Per una morfologia di cose e immagini: Siegfried Kracauer e Georg Simmel

Over the past two decades, thanks to the publication of several volumes of unknown texts, letters and various materials by Siegfried Kracauer, his critical and ambivalent relationship with Georg Simmel’s thought became finally more clear, in order to define his specific morphological approach to things and images. In particular, it is now available the entire monograph on Simmel that Kracauer had composed in 1919, then releasing only the introductory chapter. From it and from other contemporary texts one can sketch Kracauer’s vision of Simmel as capable of interpreting specific phenomena of the perceptual-sensitive sphere, an aesthetic and social sphere, obtaining the universal structures that appear in them, and as a modern, a metropolitan, a relativist, a pluralist, a doubter, a wanderer and a stranger. In the following years, Kracauer changed his mind and quickly consumed a deep disillusionment about the possibility to find an absolute foundation for ethics and knowledge. To the point that a recent work establishes that Simmel «is more than just Kracauer's companion in misfortune; he is his guiding spirit» (G. Gilloch). Kracauer made of the aspects enucleated from Simmel the terms for the elaboration of his own philosophical tools and, with others inspired by Simmel, contributed to research on some sort of philosophy of sensitive forms.