«La favola più straordinaria che sia mai stata inventata». Alcune considerazioni sul significato del fantastico in E.T.A. Hoffmann

This paper investigates the philosophical vision underlying some of the works of the Romantic writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822), attempting to show how it is expressed in an exemplary way through the fairytale conception of the world, suspended between the horrific and the fantastic. A threefold movement is identified as proper to the Hoffmannian experience of reality: the estrangement of reality is for the protagonist the condition of the possibility of unveiling the fairy forces that lurk beneath the mundane textures of everyday reality; access to such an underworld inhabited by irrational forces can either lead to the loss of connection with the real world and the destruction of the individual, or allow a return to it in which the person and the world around him are transfigured and redeemed from the mortification to which the limited and intellectualistic understanding of reality condemns no less than visionary madness. In this way, Hoffmann’s vision is placed by right in the process of dismissing the principle of contradiction as the supreme principle in which the deepest meaning of transcendental philosophy consists.