Filosofia-luce: Deleuze nella caverna di Platone (original) (raw)

Il pensare, n. 10, 2020, pp. 56-74. This paper aims at investigating the role that light plays in Deleuze’s books starting from the Eighties. His neo-Kantian reading of Foucault offers a conception of light as a transcendental principle, close to Goethe’s concept of «pure light»: this «chromatic Spinozism», that sees light and whiteness as the matter of the plane of immanence and darkness as a mere byproduct, is given ontological, esthetical, gnoseological, and ethical value through Deleuze’s renewed appreciation of Bergson’s Matter and Memory and through his studies on cinema. Cinema itself can be conceived as a privileged access to Deleuze’s ethical commitment through the conceptual persona of the «idiot», and the teleology – from bare action to sight and «thinking action» – that he diagnoses in the history of cinema can be seen as the strongest modern affirmation of the teaching of Plato’s myth of the cave: a new way of seeing or a conversion towards the light, that forbids the philosopher to share the doxa of his community, becomes the only way to grasp the «intolerable» in the given historical and social situations, and is turned directly into a means of political action.

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact