Conférences Samedi 10 mars 2018

 
Lorenzo Marinucci  (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”) 

Titre : « Different Smellscapes: Olfactory Patterns through the Japanese Worldview »

Résumé : Greek-European philosophy has a distinct partiality towards vision, since its beginnings. This “optocentrism” has had a deep influence on its ontology, and even phenomenological attempts (from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty) of an unbiased access to experience do not fully manage to overcome it.

Can “the oral sensorium” (Tellenbach) of taste and smell offer a different access to reality, even far different from common sense? Can a philosophy or phenomenology of smell offer very different insights on space, time, aesthetic consciousness and desire? And does it help to pose these two questions cross-culturally, since European cultural history has never explored smell with much attention?

In this presentation I would like to address this problem by gathering examples of “smellscapes” (as organized, located, conceptual-sensual nexuses) within Japanese culture. The attention for the invisible, formless and impermanent in Japanese thought and aesthetics has given to smell a meaning and a relevance that exceeds greatly what we can see in European culture, up to its late rediscovery in French culture by Bergson and Proust.