Archaeology of the Unconscious

<p>In reconstructing the birth and development of the notion of ‘unconscious’ historians of ideas have heavily relied on the Freudian concept of <i>Unbewussten</i> retroactively projecting the psychoanalytic unconscious over a constellation of diverse cultural experiences taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between France and Germany. <em>Archaeology of the Unconscious</em> aims to challenge this perspective by adopting an unusual and thought-provoking viewpoint as the one offered by the Italian case from the 1770s to the immediate aftermath of WWI when Italo Svevo’s <i>La coscienza di Zeno </i>provides Italy with the first example of a ‘psychoanalytic novel’. Italy’s vibrant culture of the long nineteenth century characterised by the sedimentation circulation intersection and synergy of different cultural philosophical and literary traditions proves itself to be a privileged object of inquiry for an <i>archaeological </i>study of the unconscious; a study whose object is not the alleged ‘origin’ of a pre-made theoretical construct but rather the stratifications by which that specific construct was assembled. In line with Michel Foucault’s <i>Archéologie du savoir</i> (1969) this volume will analyze the formation and the circulation across different authors and texts of a network of ideas and discourses on interconnected themes including dreams memory recollection desire imagination fantasy madness creativity inspiration magnetism and somnambulism. Alongside questioning pre-given narratives of the ‘history of the unconscious’ this book will employ the Italian ‘difference’ as a powerful perspective from whence to address the undeveloped potentialities of the pre-Freudian unconscious beyond uniquely psychoanalytical viewpoints.</p>