Versus Laboratory, a research project initiated by Bruno Besana and Ozren Pupovac, is a theoretical laboratory set to explore the polemical genesis and function of philosophical concepts, both internally to the philosophical space, and at the points of adversity and tension between philosophy and its exterior, namely, political, aesthetical and...

Our inquiry starts from a classical concern regarding non-being: how can we speak of non-being if to speak at all implies saying “some thing”? This difficulty raises the broader question of the nature of negation as a rhetorical, logical and political act. Negation is not independent from affirmation, since negation always involves a thing...

After almost seven centuries, Dante persists and even seems to haunt the present. This conference investigates what so many authors, artists and thinkers from very different artistic, political, geographical and cultural backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The hypothesis is that, along with a...

The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to re-assess the Freudian concept of the ›uncanny‹ in relation to its reverberation in literature, arts, aesthetics and politics. Built upon a tension between familiarity and non-familiarity, the ›uncanny‹ is characterized by a peculiarly floating and undetermined nature, thereby allowing to re-discuss...

This international conference gathers scholars from different disciplines (literary studies, history, linguistics, philosophy, queer theory, theatre) to discuss the role that language plays for the innovative character of Dante's oeuvre which already Erich Auerbach associated with a modern representation of the human being in its individuality and...

Aracoeli (1982) is the last novel written by Elsa Morante (1912-85), one of the most significant Italian writers of the twentieth century. From Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) and L’isola di Arturo (1957) to La Storia (1974), Morante became an increasingly important author, provoking animated debates in the Italian and European literary and cultural...