The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The delusion of omnipotence

2021-08-06T03:23:47.475Z


The writer Roberto Calasso pointed out the fictitious sense of power that new technologies transmit Italian writer and editor Roberto Calasso Susanna Saez I copy: “It is as if the imagination had amputated itself, after thousands of years, its ability to look beyond society, in search of something that would give meaning to what happens inside.of the society". And also: “Everyone today has the ability to produce, without any connection, words and images, virtually disseminable throughout the wo


Italian writer and editor Roberto Calasso Susanna Saez

I copy: “It is as if the imagination had amputated itself, after thousands of years, its ability to look

beyond

society, in search of something that would give meaning to what happens

inside.

of the society".

And also: “Everyone today has the ability to produce, without any connection, words and images, virtually disseminable throughout the world, for an unlimited audience.

Which is enough to provoke a widespread delusion of omnipotence, but no longer as a clinical phenomenon ”.

Still another: "Information does not tend to replace only consciousness but also thought in general, relieving it of the burden of having to constantly elaborate and govern."

And one last: "The artist's object is to tell people what they have not yet realized and were about to say themselves."

The four quotes are part of

The Innumerable Present,

an essay by Roberto Calasso.

The Italian editor and writer noted in another work of his,

How to order a library,

that "every true reader follows a thread, although it can also be a hundred threads at a time", and that "every time he opens a book he takes that thread back in his hands and complicates it, confuses, unties, knots, prolongs it." In that same piece, he said that Enzo Turolla, whom he considered El Lector par excellence, "only put almost invisible points on the margins of the passage, on the lines or on the words in particular that had caught his attention." Read with a pencil, establish reference marks, intervene with your own gaze in the gaze of the other, make it your own, or muddle it, develop it, conquer it. Calasso observed that if one were to reread a work following those “points” that he slipped in his day in a first reading, what he would end up doing was “read an essay, sharp and articulate, on that book”.

Roberto Calasso died a few days ago. The temptation to visit him again is inevitable, and those four quotes from the beginning want to operate today like those little points that Turolla left in his readings. Four points that make up a territory and that can be taken as a lucid diagnosis of our time. Do they still belong to Calasso or are they already an essay on

The Unspeakable Present?

Likewise, the reader has devoured them in the wake of his worries. Have you lost yourself inside this society and don't recognize it? Are you too overwhelmed by so much information that you can't articulate your own thought? Are you so fascinated by new technologies, and by digital speed, that you feel possessed by that “delusion of omnipotence” that Calasso pointed out?

Four points and four quotes: one world. Surely the Italian writer is right when he says that it is the artist who manages "to tell people what they have not yet realized and that they were about to say themselves." And what that essay of his facilitated was to articulate precisely that feeling of helplessness to which that omnipotence transmitted by new technologies ultimately leads. In front of a computer, a tablet, a mobile phone, you have the false security of dominating the world, when what happens is that you do not stop putting there signs of being, at least, a little lost.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-06

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-29T18:37:16.923Z
News/Politics 2024-02-23T08:01:41.144Z
News/Politics 2024-02-23T08:13:12.972Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.