Massimo Cacciari 
Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political 
Essays on Dante

Among today’s Italian philosophers, Massimo Cacciari is perhaps the most assiduous commentator of Dante.
Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political collects all of Cacciari’s writings on Dante to this day, from his masterful analysis of St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s
Paradiso and Giotto’s frescoes to a new consideration of Dante’s ‘European’ idea of empire as a federation of nations, peoples, and languages. Cacciari does not force Dante into any philosophical straitjacket. Rather, he walks with Dante, takes notes, asks questions, raises issues, and tries to understand the
Divine Comedy in Dante’s terms. Cacciari approaches Dante’s Ulysses and the theologico-philosophical vertigo of
Paradiso not as a critic but from the point of view of a faithful, assiduous, perceptive, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes worshipful reader. Cacciari’s analysis shows once more that Dante does not belong to the past. Dante creates his own age and stays with us whenever we wish to follow his path.

Table of Content

Introduction: Nostalgia for the Empire, or Dante’s Metapolitics


Alessandro Carrera



1. Double Portrait: Saint Francis of Assisi in Dante and Giotto



2. The ‘Sin’ of Ulysses



3. Dante’s Divine Perception (
Aesthesis Theia)



4. The Concrete Ineffable: The Last Cantos of the
Commedia



5. Dante’s
Intellectual Love



6. Latin and Vernacular in the
De vulgari eloquentia



7. On Dante’s Political Theology



8. A Brief Note on the German Reception of Dante



9. Schelling’s Dante



Notes

Chapter Sources

Index

About the author

Massimo Cacciari is an Italian philosopher, politician, and public intellectual. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Italy. His many books include
The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology (translated by Edi Pucci).
Alessandro Carrera is Professor of Italian Studies and World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. His many books include
Fellini’s Eternal Rome: Paganism and Christianity in the Films of Federico Fellini.
Giorgio Mobili is a poet and translator and teaches Italian and Spanish at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of
Irritable Bodies and Postmodern Subjects in Pynchon, Puig, Volponi.