Lorenzo VINCIGUERRA

"Figures of the labyrinth in the philosophical literature of modernity. Games and stakes of a graphic archetype"

The rationalisms of the European classical age seem to have turned away radically from a topos of tradition, symbol of the human condition: the labyrinth and its image of the quest for meaning. The search for the method (methodos) and the novum organum, elected to new instruments of the constitution of the sciences, was done to the detriment of the very old idea of path (‘odos), way. The investigation we are conducting concerns the particularly philosophical literature of this period, where the reference (explicit or implicit) to the image of labyrinths and its avatars reveals the work of demarcation led by modernity vis-à-vis the tradition. The question of forgetfulness, even repression, of the labyrinthine model is itself symptomatic of a new ethos, of a new way of being in the world, which is beginning to impose itself in the West. That of a man donning the clothes of the « maître et possesseur » of a nature, from which he would have extracted himself on the path of emancipation through the mastery of science and technology. It will be in charge of this investigation to show how this Promethean program encounters resistance and that the labyrinthine scheme does not lose its relevance at the very moment when it seems to want to free itself from it.