The Age of the Plug
Editorial
We have decided to devote this issue to the concept of “saturation” because we think that saturation is both a widespread feeling and a concept under shock, a concept that must be rethought. As feeling, “saturation” designates something like being fed up. It is a condition of light submersion that is however sufficient to make one drown, as in the beautiful photographs by Alban Grosdidier. Leggi tutto »
The essay is a short theological-political treatise that, on the basis of an interpretation of Christianity as religion of the addition, proposes a reading of the political situation in terms of the categories of saturation, addition, and distribution. Faced with the crisis of the social welfare state, the author advances a definition of saturation as originary distributive situation. Leggi tutto »
One of the points seemingly made by Genesis 3, a foundational text in Western culture, is that one of the essential conditions that guarantee human identity is the preservation of a criterion of epistemological insaturation, that is, of dualistic antithesis that, in the specific circumstance, separates Adam and Eve from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Leggi tutto »
Our age loves intensity, it loves events. This is our truth, this is our symptom. What hides in all this? What is the link between this fondness and its reversal, namely, the agonizing attention and the amount of technical resources that we incessantly destine to the realm of planning, prevention, and insurance against the unforeseen? Leggi tutto »
This essay discusses how the distinction between saturated and unsaturated concepts is of great help in view of a sharp distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Metonymy connects heterogeneous concepts, whereas metaphor transfers concepts into strange domains. Whereas connection requires saturated terms, transfer is compatible with both saturated and unsaturated concepts. This accounts for both the distributional restrictions on metonymy and the ubiquity of metaphor in sentence structure. Leggi tutto »
We can define as “saturated” those situations in which human dignity is violated and there occurs a trespassing of that limit that ought to remain inviolable for everyone and for all reasons whatsoever. In Italian prisons, this limit has been clearly trespassed for a while now. In the Report of the Italian Senate’s Commission on Human Rights, we have spoken of “minimal incarceration,” that is, of resorting to prison as to the last recourse to be taken up only when there is no other possibility. Everything would then simply change in the Italian Leggi tutto »
The essay analyzes the concept of saturation according to a gender perspective and, by way of example, highlights some situations that have been characterizing the relation between men and women for years. It describes contemporary situations, some more obvious and measurable, others subtler and intangible, Leggi tutto »