CFP: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio

In recent years, fuelled by the crises that have disrupted — and continue to disrupt — the social, political and cultural order from many quarters, creating a state of 'multiple crises', the recourse to new and old rituals seems to provide means capable of helping to confront uncertainty, reorient individual and collective experience, organise perception and produce meaning. However, they can also act as ambiguous instruments of hegemony and manipulation of beliefs.

Beyond their disciplinary specificities, the three terms — ritual, aesthetics, and language — share an inseparable yet critical relationship that must be specified and examined. Rituals employ material objects, artefacts, gestures, words, symbols and narratives that evoke emotional and cognitive resonances in participants, which are an essential element in the effectiveness of the ritual itself. Conversely, the aesthetic experience, especially in its artistic manifestation, has historically emerged within the cultic sphere and appears poised to inherit a search for meaning that has been disappointed elsewhere. Finally, linguistic expression draws upon the codification of ritualised behaviours and plays a primary role in the repetition of ritual formulas.

This issue of RIFL aims to investigate the connections between ritual, aesthetics and language from various disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, semiotics, the history of religions, theology, psychoanalysis, ethnography, anthropology, the sociology of religion, and the history and criticism of contemporary arts.