The Carlo MichelstaedterEnigma
THE MICHELSTAEDTER ENIGMA
© Differentia: Review of Italian Thought 8-9 (Spring/Autumn, 1999), pp. 125-141
Source:
http://www.italian.ucla.edu/faculty/...lstaedter2.htm
If ever there was one who, in Nietzsche's words, was born posthumously it was Carlo Michelstaedter. And doubly so. The first posthumous birth was his natural one, which for a variety of reasons he experienced as a species of death. The second was a result of critical exhumations, resuscitations of his life and work in decades following his suicide in 1910. The latest chapter in this second coming began when Carlo's sister Paula died in 1972 and bequeathed his manuscripts and paintings to her son Carlo Winteler. He, in turn, donated them to the Biblioteca Civica di Gorizia, where an archive was established as the Fondo Michelstaedter. Two years later Professor Sergio Campailla took over the task of putting order into the works, and new editions of Michelstaedter's work began to be published by Adelphi Edizioni in Milan. Campailla himself went on to write three definitive studies of the multifarious artist. [i]
In the wake of the meticulous work of the Fondo Michelstaedter, now directed by Dr. Antonella Gallarotti, a question confronts those who work in the field of twentieth-century Italian. Is Michelstaedter a figure of singular artistic stature or just an interesting anomaly? Is he critical to our understanding of the early 20 th century or can we ignore his work with no significant loss? The enigmas embedded in the Michelstaedter phenomenon make these questions unavoidable. He is not simply an Italian, but a Jewish Italian, and at the same time a citizen of Austria-Hungary. He is as much of a painter and a poet as a philosopher. A great praiser of life, he is also perfect the most perfect nihilist in Western thought. As philosophers like Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile recognized already in the twenties, the extravagant dissertation Michelstaedter wrote for the Università degli Studi di Firenze— La persuasione e la rettorica , finished literally on the eve of his death at age twenty-three—is anything but systematic. [ii] It proposes an ideal for life, but makes it all but impossible to practice. Michelstaedter demands that action measure up to thought, but respects no thought that is not spontaneously prompted by action itself. He inveighs against the temptations of “rhetoric” in one of the most rhetorically thick pieces of writing in the Italian early 20 th century. Advocating independence of mind, he invokes the authority of classical sources. He sees existence as continuous change, but thinks real what is permanent and immobile. Insisting that knowledge can only be relative to the knower, he proceeds to postulate universal, metaphysical truths. Finally, despite his overweening contempt for language, he takes his words so seriously that he is willing to sacrifice everything for them, even his life.
It is Michelstaedter himself who makes us forego the distanced, protected response to textual matters which afford us a certain shelter. His categorical, moralizing descriptions of life force us to decide: either he is right or he is wrong. We cannot easily assimilate his views into our systems of knowledge. Scoffing at virtually everything people take for granted when not living intellectually, Michelstaedter forces us to consider whether we have a place for his radical positions in our pictures of the world. This, too, is why, at every junction, readers must directly confront the question of his contemporary relevance.
The recent wave of Michelstaedter readings has offerred its own answer to this question. It has shown (1) that Michelstaedter has acquired international stature and (2) that his thinking has been incorporated into a series of debates in contemporary philosophy. In the company of ten or so book-length studies that have followed Campailla's, [iii] three treatments in particular bring these two dimensions of the Michelstaedter rebirth into high relief: Daniela Bini's Carlo Michelstaedter and the Failure of Language , the articles published in the pages of Differentia by the philosopher Mario Perniola, and two essays by another eminent philosopher of Italy, Massimo Cacciari, in his French collection, DPAN . [iv] Daniela Bini's study is the most complete monograph on Michelstaedter to date, and the first in English, covering the full extent of his artistic achievements. Cacciari's and Perniola's studies then propose two exemplary ways in which Michelstaedter's thinking has been appropriated by contemporary philosophy. New interpretations of Michelstaedter will no doubt have to pass through these three recuperations. Here I would like only to initiate such a passage, and perhaps imagine some occasional byways.
In the face of the interpretive difficulties attending the work of Michelstaedter, Bini's sensitive readings come as a remarkable achievement, preserving unflinching aplomb in the face of his paradoxes, reading in the manner of an elegant narrative, recounting each twist and turn in Michelstaedter's artistic and spiritual development. Most importantly, perhaps, it engages in that type of intellectual contextualization which Michelstaedter requires of his audience, stressing intimate ties between his work and that of many towering figures of our theoretical tradition (Socrates and Plato, Heraclitus and Parmenides, Buddha and Christ, Leopardi and Pirandello). Bini's is probably the most balanced presentation of Michelstaedter in European context, clearly unravelling the difficult arguments of La persuasione e la rettorica and performing in-depth analyses of his poetry and visual art. In fact, Bini's study is a model for those who plan to engage in a detailed examination of Michelstaedter's artistic work. Both on the visual and the literary levels, it offers a consistently acute commentary to the numerous contributions of this "comet in the sky" of early twentieth century Italian art.
