Flower of the Desert

Antonio Negri, Timothy S. Murphy

Description

Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition—a uniquely Italian one—that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.
Translator’s Note and Acknowledgments
Translator’s Introduction: Leopardi and Us
Preface to the French Translation (2006)
Preface to the First Edition: The European Leopardi

1. The Catastrophe of Memory

Time of the Dialectic
Experimenting with the Infinite
The Critical Question

2. The Web of Sense

Solid Nothingness
Pain and Desire
Imagining

3. Poetics of True Being

Metaphysics of Morals
The Sense of True Being
Grasping Nothingness

4. Dialects of Illusion

Irony; or Concerning the Psyche
Deception; or Concerning Knowledge
Sarcasm; or Concerning Politics

5. A Lyric Machiavelli

The Event of Critique
Ethics as Foundation
Materialism and Poetry

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• My Last Duchess
• Italy
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 26 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438458489
• Langue: English

Extrait

Flower of the Desert
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
Flower of the Desert
Giacomo Leopardi’s Poetic Ontology
Antonio Negri
Translated by Timothy S. Murphy
Original Italian publications, Lenta Ginestra: Saggio su Leopardi
© 1987 SugarCo, © 2001 Mimesis
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Negri, Antonio, 1933-
[Lenta ginestra. English]
Flower of the desert : Giacomo Leopardi’s poetic ontology / Antonio Negri; translated by Timothy S. Murphy.
pages cm. – (SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5847-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5848-9 (e-book)
1. Leopardi, Giacomo, 1798–1837–Philosophy. I. Murphy, Timothy S., 1964-translator. II. Title. III. Title: Giacomo Leopardi’s poetic ontology. PQ4710.N3913 2015 851’.7—dc23 2014045876
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nina
Contents
Translator’s Note and Acknowledgements
Translator’s Introduction: Leopardi and Us
Preface to the French Translation (2006)
Preface to the First Edition: The European Leopardi
Chapter 1: The Catastrophe of Memory
Time of the Dialectic
Experimenting with the Infinite
The Critical Question
Chapter 2: The Web of Sense
Solid Nothingness
Pain and Desire
Imagining
Chapter 3: Poetics of True Being
Metaphysics of Morals
The Sense of True Being
Grasping Nothingness
Chapter 4: Dialects of Illusion
Irony; or Concerning the Psyche
Deception; or Concerning Knowledge
Sarcasm; or Concerning Politics
Chapter 5: A Lyric Machiavelli
The Event of Critique
Ethics as Foundation
Materialism and Poetry
Notes
Index of Leopardi’s Works
Index of Names and Terms
Translator’s Note and Acknowledgements
Throughout this book, Antonio Negri cites Giacomo Leopardi’s works from the Sansoni edition assembled by Walter Binni and Enrico Ghidetti, Tutte le opere (Florence, 1976), in two volumes. Volume 2 contains the Zibaldone and volume 1 contains all Leopardi’s other works. References to those volumes in the notes are abbreviated TO I and TO II , followed by page numbers. In addition, Negri cites Leopardi’s Canti in the critical edition by Emilio Peruzzi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981); references to this edition in the notes are abbreviated as Peruzzi, followed by page numbers.
Since no uniform English edition of Leopardi’s works yet exists, this translation draws upon the following versions of individual works (and often modifies them in order to conform more closely to the details of Negri’s interpretations):
• The Canti , translated by J.G. Nichols (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994) and abbreviated as Nichols.
• The Letters of Giacomo Leopardi 1817–1837 , selected and translated by Prue Shaw (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 1998) and abbreviated as Shaw; many of Leopardi’s letters are not included in Shaw’s translation and the notes reflect this.
• The Moral Essays (Operette morali) , translated by Patrick Creagh (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and abbreviated as Creagh.
• Pensieri , translated by W.S. Di Piero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) and abbreviated as Di Piero.
• The War of the Mice and the Crabs ( Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia ), translated by Ernesto G. Caserta (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976) and abbreviated as Caserta.
• Zibaldone , edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013) and abbreviated as Caesar/D’Intino. According to the conventions of Italian Leopardi scholarship, all references to the Zibaldone begin with the page numbers to Leopardi’s original manuscript, followed by the page numbers of TO II and Caesar/D’Intino.
