Dal fondo di un naufragio

As it was circulating the notion of a “material turn” in the criticism and interpretation of the visual arts for some time now, it seems that it’s time to focus on the symbolic meaning and implicit ideology of the material components involved in the production and circulation of literary objects. Paraphrasing the «optical unconscious » of photography, in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation (and the previous paraphrases of expression by Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss and Jacques Rancière), we will therefore speak of a «typographic unconscious» that the user of the machine-book has always perceived on a subliminal level, but which is now unleashing as much as possible. It makes an ironic sense that this sensibility appears at a time when the book object, in its material components, is increasingly being replaced by its digital projections (which, however, as always in the transitions of the media era, borrow various material and “symbolic” components), as a prophetic Jacques Derrida already noticed in 1997.