FRI 12 JUNE  11 AM

In the present state of war of the world against the world, when conflicts and catastrophes of every kind occupy the daily news, it seems that every atrocity can be accepted and endured within the mesh of everyday life. It is as if contemporaries had adopted the gaze of the author of the Apocalypse, who witnesses the end of the world without being touched by it. A detached and imperturbable gaze, which Andrea Tagliapietra identifies as typical of the spectator, a figure who in the Age of Enlightenment inaugurated the modern condition and who today increasingly stands as the protagonist of a world conceived as spectacle.Competing with him on the stage, however, moves another figure, that of the reader: the reader never ceases to create a metaphorical, intimate and private space, never ceases, even today, to patiently erect a bastion of resistance against the spectacular and anaesthetising processes of social homogenisation.The two emblematic figures of the reader and the spectator are configured as two modes of existence. On the one hand there is the one who passively witnesses catastrophe, deluding himself into always surviving it, and on the other the one who, through the secret of reading, attempts to oppose to the daily apocalypse the barrier of his own singularity.

Andrea Tagliapietra, full professor of History of Philosophy, teaches at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He founded Crisi (Interdisciplinary Research Centre for the History of Ideas) and, together with Massimo Cacciari, Icone (European Research Centre for the History and Theory of the Image). For Donzelli he published I cani del tempo (2022), La metafora dello specchio (2023), Il lettore e lo spettatore (2024). In 2004, with La virtù crudele. Filosofia e storia della sincerità, he won the Viareggio-Répaci Prize for non-fiction.

FESTIVAL OPERA PRIMA – XXII EDITION