Bini affirms Michelstaedter's importance in no uncertain terms. She gives his philosophy eminent credit, likening it not only to his great pre-Socratic models, but also to two masters of our century, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. [v] She measures his drawings and paintings against those of the commanding expressionists, Oscar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Erich Heckel, and compares his poetry to that of Eugenio Montale. While these are precisely the figures in whose company Michelstaedter stylistically belongs, some readers may be nagged by the question: Is Michelstaedter quite this towering? How central is he to our artistic and philosophical tradition?
The concluding sentence of Bini's study answers this question by bringing Michelstaedter directly within the purview of issues that have occupied us for some time in literary studies—those of linguistic negativity and difference, addressed in various ways by a whole line of thinkers from Georges Bataille to Jacques Derrida, from Maurice Blanchot to Emmanuel Levinas. "It is not too farfetched to state," writes Bini, "that Blanchot's L'Ecriture du désastre and even Bataille's central idea of the insuperable différence of the negative had their conscious sacrificial victim in Carlo Michelstaedter" (p. 268). The dust cover of the book foregrounds that general connection, introducing Michelstaedter as "a forerunner of Blanchot, Bataille, and Derrida." Granted that these are the publisher's words and not the author's, it is still clear that Bini assimilates Michelstaedter into what has come to be called the twentieth-century critique of the logocentric tradition. And that is already something.
Michelstaedter's place in this critique seems to rely on the emphasis he places on the opposition between the key terms of his dissertation: persuasion and rhetoric. Persuasion, as Bini glosses it, is akin to the existentialist notion of authenticity. To be "persuaded" is to act in accordance with our being, to say and do what we inherently believe, to commit ourselves first and foremost to our deepest, most inalienable self. Rhetoric, on the other hand, encompasses a mass of practical and theoretical procedures, concessions, and delusions informing the greater part of our cognitive traffic—whether scientific faith in facts, the self-rationalizing ethics of business and pleasure, or just a trust that life can be properly reflected in concept.
What would seem to account for Michelstaedter's contemporaneity, if not postmodernity, is his vision of the simultaneous ubiquity and inadequacy of all subterfuges of rhetoric. Hope though we may to translate persuasion into principles or systems or practical suggestions, it is entirely off-limits to words—to rhetoric. Persuasion, writes Bini, is "not an intellectual category, but a moral category. It belongs to the realm of ethics, and it cannot be explained" (p. 33). And again, "The nature of persuasione is, in fact, its very unspeakability . . . it cannot be known but must be lived" (pp. 35-36). On the surface, then, Michelstaedter's recognition of the unspeakability of all foundational matters of life assimilates him to the company of many of the most interesting thinkers of our century. Even so, there is an important difference between Michelstaedter and some of these others. The Italian truly believed in the autonomy of this essential persuasion; others saw it as itself a function of rhetoric, a delusion invented by words.
This raises the question of whether Michelstaedter's elusive and apparently inexpressible idea of persuasion names anything different from the topic of philosophy and religion since time immemorial (the true nature of being, authentic morality, the real and not apparent order of things). Whether called truth or persuasion or the Absolute, whether reserved for the hero, the seer, the saint, or the angel, it seems to have been theorized from the very beginnings of the West. Michelstaedter himself speaks of it with vatic insistence, sometimes even suggesting that the sole hope for human salvation is to keep conveying this message. The hero of persuasion thus speaks to people "in the voice of their own pain, a voice distant to them ." [vi] Each word of the persuaded hero "is luminous" and "creates the presence of that which is distant" (PR, p. 88).
From Parmenides to Henri Bergson the dream has been one and the same: a non-rhetorical world of meaning, identity, and being. If this is logocentrism, then Michelstaedter is its most committed proponent in the last hundred years. Nothing, in this sense, could be further from the deconstruction of the linguistic metaphysics which marks our era. Michelstaedter's resolution, in the words quoted by Bini, is "to give back to words their original meanings" (p. 20). If Christ and Socrates offer models of persuasion, it is partially, Bini explains, because "they alone did not entrust their thought to the written word" (p. 20).
The ideal of persuasion does not grow more persuasive when linked to Wittgenstein and other theorists of the unsayable; it does not become more vibrant when identified with organic vitality. Radically different from the modes by which life typically requests that we operate, notes Bini, "persuasion seems not to belong to men" (p. 24). Even so, it is men who have devised the notion, and in countless articulated forms, some sacrificing their lives to it, [vii] others arguing that it can be achieved in a speechless purity of passionate, spontaneous action. Michelstaedter even appears to suggest that persuasion might have been more the rule than the exception before philosophers like Plato chose to separate theory from practice (Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have located the fateful date much earlier). Michelstaedter's Socrates stands precisely for an example of how such persuasion can belong to men. And this, comments Bini, is because "Socrates' theoretical and ethical goals coincide; his life was the enactment of his theory. He was a real persuaso " (p. 26).
