Learning outcomes

The course aims at giving the conceptual, methodological and cultural grounds to promote a phenomenological inquiry on the affective experience and on the importance of emotional sharing for the relations of care, the individual formation (Bildung) and the foundation of social ontology.
In this course, crucial importance will be given to the role that desire plays in the relations of care and in the process of the human formation.

At the end of the course, students will have to prove: their adequate knowledge of the texts; critical assessment; to know how to communicate their knowledge in a clear, coherent and well-supported way; to know how to interact in the discussions with the professor and the other students.

Program

Course Title: Individuation process through making experience

Participants are asked first of all to make an effort of radical rethinking of their concept of experience. Commonly experience in the proper sense means only what is due to an objective perception which can be shared and therefore reproduced, while everything that comes from emotion, from memory and imagination is downgraded to a subjective experience, which be inner, fictitious and therefore arbitrary. Furthermore, experience often means the realization of a possibility already given, and what is beyond the horizon of possibilities is reduced to the virtual. With the help of Bergson, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Marion, Straus and Maldiney we will try to delineate the boundaries of a different concept of experience and its correlation with the problem of the formation of human singularity.

Participants should have knowledge of at least two of the following groups of texts:

1. Bergson, Il possibile e il reale, in: Id., Pensiero e movimento, 83-97; Deleuze, Differenza e ripetizione, Milano 1997.
2. Scheler, Il formalismo nell’etica e l’etica materiale dei valori, Bompiani, Milano 2013 (the parts to be agreed).
3. Merleau-Ponty, L’occhio e lo spirito, Milano 1996; H. Maldiney, Esistenza. Crisi e creazione, Milano 2012; Straus/Maldiney, L’estetico e l’estetica, (a cura di A, Pinotti) Milano 2005.
4. Marion, Dato che. Saggio per una fenomenologia della donazione, Milano 2001.
5. G. Cusinato, Periagoge, Verona 2014 .

Examination Methods

The exam is in oral form and foresees discussion of the short thesis about 20,000 characters on the issue agreed with the professor during the reception hour and to be handed in by ten days before the exam.