Nati per patire. Passioni ed esemplarità

Abstract

Born to sense. Passions and esemplarityAs introduction, I show how passions have been conquering more and more importance in the structure of the modern western societies, and – consequently – that contemporary philosophy has denoted the crisis of the calculative-instrumental rationality and the need to reconstruct the geometry of passions. My paper wants to contribute to this reconstruction in two ways: clarifying the reason why passions are involved in our existence in a so ambiguous way – that is, how they express the open nature of the human animal; discussing if and how it is possible to think passions, relations and individuation without referring them to a transcendence or reducing them to an autistic immanence – that is, the difference between the model and the example. At first, I defend a non-anthropocentric declination of the approach of the philosophical anthropology, in order to explain that our biological nature makes us relational and pathic animals: human animals can define and determinate themselves only moving from the passion and sensation of the alterity. Secondly, I describe the different status of the model and the example from a philosophical-anthropological point of view, and I propose a post-deconstructive interpretation of the work of Gilles Deleuze, according to which Deleuze aims to build a new hierarchy, founded on concepts as difference, repetition, immanence, relationship, distinction and intensification: in the deleuzian world, the dynamical relation with the example is able to deep and amplify the process of individuation, opening to a sensible transcendence, to a transformation of how singularities feel and sense the world and their own relationship with the world. Then, I suggest that if we cross the deleuzian and philosophical-antropological perspectives, we could enquire the possibility of a new paradoxical immanent transcendence or transimmanence: the question of style thus becomes the question of an existential transformation which does not retrace a model, but repeats the differentiation of an example. In conclusion, I deal with a possible criticism: an esthetical transformation is completely different from a social one. I claim indeed that without the first, the second is not possible: the construction of a different society depends on the emergence of a widespread different way to sense and imagine.