Call for Papers
La volontà di sapere | The Will to Knowledge
Vesper No. 14, Università Iuav di Venezia
Call for abstracts by September 5, 2025
See PDF of call for complete details
[…] Michel Foucault, in La volonté de savoir (1976), described how the mechanisms of the examination of conscience belonging to the pastoral tradition of the 17th century progressively extended to all areas of society, marking the threshold of a biopolitical modernity. Here, the ‘will to knowledge’ is not the subject’s drive for research, but the injunction to bring into the field of knowledge-power those borderline domains of life that had been previously excluded from it: death, birth, sexuality. By the mid-Seventies it was already clear that power was no longer a matter of limitation and denial, but of injunction and stimulation of life. Foucault’s concise book opens a fundamental philosophical reflection on biopolitics, yet it does so through an immanent and concrete mode of thought that possesses its own archaeology: if knowledge once sought signs, on the body of the witch, of her relationship with the evil that lay ‘outside’ her, Foucault says, it will later seek to reveal an evil that is internal and introjected, arising from within the body of the possessed woman in her convulsions. This process of the adherence of knowledge to bodies entirely invests our time and urges us to reflect on the figures of the ‘will to knowledge’ in the new millennium: the questions of surveillance, of the constant and widespread mapping of life in its social and biological dimension – with the implosion, indeed, of this threshold – of ubiquitous visibility, of the collapse of the limits between inside and outside, between inside and outside of work, of wakefulness, of private life, are explored by artistic and design forms. Philippe Parreno, with his Marquee (2006 onwards), exhibits illuminated thresholds that lead to no interior, the mere threshold itself, the glow of a crossing, the condition of possibility of going elsewhere. But it is the thresholds of the modern body, invested by the will to knowledge, that lie at the centre of an intense exploration within visual culture: Vesalius’s flayed men bear witness to the split that traverses their bodies – ‘someone has skinned them, but they are still alive […] it seems that they want to say something’ (J. Gil, ‘Corpo’, in Enciclopedia Einaudi, 1978) – and contemporary arts explore the biological substratum of flesh, both as an object of visualisation (the now proverbial journey that Mona Hatoum undertakes with a probe inside her own body, Corps étranger, 1994) and as an actor of an ‘other’ speech act, written with blood and viscera, a discourse of the ‘anterior body’ that precedes the body as image (R. Barthes, Réquichot and His Body, 1982).
‘The will to knowledge’ also carries a more straightforward, primary meaning: here we encounter the sphere of the desire for knowledge and its challenges, a theme constantly evoked today – above all, that of finding orientation within a hypertrophic labyrinth of information. Thus, a few years after Foucault’s work, we encounter another text on the inexhaustible drive towards knowledge, its infinite resources of seduction, its lethal traps. With The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco constructs a thriller whose origin lies in the will to knowledge, with a book at its centre and, surrounding it, the desire of the aspiring initiates in opposition to the strenuous defence mounted by the custodians of tradition; for the reader, meanwhile, a comparable journey unfolds through the multi-layered plot of coded quotations, in one of the greatest examples of a dialogic textual machine, as Bakhtin defines it. […]
Call for abstracts and call for papers
“Vesper” is structured in sections; below the call for abstracts and the call for papers according to categories.
All final contributions will be submitted to a double-blind peer review process, except for the section ‘Tale’.
Following the tradition of Italian paper journals, “Vesper” revives it by hosting a wide spectrum of narratives, welcoming different writings and styles, privileging the visual intelligence of design, of graphic expression, of images and contaminations between different languages. For these reasons, the selection process will consider the iconographic and textual apparatuses of equal importance.
“Vesper” is a six-monthly, double-blind peer-reviewed journal, multidisciplinary and bilingual (Italian and English), included into the list of the National Agency for the Evaluation of the University System and Research (ANVUR) of Class A journals in the competition sectors 08/D1 ‘Architectural Design’, 08/F1 ‘Urban and Landscape Planning and Design’ and 11/C4 ‘Aesthetics and Philosophy of Languages’, as of No. 1. Vesper is included in the ANVUR list of scientific journals for the non-bibliometric areas 08 ‘Civil Engineering and Architecture’, 10 ‘Antiquities, Philology, Literary Studies, Art History’ and 11 ‘History, Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology’, as of No. 1 (with the exception of their bibliometric subfields). “Vesper” is indexed in SCOPUS, EBSCO, Torrossa and JSTOR.
Open access issues are available at the following link: http://www.iuav.it/en/node/1011.
Call for abstracts by September 5, 2025
Foucault News 