By putting together Walter Benjamin’s and Bruno Latour’s work on aura with contemporary semiotic takes on cultural process of symbolisation, the paper explores the idea of “aura of symbols”. Drawing from this, we propose for an empirical analysis of the “symbolic career” of an iconic picture of antima!a magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino: an image whose process of symbolisation, marked by gains and losses of “sym- bolic aura”, has had a profound in"uence on italian culture and memory, far beyond the domain of the struggle against the ma!a.
Falcone and Borsellino / Carlo Andrea Tassinari. - In: GLOBAL HUMANITIES - STUDIES IN HISTORIES, CULTURES AND SOCIETIES. - ISSN 2199-3939. - ELETTRONICO. - 9:10(2023), pp. 23-41. [10.53123/GH_10_3]
Falcone and Borsellino
Carlo Andrea Tassinari
2023
Abstract
By putting together Walter Benjamin’s and Bruno Latour’s work on aura with contemporary semiotic takes on cultural process of symbolisation, the paper explores the idea of “aura of symbols”. Drawing from this, we propose for an empirical analysis of the “symbolic career” of an iconic picture of antima!a magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino: an image whose process of symbolisation, marked by gains and losses of “sym- bolic aura”, has had a profound in"uence on italian culture and memory, far beyond the domain of the struggle against the ma!a.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
