«Andrea Cavalletti is one of the most innovative Italian philosophers. Under his watch everything appears in a new light».
- Giorgio Agamben

★World Spanish translation rights sold.

An unprecedented investigation of the pre-Freudian psychiatric literature – an infinite source of surprises – and an exemplary study of the reasons that urged all the major philosophers of the 19th and 20th century to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself: Andrea Cavalletti reads these narrations through the lens of Hithcock’s Vertigo.

Fear of emptiness, fear of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and a lot of people are affected by it. Before Freud, the so-called «science of the soul» regarded it as the queen of mental illnesses; it destabilizes and poisons consciousness, making it override the ego with an illusory congestion. This acknowledgment was already anticipated by the big thinkers of the past, who not surprisingly commented on the uselessness of the rational mind to cope with the anxiety induced by the abyss.

Montaigne stated that if a philosopher was going to be hanging mid-air in a cage on top of the Notre-Dame towers, he «will see, by manifest reason, that he cannot possibly fall, and yet he will find (unless he has been used to the plumber’s trade) that he cannot help but the sight of the excessive height will fright and astound him». Pascal agreed: «put the greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail».

It is only in the last two centuries that philosophy has come to the conclusion that vertigo is not simply an effect of an occasional unbalance to overcome, but something with its own existence. Our identity appears uncertain, kinetic, opaque, vertiginous. The consciousness paradigm and its alleged stability has been analysed through whole theoretical traditions, from Kierkegaard to Husserl, from Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, from Lévinas to Jankélévitch.
With a very effective and enlightening move, Cavalletti juxtaposes the philosophical themes of the eccentric dislocation of the ego, the «abyssal» inversion between the close and the far, typical of intentionality, to Hitchcock’s cinematographic rendition of falling into the void. The director fretted on that scene for fifteen year, eventually shooting it with an ingenious movement and counter-movement of dolly and zoom, now a standard in cinema technique. That «push and hold back» that triggers the vertigo effect is the habitual condition of subject and intersubjectivity: in order to reach myself I have to see myself from down there, with other people’s eyes. «Then, my here flees over there and pulls me in».

Andrea Cavalletti teaches moral Philosophy at the University of Bologna. He writes for alias, the Manifesto’s Sunday magazine. Among his essays: La città biopolitica. Mitologie della sicurezza (2005). With Bollati he published Classe (2009, translated in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese) and Suggestione. Potenza e limiti del fascino politico (2011, translated in Spanish and English); he has edited some of Furio Jesi’s work (Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta, 2000, Kierkegaard, 2001 and Bachofen,2005) and Chaim Nachman Bialik’s essay Halachah e Aggadah. Sulla legge ebraica (2006).