Aisthesis Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell'estetico Aisthesis Reading Philosophy Through Archives and Manuscripts 13 • 2/2020 edited by Fabrizio Desideri Benedetta Zaccarello 13 • 2/2020 FIRENZE ISSN 2035-8466 PRESSUNIVERSITY www.fupress.net FUP di libro pagata - Piego Tassa Italiane spa - Poste 072/DCB/FI1/VF del 31.03.2005 n. Aut. Aisthesis Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell'estetico Reading Philosophy Through Archives and Manuscripts Edited by Fabrizio Desideri, Benedetta Zaccarello Vol 13, No 2 (2020) Firenze University Press Published with the financial support of C.E.F.R.E.S. (Centre Français d’Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Prague, U.S.R. 3138 C.N.R.S./M.E.A.E.) and the Department of Lettere e Filosofia of the University of Florence. Firenze University Press Aisthesis www.fupress.com/aisthesis What can we learn from philosophical manuscripts and archives? Citation: B. Zaccarello (2020) What can we learn from philosophical manu- scripts and archives?. Aisthesis 13(2): 3-8. doi: 10.13128/Aisthesis-12379 Benedetta Zaccarello Copyright: © 2020 B. Zaccarello. This is Senior researcher at C.N.R.S., Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (I.T.E.M., an open access, peer-reviewed article UMR 8132, C.N.R.S./E.N.S., Paris) published by Firenze University Press E-mail: [email protected] (http://www.fupress.com/aisthesis) and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distri- bution, and reproduction in any medi- um, provided the original author and Manuscripts became more accessible items only in very recent source are credited. times, after having being handled as for-specialists-only relics along Data Availability Statement: All rel- decades if not centuries. Nonetheless, it is still usually the case that evant data are within the paper and its only researchers working on the critical edition of a writer’s work, Supporting Information files. or archivists in charge of related collections, develop specific knowl- Competing Interests: The authors edge on the author’s manuscripts and archival materials. Work on have declared that no competing inter- autographs requires time, it does not easily match the pace imposed ests exist. on contemporary research and intellectual production in general. Archivists, editors, scholars working on manuscripts know the com- plexity of the information transmitted by such papers, as the irre- ducible idiosyncrasy of each writer’s archive. Philosophical manuscripts are an even less known kind of object. Some of the “initiations” which one must undergo, if she’s stubborn enough to will to deal with such enigmatic documents, are similar to those experienced by colleagues handling literary papers: the first one required consists, naturally, in getting acquainted with some- one else’s handwriting. But that’s just the beginning. Following steps include challenging tasks, such as becoming familiar with strategies in composition, techniques for storage ad usum sui of notes and quotes, recurrent abbreviations, codes used in drafts or while scrib- bling marginalia, ways of synthetizing when sketching for a speech or a lesson… Not only are these materials richer in layers of qualita- tive information when compared to the printed page (the aspect of the handwriting, the kind and quality of the paper, the symbols and drawings used to implement the text, all convey contents that can be methodically analyzed, but are often grasped more intuitively): they require different skills and a different methodology in analysis and interpretation. Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell'estetico 13(2): 3-8, 2020 ISSN 2035-8466 (online) | DOI: 10.13128/Aisthesis-12379 4 Benedetta Zaccarello Since manuscripts of an author are the only that are not trained philologists recur to manu- surviving traces of a living process of elaborating, scripts. This means that it is even rarer for a spe- wording and sharing thought, it doesn’t seem absurd cialist in philosophy to acquire skills and experi- to compare the complexity of such “corpora” to an ence on more than a single archive. Beside such organism whose specialized parts work together as subjective obstacle, on the way of the building of organs relating in turn to other portions as to the a specific approach to and a shared methodol- whole in time. Such interrelated topologies within ogy for the study and the edition of philosophical the collections or streams in the evolutive transfor- manuscripts, several features of the objects stand mation of a project; symmetries and kinships within as obstacles themselves. sets of manuscripts; the shift in meaning appearing All writing is an attempt to translate an inner by repositioning parts of a corpus after reconsider- experience (usually self-represented as pre-verbal) ing their classification; the peculiar logics in reading into words, an attempt to make thoughts fit the and composing appearing through the study of the mold of a language. Nevertheless, conceptual writ- material in support of the writing; the strategies in ing is