Being outside Self/Being in Self. How to Think of Oneself in the Light of Ecstasy

Lecture: Being outside Self/Being in Self. How to Think of Oneself in the Light of Ecstasy

Lecturer: Alessandra Cislaghi (Università degli Studi di Trieste)

Date: Friday, June 7, 2024, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 2024 - The Great Worksites of Contemporaneity. Looks at the Knots of the Present

Language: Italian

Moderator: Fabio Merlini (Eranos Foundation, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the lecture is viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

Human beings have always experienced a multiple split between inner and outer, self and other, body and spirit. But, looking closely, we immediately perceive a kind of reversal: what is most intimate to me, appears the most foreign to me; my body does not exhaust my identity; the spirit is almost unspeakable, lacking the very meaning of the term today. Such a split struggles to compose itself into a successful harmonization and, at the same time, reverberates a larger split, the one with respect to the original, the mystery of being. We are living, separated from the origin, curious to tap into the inexhaustibility of the principle. Indeed, we all have the personal experience of being, from time to time, outside of us (as in love or despair) or being in us (pacified in good balance). Yet precisely centering turns out to be eccentric: we do not master it; it constitutes us as the power that makes us be. So let us try to investigate who we are in the dimension of ecstasy, which expresses both our existence, which does not stand alone, and the fullness of being, which we seek as happiness of life.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Alessandra Cislaghi, trained in Turin in the line of the hermeneutic school of Luigi Pareyson and Ugo Perone, is full professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Trieste, Department of Humanistic Studies, where she teaches Philosophical Anthropology, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Religions. His research is devoted to borderline issues between philosophy and theology, with specific regard to the theme of subjectivity. Her publications include Interruzione e corrispondenza (1994), Il sapere del desiderio. Libertà metafisica e saggezza etica (2002), La frattura originaria. Riflessioni sulla condizione umana postedenica (2006), Parresìa (2008), Essere fuori di sé. Saggio sulla soggettività estatica (2012), and L’invenzione della grazia. Sulle tracce di un’idea splendida (2018). Also of note are the contributions Per un pensiero sulla migrazione: interpretare il limite e l’infinito (in Pensieri migranti, 2019), L’inscindibile nesso di umanità e natura (in Ragioni comuni. Culture e religioni in trasformazione, 2020), and “Io vivo”. Il magnifico groviglio della relazionalità (in L’umano in relazione, 2023).

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The Foundation wanted to question some leading figures in today's cultural world, asking them to present the projects and issues on which they are working. The idea is to bring into dialogue at a distance qualified gazes on the nodes of our present, to highlight their risks, opportunities, and prospects. Not, of course, to listen to the last word on what is happening today, but rather to enter their laboratories of thought and try to focus on a kind of ongoing geography of the present time: to orient ourselves, to find ourselves, to map out possible virtuous paths-despite the disorientation and uncertainty that characterizes us, in an age that is very rich in technological resources, but very poor in future perspectives. Rather than inviting them to reflect on a guiding theme, as is the Eranos-Jung Lectures usual practice, we wanted to offer the lecturers the chance to present to the audience the issues they are working on, to see how the gaze on an object is constructed, through what sensibility, what concerns, what desire for understanding, and what method. And, of course, what passion. It will be a journey that will allow us to visit some “great worksites of contemporaneity” dedicated to different thematic areas: i.e., the state of health of our democracies; the fate of the “book” object and interiority in the time of endless distraction and social media; the reality of the metaverse, the overcoming of the human, and the resources of mysticism; the sonic perceptive in a society that continually solicits the sense of hearing; the solitude of the artist in the glittering world of the commodification of creativity; the drifts of the divine; and the meaning of making culture. In essence: a journey outside and inside ourselves.