Costica Bradatan

The starting point of my essay is a paradoxical claim that the Spanish philosopher, poet and novelist Miguel de Unamuno makes—in his essay “Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho” —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” , 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

:Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. From Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc to Pasolini's Mamma Roma to Tarkovsky's Sacrifice to many of Ozu's films to Kar Wai Wong's In the Mood for Love or to Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus, to give just a few examples, sacrifice has nourished, informed and shaped filmmaking. Sacrifice is a fundamental human act, and cinema has always, in some way or another, danced around it. Yet that's not all. In a world like ours from which the gods have mostly withdrawn, but people haven't stopped feeling the need to believe, in an important sense film has taken over the myth-factory. It's on screen that the post-Christian grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Our contemporaries may no longer be church-goers, but they go to the movies religiously. And the sacrificial theme makes..