La scrittura come laboratorio mistico: Le lettere di Padre Pio ai suoi direttori spirituali

The parresiac contract (Foucault 1983), featuring the relation of spiritual direction, needs a clarification from a semiotic point of view. In particular, in the case study of Padre Pio’s letters to his spiritual directors and to his spiritual daughter Raffaelina Cerase it is possible to investigate how the two thematic roles of director and directed soul emerge from writing through semiotic labor (Eco 1975). Their rela- tion is polemical: it can be interpreted as a spiritual agon (Bloom 1973) in which the directed soul attempts to reverse the direction of the relation. The peculiar features of the enunciation which derive from this combat allow to distinguish the autobio- graphism (Battistini 1997, Kubas 2022) of spiritual letters from the autobiography considered as a genre (Lejeune 1975, Starobinski 1963).