Il dono del filosofo. Sul gesto originario della filosofia

Two themes and two scenes cross each other and make up the framework of this book. The two themes are constituted by two questions. The former poses again what Deleuze and Guattari called "the midnight question", in order to recall its ultimate and definitive character. It is the classical question: what is philosophy? On the contrary, the latter asks (with a tradition that goes from Seneca to Mauss and further) what actually is a gift? Socrates, the first philosopher, and Montesquieu, the author of "The Spirit of the Laws" and of the doctrine of the separation of powers, are the protagonists of these two scenes. As a matter of fact, both the scenes tell the story of a gift. In the first scene Socrates stands in front of the citizens of Athens, that are there to judge him, and says that he is a gift of the god to the city. In the second Montesquieu pays a ransom to save an unknown merchant who is victim of the pirates, but refuses to let him know he is his benefactor. The first scene belongs to the "Apology of Socrates" and has a fascinating and less known development in the probably spurious dialogue "Second Alcibiades", in which Socrates talks about gifts and sacrifices and ends up putting the crown of sacrifice on. The second scene has been told in "Montesquieu a Marseille", written by the follower of Enlightenment and dramatist Louis-Sebastien Mercier, and in other plays of that time and probably resembles real events of the biography of Montesquieu.
The gift of oneself and the anonymous gift: between this two dimension of donation the book makes its attempt to answer the midnight question about the essence of philosophy. The gift of the god, the gift of philosophy is the critic function of truth. In front of the generality of the behavior of men, the philosopher is someone that is not pleased with contingent explanations. He asks and expects more. He aspires to a gesture which is sovereign but at the same time useless, if one looks at it in the perspective of the general system of exemptions and explanations of powers and knowledge.
Telling the truth is something different and something more than truth as a fact or truth as a theory that science can demonstrate. The problem of telling the truth is more wide. It is a problem certainly connected to truth but also different, that is to say the problem of meaning. Meaning is experienced and explored by the philosopher in the gesture of rupture and departure from the common use of language that consists in the sharp and harsh act of negation. The essence of philosophy is an activity which, by principle, is not constituted by philosophical propositions, but only by philosophical acts and events. This activity can be described as an act of liberation. So, as Wittgenstein noticed in one of the most beautiful passages of his work, the task of philosophy is not to teach how to build traps, but to teach the fly how to come out of them.
Only two words concerning the style of the book. If philosophy is an activity of research of the meaning which presuppose the play of imagination, the text that expresses this philosophy can't be constrained into the discipline of pure argumentation, into the impersonal monologue of concept. On the contrary, it has to approach, at least in its style, to narrative dramatization. It has to use images and figures, scenes and personifications, as it was a sort of philosophical theatre.