Giacomo Donis - Böcker

Meta-memoir, 'after' memoir. Aristotle's Meta-physics comes 'after' his Physics. 'An Abyss of Dreams' is a 'meta' book, an 'after' book. A dream itself has no 'before' but only a 'present,' which in consciousness is already an 'after.' This is the author's 'dream book': he recounts, vividly, his real nighttime dreams, of the night before, and of years and decades before. His two cats tell their tales, chasing their tails, 'after' their lives and their deaths. His protagonists: Pound, Artaud, Conrad; Hegel, his logic, philosophy of spirit, and 'anthropology'; Aristotle; and Freud. And Plato, (affectionately) accused of being the father of contemporary totalitarianism. This Abyss originates in Hegel's lines on the 'night of the world,' the 'terrible,' the nocturnal abyss of conscious life, pure self, 'the interior of nature,' where 'suddenly a bloody head darts out and just as suddenly vanishes.' Meanwhile, for Freud, 'old eel,' dreams are wish fulfillment. What! asks the author, in 'Why Dream?', the first of the two novellas in this volume. Wish fulfillment? Then why do I only have nightmares? I only dream what I do not wish for! Why, Siggy, why? Why dream? Aristotle is next, with his schoolmate at Plato's Academy, Eudemus, known to us only for his (relatively) famous dream, and for Aristotle's lost dialogue dedicated to him, 'On the Soul.' Eudemus, our real hero. Who, unlike Aristotle, was to be famous only for his dream, celebrated, and fatally distorted, by Platonists, forever. But, we dream, not by Aristotle, forever tormented by the dream itself and, especially, by its totalitarian distortion. This is the premise of the second novella, 'I Dream of Eudemus': Eudemus, 'psyche iatros,' dreamed as the first 'soul doctor' in history. The first, and already a rebel: no drugs, no! 'Abyss therapy.' Dreams have long afterlives: 'An Abyss of Dreams' is 'meta'-memoir. With its cats, and its dreams, we travel through the entire history of psychiatry, from ancient Greece to present-day Venice. Where, dressed in a moon suit, Eudemus visits the author's great friend, and psychiatrist, in Intensive Care, in the Venice hospital. Chasing their tails, author and Eudemus together see, for themselves, reaching out from the eyes of their friend, the beginning, and the end, of the soul: the night of the world.

It is a commonly expressed view that the sickness of our society is unemployment. Less frequently argued is the fact that this same society is suffering from overwork. And less frequently still that in our capitalist market society the two sicknesses, unemployment and overwork, feed off one another and jointly attack the working classes of the world.Pietro Basso's thesis is that the average working time of wage labourers is now more intense, fast-paced, "flexible" and longer than at any time in recent history. This is true, he argues, not only in industry and agriculture, but also, and particularly, in "services." It is also increasingly true for all Western countries and not just the USA. The introduction of the thirty-five-hour working week in France notwithstanding, all the signs of a creeping deterioration in the working lives of millions of people are evident: a reduction in the purchasing power of wages, the mass downsizing of corporations, the continual erosion of company and state-ensured benefits, and the availability of much cheaper labour from Latin America, Asia, Africa and eastern Europe.Modern Times, Ancient Hours combines a theoretical explanation of the causes of this "paradoxical" evolution of working hours with an impressively broad range of empirical documentation, making the book a highly significant and timely contribution to the study of the way in which most people's working lives are now lived. The book also reminds us that the human aspiration to do work that does not break the body or the spirit is universal and deep-rooted. Workers will rise, Basso argues, if they continue to be pushed beyond their limits.