Etica e desiderio: Il responsabile delle risorse umane di Abram Yehoshua

Emanuele Zinato

doi:10.13125/2039-6597/901

Emanuele Zinato Università degli Studi di Padova

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/901

Keywords: Ethics, Desire, Yehoshua, Body, Orlando

Abstract

This work offers a Freudian lecture of Yehoshua’s novel, based on the contrast between ethical project and dynamics of desire. The protagonist is a human resources manager from Jerusalem going to Russia with the corpse of an employee dead in an attack; he has a metamorphosis that seems on one hand functional to the construction of a moral apologue: as in Lévinas’ late thinking, so in Yehoshua the responsibility for the Other is entrenched in our subjective being. The Manager arbitrary inverts his route and brings back to Jerusalem the victim’s coffin, mother and child because this allegoric City belongs to everyone and its sharing is the only achievable reparation. What stays in the background in the ‘ethical’ interpretation of the text is the role of desire. The beginning of the inquiry on Julia’s corpse causes in the text the emerging of symmetrization (as Matte Blanco would say). Julia’s body, desirable althought (or because) closed in a coffin, causes the breaking in a dimension that, potentially, don’t know the distinction between things but, conversely, assimilate and confuse them in a unique reality.

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Author Biography

Emanuele Zinato, Università degli Studi di Padova

Emanuele Zinato is assistant Professor of the scientific disciplinary sector L-FIL-LET/14. He teaches Theory of literature and Comparative literature at University of Padova. He works on three research fields: the rhetorical strategies in galilean school’s texts, the conversational form of literary critics and the relationship between modernization and writing in some Italian writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century (Volponi, Vittorini, Fortini, Calvino, Sciascia, Primo Levi). He edited for Einaudi Romanzi e prose by Paolo Volponi (2002-3) and for Liguori La scienza dissimulata nel Seicento (2005). He published the volumes Volponi (2002), Il vero in maschera. Dialogismi galileiani (2003), Le idee e le forme. La critica letteraria italiana dal 1900 a oggi (2010) and (with Andrea Afribo) Modernità italiana (2011). In 2010/11 he was “professeur invité” at Université Charles De Gaulle in Lille.

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Ethics and desire: Il responsabile delle risorse umane by Abram Yehoshua

Abstract

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Author Biography

References