Abstract

The Taste of the Secret was published in Italy in 1997. At that time, I was facing two problems: a general one, regarding the dangers of postmodernism, and a particular one – that is, my relationship with Derrida. In the same year Estetica Razionale also came out. There I articulated my realist turn and my distancing from the philosophical tradition I grew up in. The change of perspective reflected by these books was very simple: deconstruction does not consist in claiming that everything is socially constructed – and that therefore everything can be deconstructed – but that there are objects resisting deconstruction and that these provides the starting point for deconstruction itself. I found this resistance mainly in Aesthetics, in its original sense of aisthesis (i.e. perception). Perception does not offer truth, but it undoubtedly provides the resistance that the world sets against our conceptual schemes (Il mondo esterno, 2001), starting from the most obscure of our senses, touch. After all, if we look at the late Derrida, we will notice that he dwells on the topic of touch. This proves that at a certain point Derrida also felt the need of a return to reality. In my Documentality (2009) – but already in An Ontology of the Cell Phone (2005) – I weakened his famous peremptory statement that “there is nothing outside the text” by turning it into “there is nothing social outside the text”. And yet, I acknowledge that the importance of documents was already fully expressed in the Derridian idea of grammatology. Thus, what I did in all these years was to go against one Derrida in the name of another.