The route must be established before navigation and then checked along the way, step by step. It is a matter of having a direction to steer the course. This is how we have tended to move for centuries. We set off with a destination and a path. This applies to our movements, to research (the ‘method’ comes from there) as to any path of truth or direction of self-care.

Today, rather, we often have the impression that something is broken. In the great historical journeys of mankind, in the sensible experiences or oriented paths above and within one’s own soul, something has broken.  These ruptures often question us, if not trouble, distress or even despair us.

Yet, the ruptures also allow us to discover something that the direction and the path of truth kept hidden. Caught up as we were by the sense, meaning and direction of our progress, we forget what was happening to us along the way, step by step, and what was being erased at each step because it was inevitably left behind, discarded, (de)cayed.

Another route, then, begins to emerge from the background of our teleological truths. Another adventure, seemingly devoid of the sense that the first knew how to display, but more rooted or radical. More than a story, then, it is a geography, a writing of spaces that become lived, inhabited, traversed places. More than a journey, a wandering. More than a discovery, an encounter.

Learning to inhabit the silent trail of what continually interrupts the route entails a general turning of ourselves and our way of inhabiting the space in which we live. It means beginning to inhabit one of the last enigmatic sentences that Freud left us: “the psyche is extended, knows nothing about it”.

The routes, our routes, are among the places, in the interstices between a life lived and another that we have instead abandoned, written on the landscapes where the traces of ourselves, realised and unrealised, allow us to rediscover what we have always been because we have never been. The psyche is out there, amidst the passages of the city, the chiaroscuros of the parks, the alleys of the houses, the grand buildings of the past and present.

Faced with the feeling we often have that something is broken, it is a matter of inventing passages, interstices, cracks that allow us, as they say, to make it through by the skin of our teeth. It is more than a survival strategy, it is an over-living, a living above life, another method, another step. As Roland Barthes suggested: “I move on to another kind of knowledge (that of the Amateur), and it is in this that I am methodical”. Another politics being announced, a different way of inhabiting the city, one’s own as well as that of others, or rather, of constantly writing and retracing this threshold between one’s own and others. Because, if the psyche is extended, the unconscious is out there, in the polis, or in what will become of it, on the condition of finding it again, forever lost, every morning, at dawn.

Matteo Bonazzi

[Philosopher (University of Verona) and psychoanalyst (SLP/AMP). President of the association “CLAC. Clinic of contemporary adolescence”]

PROGRAM

25 + 26 October c/o ZONA K
Diana Anselmo e Sara Pranovi (IT)

8 + 9 November c/o ZONA K
Simon Senn (CH)

14 + 15 November c/o Teatro La Cucina
Berlin (BE)

4 – 6 December c/o ZONA K
Giulia Scotti (IT)

13 + 14 December c/o case private
Tolja Djokovic (IT)

Photo by Cesura – Design by Neo Studio/Leonardo Mazzi