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How can one recognize what one did not know? Mnemosyne and the art of the twentieth century

Carbone, Mauro

"In a page of his posthumous book entitled The Visible and the Invisible (1964), the French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) writes: “As the ethnologist in the face of
societies called archaic . . . must describe a mythical time where certain events ‘in the beginning’
maintain a continued efficacity; so also social psychology, precisely if it wishes to really know
our own societies, cannot exclude a priori the hypothesis of mythical time as a component of our
personal and public history”. For Merleau-Ponty it is precisely this mythical time that is evoked
in the works of Proust and Freud, or in the attention for simultaneity that characterizes modern
painting."

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Academic Units
Italian Academy
Publisher
Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University
Series
Italian Academy Fellows' Seminar Working Papers
Published Here
March 30, 2011