Mario Perniola - Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism

In the 1980s Perniola offers some of his most insightful contributions to continental philosophy. In Dopo Heidegger. Filosofia e organizzazione della cultura (After Heidegger. Philosophy and Organization of Culture 1982), drawing on Martin Heidegger and Antonio Gramsci, Perniola includes a theoretical discourse on social organization. He in fact argues the possibility of establishing a novel relationship between culture and society in Western civilization. As the former interrelations between metaphysics and church, dialectics and state, science and profession have been deconstructed, philosophy and culture provide a way to overcome nihilism and populism which characterize today’s society. Ritual Thinking. Sexuality, Death, World (2001) is a composite volume in English containing sections of two works published in Italian in the 1980s, i.e. La società dei simulacri (The Society of Simulacra 1980) and Transiti. Come si va dallo stesso allo stesso (Transits. How to go from the Same to the Same 1985). Perniola’s theory of simulacra deals with the logic of seduction which was also pursued by Jean Baudrillard. Although seduction is empty, it is nevertheless rooted in a concrete historical context. Simulation, however, provides images which are valued as such regardless of what they actually represent or refer to. “Images are simulations in that they seduce and yet out of their emptiness they have effects”. Perniola then illustrates the role of such images in a wide range of cultural, aesthetic and social contexts. The notion of transit seems to be more suitable to capture the cultural aspects of technology which have altered today’s society.Transit – i.e. going from the same to the same – avoids falling into the opposition of dialectics “that would precipitate thinking in the mystification of metaphysics”.