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Difference, split, contingency: it is through these all too familiar and thus unheimlich terms that we can conceive of what I will call an Italian turn in psychoanalytic aesthetics. The word “turn,” as I will use it here, brings to mind a shift of direction or tendency; this essay will highlight the series of separations that define the contours of this shift and that make it a new and unique tendency in contemporary aesthetics. Born midway between the couch and academia, the Italian turn has not yet attained the privilege of living within the safe walls of a school, nor is it sustained by any will to secure itself as a system. It invites us instead to imagine it in the precarious terms of a possibility, an occasion, an opening. In that sense, the Italian turn is also Italy's turn back toward the limelight of critical theory.1 Yet its very existence remains to be argued for and demonstrated—or rather, inaugurated as an opportunity to ask different questions about art and about psychoanalysis itself. This essay pursues such an inquiry.
To explain the nature and promise of the Italian turn I will identify the shared questions—and different answers—offered by various participants in the new direction. They form a diverse group, including: the psychoanalytic clinician and academic Massimo Recalcati; the literary theorist Giovanni Bottiroli; the scholar of aesthetics Fulvio Carmagnola; the film and media scholar Andrea Bellavita; and the philosopher Silvano Petrosino. My search for common traits among them will require a synthetic and inductive approach. Although I am well aware that any act of naming implies violence and subtraction—that is the price to be paid to introduce what is named into a shared discourse—I will refrain as far as possible from oversimplification and unwarranted generalizations.