Thesis title: Soggetti collettivi e linguaggio: genesi e problemi della nozione di 'massa'
The thesis investigates the notion of the collective subject and its relationship to language within linguistic and intellectual thought between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reconstructing several of the major theoretical configurations through which the relation between the individual and the totality has been articulated. Starting from the Saussurean notion of the speaking mass, the study engages with a range of disciplines—crowd psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and sociolinguistics—that have conceptualized forms of aggregation such as crowd, public, mass, and speech community. Its aim is to show that these theorisations do not respond to a merely descriptive vocation but constitute reference models for thinking linguistic sociality. The tensions among terms often treated as interchangeable make it possible to reveal the amphibious nature of the social bond: on the one hand, a totality irreducible to the sum of the individuals that compose it; on the other, an intersubjective “field of action” that acknowledges its pragmatic and performative character. Far from being reducible to an "aggregatio corporum", the “mass dimension” makes it possible—particularly through the contributions of Saussurean linguistics and more recent developments in linguistic pragmatics—to move beyond a rigid and reductive opposition between individual and collectivity, recognising their organic interconnection as grounded in the experience of language. The complex interplay of inheritances and interactions further provides the basis for a discussion of the power of words.