Diventare uomo, diventare donna. L’Attis di Catullo

The purpose of this summary lectura Catulli is to re-analyze the features of the extreme act of violence that Attis commits on himself: important symbolic meanings and cultural representations are involved and they deserve a reflection within a volume dealing with the ‘Grammar of violence’. Attis is described by Catullus as a young, handsome boy, in the most delicate moment of his self-identification; he is touched by the fury of Cybele and rejects his fate of man, subjecting himself to an impossible ‘metamorphosis’ into a woman, devoted to the goddess. The poem is one of the Greco-Roman texts that most disturbingly reveal the link between self-domination and dominion over the other, showing how violence, in the ancient world, funds the ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault) and the idea of domination.