Foreword

Bergson once proposed to distinguish between three types of concepts: rigid, malleable, and individual concepts. Rigid concepts are only suitable for the scientific knowledge of the world and its exploitation, but they do not allow us to grasp reality (in particular, its temporality). Malleable concepts are capable of transforming themselves, adapting to the objects to which they are applied, following an internal rule – just as mathematical functions allow us to describe different phenomena, discovering their common logic. Then there are individual concepts. These are valid for only one object, and like Borges’ map that almost coincides with the territory, it is difficult to say whether there is still a difference between concept and object. They are like the shadow of a thing, which becomes a paradigm of itself.

In 2025, we celebrate the first centenary of Deleuze’s birth (and the thirtieth anniversary of his death). And, as we know, Deleuze, among the French thinkers of the twentieth century, was certainly the most inclined (or the most skilled) to create concepts (and to reflect on the creation of concepts): the thinker-comet, the apprentice, the schizo, the body without organs, the searching heads… If we take up Bergson’s categories, it is evident that Deleuze’s concepts are certainly not rigid concepts. But one can ask whether they are malleable or individual concepts. And the question is all the more legitimate if we compare Deleuze’s legacy with that of Derrida and Foucault: the first, more inclined to figures than concepts; and the second engaged in inventing countless devices that are sometimes quite difficult to clarify in their real contents.

One could say that Deleuze’s concepts are first and foremost malleable concepts, and the masterful pages that Deleuze dedicates to the notion of expression in Leibniz and Spinoza validate his interest in the role of concepts as functions. But what perhaps keeps Deleuze alive, and what allows him to be safeguarded from the (permanent) temptation to transform his teaching into doctrines, is the individual character of his conceptual creations. In other words, Deleuze’s concepts have little that is abstract, and sometimes little that is truly shareable: it is the labor of his thought that is shown, and that shows, in becoming, how other thoughts can take their own path.

The essays collected by Cristina Zaltieri under the title Cristallo-Deleuze (a new concept, as individual as it could be!) that occupies the “Philosophical Question” of this issue is an excellent example of how Deleuze’s concepts work and what they produce. The explorations proposed by the various contributions, with themes ranging from aesthetics to logic, from philosophy of nature to literary criticism, show how Deleuze’s intuitions do not ask to be verified or extended but demand constant reinterpretation. Valid for the singular (philosophical) objects that have elicited them, Deleuze’s concepts call for further activations. The model of the crystal should not be misleading: it is not its transparency that counts, nor the refraction it exerts, but the coexistence of opacity and luminosity – a dense instrument, an “individual” concept that reveals inaccessible but inspiring brilliance.

For the “Laboratory” section, Andrea Lucchini’s text Nietzsche and the Plural Form of Thought highlights the fundamental role of Nietzsche’s stylistic choices, consistent with the aim of a profound detachment from the rationalistic tradition of Western thought. He adopts the allegorical form in line with Benjamin’s reflections on it, as expressive of an intrinsic divergence from the system of codes aligned with the concatenation of rigorously organized logical syntax. The fragment of the allegorical ideogram underlies and inaugurates clues of a new and pluralistic thought, understood as a denunciation of the co-implication between language and the repressive dynamics of human civilization, more generally between power and domination.

Fabiana Grazioli, in Style as a Constitutive Element of Experience, takes up the theme of style in general terms, highlighting its impact on the level of aesthetics understood not simply as philosophy of art, but as a field predisposed to a total experience of the immanent itself. Style denotes a horizon of meaning, allowing us to grasp the play of differences in the surrounding world to which we have access. The aesthetics of Dilthey, the phenomenology of perception of Merleau-Ponty, and the singularity of Deleuze are promoters and supporters of this. In the final part, the author hopes for an additional extension of stylistic virtualities in the digital field as an innovative potential to be tested in hybridations with technology.

