Between Philosophy and Theatre

About a Book by Rosario Diana

Abstract

This paper attempts to take a look at a topic such as the contamination between philosophy and the arts from a reading of the volume Migrations of Concepts. From Philosophical Text to Scene by Rosario Diana. Diana has been carrying out research for years in the name of contamination between humanistic knowledge and artistic languages. This paper focuses on the interdisciplinary matrix of his method, attempting to identify its intentions and motivations, modalities of realisation and results. The main subject is the notion of migration, precisely the migration of philosophical concepts to the stage, and more generally to the language of the arts. The argumentative mediation of the philosophical text too often confines philosophy to a solitary and silent reading. Diana’s research goes in the direction of breaking this silence of the lógos: through a precise and philologically careful work of translation and transposition of the texts into an artistic language, it is possible to give philosophy a voice again for a wider community than the restricted circle of scholars. The privileged place is the theatre stage and the chosen mode is that of public reading for music, where the element of the word and that of music are in close dialogue, like two real characters. The immediacy of the stage and the ephemeral character of the theatrical event are unprecedented keys to accessing philosophy, which - although they remain firmly rooted in a historicity and are the result of a constant confrontation of the present with tradition - have on their side the possibility of rehabilitating philosophical knowledge outside university walls.