The Immemorial

Forthcoming in July 2025

A thought-provoking exploration of the fragility of bourgeois identity.

1825, Vienna—news of a sickly, listless boy is making the rounds. In broad daylight, he falls into deep sleep and his personality shifts. All while sleeping, he reads, writes, plays cards, challenges his doctors with amusement and accomplishes the most astonishing of exercises with his eyes closed. A new subject has appeared, a second I has now supplanted the first.

Cavalletti carefully registers the disquieting appearances of this second I in the literature and psychology of the past two centuries. In a context dominated by amnesia and somnambulism, hallucinations and wakeful dreams, the bourgeois subject, whose identity seemed so stable, turns out to be inhabited by masks that elude every grasp, at the mercy of a doubling that can no longer be recomposed.

In the cases that Henri Bergson will go on to study, in the visions procured by Théophile Gautier with the aid of hashish and immortalized by Poe in his nightmarish projections or overturned by Döblin in his comic parodies, personalities multiply and do battle, as even life and death exchange roles. And, ultimately, the identity of the Western subject reveals itself as a shade-like, constitutively double figure, that only lives in its weakness and forgetting, in its losses and distractions. Immemorial and, hence, unforgettable.