Today, after decades of phenomenological thinking (inaugurated in the very years in which Michelstaedter was writing his dissertation) one wonders whether the distinction between theory and practice is the most useful way to understand the structure of human experience. Now it appears more likely that practice is always motivated by theory in some way or other—always dependent on a manner of vision, on intention and purpose, even in animals. Theory, too, appears always geared to some sort of practice. If anything, one of the pressing tasks of the century seems to have been that of embracing the connection between the terms, inventing a new way of conceiving of the complexities of human behavior outside of the issue of unity or separation.
Even assuming that this spontaneous, undifferentiated fusion of theory and practice is occasionally mercifully accorded to experience (in ecstasy, savagery, and Zen), the problems still linger. To what extent does it make sense to extrapolate from such an experience of unity, as Michelstaedter does, a "one," fundamental state of being underlying the two-ness, three-ness, and thousandfold variety of more widespread experience? (Something like this question led a thinker truly inclined to mysticism, Martin Buber, to abandon the early monistic metaphysics of his Daniel , 1913, for the dialogical historicity of I and Thou , 1923.) Besides, when philosophers and moralists have called for a correspondence between theory and practice they have usually had in mind the capitulation of one to the other (more specifically, of practice to theory). Noble as the intention may sometimes be, one would also like to see the operation moving for once in the opposite direction (making theory answer to practice). Here Michelstaedter remains regrettably on the far side of the fence.
Understood as ethical authenticity, persuasion has difficulty disengaging itself not only from the idea of theoretical truth (the intuited or experienced true nature of being) but also from the idea of a free-standing subject. The authentic, autonomous person to whom Michelstaedter advises us to conform our behavior is more like a fiction abstracted from all the contingencies constitutive of selfhood: cultural tradition and prejudice, learning and historical fortune, winding existential ways, the instabilities of care, emotion, and fear. Michelstaedter condemns all of these components of identity as rhetorical layovers, whisking his hero away into the ethereal zones of divine self-standing: The persuaded self is one who "must create himself and the world, which does not exist before him: he must be master and not slave in his house" (PR, p. 73). And this belief in authentic self-making is another reason why Michelstaedter is not as deconstructive as he seems. He never accepted the "ambivalence" (p. 21) of that historical rhetoric in which experience is always caught, that hermeneutical reading and writing of life which is complicitous with—if not responsible for—every human ideal. If he had truly accepted the ambivalence of rhetoric, as Bini claims, the story she recounts would not hold as well as it does.
To be sure, the story is a compelling one, beginning with Michelstaedter the philosopher and ending with the poet and artist. In writing La persuasione e la rettorica , Michelstaedter runs up against a paradox that he cannot escape without abandoning his vehicle of communication. Conceptual reason can never bridge its distance from the absolute it strives to articulate. This paradox revalorizes Michelstaedter's work in poetry and drawing, those activities which have generally been considered of secondary importance to his thinking. Bini instead sees them, and not the dissertation, as the genres in which Michelstaedter invested his greatest resources. We know, for example, that the concepts of philosophy struck him as "dead bodies without souls" (p. 10). Poetry, on the other hand, may have extended him the promise of a "synthetic image; the image that does not explain, but evokes; the image that does not claim the assent of theoretical reason, but hopes for that of the feelings, through which truth can often speak with a more effective voice" (p. 10). At the end of Michelstaedter's trajectory—away from the sterility of language—lie his portraits of living individuals. It was in these hundreds of sketches, writes Bini, "that Michelstaedter was to find his authentic form of expression, the means by which he could finally defeat rettorica . With pencil or black chalk, the simplest of tools, he could try to catch the fleeting spark of the soul and with rapid strokes fix it on paper" (p. 10). The culminating chapter of Bini's book is called "The Authenticity of Drawing." It divulges Michelstaedter's work in a genre where "between the subject portrayed and the beholder there is no longer any rhetorical mediation" (p. 10).
Here too a deconstructive sensibility might want to ask: If the division between signs and meanings is as absolute as Michelstaedter claims it is, does it not mark drawing as well? Doesn't a visual representation give us only the body of a person, not the soul (or the image of a body, the projection, as it were, of one "I" on another)? If Michelstaedter had fully believed in the ambivalence of rhetoric he might have had no ground for privileging drawing over writing, for both operate equally under the sway of the sign—revealing and hiding at once. That "communication from within" (p. 216) at which expressionist portraitists aimed is as impossible to achieve in drawing as in philosophy.
Nevertheless Bini is right about Michelstaedter's interest in human sketches. Portraits try to lay hands on the living core of an individual in a way that philosophy generally does not. It is also true that an artistic arrangement of signs can overcome stereotyped associations of those signs, especially as these associations accrue to the semantics of speech. But the real question may be, how committed was Michelstaedter to exploring such arrangements? His poetry is not Dino Campana's or Giuseppe Ungaretti's, not visionary or hermetic. It is conceptual and cerebral, often rawly allegorical, articulated in much the same rhetoric as his philosophy:
Io son solo, lontano, io son diverso--
altro sole, altro vento e più superbo
volo per altri cieli è la mia vita . . .