The keyword around which the argumentative thread of Gianluca Viola’s Encountering the Other in the ‘Tout-Monde’ unfolds is chance, concerning the encounter with the Other in the historical events that have characterized the West. The author takes up and develops the four phases identified and illustrated by the Pole Ryszard Kapuscinski, from Greek antiquity to our contemporary era, in which an “explosion of the Other” connected to globalization and the effect of multiculturalism has taken place. The loss of the political and cultural centrality of the West induces uncertainty, ideological and planning disorientation. Here, the proposal is to remove the fear and dismay for the Other that are increasingly pervasive in public opinion, taking into consideration the chance to inaugurate a common globalized history founded on coexistence, sharing, and friendship.

On the theme of the environment, Matteo Andreozzi presents a rich variety of arguments to reflect on and open a dialogue in his contribution entitled The Legacy of Environmental Ethics. The stated goal is to create the theoretical conditions for a new paradigm of environmental ethics, starting from the observation that humanity, although rooted in the natural world, has progressively distanced itself from it throughout history, neglecting the intuition of the fundamental unity of the living. A humanist environmentalism dictated by “anthroposcopy” is proposed, that is, an examination of the natural environment conducted from within, as we are part of it. Values to be respected, limits to be observed, and alterity to be protected are derived from this, with the hope that the theoretical assumptions outlined for a new environmental ethics, inspired by a rebalancing of the relationship between humans and non-humans, will translate into coherent operational practices in the world we live in.

“Intersections” contains In the Footsteps of Benjamin: From the Kinderbuchsammlung to the Passages by Iosella Greco, who highlights – as rarely has been done so incisively – the extraordinary disposition to intersections of Walter Benjamin, a Marxist philosopher, but also a sociologist and literary critic. This is how he appears in the Passages, a restitution to us of a phantasmagorical Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, traversed by him through streets that are “the dwelling place of the collective,” with an inexhaustible curiosity of a flaneur, detective, and inveterate collector. Moving from Berlin Childhood to the Passages, as in the author’s title, proposes a significant trait of Benjamin’s personality. His writing is fragmentary, so composite as to recall the figures of a kaleidoscope, and unlimited: the Passages is a work of about 1200 pages that remained unfinished. In conclusion, the author quotes Klee’s angel, which Benjamin takes up, “dragged into the future, with open wings, by a paradisiacal storm: we call this storm progress.”

“Philosophical Practices” reports on an event presented by Antonio Sartori in his contribution The Museum of Philosophy: A Room That Becomes a Home, which tells about the exhibition on conspiracy theories at the State University of Milan. After a part on the usefulness and meaning of a museum of philosophy in Italy capable of involving a wider audience than the specialized one, the author accurately describes the organization and objectives of this exhibition, which focused on an interdisciplinary perspective on a problem like that of fake news, highly topical in the midst of factchecking and nudging, which finds a philosophical interdiction in the reference to the theme of truth. In conclusion, it is announced that the exhibition is a preamble to the inauguration in Milan of a museum of philosophy, open to universities and associations such as the Italian Philosophical Society, promoter of the last World Congress of Philosophy held in Rome in 2024 with the title “Philosophy across Boundaries” – a perspective that this event on conspiracy theories has adopted without reservation.

The issue concludes with the “Readings and Events” section, with a series of book reviews: Gianni Trimarchi on Il divenire della Bildung in Nietzsche e Spinoza by Cristina Zaltieri; Matteo Canevari on Pedagogie dell’esclusione Pedagogie dell’inclusione by Monica Ferrari e Matteo Morandi; Davide Gianetti on Selfie. Sentirsi nello sguardo dell’altro by Giovanni Stanghellini; Davide Bernini on L’égoïsme vertueux: Montaigne et la formation de l’ésprit libéral by Thierry Goutier; Manlio Forni on L’altra scommessa. Pascal, indagine sul pessimismo by Antonio Pascale; Danilo Di Matteo on Cybercapitalismo. Fine del legame sociale? by Emanuela Fornari.