Don Chisciotte e la ferita della Modernità

Don Quixote, in addition to being a literary masterpiece, is also an inexhaustible epistemic reservoir that we need to draw on in order to understand what the relationship between imaginary and reality is made of and the peculiar way it is articulated in different eras, not only in Modernity. In this essay - from the perspective of Social Theory and the Social Change analysis - I will try to highlight how Cervantes' novel anticipates by many centuries what will be the most important epistemological (and aesthetic) acquisitions of the 20th century. Don Quixote is, from this point of view, a poetic treatise on the epistemology of complexity that reveals, in its folds, the mechanisms of functioning of complex systems and the paradoxes that are produced in them. After mentioning what makes this work unique in the cultural landscape of any age, I will therefore dwell on its great epistemic legacy. In addition to having made it possible to highlight the existence of multiple realities (Schütz, 2008), it consists in having created an immortal mimetic device that ostensibly illustrates the coessentiality and secret relationships between reality and the imaginary, anticipating the relational and systemic character of social reality and the risks that lurk in the inauspicious treatment of its complexity.