The Immemorial: The Subject and Its Doubles

A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity.

Vienna, 1825. News of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality changes dramatically. While sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement, and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject has appeared, a second ＂I＂ has now supplanted the first.

Andrea Cavalletti carefully registers the disquieting appearances of this second ＂I＂ in the literature and psychology of the past two centuries. In a context dominated by amnesia and somnambulism, hallucinations and wakeful dreams, the bourgeois subject, whose identity seemed so stable, turns out to be inhabited by masks that elude every grasp, at the mercy of a doubling that can no longer be recomposed. Personalities multiply and do battle, as even life and death exchange roles. And, ultimately, the identity of the Western subject reveals itself as a shade-like, constitutively double figure, that only lives in its weakness and forgetting, in its losses and distractions.

Andrea Cavalletti teaches the history of medieval philosophy at the University of Verona. His books available in English translation include Class and Vertigo: The Temptation of Identity. Max Matukhin works as a researcher at the Università degli studi di Bergamo. His writings have appeared in The Decameron Ninth Day in Perspective and the journals Heliotropia, Bibliotheca Dantesca, and Mediaevalia.