not only a battle with oneself as the author criticizing and self-censorship in editing displayed often struggles in building bridges between dif- by underlined and erased words… all these phe- ferent speculative traditions and established theo- nomena appear to the reader almost like specters ries. In the elaboration of their texts, philosophers after long exposition to one author’s manuscripts: constantly produce and recreate the image of the they are effects of stratification in time, they require cultural and theoretical heritage they address, acquaintance to be perceived. either to embrace or to confute it. In this meas- Of such “aesthetic” cognition of philosophical ure, what we call philosophy is not only a creative texts, distilled in the form of a long-term trained act of thinking rooted in a living experience and knowledge of archives, the reader often becomes grounded in an existential perspective, but also aware only when she dares moving to the study a textual production involving an often-explicit of a different author. Such landing in a new con- dialogue with one’s own culture. A dialogue that tinent feels similar to the experience of a jour- appears, moreover, structured around epistemic ney abroad: possibly a different language, surely paradigms and specific intellectual goals, dealing new maps to discover and draw, as-yet-unknown with determined criteria of validity as with pro- customs and a tangible shift in the surrounding cedures, forms and styles supposed to better fit atmosphere. At the same time, investigation on a such epistemological ambitions. Despite claiming new corpus, often reveals ex post the methodol- to universality, philosophical statements are the ogy that had been previously and more or less result of negotiations between individual expres- consciously built to travel across our first writer’s sion and shared vocabularies. Precisely the thick papers. As writing methods display the idiosyn- medium of expression – the whole set of liter- crasy of an author, the researcher approaching a ary dynamics implicitly involved in the writing of different field of inquiry in the form of a new set philosophy, for instance – is easily forgotten, the of collections becomes aware of the specificity of discipline itself being traditionally focused on the the methods she had empirically crafted before, theoretical contents assessed rather than on her as she has to adjust them and have them fit the own ways of expressing them, as is the case for lit- requirements of the new object of study. erature. When we come to tracking the genesis of Indeed, the study and edition of philosophi- some conceptual constellation across philosophi- cal manuscripts delivers a vast array of informa- cal manuscripts, the matter is even more deli- tion in this regard, well exceeding the limits of the cate. First, on a very empirical level, as mentioned texts themselves. The archive allows the scholar above, it is mainly for the sake of scholarly edit- to study the emergence of concepts and to trace ing or highly specialized exegesis that researchers the production of abstract vocabulary beyond the What can we learn from philosophical manuscripts and archives? 5 static representations offered by the printed book. various codes and traditions and contributes to It reveals how abstract thought originates from the disclosure and reconfiguration of heterogene- working with the multi-layered fabric of language. ous world-conceptions, sedimented in the verbal In this measure, manuscripts and archives matter of the papers. uncover, for instance, the heterogeneous range Having been scarcely used in the study of phi- of sources that inspired the formulation of ideas. losophy so far (neither in the writing of its history, Archival work also helps us observe how each nor in the exegesis of its published texts), philo- thinker creates for herself an eclectic landscape of sophical manuscripts can indeed help unfolding a references, a galaxy of conceptual networks which different understanding of the discipline, helping hardly ever belong to a single language or national reveal the underlying practices related to the writ- tradition. Although we like to think that theory ing of texts: the multiple layers and various ver- is universal, the perspective offered by archives, sions of texts; the continuity of the struggle with personal libraries and manuscripts shows us some theoretical problems; the interactions with that abstraction is also a matter of languages and peers and students; the hesitations, doubts, uncer- codes, and reveals the work of the thinker/writer tainty lying behind so many universal statements; as a cultural mediator between all such codes. This the role played by circumstances, travel, meetings suggests a different paradigm for the analysis of and so much more we do not necessarily tend to conceptual productions, one that focuses less on associate with abstract discourse. While genetic values of neutrality and universality and more on criticism has developed since the 1970s an impor- those of integration and synthesis.