Il testamento di James Hillman 一 Silvia Ronchey

Silvia Ronchey, interviewed on May 28, 2022, at the Vivarium Novum Academy, on the occasion of the international conference "The Knower of Secrets: The Intellectual Legacy of Elémire Zolla (1926-2002), discusses the book "The Last Image," co-written with American philosopher and psychologist James Hillman and published by Rizzoli in 2021. We can define the last image as the ultimate image, that profound, true image that we can all grasp if we can look at the outside world with a clear gaze and allow the suggestion of the external image to trigger within us that inner image, buried, ancient, and, in most cases, unconscious, which contains truth, beauty, and therefore also the possibility of healing ourselves. James Hillman has always reflected on the image, partly because this reflection is at the heart of the thought of his teacher, Carl Gustav Jung, who argued that the psyche is made of images and that therefore the image is the key to reaching the depths of our soul. Hillman's thought can be summed up in a phrase from a letter by the English poet Keats: "Please call the world the valley of soul-making." Soul-making is at the heart of Hillman's teaching, but soul-making means image-making, because the soul is made of images. The key is how to find the true image, avoiding the toxic images that come to us from what he called hermetic intoxication: the internet, the media, and advertising. We are suffocated by commodified images that drive consumption, that seek to promote or propagandize something, but in reality we suffer from an anemia of the soul, which distracts us and deprives us of that ultimate, archetypal, true, salvific image that we must extract from ourselves when we contemplate an external image. Three years before his death and a few months before the beginning of his battle with an illness that would kill him, Hillman had the idea of ​​writing a book that would summarize the many definitions of image he had scattered throughout his previous works. He therefore decided to travel to Ravenna, home to magnificent Byzantine mosaics, to explore these new images and draw from them a sort of psychic resonance, a direct correspondence between what the image transmitted to his soul and how his soul responded to the image. He asked Silvia Rochey, with whom he had previously written two books, structured in the form of dialogues, to accompany him. Unfortunately, illness had intervened, and shortly before his death, Hillman had summoned Silvia Ronchey to his home in New England to complete the work begun in Ravenna. He wanted this testament on the image to be made public, and so a second series of conversations held at her bedside formed the second narrative layer of the book. Hillman remained lucid until the very end; he wanted to remain thoughtful until the very threshold of being. Silvia Ronchey is a full professor of Byzantine Civilization at the University of Roma Tre. In addition to numerous specialized essays and translations from Byzantine Greek, such as that of Michael Psellus's Chronography (Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1984), she has written widely read books, including: "The Byzantine Aristocracy" (Sellerio, 1998, 1999), with Alexander Kazhdan; "The Byzantine State" (Einaudi, 2002); "The Romance of Constantinople" (Einaudi, 2010), with Tommaso Braccini; "Hypatia. The True Story" (Rizzoli, 2010); "The Story of Barlaam and Joasaph: The Byzantine Life of the Buddha" (Einaudi, 2012); the critical edition of Eustathius of Thessalonica's commentary on the iambic canon on Pentecost (De Gruyter 2014); "The Submerged Cathedral. In Search of the Lost Sacred" (Rizzoli, 2017). She has been a cultural contributor to Italian newspapers since 1989. She has written and hosted television programs for RAI, including L'altra edicola (RaiDue, 1994-1999) and Fino alla fine del mondo (RaiDue, 1999). He conducted interviews with 20th-century figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Hillman, Ernst Jünger, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Elémire Zolla. His meeting with James Hillman, in particular, sparked a lasting collaboration that found expression not only in television interviews but also in the two book-dialogues "The Soul of the World" (Rizzoli, 1999) and "The Pleasure of Thinking" (Rizzoli, 2001), which continued until Hillman's death: their last book-dialogue ("The Last Image," Rizzoli 2021) was published posthumously on the tenth anniversary of his death. Among his radio programmes, noteworthy are the series on the fall of Constantinople in Alle 8 della Sera (Rai Radio Due), the series on ancient, medieval and Byzantine melodrama in Di tanti palpiti (Rai Radio Tre) and the series Contaminazioni del sacro, Il buddhismo e l’occidente and Queste anime viventi: animali, anima, mondo (Rai Radio Tre).