Gabriele Pulli

"Sull'immagine"

Liguori editore, Napoli, 2024

(Reading note)

Following the author's train of thought, as in his latest works, we see how a close dialogue unfolds with well-known places in literary, artistic, poetic, and philosophical tradition, on the assumption that there is a significant trace of thought in the arts and poetry and that these can indeed be useful “also” in bringing ideas to the fore. This is the case with Tiresias, the blind seer who sees the hidden truth, whose ancient figure opens the book. Here, the question seems to be about the ‘passion for truth’ (12). The relationship between truth and image, the title of the book, comes to light by revisiting the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Narcissus sees his own truth when, reflecting himself in the water, he obtains “imaginis umbra” (quoted on p. 14). Such is the painful truth, that ‘We are all images’ (16), and such is the relationship between truth and image. Painful but at the same time joyful? And why, according to Heraclitus, would truth want to hide? (19). Because, hypothetically, if it is revealed, it is ‘lost’ (ibid.). But, again, why?

According to Heraclitus, apparent oppositions give sublime harmony as long as they remain hidden but can turn into disharmony if revealed. A kind of enigma. The path Pulli chooses to untie the knot consists in seeing harmony as ‘the absence of contradiction’ (25). If what appears contradictory (as long as it remains hidden) may not be so but only appear to be so, this ‘means that the realm of apparent contradictions exists’ (ibid.). Various forms of what Pulli refers to as contradictory opposition, such as “day and night, hunger and satiety, fatigue and rest” (27), are not in contradiction with each other, although they may appear to be. Truth, on the other hand, is harmony.

This does not answer the question of why “something that is not contradictory when it is hidden becomes contradictory when it manifests itself” (33). The author then draws on the thinking of Ignacio Matte Blanco: there “are” phenomena and dynamics in the psyche that are not felt as disturbing in the unconscious, but become so when brought to consciousness—the opposite of what Freud claims. According to Matte Blanco, “consciousness is not what solves the problem but what causes it,” while “the unconscious is not what causes the problem but what prevents it” (36). Consciousness does not grasp what remains hidden, that is, what normally exists in the deep unconscious, even though it is contradictory: and so consciousness is at peace, because it hides “something” “by misunderstanding it as contradictory” (38). If such content came to light in consciousness, the contradiction “could not present itself in a more disruptive way” (ibid.). Therefore, “in the deepest unconscious (...) there is something that can heal any negativity (... and therefore there, editor's note) everything, even the most intense pain, can be transformed into joy” (39).

If the manifestation of unconscious content leads to disharmony, perhaps the reverse path from consciousness to the unconscious involves the possibility of positivity in existence? And is this possible?

In order to answer this question, we must first understand the difference between consciousness and the unconscious: according to Freud himself, consciousness is an image enveloped in words, while the unconscious is “the realm of pure images” (44), so returning to the unconscious will involve “freeing images from the grip of words” (ibid.).

This brings us to the heart of the book, which consists of thinking about images.

Freud himself, in another writing, admits the possibility “that images enter consciousness on their own, without necessarily connecting to words” (45). These remain essential because consciousness makes the ‘relationships’ between things or their representations. Thinking solely in images, although it is an approximate way of becoming conscious, also represents the “closest ever” approach “to the way of being of the unconscious” (47). Fine, but in this, according to the author, “is there anything desirable, intense, precious?” (49). According to Sartre, if something “jumps out of its context,” “recalls the infinite,” it can accompany everything that is virtually around it, like a halo. And this is a “fascination” (51) that belongs to the imaginary (unlike perception, the imaginary sees objects in the absence of relationships) and in particular belongs to the single image that finds itself “in a sort of essential poverty” (52). Every real object—not imaginary—can acquire this mode of being of the imaginary. In the path hypothesized from the manifest to the hidden, “the real takes on the mode of being of the imaginary” (ibid.). The author has already discussed this in previous works, such as in the book Infinity and Vagueness, but here the theme is taken up again. If nothingness, what distresses us most, is in the imaginary, what fascinates us most, can going to pure images have a sense of access to a form of catharsis? (53).

We have only talked about “pure” images. What about words?

Can we walk backwards, as we did for images, towards the constitution of words and beyond? According to another approach (Bucci, cf. pp. 75-80), the constitution of words, in addition to the constitution of logos, also allows us to “give stability to our own world” (78). The meaning is clear. Investigating the origin of words, Cassirer states that, if we think of a kind of original experience, the internal tension—feeling, intuition—caused in us by something coming towards us, at the height of its intensity, is transformed “into the sound of the voice” (59), into words, into language with its logical-discursive concepts (61), or relationships, or into myth. The intensity of origin is lost in inverse proportion to the effectiveness of relationships in logos but is rediscovered in the language of art. It so happens that it is words, in the reverse path to that of origin, that return to images to obtain their “enchantment” (63). Words can therefore ‘sink (...) into themselves’ (66) and, in this journey, having severed the link to meanings, they can be found ‘as pure sound’ (ibid.) and sound is susceptible to ‘transposing itself into image’ (67) in relation to which, since the object is empty of meaning, ‘emotion without object’ will be felt (ibid.).

And what to call this emotion? Pulli replies: “something indefinite” (69). Certainly not mere abstraction, but rather a reference to “pure feeling” which is “first feeling without seeing” (ibid.) in “the mother's body, and in the early stages of subsequent life” (70). “The first object of the imagination (could be...) something undefined” (ibid.). Thus Heraclitus returns: “the intimate nature of things loves to hide and disperses with its own unveiling” (71). And this could be the origin of the desire to know and bring to light what is hidden, in this case according to the direction of words-images.

The final part of the essay, one of the most evocative, again referring to Heraclitus, investigates the meaning of the unrepeatability and repeatability (84) of images, experience, and time (which the sage of Ephesus seems to suggest), arguing that both can contribute to the “liveability of a fully accomplished life” (85) since both the notion of the uniqueness of the event and the hope of its permanence contribute to a better perception of existence.

The conclusion, returning to the desire for knowledge from which the investigation began, opens up the relationship between the truth that seems to have been acquired, the new perspectives to be investigated, mystery, and the hidden.