In my End is my Beginning

Overview & Synopsis

The volume comprises a selection of papers presented at the 6th Postgraduate International Conference organized by the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Venice, 9-11 October 2024): In my End is my Beginning. Dialectical Images in Times of Crisis. Both in the past and the present, humanity has been witnessing the collapse of its own identity, sociopolitical system and cultural order, as well as their restoration. In this imbalance, Ernesto De Martino acknowledges the roots of crisis, elaborating how the end of the world represents the culmination of the issue of existence, caught between the risk of downfall and the quest for redemption. At that moment, an apocalypse happens to reveal when a specific order needs to be replaced by new symbolic formations that correspond to the changed Zeitgeist. The vitality of an apocalyptic thinking, which continually transforms and produces new images of the crisis, leads us to consider a dimension in which the clash between the past and the future creates a generative power. In this liminal space between different meanings of ‘crisis’ and their translation into images, it is fundamental to consider what Walter Benjamin conceptualized as a dialectical image, a fragment wherein “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (Arcades Project, 1999, 462).The 6th Postgraduate International Conference was aimed at investigating the liminal space between different meanings of ‘crisis’ and ‘apocalypse’, discovering how, through multiple processes of translation into images, these notions reveal new, unexpected beginnings. This volume therefore investigates the image as a representation of this dialectical moment.