Lo sguardo e la conoscenza. Il detective ne "L’uomo della folla" e ne "I Delitti della Rue Morgue" di Edgar Allan Poe

By means of a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd and The Murders of the Rue Morgue, this paper reconstructs the figure of the detective, showing his centrality within the following sociological problems: (a) the relationship between metropolis and identity, an identity caught in its fragmentation and disintegration; (b) the implications of nervous life, a state which is associated with both the advent of technologies and the modern oscillations between sensitivity and insensitivity; (c) the functions and value assumed by the media, now understood as instruments of survival and as places of social bonding; d) the conflicts between talent and habituation, as well as between creativity and protocols, in a founding dialectic between distinction and uniformity; e) the methods and procedures of media knowledge, suspended between the dispersion of minutiae and the affirmation of successive states of consciousness.