‘It was here, perhaps, that the injunction, so peculiar to the West, was laid down for the first time, in the form of a general constraint. I am not talking about the obligation to admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by traditional penance; but of the nearly infinite task of telling – telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex. […] An imperative was established: Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse’. Thus, fifty years ago, 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.
Eco’s novel, structured around the space of a library, becomes – like the ephemeral Strada Novissima, conceived by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980 for the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice – a bastion of postmodernity. On the one hand, a library that imposes itself upon the territory – a fortress and also a multicultural crossroads shaped by continuous arrivals and departures, translations and rewritings – recalling the culturally hybrid roots of Europe; on the other, a road, or rather, the space of transit and intersection for inhabitants, explorers and frequenters of the city. The distance between these two figures is, therefore, only apparent: the impregnable library and the airy road both allude to forms of knowledge. Francalanci, in the book Del ludico. Dopo il sorriso delle avanguardie (1982), notes: ‘It is the very text by Eco, moreover, that is imagined as the total quotation of a book faithfully reproducing a manuscript; it is nothing but an extraordinary game around allusion, since allusion is the very form of language, the true nature of the word, that is, of the Library, which gives the illusion of containing knowledge, whereas knowledge is in fact dispersed in signs whose reciprocal relationship is incomprehensible’. The Strada Novissima, made of papier-mâché, offered Portoghesi the chance to celebrate the end of prohibition in architecture. Eco’s narrative, meanwhile, revolves around the fabricated discovery of a manuscript, with the plot driven by the search for a book that ‘must not exist’: Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy and laughter. Within this constant play of mirrors, where reality is distorted by the will to knowledge, the library appears monumental and impregnable from the outside, yet inside it reveals an inextricable forest of wooden staircases. The Franciscan William of Baskerville takes pride in the certainty of his knowledge, while the Dolcinian heretic Salvatore takes pride in his ignorance.
The Name of the Rose paves the way for a revival, within popular culture, of history – particularly of the Middle Ages – a period which, as James Bridle (New Dark Age. Technology and the End of the Future, 2018) observes, shares several points of connection with the present, now enriched by new virtual pathways. The novel was written at a time when yet another revolution in communication was already underway: the advent of the vast digital library, which seemed to herald the death of the printed story and the obsolescence of its architectural ‘vault’. The library burns at the end of the novel; what remains, as the final sentence declares, is ‘Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus’ – only a name. And yet, what truly remains is an endless and adventurous chain of books which, together with the success of Eco’s novel itself, undermines the burning of the library and resists any reading of it as premonition.
The ‘will to knowledge’ evokes both the symbol of infinity, to express the limitless scope of knowledge, and the labyrinth, to indicate its intricate structure and the countless possible paths through it. The exhibition Typologie, currently on display at Fondazione Prada in Milan, reaffirms the exploration of the labyrinth of knowledge – with its dizzying proliferation of possible classifications – as one of the central spaces of reflection within contemporary art. The extensive photographic and visual atlases – from August Sander to Gerhard Richter, to Bernd and Hilla Becher – raise, through non-digital media, the same questions now posed by big data: how can we orient ourselves within the visual proliferation, in the absence of predetermined archival rules, relying instead on the contingent emergence of variations, modulations, and relationships governed entirely by visual logic? And what do these artistic forms reveal about the will to knowledge that we increasingly entrust to Artificial Intelligence – nourished by vast data masses within what Antonio Somaini defines as a ‘latent space’ – whose relationship to the ‘outside’ world and to the forms of contingency is itself becoming ever more problematic?
Vasconcelos, in Mexico City – the largest library in Latin America, created by Alberto Kalach in 2006 – presents itself as a fortress that displays its infinite treasures within. Masses of suspended books welcome the visitor, proclaiming the power of knowledge, its spectacular presence, its immeasurable nature. Seen from a certain distance, the shelves of books appear not dissimilar to those containing databases.
Libraries can be bastions of the state, as the city of Paris and the substantial investments made to affirm the recurrent urban presence of monuments to knowledge clearly demonstrate. The role of libraries remains, even today, in a time when economic inequalities are becoming more evident, that of a ‘public space’ in which access to knowledge is possible, ‘squares’ in which temporary or persistent communities are defined. The design of the architecture that preserves books and documents is, whether pursuing the real or the fantastic, whether through new foundations or the revision of the existing, an exercise in the relationship between bodies in motion through space, objects, and written discourses that set minds in motion: a challenge, therefore, that seeks a balance between the calculated weight of paper and the elevation of thought.
The new libraries being built around the world largely follow the precedent set by the Seattle Central Library, designed by OMA in 2004: clearly recognisable objects, with distinct perimeters and defined forms, conceived to optimise the management and use of interior spaces. This model is progressively evolving, giving increasing space, alongside conservation and study, to leisure areas, spaces for social interaction, and a variety of other activities. In 2010, Sou Fujimoto completed the Musashino Art University Library in Tokyo, designed around a labyrinthine plan in which the bookshelves form the very walls themselves; in the Tianjin Binhai Library, built in China in 2017 by MVRDV, stairs and walls are integrated with the shelving, creating space for a vast agora. Within the new large libraries constructed in the metropolises of the world, fragments of the city are gathered, preserving microclimates. Yet there is also another approach, which often coexists with the first: new open libraries, conceived by institutions rooted in the existing urban fabric. These are small in scale but numerous and specialised, forming an archipelago. In historic centres – often emptied out – as well as in dispersed suburbs, inhabiting libraries becomes equivalent to inhabiting the spaces of the city: discovering places, traversing centuries, stepping out and walking along streets, squares, piazzas, discovering cloisters, gardens, abandoned areas, shaded corners.
One goes to the library not to find the book one is looking for, but to encounter a text previously unknown; this is the adventure that the physical library offers, particularly in its open-shelf section. Again – and above all – libraries are places of the imagination that produce other images, propose new paths; precisely because they are real, they reveal even more evident connections between tangible things and the images of the world. Books, like characters in a story, wait to be animated, consulted, forgotten, only to be rediscovered, to become the subject of discussion between acquaintances or strangers.
In 1997, Rachel Whiteread installed Untitled (Paperbacks) at MoMA in New York: the work is the negative cast of bookcases full of books, a plaster library with the memory of absent volumes, erased titles and colours largely cancelled out; only a few fragments manage to resurface from the homogeneous material. With his Delocazioni, the first of which date from the Seventies, Claudio Parmiggiani creates works of ‘smoke on the wall’, in which the smoke and ash of burnt tyres trace the outline of bookcases full of books, once leaning against the wall and then removed – an evocation of a destructive fire, but also residual matter capable of preserving the memory of a presence and creating an evocative vision. Between the disturbing and the poetic, the monumental and the fragile, the ephemeral and the eternal, the will to knowledge challenges and mocks us.

Sara Marini, Angela Mengoni