Metaphysics of the image: between shadows and signs in the teaching of philosophy for deaf students

Abstract

This article presents a teaching experience report regarding the instruction of Philosophy for Deaf students in the 1st grade of Bilingual High School, carried out at the Instituto Londrinense de Educação de Surdos (ILES). The central objective is to analyze how the approach to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave allows for a tensioning of the boundaries between abstraction and visuality, proposing the concept of a metaphysics of the image. The methodology, qualitative in nature and grounded in critical reflection on practice, analyzes a didactic sequence of eight sessions in which light and shadow projections served as apparatuses for the creation of terminology-signs in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language). The theoretical framework articulates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Gladis Perlin’s visual ontology, and Carlos Skliar’s critiques of logocentrism, while incorporating the Sartrean critique of the naive metaphysics of the image. The results indicate that, for the Deaf subject, the image does not operate as an illusory simulacrum (eikasia), but as an act of consciousness, an extension of the body proper, and a fundamental support for abstraction. The study concludes that teaching Philosophy in Deaf education requires an ontological translation that validates visual experience as a sovereign pathway to knowledge and intellectual sovereignty.