Vertigo

"Cavalletti is one of the most innovative Italian philosophers. Everything is unsettled and illuminated by his gaze."--Giorgio Agamben "Andrea Cavalletti's style induces traces of the vertigo it portrays. Starting with an account of Hitchcock's film, this superb book works upon us through its engagements with the anxious attractions of vertigo. For vertigo--when the dose is right--challenges identity. As you slip and slide away from yourself an adventure of thinking commences. An indispensable book for intellectuals today and for all those worried about the closures of identity politics."--William E. Connolly, author of Resounding Events: Adventures of an Academic from the Working Class. "A timely argument, challenging readers to overcome the fear of falling into the yawning abyss of otherness and to resist the siren call of identitarian fantasies." Alessia Ricciardi, Northwestern University Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called "sciences of the mind," reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling--which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall--has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy as a phenomenon intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. From classical medicine to Heidegger, to Hollywood, Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity. Andrea Cavalletti teaches philosophy at the University of Verona. He is the author of Class (2019).