Quel dolore senza nome: la noia come sentimento vitale

Abstract

A nameless sorrow: boredom as sentiment of life

Boredom is rarely considered an important theme of analysis, within the theory of Emotions. This paper aims to demonstrate the fundamental role of Boredom, whether from a psychological point of view, or from a philosophical one, for contemporary philosophical Anthropology and Morals. From the psychoanalytic perspective, the paper examines authors as Otto Fenichel and Donald W. Winnicott, to define the relations of boredom, play and creativity. Wilhelm Josef Revers’s and Martin Heidegger’s classical analysis of deep Boredom introduce to an anthropological view of the problem. The possible contribution of a radical analysis of this nameless sorrow to overcome the contemporary crisis of culture and alienation is at last emphasized by Jan Patočka and Giorgio Agamben.