Immagini del pensiero. Omaggio a Franco Rella. Editoriale di Engramma n. 209

The issue of Engramma no. 209 is the outcome of a Seminar held in Venice ,on 11 January 2024, on the occasion of what would have been Franco Rella’s eightieth birthday, not to honour his death, but to celebrate the life of his thought; not an “Obituary”, therefore, but a “Festschrift”. The title “Immagini del pensiero” (“Images of Thought”) is borrowed from Franco Rella's important volume published in 1984, Metamorfosi. Immagini del pensiero and responds to this need: to open up the field to a thematic horizon that starts from the object and follows a personal gradient of abstraction, in virtue of the fact that “the word and the image open a way to thought, through things, towards form, to a form” (so Franco Rella wrote). In this “Homage to Franco Rella”, we have collected the voices of friends and scholars who were close to Franco Rella and companions in their intellectual adventures, and even readers who shared and intersected parts of their intellectual journey with his thought and works. The fil rouge that spontaneously wove itself between the different voices was the fact that all the authors took their cue from an essay, a volume, a page, a passage from a specific text by Rella in order to weave a living dialogue with his thought. The issue includes contributions by: Emanuele Arielli, Alessandra Chemollo, Giorgiomaria Cornelio, Franco Ermini, Mario Farina, Roberto Masiero, Susanna Mati, Lea Melandri, Angela Mengoni, Antonella Sbrilli, Tommaso Scarponi, Massimo Stella, Davide Susanetti, Angela Vettese, Giulia Zanon. As afinal, important contribution, in this issue we publish a Bibliography of Franco Rella’s works edited by Giulia Zanon, under the supervision of Susanna Mati, which includes his main monographs, translations and curatorships, as well as numerous contributions in catalogues and volumes, and an initial outline of his boundless non-fiction production in collective volumes and journals. Organised in chronological order, the Bibliography traces a kind of 'intellectual biography' that outlines and unravels through the philosopher's production from the 1970s to the present day, tracing a history of the evolution of his interests and thought.