Ma ora qui che aspetto, e la mia vita
perché non vive, perché non avviene?
Che è questa luce, che è questo calore,
questo ronzar confuso, questa terra,
questo cielo che incombe? M'è straniero
l'aspetto d'ogni cosa, m'è nemica
questa natura! basta! voglio uscire
da questa trama d'incubi! la vita!
la mia vita! il mio sole! [viii]
While these may not be his most successful lines, we find that Michelstaedter's poetry as a whole rarely embodies persuasion (as art presumably would, in a classical unity of form and content); it speaks around it—and less persuasively, I believe, than does his prose.
And what of the idea that truth might speak more effectively in poetry, because there it appeals to the feelings rather than reason? How? If the entire polemic of La persuasione e la rettorica is directed against the irrationality and cowardice of feeling! Even Bini tends to agree with Campailla that Michelstaedter committed suicide precisely because he was unable to tolerate the autonomy of his feelings (especially wrath, resentment, and guilt). One can even imagine a scenario in which the chronologically last Michelstaedter—the Michelstaedter of La persuasione , who focused his readings on the Gospels, Tolstoy, and a handful of moral, theoretical texts—argues that poetry is a spiritually immature form of expression, a language of emotional plaint rather than of firm and stable conviction.
Similar considerations can be applied to his drawings. The vast majority of them are caricatures —attacks on stereotypes, not positive, alternative visions. Instead of a coincidence of form and content, they represent a schism (a procedure Bini eloquently glosses by reference to Pirandello's umorismo , psychoanalytic theory, and the formal distortions of expressionistic art). The suspicion remains that, up to the end, Michelstaedter never succeeded in liberating his art and his poetry from the conceptual deadlock of persuasion and rhetoric—which did, however, grow eloquent in La persuasione . He never succeeded in persuading himself of the persuasive power of various forms of rhetoric.
This brings us to another question that no discussion of Michelstaedter seems able to avoid, namely, the outcome of Michelstaedter's spiritual journey, crowned by suicide. On the one hand Bini notes that a literal commitment to persuasion can only be deadly. Michelstaedter "knows that to make himself an absolute being is to negate himself as a finite being, that to make himself an eternal being is to negate himself as becoming. Michelstaedter's suicide seems at this point to have been a coherent and logical consequence" (p. 39-40). On the other hand she is not willing to read his death as an essentially philosophical gesture. She, one of the few people aware of the torments by which Michelstaedter's mind was racked, interprets his suicide as probably a admission that he was unable to live up to his ideal of existential unity. Thus she takes issue with that other, pervasive reading of his suicide as a logical exemplification of that same ideal, or as a symptom of the nihilism inherent in it (in the notion of persuasion). To believe in such a unity of theory and act, writes Bini, is only "to fall prey to the systematic fallacy that mocks postmodernists" (p. 259): the assumption that since Michelstaedter insisted on an absolute coherence of theory and practice he must also have enacted that coherence in his own experience. While the objection is well taken, why we should want to deny Michelstaedter such coherence at the one moment when he made the most absolute decision of his life? In one sense suicide is always an admission that practice (life) is not conforming to theory; the difference in Michelstaedter's case is that his own theories left him no space in which to pursue such a match. Considering persuasion something that practice could never live up to (and allowing for no other value in life) Michelstaedter foreclosed his possibilities. In this sense his suicide was plainly occasioned by philosophy (irrespective of what other, concrete reasons might also have accompanied it, such as a quarrel with his mother the morning of the act, or a lethal disease from which he may have been suffering). In short, it is impossible to divorce Michelstaedter's suicide from the negative judgments he passes on life at every turn. "There is no need," as he writes in La persuasione , "to continue a life which, wanting in everything, is revealed not to be life " (p. 70).
What would it have taken for Michelstaedter to continue to live? Had he not chosen to believe that the Absolute and the Eternal and the True were the stuff of which life must be made, the intolerable contradictions of experience would certainly have dissolved—and along with them perhaps also the suicidal temptation. Short of this, however, Michelstaedter would have had to find a way to valorize the failure of rhetoric , the rhetorical failure of existence itself. Bini suggests that silence was the inevitable consequence of his philosophical battle. And silence is a stand-in for death. However, one could just as well claim that only there, where silence and death are the only response to the absurdity of experience, do art and life begin. Only there does one take on limitless responsibility for shaping meaning, for actualizing a relatively persuasive form of life. To continue to live Michelstaedter would have had to cease railing directly against language, convention, and interpretation. He would have had to shift more of his energy into the production of art. His talents were so exceptional that he would have found remarkable ways to make his painting, poetry, and philosophy transcend the phantoms by which they were haunted—to coerce these idioms, as it were, into a new type of vitality. Where negativity, duplicity, and rhetoric are prime movers in the demand for the fullnes of meaning and life, creativity accepts its greatest challenge. Adriano Tilgher recognized something of this in his review of La persuasione in La Stampa , 23 December, 1922, p. 3.
