Pietro Montani
Pietro Montani (born in 1946) is an Italian philosopher, film critic and academic.
Contents
Biography
Pupil of Emilio Garroni, he is full professor of Aesthetics at the Sapienza University of Rome. Montani has been director at the EHESS in Paris and has taught Aesthetics at the Experimental Film Centre in Rome. His research focuses today mainly on issues of philosophy of technology.
Montani's aesthetics should not be considered as a philosophy of art, but as a theory of human sensitivity, which has the peculiarity of being open to the stimuli from the outside world. Montani's reflection unfolds in different passages and through the comparison with some of the protagonists of philosophy, linguistics, semiotics and film theory of the twentieth century, always having as a reference point the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
Thought
Hermeneutics and critical philosophy
In 1985, Montani published Il debito del linguaggio ("The debt of language"), in which, starting from the comparison with structuralist theories, in particular those of Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, he shows how the question of the meaning of the poetic text cannot be resolved through the identification of the linguistic or semiotic code of reference, but refers to an aesthetic condition of signification.
This theme is further explored by Montani in Estetica ed ermeneutica ("Aesthetics and Hermeneutics"). In this text Montani, starting from Kant's critical philosophy, proposes to rethink truth — in the Heideggerian sense of a-letheia, of the unveiling of being — as a hermeneutic situation closely linked to the actual experience of the subject, following the reinterpretation of Heidegger's philosophy proposed by Hans Georg Gadamer.
Soviet cinema
Montani's education and thought were marked by his interest in cinema and in particular in two Soviet authors: Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. He edited the Italian edition of their writings.
Theory of imagination
In the text L'immaginazione narrativa (1999) Montani combines his interest in cinema with a more strictly philosophical interest in the theme of imagination. Montani proposes to consider imagination in the terms in which, in Tempo e racconto, Paul Ricœur speaks of narration, that is, as a process of "refiguration" of the experience of time by man.
For Ricoeur, narration has the power to make the reader experience a time that is properly human. Montani takes Ricoeur's thesis and applies it to the field of cinematographic narration. Montani believes that the territory of imagination in which cinema works is that of the interweaving of fiction and testimony, between the construction of the narrative plot and the documentation of reality. The transformation of the experience of time thus takes place at a deeper and more creative level.
Technique and aesthetics
Bioestetica ("Bioaesthetics") marks the beginning of the most recent phase of Montani's thought, dedicated to an in-depth examination of the relationship between technique and aesthetics. Through the paradigm of bioaesthetics Montani proposes to read the phenomena of biopower that characterize the contemporary era from their nature primarily technical and aesthetic, that is, from the fact that the sensitivity of the human being is increasingly oriented and organized technically. Biopower consists precisely in the ability to channel human sensitivity.
In L'immaginazione intermediale Montani examines the ways in which cinema responds to forms of anesthetization. Taking his cue from the spectacularization of politics that emerged following the attack on the Twin Towers, Montani introduces the concept of "authentication of the image", which does not consist in ascertaining the factual referent of the image (the true, the real) but in the regeneration of a shared horizon of meaning, the capacity of reference of experience and language, in an era characterized by growing phenomena of "referential indifference." The reflection on the relationship between aesthetics and technology continues in Tecnologie della sensibilità ("Technologies of Sensibility"), in which the existence of a third function of imagination is theorized: next to the productive and reproductive one there is an interactive function. Interactive imagination becomes the paradigm through which to read the contemporary era, profoundly crossed by phenomena of digital interactivity and the proliferation of virtual environments.
Works
- Il debito del linguaggio: il problema dell'autoriflessività estetica nel segno, nel teesto e nel discorso (1985)
- Fuori campo: studi sul cinema e l'estetica (1993)
- Estetica ed ermeneutica: senso, contingenza, verità (1996)
- L'immaginazione narrativa: il racconto del cinema oltre i confini dello spazio letterario (1999)
- Arte e verità dall'antichità alla filosofia contemporanea: un'introduzione all'estetica (2002; with A. Ardovino & D. Guastini)
- L'estetica contemporanea: il destino delle arti nella tarda modernità (2004; editor)
- Lo stato dell'arte: l'esperienza estetica nell'era della tecnica (2005; editor, with M. Carboni)
- Bioestetica: senso comune, tecnica e arte nell'età della globalizzazione (2007)
- L'immaginazione intermediale: perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile (2010)
- Tecnologie della sensibilità. Estetica e immaginazione interattiva (2014)
- Tre forme di creatività: tecnica, estetica, politica (2017)
- Emozioni dell'intelligenza: un percorso nel sensorio digitale (2020)
