Sul piacere e sul dolore. Sintomi della mancanza di felicità.

This book inquiries into the role that contemporary Western civilisation accords to pleasure and pain, and proposes a different interpretation of these very basic perceptions. The analysis starts from the observation of a peculiar lack of happiness: the exponential increase in material comfort – that, according to the positivist project, should have guaranteed happiness to all – has turned into a peculiar form of general anaesthesia, where physical bluntness and intellectual repression make not only pain, but also pleasure, disappear from view. The argumentation proceeds to analyse Western discourses and practices of pleasure and pain, and of their historical and “archaeological” reasons. Special focus is put on the poverty of the vocabulary of perceptions; on the systematic hiding of experienced pain, coupled with the spectacular ostentation of disasters; on the reduction of the subtleties of pain to a generic evolutionary physiology; on the equivalence between performance and pleasure; on the separation between pleasure and rationality and, more generally, between perception and knowledge. The texts then goes on with its most proper theoretical contribution. It digs into the Western philosophical tradition (with special regards to Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Simondon) in search of instruments for rethinking pleasure and pain not as meaningless perceptions, but as “subjectivation indexes”, signs of “good life”, or of the lack of good life. A final section is devoted to a phenomenological analysis of our present time, both in its being the result of a long historical tradition that keeps on repressing pleasure and pain and depriving them of meaning, and in its being unresolved and potential, with its aspiration to a fullness of feeling that points towards politics.