What emerges from Daniela Bini's study of the entire gambit of Michelstaedter's work is a sense that the importance of Michelstaedter's thinking ultimately hinges on how persuasive we find his Hauptbegriff —the moral and intellectual ideal of persuasion. In an age where, to borrow Mario Perniola's sardonic words, "everything seems to be reduced . . . to the daily tactical ministering of the spheres of feelings, interest, and ideas which appear to be obvious," it is more difficult than it once was to respond seriously to discourse about truth and unyielding commitment. [ix] We have become pragmatic through and through, cultivating only experiences and techniques we know to work . We humor only ideas we can translate into palpable results (the very opposite of the direction in which Michelstaedter travels). It is in this type of setting that Perniola prescribes Michelstaedter as a curative. To do so, he too must rethink the significance of persuasion.
For Perniola persuasion is not a condition in which the self becomes what it most inalienably is—and theorefore immune to the allure of rhetorical deceits. Persuasion is essentially amor fati , love of fate:
In Greek, persuade, or convince, is peítho . Originally the root peith - was only intransitive: it did not mean to convince someone, but to have trust, or to trust someone. The transitive use of the verb does not belong to the ancient Greek and represents a later change.
The fundamental meaning of persuasion is trust. To be persuaded thus means to have great trust, to be or remain in a state of trust. (5: 27-28)
Trust is not at all equivalent to the futural, messianic orientation of "faith"; it is a bearing toward "something already given, something present," a condition of a person "who feels safe because he can rely on a solid reality" (5: 28).
This vision of persuasion sidesteps the tragic implications that Bini so carefully ferrets out from its textual descriptions. Gone are the speechless dilemmas, the beckoning of death, the self-immolation of Michelstaedter's persuaded heroes. And this is primarily because Perniola is interested in Michelstaedter as a model for a new type of project, one radically different from the two at stake in modernism vs. postmodernism, idealism vs. pragmatism, the sixties vs. the eighties of the twentieth century.
The sixties and early seventies, claims Perniola, were modernist in style: militant, revolutionary, and intent on the future, protesting the present in deference to social and political ideals. The eighties, by contrast, were postmodernist: passéistes , dispassionately immersed in what has historically come to pass, disillusioned or entertained as the case may be. The postmodernism of the eighties, writes Perniola, "oozes with boredom. This total acquiesence and consent to universal inconsistencies, and this state of misery, when it comes to emotions and feelings," generates only flatness, emanating intellectual pretensions which somersault "in every direction" (3-4: 42). Emerging from this postmodernist period, we may finally be able to grasp the "vitality and fecundity" of Michelstaedter's thinking for the nineties. Very simply, it consists in his call for a "strong feeling" for the present—what neither the sixties nor the eighties respected. It offers an alternative to activism and passivism alike, both equally evasive. In Michelstaedter's idea of passionate commitment to what actually is at any moment, as all there is, of trust in the phenomena composing historical presence, lies the "point of departure of a new cultural tendency" (3-4: 41).
What is implied by this strong feeling for the present? To begin with, an overcoming of obnoxious, self-assertive subjectivity (though not in the manner of "sentimental Postmodern softness," 3-4: 43). Perniola is almost alone in making an issue of Michelstaedter's critique of vitalistic subjectivity—or the notion that human motivation can be anchored in needs, desires, or lust for power. If subjectivism means acting in accordance with some form of this psychological or biological substratum (including the primal, Cartesian consciousness of the "thinking I"), then Perniola is right: Michelstaedter is not a subjectivist. He wants people to be absorbed in things. "Persuasion," he writes, is "wanting to possess oneself in the things and in the things oneself" (qtd, 3-4: 44, though the original is slightly different: "veder oggettivamente . . . è l'estrema coscienza di chi è uno colle cose, ha in sé tutte le cose: . . . il persuaso : il dio," PR, p. 123). This externalized type of identity gives rise to a new immediacy of being, both phenomenologically and temporally, experienced humbly in listening to "that which emerges from the present, to that which is coming ( sopraggiunge ) hic et nunc , and to that which is manifested in things" (3-4: 43).
This non-subjective feeling for temporal, phenomenological presence issues into new types of commitment. One enters the "age of the thing" which ensues the postmodern "age of the image" and becomes a "high profile intellectual" (3-4: 47). Strong feeling issues into strong writing. In the nineties, strong writers replace both the weak writers of the eighties and the maîtres à penser of the sixties. Not authors or intellectuals in the classical sense, they are gatherers of traces, bearing witness to experience not in just authorial forms but non-authorial ones (iconographic documentations, the intellectual's library, tomb, and so on). In essence, a high-profile intellectual is not a subject at all but "a thing, " entering into "direct contact . . . between thought and the world of history" (3-4: 46, 49). Silencing all "inordinate affections," desires, and opinions, this new type of thinker may even be more of a reader than a writer, making "him/herself into the single conduit of phenomena, their place of transit, their gateway to phenomena which surprise, upset, and amaze us, which constantly present themselves in an unexpected and unpredictable way" (3-4: 49).
