Calasso e l'Adelphi: il fondamento del mondo.

Calasso, Adelphi, and the foundation of the world My doctoral thesis deals with the publishing house Adelphi and the figure of its founder, Roberto Calasso. The work has been divided into three parts. The purpose of the first part has been to outline the sixty-year history of the publishing house by illustrating the atmosphere of its beginnings, the cultural and political environment and the personalities around whom the Adelphi project was born. The Roman environment that arose around psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard, a German psychoanalyst of Jungian extraction, was recognized as fundamental. Important names in Italian culture of the time were patients of the analyst and friends of this circle; among them we find Giorgio Manganelli, Natalia Ginzburg, Cristina Campo, Adriano Olivetti and Roberto Bazlen. The fundamental importance of the figure of Bazlen for the cultural physiognomy of the early publishing house and that of his friend Luciano Foà for the managerial and organizational component, without forgetting the Turin environment of the Einaudi publishing house, with which both were in contact, has been contextually highlighted, and the story of the "Nietzsche operation" directed by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari has been summarized in this regard. Dividing the history of Adelphi into decades, I then focused on the first turn from the 1970s, with the publications of many Central European authors, and then highlighted the significant change in the mid-1980s, a time when Adelphi gained an even larger audience, which it would never lose again. In a second part I dealt centrally with Roberto Calasso's work as a writer, focusing on the theme of sacrifice within his books and outlining the contours of a "Historia mundi" under the specter of sacrifice itself. In this light, I then illustrated Calasso's view of human history, the importance he attached to hunting, the relationship with the sacred, and his sacrificial view of existence, from mythical and prehistoric origins to today's computerized civilization. The relationship with the divine, a central theme of Calasso's work, was analyzed from the author's comparative perspective, ranging from Vedic India to classical Greece and early 19th-century Germany. In a third part I then analyzed the catalog in more depth, identifying the most relevant themes that run through it transversally, considering the publishing house in the same way as a book, as in President Calasso's vision. The theme of possession, which, in its various forms of mental illness, mystical ecstasy, and erotic obsession, appears in many of Adelphi's books, in all genres and eras, and reflects the Bazlenian idea of the unique book as the residue of an extraordinarily powerful experience, was then inviduated. I therefore detected in the drive to seek radical knowledge, which questions the foundations of the world, a meeting point, in the Adelphi perspective, between memoiristic publications, religious and spiritual publications, and scientific publications. I have therefore analyzed publications in neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology to show this perspective and its filiation from the early twentieth-century crisis of foundations, both of which are rooted in the desire to understand the world and question its fundamentals. I then eposed and commented, mainly through the works of physicist Carlo Rovelli, on the major achievements and discussions still taking place in contemporeal physics, from general realism to quantum theory, highlighting their points of contact with Eastern philosophies. The discussion then continued with neuroscience, which, in Calasso's view, carries on the same research on consciousness that began in Vedic texts three thousand years ago. The publishing house's philosophical publications, which are mainly built around the authors of Heidegger, Severino, Wittgenstein and Cacciari, also received an exposition and clarification of their contiguity to the twentieth-century thought of the crisis of foundations. Finally, I have highlighted the features of the "Adelphi style," which, though of blurred contours, centers around the Calassian idea of "absolute literature" and its personal vision of myth as a realm of images closely connected to art. Iosif Brodksky, W.G. Sebald and Emmanuel Carrère then received exclusive treatment because of the importance of their style and the themes of their work, which are also close to those at the heart of the publishing house. In conclusion, I believe I have shed light on the cultural design of a publishing house so important to Italian culture in recent decades and on the direct relationship between it and the culture of its longtime editorial director, Roberto Calasso, providing a mixture of thought of both an unactual and profoundly twentieth-century forge, which undoubtedly constitutes one of the happiest cultural syntheses that has occurred in Europe from the second half of the twentieth century to the present.