THE NAMES OF DIONYSUS

The name of Dionysus in the title of this collection of essays is a metaphor for his other discourse: that element which remained steadfastly denied or repressed within Enlightenment culture, feared for its urban and patriarchal foundations (another name for which might is matter or nature). Constitutively associated with celebration and rebellion, it has been the hidden content of every popular rebellion, every messianic expectation and every revolutionary proclamation in history – and in our times it has dramatically returned with the echoes of a certain romanticism and the vibrations of a multifaceted social movement. , of a new liberation utopia (which was still with us until yesterday, on the eve of the end of the millennium). In philosophy this appears as first difference (or otherwise non-identity), in genetic anthropology and the theory of language as play or imitation, in the analysis of religion it is represented by ecstasy and the orgy, in psychoanalysis by the principle of pleasure and the dynamism of of desire (a metaphor of which may well be the psychiatric ideotype of madness), while in modern art the most archaic (or in general the non-Western) is raised as search and creative assimilation. The above essays investigate the emergence of this element in privileged moments of very recent culture – among them the dialectical anthropology of the Frankfurt School (in conversation with that of Georges Bataille), the paradoxical philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the British anti-psychiatry as well as aesthetics or cultural forms such as Tarkovsky's cinema, African-American music and the so-called psychedelic culture that reinterpreted in modern terms certain stereotypes of mystical experience. Through critical interpretive shifts, the author tries not only to show the semantic continuity under the apparent multiplicity of forms, but also to highlight what constitutes the inalienably new within them. Another philosophical language, which could be spoken – if there is still time for it – by the rising century.