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Ruins: Privileged Corpses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Alexandre Cioranescu
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Fundamentally, a ruin is a utilitarian structure which through the ravages of time or through some other circumstance has lost its utility and its function. When a useful object becomes useless, it continues to be present without a true existence, exactly as if it were dead. A torn glove, a bicycle without wheels, do not deserve to be called by their original names. It is difficult, of course, for us to resign ourselves to the fact that objects we have always thought of as useful are no longer useful; we hold on to the illusion of profiting from them as long as possible. We still make use of an abandoned automobile by stripping it of its accessories; we make use of a dilapidated house by salvaging some of its building material. However, the time comes when we must accept the evidence and admit that the object has become a burden.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 26 , Issue 103 , September 1978 , pp. 100 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Roland Mortier, La poétique des ruines en France, Geneva, 1974. See also R. Michéa, "La poésie des ruines au XIIIe siècle et la contribution de l'Italie à la sensibilité préromantique," in Etudes Italiennes, 1935, pp. 117-32, 337-50; Wilhelm S. Heckscher, Die Romruinen. Die geistigen Voraussetzungen ihrer Wertung im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, Würzburg, 1936; Ingrid G. Daemmrich, "The Ruins Motif as Artistic Device in French Literature," in Journal of Aesthetics, 1972.

2 Flavio Biondo admits however that the Empire was a period of decadence: good Republican manners were lost to the point that the corrupt Romans took a bath "almost every day."

3 See especially Françoise Joukovscy-Nicha, La gloire dans la poésie française et néo-latine du XVIe siècle, Geneva, 1969.

4 A. Cioranescu, "La Renaissance et la mort de l'antiquité," in Miscellanea Franco Simone (in press).

5 Augustin Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques, p. 27.