[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_02

Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno, 2002

In December 2022, while teaching in a small Italian village lost in the mountains, I wrote in my diary: "How I wish there were a way of charting the Grammar of feelings, the Geography of the heart, the History of our emotions.". I was convinced that it would have been easy to become passionate about History, Geography, and Grammar if a personal equivalent existed within us for each subject. A way of creating mental schemes to catalog one's own space, chronology, and symbolic language before having to adapt them to the codes, dimensions, and stories of others. How can you expect a child to memorize boundaries and dates when they have not yet mapped out their feelings or put their existence into perspective?

“To pursue an intellectual trajectory or an idea,” writes Giuliana Bruno in the Atlas, “time and sensorial enjoyment are essential.".

Discovering her book was heart-warming for me; it was a surprise and confirmation at the same time. Her search for an intimate geography and cartography of the subjective responds to a collective need to put knowledge into perspective, of humanization of the concept of knowledge and knowing, of the expulsion of abstract intellectualism and the rigor of the rational from the paradise of science, after a thousand-year dominion over our way of perceiving the world. “The Atlas of Emotions” offers an interdisciplinary, transcultural, internationalistic vision that remains intimate, personal, and close to the author.

“Every story,” writes Bruno, “is a travel story, an experience of space.”.

We must also take into account the position from which we speak because only this allows us to rethink the location of analytical knowledge and the center of gravity of the historical narrative to which we refer and belong.