Thinking on the Border: Internal and External. Final Remarks

Journal title PSICOANALISI
Author/s Jorge Canestri
Publishing Year 2019 Issue 2019/1 Language Italian
Pages 6 P. 85-90 File size 128 KB
DOI 10.3280/PSI2019-001009
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

These observations focus on the "inclusion of the other" mentioned by Jürgen Habermas (1996) and follow the thread of the analysis that Emile Benveniste dedicates to the two mean-ings of the word "guest" in Latin: the one who welcomes and the other who is hosted. But why hostis and hospes? Hostis in Latin corresponds to the Gothic term gasts, but the Gothic meaning of gasts is host, while in Latin it means enemy. The transition from hostis to hostes, deriving in the Roman world from a socio-economic-political process, is of considerable im-portance; defines a type of relationship and articulates the notions of hospitality, otherness and identity in a single concept. In psychoanalytic thinking, the notion of identity takes the name of feeling of the self (selbstgefühl). We are aware of the characteristics of fragility, precariousness and relativity that this feeling identifies. Psychoanalysis, Freud first, proposed to analyze the "particular phases of the development of the feeling of the self (selbstgefühl) and their vicissitudes", starting from a very early mental stage. It is the condition of greater or lesser integration of the subject and of greater or lesser ac-ceptance of the constitutive otherness of the identity that allows us to give hospitality and prac-tice the aequamentum, equality in accepting the difference. Habermas states in this regard that: «the equal respect for anyone (jedermann) does not re-examine those who are like us, but the person of the other (the others) in his specific diversity. And the responsibility in solidarity with others understood as one of us [...]». I conclude by suggesting that our concept of boundary and the division between internal and external should and should be reviewed considering its profound implications for the use of technology.

Keywords: Hostis-hospes, equamentum, selbstgefühl, identity, alterity

  1. Habermas J. (1996). Die Enbeziehung des Anderen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
  2. Hobsbawm J. (2017). Fully Connected. Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload. Lon-don-New York: Bloomsbury.

Jorge Canestri, Riflettere sul confine: interno ed esterno. Considerazioni conclusive in "PSICOANALISI" 1/2019, pp 85-90, DOI: 10.3280/PSI2019-001009