If I can make it there - On Cities and their Promises
International Lecture Series in Berlin
NAPLES or the Arithmetic of Fate
Marino Niola (Napoli, I)
Moderator: Thomas Hauschild (Ethnologist, Halle)
Italian with simultaneous German translation
The innumerable attempts of the 18th and 19th Century to portray a distinctive picture of Naples time and again put down one fundamental contradiction: the one between the coolness of the calculating North, on the one hand, and the warmth and primeval deep seated ‘Fantasy’ of the South, on the other. In European culture, this city, founded by a siren, qualifies as a poetic place par excellence. It virtually vouches for the myth not to be expelled from the modern - not from its thoughts and not from its experiential horizon. It is evident, for instance, from the fact that here in Naples, lottery was closely connected to the art of fortune telling even then, when Naples had already developed into one of the centres of European Enlightenment. It is this very synchronicity between the archaic and the modern, as observed by Bloch and Benjamin, which is the hallmark of this polymorphic and ever changing city. Naples bears witness to an incomplete modernism rather than to antiquity. It was always ‘Post Modern’.
Marino Niola is an Ethnologist of Cities and Professor for Cultural Anthropology at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples. “Totem and Ragu. Neapolitan Walks” (2000) was published in German.
Thomas Hauschild is Professor of Ethnology at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.
19 April 2010, 7.30pm
HAU 3
Lectures in Berlin
NAPLES or the Arithmetic of Fate
Marino Niola (Napoli, I)
Moderator: Thomas Hauschild (Ethnologist, Halle)
Italian with simultaneous German translation
The innumerable attempts of the 18th and 19th Century to portray a distinctive picture of Naples time and again put down one fundamental contradiction: the one between the coolness of the calculating North, on the one hand, and the warmth and primeval deep seated ‘Fantasy’ of the South, on the other. In European culture, this city, founded by a siren, qualifies as a poetic place par excellence. It virtually vouches for the myth not to be expelled from the modern - not from its thoughts and not from its experiential horizon. It is evident, for instance, from the fact that here in Naples, lottery was closely connected to the art of fortune telling even then, when Naples had already developed into one of the centres of European Enlightenment. It is this very synchronicity between the archaic and the modern, as observed by Bloch and Benjamin, which is the hallmark of this polymorphic and ever changing city. Naples bears witness to an incomplete modernism rather than to antiquity. It was always ‘Post Modern’.
Marino Niola is an Ethnologist of Cities and Professor for Cultural Anthropology at the Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples. “Totem and Ragu. Neapolitan Walks” (2000) was published in German.
Thomas Hauschild is Professor of Ethnology at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.
19 April 2010, 7.30pm
HAU 3
Lectures in Berlin
