Edition year:   2018
 Marketed by:   August 2018
 Pages:   218, Paperback
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 [...]  perhaps, one of the best philosophical essays in Italian of these first twenty years of the century. Indeed, more than strictu sensu philosophy, I would not hesitate to speak of metaphysics; and when you dare to bring up the "philosophia prima", the mind of those who love a certain type of literature cannot fail to run to an author - who has always been dear to me, en passant - such as Elémire Zolla from Turin, and in this case to his masterpiece of 1971, What is Tradition , and in more detail to the fourth chapter of the Second part, "What is Satanism", which, without fear of exaggeration, Philosophy of the devil can be easily compared, both for the intellectual value and quality of writing that for the topics addressed.  The start  it is a review, indeed a punctual (and pointed) replica of an old review of 1979, signed by the German Marxist Franz Fuhmann (1922-1984), of one of the fantastic short stories by Ernst TA Hoffmann, Ignazio Denner [1814]. From here, the author's gaze goes into the Hegelian background of Fuhmann himself to hazard a highly original critique of one of the best known (and discussed) "figures" of the Phenomenology of the spirit , the slave-master dialectic, which - thanks also to studies on the birth of the archaic societies of the French philosopher and anthropologist René Girard and on the intuitions of one of the main Catholic philosophers of the last century, Jacques Maritain - a theological twist is impressed which undermines the supposed logical-rational essence and unmasks, indeed , the speculative background impregnated with occultism, esotericism, ultimately Satanism, a very heavy cultural heritage destined to throw a more than sinister light on the nature of Nietzsche's will to power and whose roots would sink no less than in the rational primacy of the sacred and indisputable "cogito "Cartesian, on which the same Hegelian dialectic rests and, as is well known, the whole framework of the modern to post-Christian. The work, therefore, is explicitly placed along the lines - so much so that it can be considered an ideal sequel, but with a quid of further daring! - of the 2001 masterpiece signed by Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the hermetic tradition , which revolutionized the studies on the German philosopher, not only in the Anglo-Saxon world, but of which very little was talked about in Italy due to the strange political-cultural conditioning on which there is neither time nor space - nor, much less, the desire - to linger [...]
 
 ( Massimo Rodriguez )