Six Memos for the Current Time. Rethinking six contemporary sociological matters in light of the emotional dynamics shaping them

This contribution is inspired by Italo Calvino’s Harvard Lectures which should had been hold at Harvard in 1986 and were never delivered because of Calvino’s sudden and premature death. Calvino began his American lectures with a series of reflections on six qualities that he considered essential for good literature, and then broadened his reflections to other (no strictly literary) dimensions of existence. This article is based on a series of reflections on six sociological subjects that I consider essential to frame the recent pandemic, and then it extends such reflections to other realms of our everyday life. Care, Welfare, Death, Politics, Europe, Marginality: the common denominator of these different key sociological subjects is represented by emotions and their every so often unacknowledged role in interpreting and explaining contemporary phenomena.