Like all my translations, this one has taken a long time to complete, but the delay allowed me to benefit from the help of many friendly and capable people. First of all I would like to thank Toni Negri for his encouragement and support of this project and many others over the past twenty-four years. Linda Austin, Dan Cottom, Michael Hardt, and Martin Wallen read drafts of this translation, and their keen eyes saved me from many errors and embarrassments. I also owe a debt to the translators of the French edition of Lenta ginestra , Nathalie Gailius and Giorgio Passerone, whose work helped me to clarify Negri’s syntax in numerous places. Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, the editors of SUNY Press’s Contemporary Italian Philosophy series, remained enthusiastic about this book throughout the editorial and production processes; and Andrew Kenyon, the philosophy acquisitions editor, has been extraordinarily flexible and patient. As always, Juliana made sure that I had an ideal working environment (and that I kept at it even when the magnitude of the project daunted me), while Daisy and Emma made sure none of my reference books blew off my desk. Don’t blame any of them for whatever errors or embarrassments remain.
The present translation of “The European Leopardi” was originally published in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 33:1 (Spring 2000), pp.13–26. It is reprinted here, in revised form, by permission of the University of Oklahoma.
Translator’s Introduction
Leopardi and Us
When Antonio Negri was arrested in 1979 on spurious, politically motivated charges of masterminding the kidnapping and assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro and of “armed insurrection against the powers of the state,” his double career as a distinguished university professor and an intransigent political militant effectively came to an end. Although the University of Padua reluctantly kept him on the payroll for several years thereafter (at less than a third of his salary, which went to his family), and although the participants in Autonomia operaia [Workers’ Autonomy] and other militant groups continued to look to him for analysis and inspiration, his years of shuttling back and forth between the lecture hall and the factory gates were over. He was cut off from his comrades as well as his colleagues and students, despite the fact that many of them had been imprisoned along with him on similar charges. As his own pretrial period of detention stretched from weeks to months to years, and as the political movements in which he had participated were systematically decimated by state repression, he came to the sobering realization that his work and, indeed, his very life would need a new foundation. He sought that new foundation in the study of three disparate figures who had been important to him since youth. The first of these was Baruch Spinoza, to whom Negri dedicated his first year’s work while in prison; the result of that work is his celebrated book The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Ethics and Politics (1980, translated into English in 1991). The third was Job, from the Old Testament, whom Negri reads against the grain in The Labor of Job (1990, translated into English in 2009). The second was Giacomo Leopardi, whose materialist ontology Negri celebrates in Lenta ginestra (1987), the English translation of which you now hold in your hands.
Taken together, these three books constitute Negri’s credo, his attempt to construct a new conceptual and affective basis for thought and militancy in the wake of his prison experience. In explicating Spinoza’s radically immanent “second foundation” in the Ethics , Negri begins to construct his own second foundation, and he demonstrates its tremendous critical power by heretically confronting one of the central texts of orthodox Christianity, Job, in order to appropriate it as a parable of immanence, human labor, and resistance to hierarchical authority. Between those books lies Flower of the Desert: Giacomo Leopardi’s Poetic Ontology , which is in many ways the most challenging and personal of the three. 1 It is by far the longest—at over 180,000 words, it is only a few pages shorter than Negri’s longest solo work, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1992)—and it focuses on a writer who is best known as a poet and philologist, not as a metaphysician or political philosopher. Although Negri had rarely referred to Leopardi in his previous writings, the entry in his prison diary for March 26, 1983 explains his renewed fascination:
I spend the day studying. I am reading Leopardi. I have been working on him for a while now and he fascinates me. There are curious analogies between our personal situations—imprisonment in Recanati and the omnipresent wretchedness of the Italian provinces; also between our historical situations—the defeat of the revolution, the disaggregation and the lack in Italy of any centre of cultural production; and at the level of our metaphysical crisis—in solitude only the poetic voice makes it possible to live an ethical tragedy that is so fully under way; and all this constitutes itself into a desire for flight—this is the continuous dimension of Leopardi’s poetry. 2
A few months later, upon fleeing to France after being elected to the Italian parliament and released from prison, he contemplates publishing an edition of Leopardi’s writings. 3 That project never came to fruition, but the study begun in prison grew into a massive, passionate vindication of Leopardi’s