MORTE E PIANTO VIRTUALE. LAMENTO E RITORNO DEL MORTO DAL RITUALE AL DIGITALE

This dissertation investigates the funeral lament as a long-lasting cultural practice, from the ritual and iconographic forms studied by Ernesto de Martino and Aby Warburg to its contemporary rearticulations in digital environments. The central hypothesis is that lament is not to be understood as an archaic relic, but rather as a transhistorical and transmedial dispositif that survives through continual transformation. The dissertation is structured in two parts: the first reconstructs the historical and theoretical genealogy of lament, while the second explores its forms and reinventions in the digital present. The first part of the thesis traces a dual intellectual legacy. On the one hand, de Martino interprets the lament as a ritual technique for orienting mourning and mediating the return of the dead ‒ a recurrent cultural motif in the history of lament. On the other hand, Warburg, through the notions of Pathosformeln and Nachleben, illuminates the figurative survival of gestures and images of pathos, capable of migrating across distant epochs and contexts. From this perspective, lament emerges as a cultural technique of memory: not a mere deposit, but a living form that persists as embodied gesture and latent image, anchoring individual expression within a collective dimension. The second part addresses the revival of lament in the digital present, with particular attention to the vernacular forms of mourning that characterize TikTok’s sociocultural environment. Here, lament appears simultaneously as an audiovisual practice and a quotidian gesture: memory is translated into replicable formulas, memes, and formats that provide continuity yet allow for variation and experimentation, thereby reactivating its dual function ‒ at once an expression of mourning and a mediation of the relationship with the dead. In this context, the digital afterlife signifies both the digital return of the deceased and the «digital beyond» of lament ‒ its survival beyond the modern diagnosis of disappearance. Generative artificial intelligence appears within this framework as the latest mnemotechnics: a latent archive that preserves and reassembles posthumous presences, gestures, and images, producing anachronistic and uncanny reemergences. The analysis indicates that lament is not simply a folkloric residue nor a definitively extinguished practice but rather can be understood as a complex critical-political dispositif that persists through continual reinvention. Situated between ritual and spectacle, between loss and revival, it emerges as a valuable lens for examining contemporary forms of memory, presence, and mourning.