The time for such non-subjective intellectuals has long come. Yet, it is unclear how much sustenance they can find in Michelstaedter's example. He admittedly advocates valuing the exclusive reality of single instants of experience, but as for whether there is any experience left to such instants, or whether he values the phenomena they make present—this is another story. Michelstaedter radically rejects the worth of what we ordinarily think of as constituting experience: the temporal progression of things, their perishing and changing, their foot in the past and their stride to the future. While he seems to recommend viewing every occurence as happening "once and once only," there is in his work, no love of experience which supports an analogous stance in Rilke or Nietzsche, no verbal or visual celebrations of the wonders of unrepeatable presence. In fact, one can hardly imagine a more widespread condemnation of life as it appears (as it comes to presence on the human and organic level) than we find in this fiery antagonist of desire and need, of affection and adaptation, of dependence and insecurity. [x] In Michelstaedter's view, e verything for which humans ordinarily live amounts to nothing. Moreover, all of this nothing—which obsesses rhetorical consciousness--is a cowardly compensation for the dread of the nothing which truly is at any moment of time. To commit to the present in the manner of Michelstaedter's persuasion is thus also to commit to nothing. The nihilism which could have yielded amor fati is closer to amor vacui .
Even the apparent non-subjectivism of this presential feeling runs into problems in Michelstaedter's text, seeming more of a promise than a position his words decisively take. Though persuasion means having "nel possesso del mondo il possesso di sé stesso" (PR, p. 82), the emphasis remains much more strongly on the self than the world. A persuaded person, writes Michelstaedter, "cannot affirm himself in the affirmation of those [needs] which are given to him . . . by a contingency external and prior to him . . . he is alone in the desert , and must create everything on his own: god and country and family and water and bread" (PR, p. 70). Could it be that the goal of persuasion is a type of subjectivity after all, aiming "to affirm the person who carries reason within him, to comunicate individual value " (PR, p. 85)? Life must consist in "creating everything by oneself [ da sé , which also means "out of oneself"], not adapting to any way . . . you have to create each thing: in order to have your life as your own. . . . Christ saved himself because out of his own mortal life he was able to create the god: the individual" (PR, p. 103-04).
While Perniola's strong, non-subjective feeling creates the presence of what is "foreign, other, different" (3-4: 44), in Michelstaedter this otherness is entirely generated out of the one, selfsame self, now dilated to encompass the entire universe (a universe not composed of differences, but a limitless expanse of universal estrangement, in which all cows and cats are black). The "disappearance of the subject" is thus also at bottom a "possession of oneself" (3-4: 44, 46)—oneself as a type of absolute spirit. This new philosophy of presence now appears to have more in common with the visions of saints and ascetics than with empirical love. If anything, as Bini has noted, Michelstaedter's sympathies are deeply Buddhistic (pp.124-25, 245-28).
Perniola's reading of Michelstaedter is radically different from the truisms we have grown accustomed to hearing. His ethics of presence presupposes "the image of a full world, of a pléroma , in which everything which is important is available." It celebrates an aesthetic conviction quite different from the indifferent dispersion of postmodern attention. Strong feeling stands in Perniola's view "at the opposite pole of negative thought and the various forms which it has recently adopted: the crisis of reason, nihilism, weak thought, and so forth" (3-4: 48). How then can we place Perniola's Michelstaedter back to back with the view presented by the very figure alluded to in the phrases "negative thought" and the "crisis of reason"—namely, Massimo Cacciari? We can do so, I believe, if we tie the positivity of Michelstaedter's ethic more closely to the negativity of his metaphysics. In his second essay for Differentia Perniola makes this negativity more explicit than in the first. There he characterizes persuasion as a paradoxical convergence of movement and immobility. In the "radical extraneousness [of experience] from which it is impossible to escape," the persuaded self does indeed aspire to absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency (5: 27). The "liveliness and exteriority" of persuasion thus becomes intimately tied to a descent into the abyss of one's innate insufficiency. And the self-energizing process of "becoming a flame" is ineluctably a "becoming stone," articulating "an admirable synthesis of sensitivity and coldness" (5: 29).
