Fabrizio Panella

Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin’s seminal accounts on the notion of capitalism and commodity fetishism will be analysed within their methodological approaches. The genealogy of notions such as commodity’s fetischcharakter and phantasmagoria will be investigated, particularly looking at the aspects of their concealing and illusory agency. Marxian theory of commodity fetishism will be analysed through Isaak Illich Rubin, György Lukács and Hannah Arendt - who agree the theory represents a central argument of Marxian analysis if not of all his economic system and theory of value.
Conversely Benjamin’s method, will be evaluated for its use of the notion of phantasmagoria as one of the keystones for The Arcades Project. As argued by Cohen, Benjamin’s phantasmagoria constitutes the emblem of one of the Passagen-Werk’s methodological tasks. As the Enlightenment critical practice seems to be no longer functioning in a commodity-saturated reality, it will be explored how the phantasmagoria is utilized to represent a new tool for critical activity.

Aiming to provide a speculative account of future form of capital accumulation, this paper interrogates the very analysability of wealth today. Within a scenario of compromised and techno-enhanced human sensorium, the manner by which we can experience and think paradigms might have changed.
After analysing Arendt's reading of Marx, Nietzsche readings of Anaximander's guilt and time, and the Frankfurt's school notion of Naturgeschischte - First Nature and Second Nature, the paper will look at Walter Benjamin’s conception of history and its potential applicability today.
Drawing from Benjamin observations of the debris of 19th century Paris it will be argued that the scrutiny of ‘pre-historical’ debris might still be able today to provide an insight on the ‘fore-historical’.

If in Kant the sense of potence can be seen as prevalently connected with ‘internal’ realms and a ‘contemplative’ attitude, with Nietzsche it is possible to find an account where the mere ‘supine observation’ of the boundless heavens, it is seen as a condition for pure impotence.

This essay aims to individuate coincidences and discrepancies between the notions of sublime and will to power in the two philosophers.
After an initial individual analysis of the two concepts, with a particular regard to their genealogies and etymologies, the paper moves onto a rather intuitive argumentation. The two aforementioned notions will be investigated and compared within the horizon of their relation with the limit, resistance or object. The object, in the case of its geological figuration, will be proposed as a representation of an unstable object and hence of the subject. Especially drawing from the aspects of the sublime of lawfulness, universality, visuality, quantity and cognition, the speculative evaluation will  explore how such notion may contrasts or finds a continuum in Nietzsche’s conception of potence.

The notion of debt (debitum), is simultaneously present within the sphere of ethics and economics. This essay will discuss the genealogy of the contended notion through an investigation that will touch upon different branches of social sciences and ethics; it will explore the possibility of the subject to exit the debtor-creditor relation that permeates a wide area of the moral sphere.

This paper critically overviews the epistemic qualities of érōs and sexuality and the limits of this relation.
In Plato’s 'Phaedrus' and 'Symposium' érōs is a fundamental condition towards truth and philosophy. With Martha Nussbaum’s 'Fragility of Goodness' instead  érōs is explored for its epistemic value of uniqueness and particular sexuality. The recognition of sexual passions and bodily limitations - in opposition to Plato’s view - provides a contrasting yet valuable account on knowledge and the good in human fragility.
With Freud’s 1910 psychosexual studies of Leonardo da Vinci, érōs will be analysed as substituted and sublimed into desire for wisdom and investigation.
Through the study of Leonardo’s psychosexuality Freud postulates the sublimation of the artist’s sexual desire with the reason for his desire for investigation.
In conclusion, the paper will present the issues of sexuality in contemporary times, in regards of the phenomena of a digitised self and the exclusion of its epistemic qualities.