VIDEO DROME
REINCANTAMENTO has invaded Decamerette’s channel -
Italy’s favourite pandemic network - from May to December 2020 with the programme Speculum! Hosted by Alessandro Y. Longo, Marco Mattei and Vincenzo Grasso, the programme Speculum! featured prominent Italian writers such as Valentina Tanni, Edoardo Camurri, Emanuele Coccia and Gianluca Didino. In two seasons, Speculum! has tried to narrate the philosophical issues of the contemporary world without being overly serious. Today, Speculum! is a newsletter to which you can subscribe here.
Further online contributions in companion digital spaces are available in the Bonus Episodes section.
This section also hosts our first video-essay, 'Archeologia Futura', produced on behalf of Petrarubra Festival and the talk, Tech Collapse, shared at the 2021 IAM Festival. With the exception of the latter, all videos are available only in Italian.
1x01, Necessity and Contingency
(29 - 05 - 20)
In the first episode of Speculum, we start with a conceptual pair that is fundamental to philosophy: the idea of necessity and its opposite, contingency. We go through the ideas of possible worlds to reach the political impact that these notions can have.
1x02, Critique of Violence
(13 - 06 - 20)
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In 1921, Walter Benjamin published his Critique of Violence, a crucial text for the critique of the state. In the days of George Floyd's rebellion, we return to both this and other critical texts to understand what separates bourgeois violence from revolutionary violence.
1x03, What is philosophy?
with Marco Storoni Mazzolani e Filippo Batisti
(21 - 06 - 20)
What do philosophers think, what do they study? Today we are working on the biggest philosophical problem there is: what philosophy is, exactly. What Diego Marconi has called 'the metier of thinking' between stereotypes and reality.
1x04, The Philosophy of Buen Vivir
(29 - 06 - 20)
Philosophy and ecology intertwine in this episode in which Vincenzo Grasso guides us through the idea of buen vivir and how it can be applied to the law of non-human beings. Embrace gardening, reject capitalism.
Men Right Activists, Nazifeminism and other ambiguous ideas pollute the gender debate. Eugenio Enrico and Marco Mattei rediscover the power of the idea of intersectionality to try to overcome this rhetorical impasse.
1x06, Other Minds
(12 - 07 - 20)
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How does it feel to be a bat? And a plant? Does a stone have emotions? Can psychedelics lead to a political revolution? Today we move away from the human to venture into the eerie of other minds.
1x07, Accelerate?
(19 - 07 - 20)
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The most controversial philosophical trend of the last decade, explained easily. Is it really the philosophy of the new terrorist groups or the only way out of collapse? Between Nick Land and Srnicek&Williams, we traverse the entire spectrum of accelerationism.
1x08, Philosophers and Pandemics
(26 - 07 - 20)
To conclude this first season of Speculum!, we pick up where it all began: the pandemic and what philosophers said about the event that changed our world forever.