Marina Canee, from Entre chien et loup, 2019–2020
Editorial: Sara Marini, Angela Mengoni, The Will to Knowledge
Fifty years ago, Michel Foucault, in La volonté de savoir (1976), described how the mechanisms of the examination of conscience belonging to the pastoral tradition of the 17th century progressively extended to all areas of society, marking the threshold of a biopolitical modernity. Here, the ‘will to knowledge’ is not the subject’s drive for research, but the injunction to bring into the field of knowledge-power those borderline domains of life that had been previously excluded from it: death, birth, sexuality. By the mid-Seventies it was already clear that power was no longer a matter of limitation and denial, but of injunction and stimulation of life. Thus, a few years after Foucault’s work, we encounter another text on the inexhaustible drive towards knowledge, its infinite resources of seduction, its lethal traps. With The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco constructs a thriller whose origin lies in the will to knowledge, with a book at its centre and, surrounding it, the desire of the aspiring initiates in opposition to the strenuous defence mounted by the custodians of tradition; for the reader, meanwhile, a comparable journey unfolds through the multi-layered plot of coded quotations, in one of the greatest examples of a dialogic textual machine, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it. Eco’s novel, structured around the space of a library, becomes – like the ephemeral Strada Novissima, conceived by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980 for the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice – a bastion of postmodernity. The design of the architecture that preserves books and documents is, whether pursuing the real or the fantastic, whether through new foundations or the revision of the existing, an exercise in the relationship between bodies in motion through space, objects, and written discourses that set minds in motion: a challenge, therefore, that seeks a balance between the calculated weight of paper and the elevation of thought. Again – and above all – libraries are places of the imagination that produce other images, propose new paths; precisely because they are real, they reveal even more evident connections between tangible things and the images of the world. Books, like characters in a story, wait to be animated, consulted, forgotten, only to be rediscovered, to become the subject of discussion between acquaintances or strangers. Between the disturbing and the poetic, the monumental and the fragile, the ephemeral and the eternal, the will to knowledge challenges and mocks us.
