«The basic problem, which [Cimatti) reappraises with rare evocative force in the upper echelons of 20th-century culture, is that of the ineliminable mediation of language – and of its inevitably divalent theoretical foundations. On the one hand is everything that prevents us from encountering things directly, on the other the only path towards them. The lens through which we view things is linguistic in nature. With the naked eye alone we would be unable to pick them up. Which does not mean that language creates them. No one believes that the pole we crash into is only a name. The name of a thing isn’t its reality. But without the name we wouldn’t be able to recognise the thing. So? Does this means that the relationship between us and things is at a standstill? That they are beyond our scope? Cimatti’s answer is that we can approach them only by renouncing the dream of identifying with them and giving them the voice they don’t have.»
——Roberto Esposito, Robinson, La Repubblica

★Metaphysics – Being – Threshold – Full – World. Five sections of a book that investigates “things” as they are.
★English translation sample available.

«Strictly speaking, this book could have not been written, because it gives a voice to non living things. Things, however, are things precisely because they do not speak, because they do not have the need to express themselves […]. Things are silent in a radical sense, […] silent as a rock, a leaf, a cloud, a pen on a table. Things do not speak because language has no use for them. This book gives word to things, and therefore cannot exist». Despite this introduction, Felice Cimatti wrote the book at the end – with words, of course – tapping into the century-old debate of the «thing in itself», the Kantian Ding an sich, the object that «is» irrespective of human thought that verbalizes it, interprets it, gives it sense; all things that the «thing» does not contemplate. This ontology would require human beings to become things, to dehumanize themselves, which is Cimatti’s philosophical effort in this book: to speak about things and how they relate to each other, drawing from the vast amount of philosophical literature produced in centuries of human inquiries, but also from enlightening literary excerpts. And all this with a language that is far from academic, because to be a philosopher you do not need to sound vague and esoteric, but to be committed to thinking.

Felice Cimatti teaches Philosophy of Communication, Semiotic and Argumentation Theory, Theory of Mind and Contemporary Italian Philosophy at the University of Calabria. He is co-director of the «Rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio» [Philosophy of Language Italian Review], and is known to the public for being one of the hosts in the radio program Fahrenheit on Rai Radio 3. Among his most recent publications: Naturalmente comunisti. Politica, linguaggio ed economia [Natural communist. Politics, language and economy] (2011), Filosofia dell’animalità [Philosophy of animality] (2013), A come animale. Voci per un bestiario dei sentimenti [A for Animal. Headings for a bestiary of feelings] (2015), Il taglio. Linguaggio e pulsione di morte [The cut. Language and death drive] (2015). For Bollati Boringhieri he published La scimmia che parla. Linguaggio, autocoscienza e libertà nell’animale umano [The talking monkey. Language, self-awareness and freedom of the human animal] (2000) and Il senso della mente. Per una critica del cognitivismo [The sense of the mind. A critique on cognitivism (2004).