The enigma of Michelstaedter in Perniola becomes Massimo Cacciari's aporia. One of our time's most single-minded philosophers of the absolute (where the absolute is understood as the impossible object of philosophy and religion, the shapeless, unspeakable goal of all linguistic efforts), Cacciari finds in Michelstaedter the same battle that is most deeply played out in the Habsburg culture to which the young philosopher belonged. [xi] With Cacciari we are closer to Bini's reading of Michelstaedter than Perniola's, though in truth on the far side of it. Here the opposition between, let us say, the one true way of persuasion and the many ways of discursive deception is so radical that the very idea of unifying theory and practice becomes unthinkable. Persuasion is not only para-doxical, it is also parà - physin , writes Cacciari in the second of his two Michelstaedter essays. [xii] Socrates, the persuaded one, is "atopos"; what he says "cannot take root " (p. 102). An insuperable difference is built into the duplicity of peithò : a divine peithò on the one hand and the oscillating peithò of mortals on the other, ineluctably governed by the built-in requirements of social and political interaction (p. 98). For Cacciari, Michelstaedter severs the two voices of peithò in primordial fashion. No longer can there be any question of actualizing persuasion in feeling or unified action. Operari and the True Way, work and health are thoroughly incommensurable. In truth, what a person reaches in persuasion is nothing less than the immanent desert of the soul, or the silence of the ground of the soul. "He wants to be autarkès . . . he knows no Other to whom to address himself" (p. 108).
Persuasion thus takes up its place in the history of that tragic spirituality which runs from Aeschlyus' Agamemnon to the absurd Christianity of Kierkegaard. Indeed, La persuasione appears as a unique effort to reconcile pagan trust with Christian faith, peithò with pistis (p. 107). Here Christ is far from a model for practicing what one preaches. Michelstaedter's Christianity is rather contained in the superhuman nature of the love it proposes, in the maniacal courage of the freedom it urges. "The Christian God does not contradict life, but requires an im-possible True Life" (p. 109). And Michelstaedter's aporia is finally that of "having to want the true Way, being able only to want it, and not being able to have it while wanting it" (p. 110).
In Cacciari's radical rhetoric—curiously appropriate to the fundamentality of the contradictions with which Michelstaedter is concerned—lies a final, essential perception. The bind, or aporia, of the will to persuasion is the experience of persuasion. The only enactment of persuasion lies in embracing its own impossibility. Cacciari sees this more clearly than others, perhaps even more clearly than Michelstaedter himself. To be persuaded is knowingly and willingly to suffer the impossibility of that same condition. It is neither to dismiss the persuasive ideal as irrelevant to the pragmatic operations of the world, nor to encapsulate it in a religious or philosophical theory. Rather, it is to show the dream in all its ineffability, to keep it sacrosanct, to allow it to mark the limits of all knowledge and intuition—in short, to voice its silence. This is the "most ancient" persuasion of life, around which words incessantly turn.
True life has nothing to do with some Beyond that reason cannot attain; "true life, its perfection, is the accomplishment of this life : the impossible perfect satisfaction of its erga —to which no method can lead. Persuasion is the silence and peace of these words --and it reveals itself in them as the uncapturable 'dià logon'" (p. 110). In still another way, persuaded life lies outside all abstract alternatives to the "sick" life of pain, desire, and need; it consists in "the concidence in process between a person's existence and a radical endurance of the pain connected to this existence. The present of persuasion means being en energhia in pain, not beyond it" (p. 82).
Perniola and Cacciari do not disagree in viewing persuasion as an existential response to the perfect imperfection of the historical present. Nor does Bini. If anything, they all disagree about how to understand this present. Perniola emphasizes its phenomenal coming-into-being in an infinitely differentiated flow of autonomous things and appearances. Cacciari places the emphasis on what has been called the ontological difference involved in such presence: the unthinkable gap between its being and its becoming, its essence and its appearance, each implied by the other but never reducible to it—a gap making all great joy simultaneously pain. Or perhaps, since Perniola and Cacciari both subscribe to the general lines of a Heideggerian ontology, the real difference lies in what to make of this inherently duplicitous presence. Perniola envisions an ethical response of strong participation. [xiii] Cacciari is primarily concerned with what the presence inspires theoretically, before ethics can even be addressed.
For Cacciari every expression of persuasion is antinomian, where nomos is the law, the rule, the doxa to which meanings are typically reduced. What is "unauthentic," in other words, is not a particular use of language but language's very constitution (p. 72). The closest it can come to authenticity is to speak from the arena of its immanent futility. And this suggests that the most striking expression of the aporia (profusely revealed by the expressionist art of Michelstaedter's time) is what he may have sensed but found intolerable—namely, the recognition that the greatest closeness to meaning depends on the greatest rhetorical distance. The keeper of language does not order silence, but asks to be taken by the hair, inciting a war in the arena of form, a stretching and distorting of all common words.
When Virginia Woolf wrote that "in or about December, 1910, human character changed," she had something like this in mind. [xiv] She did not mean that human nature had become different, but that a particular manner of representing it had broken down. Like Michelstaedter, the writers of the first decade of the century were left facing a "Mrs. Brown without any method of conveying her to the reader" (p. 332). They could not start, in their novels, by describing a house "in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there," p. 332).
