The root of the noun _monster_ (_monstrum_), derived from _monere_, to admonish, to warn, holds together the meaning of warning, to announce something that is out of the ordinary, against the natural order of things, with the meaning of showing, exposing – the root of _monstrum_ is the same of the Italian verb _mostrare_ (to show). Something announces itself, manifests itself as extraordinary, outside the normal course of events. On the other hand, the etymology of the noun _prodigy_ (_prod-igium_) also (...) expresses the sense of something that is ‘placed before’, exposed, shown. Which means that something particular, something that differs from the usual and natural order of things is exhibited, placed in front of a subject, causing astonishment and fear, disrupting one’s ability to represent. Starting from these two aspects – the feeling of fear and the break in the subject’s ordinary representational schema – the following pages aim to investigate the relationship between the monstrous and the concept of the sublime, linking them primarily as moments that challenge our cognitive possibilities. (shrink)

In a conference from 1987 on ‘What is the Creative Act?’, Deleuze argues that a fundamental and mysterious affinity subsists between the work of art and the act of resistance. Starting from this statement, Agamben in his echoing text ‘What is the Act of Creation?’ presents an idea of resistance co-essential to power itself. Each power, in other words each possibility for human beings of doing something, is connected to their impotence, not necessarily understood as total absence of power, but (...) as potential to not-do. Therefore, in the very creative act one detects something that resists and opposes the critical possibility of a retreat, of an emptiness that is itself a form of potentiality. The essay picks things up from here. The act of resistance, described in terms of dynamis, as power which is always in contact with its power-not-to, is identified as the core element of modern cinema images, notably in Italian neorealism. (shrink)

The essay analyzes the transformations suffered from the cinema with the advent of digital technology and the theories that hypothesize the disappearance of film. The author affirms that cinema resists as model for new media and as experience of the spectator, despite these transformations. Finally, the essay suggests to abandon the ontological question for a phenomenological description. This description allows to identify some similarity between digital cinema and painting.

The present paper traces some of the main articulations of the book Marcel Proust and the signs (1964), in which the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze affirms the superiority of literature on classical rationalist philosophy in the search for truth. Proust’s work rivals the philosophy itself, since it brings into play the involuntary nature of memory and intelligence – a condition which lies at the beginning of every thought – which can grasp the truth only solicited and forced by chance encounters. (...) Classical rationalist philosophy as a methodical exercise, induced by the good will of the thinker, can instead reach only abstract and conventional truths. The paper underlines how, according to Deleuze, Proust’s work will represent the model of authentic philosophy, the one that comes to produce with violence new concepts forced by problems and urgencies that impose themselves from outside. In fact, in Difference and Repetition (1968), the characteristics ascribed to the Proustian Recherche are explicitly attributed to a philosophy of Difference, which is posited by the author as the real need of his own time. In 1991, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posed the question: What is philosophy? The attributes previously assigned to the literature, reappeared in the answer to such a question. A paradoxical necessity – reached through contingent encounters on one side, and the involuntary nature of thought on the other side – will appear at the center of the book that closes the theoretical trajectory of Deleuze: such a paradox shows itself as the only condition for the “invention of concepts”, which is at the same time the definition and ultimate task of philosophical practice. (shrink)

The article explores the closeness of the theme of the monstrous to the concept of the sublime, first of all linking them as moments that challenge our cognitive possibilities, starting from these two aspects: the feeling of fear and the rupture of the ordinary representative scheme of the subject. Among the many revivals and interpretations of the Third Critique and of Kant's sublime, two authors of the French twentieth century – Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard – bring together the sublime (...) and the monstrous, radicalizing their epistemological scope, making them not only a cognitive possibility, but a necessary condition for the emergence of thought. (shrink)

The essay analyzes the transformations suffered from the cinema with the advent of digital technology and the theories that hypothesize the disappearance of film. The author affirms that cinema resists as model for new media and as experience of the spectator, despite these transformations. Finally, the essay suggests to abandon the ontological question for a phenomenological description. This description allows to identify some similarity between digital cinema and painting.