Agalma (from the Greek “statue”, “image”) captures the beauty of the museum not only in the evidence of its enchanting exhibition of classical art, but also in the intimate and otherwise invisible relationships that take place within it: the secret and always new relationship that arises between visitors and the wonders of Greco-Roman antiquity the passionate breathing of those who plan the life of the museum every day.īefore crossing the threshold of the Archaeological Museum, I had identified the fragmentary nature of classical works and, consequently, of the ancient world as the center of my research. Everything brings out the museum as a great productive organism, which reveals its nature as a material and intellectual construction site. All this happens as visitors arrive from all over the world, populating the many exhibition halls under the seemingly impassive eye of the works that are protagonists and spectators in turn of the great human work. The artworks that have lived and vibrated for centuries are monitored as living bodies. ![]() In the illusory stillness of the large Bourbon building that houses the National Archaeological Museum, a whirlwind of activity offers new breath to statues, frescoes, mosaics and various kinds of finds, the film observes what happens every day in the museum’s environments, dwelling on the daily routines of the workers, grappling with delicate interventions that require care, time, and constant maintenance. More than a simple toolbox, living philology can be an intellectual commitment to recovering the qualitative value of life from the alienating biopolitical practices of today’s society, and to understanding the fundamental importance of the aesthetic experience for the sake of our present and future potentials for emancipation and enlightenment.Naples. Thus, the kairotic dimension is essential because only from its perspective becomes possible to flesh out the affective entailments of a life perpetually in crisis, piercing with critical eye the experiential dimension where bio-power exerts its most persuasive and violent effects. If crisis is, indeed, a biopolitical technique of management that invests the material precarity shared by all human individuals in their everyday lives, living philology is a “technique of trouble” that allows to recover the qualitative dimension of life from the crisis-driven cultural logic of financial liberalism. In Greek, kairos indicated the due-time of the affective and experiential dimension of life, opposed to chronos, the passing time of biological and physical cycles. ![]() In the augmented reality of modern liberal societies, cultural concepts like crisis attained an unsettling ‘operative force’ that profoundly affects both the material and the qualitative experience of life. In Frames of War, Judith Butler suggested that modern society imposed a tragic condition of “precarity” onto life: established by the biopolitical state of exception that has become the rule, precarity is the constitutive dimension of the life in crisis, from which there is no protection because one must appeal to the very state from which protection is required. ![]() In this paper, I will elaborate on Edward Said’s philological methodology for proposing a “living philology” of crisis as an attempt to recover the kairotic dimension of life from the constitutive precarity of modernity.
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