The Immemorial: The Subject and Its Doubles
Seagull Books, 2025
eISBN: 978-1-80309-530-1 | Cloth: 978-1-80309-528-8 | Paper: 978-1-80309-529-5
See other books on: Cavalletti, Andrea | Its Doubles | Philosophy | Political | Subject
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eISBN: 978-1-80309-530-1 | Cloth: 978-1-80309-528-8 | Paper: 978-1-80309-529-5
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity.
Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement, and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject has appeared, a second “I” has now supplanted the first.
Andrea Cavalletti carefully registers the disquieting appearances of this second “I” in the literature and psychology of the past two centuries. In a context dominated by amnesia and somnambulism, hallucinations and wakeful dreams, the bourgeois subject, whose identity seemed so stable, turns out to be inhabited by masks that elude every grasp, at the mercy of a doubling that can no longer be recomposed. Personalities multiply and do battle, as even life and death exchange roles. And, ultimately, the identity of the Western subject reveals itself as a shade-like, constitutively double figure, that only lives in its weakness and forgetting, in its losses and distractions.
Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement, and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject has appeared, a second “I” has now supplanted the first.
Andrea Cavalletti carefully registers the disquieting appearances of this second “I” in the literature and psychology of the past two centuries. In a context dominated by amnesia and somnambulism, hallucinations and wakeful dreams, the bourgeois subject, whose identity seemed so stable, turns out to be inhabited by masks that elude every grasp, at the mercy of a doubling that can no longer be recomposed. Personalities multiply and do battle, as even life and death exchange roles. And, ultimately, the identity of the Western subject reveals itself as a shade-like, constitutively double figure, that only lives in its weakness and forgetting, in its losses and distractions.
See other books on: Cavalletti, Andrea | Its Doubles | Philosophy | Political | Subject
See other titles from Seagull Books
