La mimesi del canto come soglia critica. Estetica e politica nell’Elogio degli uccelli di Giacomo Leopardi

Abstract

The paper focuses on one of Leopardi’s The Moral Essays, “Praise of Birds” (1824), which most exemplarily raises not only the question of aesthetics, that is the idea of a sense that is ignited at the boundary between the sensible and the intelligible, but also the properly ethical, and therefore political, tenor that immanently connotes the undertaking of such a question. In Praise of Birds, in fact, what Leopardi presents is the originally constitutive threshold of that “ultra-philosophical” practice to which Leopardi himself feels he must attune his writing, with full awareness of the formidable critical and emancipatory potential inherent in it.