to Western thought has been acclaimed by admirers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Benjamin. A variety of readings, moving between different disciplines and approaches – including film studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory – shed new light on Leopardi’s fascinating and at the same time epistemologically radical compound of poetic imagination and philosophical complexity. An advocate of an ultra-philosophy, which aims to negotiate the fracture opened in Western imagination by the irrecoverable loss of ancient «illusions», Leopardi’s thought seems more relevant than ever in the post-human era, offering an (un)timely meditation on desire, suffering, and imagination as the foundational features of humanity.

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