At the beginning of the 80s, from what was then the magic touch of Steven Spielberg , among many other things, a film destined to become a small cult of family and social horror was also released: Poltergeist-Demoniache presenze , directed by Tobe Hooper but written and produced by the ET director. The poltergeists are, from the German, the noisy and smashing spirits that make objects move. Here, to date the film as a typical product of those years, they came from the television, identified as the origin of all evils and disruptive cause of the family, and kidnapped a girl.
The presences are therefore demonic, according to the Italian extension of the title, because in reality they are not seen, they are present without, apparently, being there. So here is another word that seems to have just referred to, and not marginally, to its opposite. In the liquid world of digital and apps, online connections and quarantines spent talking, so to speak, with chefs explaining recipes or relentless coaches who dictate the rhythms of the indispensable parenthesis of home fitness, the presence was evoked , it is appropriate to say it, as the hoped for return to normal in flesh and blood. The school in presence , above all and above all, but also the summit in presence and the European Council in presence which is finally held in mid-July.
Michel Onfray , the atheist and anarchist French intellectual who loves flesh and physicality, creator of a popular university that dispenses courses to all, recently quoted the expression by contrasting it at a distance, another cult word of the days of the epidemic , to say that if we do not regain our presence we risk a new dictatorship, the triumph of the control society thanks to a sort of digital Big Brother . For someone who calls himself a slightly optimistic materialist, this is perhaps a bit too apocalyptic vision. But above all, it seems to ignore an important part of the expression presence itself. Just to start, to begin, the many ways of saying related to the word. Despite the fact that the first meaning of the term is the simple circumstance of being present in a certain place, of being there, of attending something or even intervening, we speak of beautiful presence , indicating with this something that goes beyond the objective aspect and physical in the strict sense, of presence of spirit (and we almost almost fall into the domain of the poltergeist, since geist in German means spirit), and on the other hand we say of someone who, although physically there, does not intervene, does not give any contribution and does not speak, which made an ' act of presence ': therefore there is also a passive presence that can be brilliantly, and with better results, replaced by an online presence. Not to mention that Catholics speak of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and certainly it is not the same presence of the student on the school desks, and that the word presence is very often accompanied by adjectives such as mysterious, dark or disturbing: and not are never the presences we invoke in these weeks.
Listen to "The word of the week: presence (by Massimo Sebastiani)" on Spreaker.
And we are talking about a word that is part, according to the research of Tullio De Mauro and Isabella Chiar i, of the 2000 words of our basic vocabulary , that is, those used most frequently. In short, one of those words that are written and pronounced with the certainty that whoever reads and listens to them knows perfectly well what we are talking about. Perhaps the most proud, and certainly adventurous, battle against the idea of presence as 'simple presence' led by a philosopher who became almost a tutelary deity of our words, Martin Heidegger . That idea of presence (simple, in fact), which is linked to the etymology of the term, the Latin prae and ens (an entity, something that stands before), is only one of the possible meanings and possible variations of the word. In other words, not everything that is present is in front of us as an object (in German Gegenstand , that is, something that is in front) and the presence does not end in being in front of and in the flesh and bones of something. Otherwise the presences could not be dark, disturbing or demonic. Franco Battiato has certainly thought of this reverberation of the sense of presence in And I come to look for you , the passage in which the presence of the other is something indispensable for understanding ourselves. In other words, every person exists only in relation to the others: and this no Big Brother can take away from us or control it.