Sobre la luz como metáfora filosófica: la no-filosofía merleaupontyana y el cine documental de Patricio Guzmán

Abstract

As opposed to the metaphor that philosophy has used – to shed “light” (through pure rationality) on our reality – two contemporary thinkers, Merleau-Ponty and Didi-Huberman, consider that our contingent world can only be interpreted in terms of light and shadow. We will project these disquisitions on a contemporary artistic practice – an "outside" of philosophy, according to Merleau-Ponty – whose realization is, basically, a product of light: cinema. We will take the triptych work of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán (2010-2019) as a reference to argue that these films bring into play the dialectization of looking proposed by Didi-Huberman and that they maintain echoes of the gaze in Merleau-Ponty, confirming that philosophizing also unfolds in “non-philosophy” (that is, outside the canonical system and argumentation). Thus, it is not light as a substitute for the rational (a metaphor that operates in the philosophical tradition) that offers answers to the unknowns of our existence, but a more promiscuous (sensitive and provisional) luminosity that allows us – unlike a supposedly established truth – to search for new answers and even new questions. As it happens in Guzmán's films.