Costica Bradatan

The starting point of my essay is a paradoxical claim that the Spanish philosopher, poet and novelist Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) makes—in his essay “Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho” (1905)—that Don Quixote, Cervantes’ character, is more real and authentic than Miguel de Cervantes himself. Then, after discussing this claim and analyzing the implications of an ingenious literary device that Unamuno employed in his fiction “Niebla” (1914), I will sketch some of the possible philosophical consequences that Unamuno’s literary concepts might have on understanding the ultimate identity of the self, and of the nature of human condition in general. The paper is in three parts: 1) the first part is dedicated to discussing the above mentioned paradoxical claim in “Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho”; 2) the second part deals mainly with Chapter XXXI of Unamuno’s “Niebla”; and 3) in the final part I will deal with Unamuno’s insight that the relationship between the self and God is, properly speaking, of the same nature as the relationship between a literary author and the fictional beings he creates. In addition, I will be trying to place Unamuno’s insight within a broader context of history of ideas, and to point to some of its far-reaching philosophical implications.

Cinema has a long history of engaging with the theme of sacrifice. Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. It is on screen that the new grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Sacrifice can provide stories of loss and mourning, betrayal and redemption, death and renewal, destruction and re-creation, apocalypses and the birth of new worlds. The contributors to this volume are not just scholars of film but also students of religion and literature, philosophers, ethicists, and political scientists, thus offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between cinema and sacrifice. They explore how cinema engages with sacrifice in its many forms and under different guises, and examine how the filmic constructions, reconstructions and misconstructions of sacrifice affect society, including its sacrificial practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities.