"Le conversazioni tradite: The Last Days of Immanuel Kant di Thomas De Quincey tra saggio e biografia"

The paper addresses Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant with the goal of underlining how the author constructed an image of the philosopher that transcends the strictly biographical facet at which the title clearly hints. The core assumption of this analysis is an acknowledgement of the essayistic nature of the text, in which the historical Kant is substituted by a personnage conceptuel. This label, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, clarifies how De Quincey’s Kant, far from representing a faithful avatar of the historical German philosopher (and of his doctrine), is the result a literary process whose aim is producing a literary embodiment of civil conversation. This multifaceted goal is achieved by De Quincey in a quite original manner, since his last essayistic memoir builds on an apologetic memoir that Kant’s last disciple, Christoph Wasianski,wrote just two decades before The Last Days was published.