La metafora dello specchio. Lineamenti per una storia simbolica dell'immagine

In the history of thought, the mirror is not a metaphor like all the others. With the myths of Dionysus, Medusa and Narcissus, it bursts into the Western imagination as an instrument capable of duplicating the sensitive world, but also and above all as an artifice capable of making the observer both subject and object of the gaze. Yet, the reflection that the mirror returns always has the characteristic of an enigma: something disturbing and dizzying appears on that threshold, which has never stopped raising questions. Andrea Tagliapietra's book opens on the trail of these questions, attributing the origin of the discovery of the image, its strength and its ambivalence to the mirror, to its concrete experience and its metaphorical use. The mirror shows, but does not respond, forcing the human being to accept the nonsense of what is unique and singular. Starting from the territories of Greek myth and the biblical story, the enigma of the mirror will, in fact, be that of the Other and the Same, of identity and difference, but also of truth and illusion, the place where generates the instituting tension of the symbol. The figure of the man looking at himself summarizes, with the power that is typical of the image, the recurring ambition of philosophical thought for absolute and without residue knowledge. Faced with this claim, the adventure of the mirror also testifies to the story of a subject who, at the school of reflection, becomes a knower of himself and, perhaps for this reason, an executioner of himself. The author retraces the crucial moments of the Western philosophical story in a tight reasoning in which the words dialogue with an iconographic apparatus of over one hundred and thirty works, going so far as to show how the reflecting object has been, from the beginnings of scientific reflection up to the last season of contemporary thought, the very metaphor of philosophy.