PIETRO BARCELLONA 18 settembre 2010 | LavorInCorso – I dilemmi della vita
The books I have written, such as my latest, 'In Praise of Useless Speech', have never been conceived beforehand with an outline or an outline, but have all been taken from recorded conversations, then reworked. My books are not conceived conceptually, but narratively. This is a dimension of knowledge that is often neglected but crucial, because the real foundation of what we are then able to say is narration, storytelling. "In Praise of Useless Discourse" was born out of an assignment I was given at the School of Group Psychoanalysis in Catania. The course was entitled Philosophy of Science and it was this experience, together with others, that enabled me to discover a way of expressing myself that could overcome the 'tiredness of words', due to the lack of meaning and substance that characterises much of today's speech. I had just finished writing The Stealing of the Soul. Let me preface this by saying that useless knowledge is the knowledge of the soul, that which escapes all quantitative reduction. The soul can be understood as you like, as the psyche, as the soul of the Christians, as the soul of the Greeks, but it is still a question of assuming this invisible that dwells within us, as a kind of energy that is constantly in motion and pushes outwards.
