Uranus' revenge on Cronus (and Cronus' on Zeus)

Lecture: Uranus' revenge on Cronus (and Cronus' on Zeus)

Lecturer: Fabio Merlini (Eranos Foundation, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Date: Friday, December 12, 2024, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 2025 - A Jungian Lexicon for our Times: Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge

Language: Italian

Moderator: Sandro Rusconi (Eranos Foundation, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

In the current technical reorganization of capital, it is the mobilization of individual life in all its dimensions, in order to keep up with a selected innovation, that protects the economic principle of socialization instructed by the self-valorization of value from the inexorable law of time (tempus edax rerum). Everything is called upon to update itself: tools, objects, knowledge, sensitivities, environments. Below, however, it is the unassailable law of the “rationalization” of value - of a value ensnared by the infinite evil of pleonexia - and its univocal forms of social mediation, which, in today's situation, has given substance to that continuous acting within certain limits, to that inexhaustible renewing of the “secondary things” without ever affecting the “principal things”, as Tocqueville says, when in his incomparable writings he reflects on the reasons for the rarity of revolutions in the democratic era. In this way, the present can continually reproduce itself, despite appearances. It saves itself from the very imperative of historical process, whereby no present can claim not to be surpassed, removed, or included within another and subsequent societal order of the time: as the myth of Uranus and Cronus teaches us. Here instead we witness the revenge of Uranus on Cronus and of Cronus on Zeus: a desire to finally and unfortunately fulfill oneself eternally.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Fabio Merlini, Regional Director of the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training (SFUVET) in Lugano, Switlerland, serves since 2010 as the President of the Eranos Foundation. From 2012 to 2019, he has served as President of the Cultural Commission of the Canton of Ticino. In 1998, he was nominated privat-docent at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, where he taught Philosophy of Culture. Subsequently, from 1999 to 2003, he taught Systemic Philosophy and was appointed Professor of Epistemology of the Human Sciences at the Université de Lausanne. In 2003, he was nominated adjunct Professor of Communication Ethics at the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria in Varese, Italy, where he taught until 2011. From 1996 to 2000, he co-directed the “Groupe de Recherche sur l’Ontologie de l’Histoire” at the Hussler Archives of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, whose seminar works, Après la fin de l’histoire (1998), Historicité et spatialité (2001), and Une histoire de l’avenir (2004), were published by J. Vrin. His publications include La comunicazione interrotta. Etica e politica nel tempo della “rete” (2004), L’efficienza insignificante. Saggio sul disorientamento (2009, translated into French as L’époque de la performance insignifiante. Réflexions sur la vie désorientée, 2011), Schizotopies : Essai sur l’espace de la mobilisation (2013, then translated into Italian as Ubicumque. Saggio sul tempo e lo spazio della mobilitazione, 2015), L’architettura inefficiente (with L. Snozzi, 2014, also translated into French as L’architecture inefficiente, 2016), Catastrofi dell’immediatezza (with S. Tagliagambe, for the series "I saggi di Eranos", Vol. 3, 2016), and Triste esthétique. Essais sur les catastrophes de l’immédiateté (2018, published also in Italian as L’estetica triste. Seduzione e ipocrisia dell'innovazione, 2019). His most recent book is entitled Ritornare in sé. L’interiorità smarrita e l’infinita distrazione (2022). He also served as editor of the volumes Nuove tecnologie e nuove sensibilità. Comunicazione, identità, formazione (2005), Identità e alterità. Tredici esercizi di comprensione (with E. Boldrini, 2006), Per una cultura della formazione al lavoro. Studi e analisi sulla crisi dell’identità professionale (with L. Bonoli, 2010), and Semi ad usum praesentis. Un incontro sul pensiero di Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2013). He is co-author of the Cahier de l’Herne dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche on the 100th anniversary of his death (2000) and of the miscellaneous volume La philosophie au risque de la promesse (2004), along with J. Derrida, P. Ricoeur, M. Crépon, and other authors. For the “Eranos Classics” series, he co-edited the original edition of Carl Gustav Jung’s Rebirth. Text and Notes of the Lecture held at Eranos in 1939 (with R. Bernardini, 2020). Among his poetry works, we mention here Filo di perle. Poesie liriche in tre tempi (2015). He is a Faculty Member of the Institute of Analytical Psychology and Psychotherapy (IPAP), Postgraduate School of Psychotherapy (Ivrea).

--

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of C.G. Jung (1875-1961), the Eranos Foundation dedicates its Eranos-Jung Lectures - the public conferences held at the Monte Verità Conference Center in Ascona - to the exploration of a Jungian micro-lexicon, with which we wish to map some problematic nodes of our present. These are six words - Guilt, Soul, Conflict, Time, Care, Knowledge - to which Jung, during his intellectual and human journey, dedicated pages of great clarity and depth. For us today, they are precious notions through which we can shed light on ourselves, on our relationship with others and with the surrounding world. In this way, Jung will accompany us on a journey of discovery inside and outside ourselves, to help us better understand what went wrong in the process of civilization to which we owe both our power and our fragility, in the face of a reality that no longer seems to respond as we would like to our hegemonic designs.