within which we give our live an institution, is the backdrop of both leading and understanding our living, how can we then possibly come to an understanding of belonging to something we share and have in common? This article tackles this question along R. Esposito’s paradigm of ‘immunity’, conceptions of empathy and E. Fink’s phenomenology of co-existence, arguing for a concept to make a sense of community within a narrative framework.

Franz Kafka: The metaphor of the "burrow" as shelter and dug

Giovanna Costanzo — 2024-03-05

The parable of the Kafkaesque script allows us to realize that it becomes more enigmatic more it becomes the figure of the loneliness of the Western Jew without memory and without roots, especially after 1917, the year in which he learns that he has fallen ill with tuberculosis, feeling as condemnation the anguish of Kierkegaardian aesthetic life. In this period, we can see the intellectual fatigue towards a time perceived as resigned and without find redemption, the inexhaustible search for the truth through writing. The Burrow represents the emblem and the epilogue of this parable.

The hut as place for "interior immensity". The sense of dwelling in Henry David Thoreau

Antonio Di Chiro — 2024-03-05

The path articulated in this paper has as its horizon the question of dwelling. This question will be analyzed in relation to a particular type of dwelling that is the hut. In this regard, we will focus on the hut built by Henry David Thoreau on the shores of Walden Lake in 1854 as a protected and privileged place of intimacy and a place that allows for reflection on oneself and one’s being in the world.

The Barbarians of the enemy. A philosophical-literary critique of political hostility

Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa — 2024-03-05

In this article I analyse the figure of the barbarian through three authors. The first is Franz Kafka, the second Carl Schmitt, the third John Maxwell Coetzee. The thesis of the essay is that the political-theoretical framework formulated by Schmitt, who saw the friend-enemy pair as the criterion for the identification of the political, can be problematised through two texts: Kafka’s Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. In conclusion of the essay, I highlight some aspects that may be useful in understanding the hostilising dynamics of our time.

Gender issue and erotique difference

Rosaria Caldarone — 2024-03-05

In her essay, the author argues that gender conflict cannot be eliminated through the eradication of identity, as the American philosopher J. Butler seems to do, but through a strengthening of the idea of relationship. To this end, the author re-proposes the “exchange of figure” of Plato’s Alcibiades I as a strong model of relationship.

Luigi Alici, Liberi tutti. Il bene, la vita, i legami, Vita e pensiero, Milano 2022

Chiara Scarlato — 2024-03-05

F. Battaglia, Natur des Menschen. Ein normativer Entwurf, Mimesis Verlag, Milano 2022

Linda Lovelli — 2024-03-05

M. Cardenas, La filosofia come attualità della storia. Sul concetto di storia della filosofia nell’Italia del Novecento, Padova University Press, Padova, 2023

Claudio Amicantonio — 2024-03-05

Martha C. Nussbaum, Il valore aggiunto della filosofia. Tra etica ed economia, a cura di O. Tolone, Morcelliana, Brescia 2023

Francesco Terenzio — 2024-03-05

Biographies

Authors — 2024-02-05