This era's expressionist suspicion that the essence of Mrs. Brown cannot be depicted by a rhetoric of material or existential conditions explains all the "breaking and falling, crashing and destruction" that accompanies the efforts of new artists to rescue such a person from her material and linguistic entrapment (p. 334). [xv] When considering the art of the beginning of the century, Woolf advises, "we must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition." Mrs. Brown, in other words, will appear "a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her." And, in the proximity of this salvaging operation, it is above all "the sound of their axes that we hear" (pp. 335-36).
This is the era of expressionist art which is given consummate expression in the tensions of Michelstaedter's dissertation, and which—who knows—may even hint at a time when such tensions would not have to prove suicidal. Few artists make the sound of the axes as alarming as Michelstaedter—in his conceptual dilemmas, in those drawings to which Bini has drawn our attention, in the contortions of a style he forged in prose. Among the lessons to be learned from the Michelstaedter interpretations of Bini, Perniola, and Cacciari the most important may be this: that only in a revaluation of rhetoric can the soul find its silent persuasion.
[i] On the history of the Michelstaedter Foundation, see the pamphlet by Antonella Gallarotti, Il Fondo Michelstaedter della Biblioteca Civica (Gorizia: Dispensa dell'Università della Terza Età, 1990). On the Foundation's holdings, see Gallarotti, "Ricordare attraverso la carta: Carlo Michelstaedter," La speranza: Attraverso l'ebraismo goriziano , Catalogue of the exhibition in Gorizia, 7 July - 20 October, 1991 (Monfalcone, Italy: Edizioni della Laguna, 1991), pp. 87-104. The editions of Michelstaedter's writing that have been published by Adelphi Edizione in Milan, all edited by Sergio Campailla and, except for one, in inexpensive paperbacks, are La persuasione e la rettorica (1982), Epistolario (1983), Poesie (1987), and Il dialogo della salute e altri dialoghi (1988). Sergio Campailla's studies include Pensiero e poesia di Carlo Michelstaedter (Bologna: Pàtron, 1973), A ferri corti con la vita (Gorizia: Arti grafiche Campestrini, 1974), Scrittori giuliani (Bologna: Pàtron, 1980).
Before Campailla, to be sure, a number of excellent studies of La persuasione had already seen the light. Alfredo Giuliani, the novissimo , had done his thesis on Michelstaedter in 1949 (Rome). Books had been written by Cerruti and others in the fifties and sixties. Michelstaedter's schoolmates Gaetano Chiavacci and Arangio-Ruiz had brought him to the attention of Italian philosophers and writers already in the twenties. For a complete bibliography of Michelstaedter criticism up to 1986, see Francesco Muzzioli, Michelstaedter (Lecce: Milella, 1987), pp. 75-194.
To date, the most ample collection of Michelstaedter's writings remains Opere , ed. Giovanni Chiavacci (Florence: Sansoni, 1958). A splendid catalogue of Michelstaedter's complete drawings and paintings, recently edited by Antonella Gallarotti, as L'immagine irragiungibile: Dipinti e disegni di Carlo Michelstaedter (Monfalcone: Edizioni della Laguna, 1992).
[ii] Giovanni Gentile's review of La persuasione e la rettorica appears in La Critica 20 (1922): 332-36. For Croce's review see the bibliography by Muzzioli cited above.
[iii] In order of publication, the main studies since 1980 are: Cristina Benussi, Negazione e integrazione nella dialettica di Carlo Michelstaedter (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1980); Claudio La Rocca, Nichilismo e retorica: Il pensiero di Carlo Michelstaedter (Pisa: ETS, 1983); Piero Pieri, La differenza ebraica: Ebraismo e grecità in Michelstaedter (Bologna: Cappelli, 1984); Giorgio Brianese, L'arco e il destino: Interpretazione di Michelstaedter (Padova: Francisci, 1985); Francesco Fratta, Il dovere dell'essere: Critica della metafisica e istanza etica in Carlo Michelstaedter (Milan: UNICOPLI, 1986); Piero Pieri, Saggio su Carlo Michelstaedter (Bologna: Cappelli, 1989). One might also note the interesting novel by Claudio Magris on Enrico Mreule, Michelstaedter's best friend from Gorizia, called Un altro mare (Milan: Garzanti, 1991).
[iv] Daniela Bini's book was published in Gainesville by the University Press of Florida in 1992. Mario Perniola's two essays are "Beyond Postmodernism: Michelstaedter, Strong Feeling, the Present," trans. by Daniela Bini and Renate Holub, and "Enigmas of Italian Temperament," trans. by Aninne Schneider. They appear, respectively, in Differentia 3-4 (Spring/ Autumn 1989): 39-50 and Differentia 5 (Spring 1991): 19-30. Massimo Cacciari's DPAN: Méridiens de la décision dans la pensée contemporaine , trans. by Michel Valensi, has been published in Combas by Editions de l'Eclat 1992. The two essays it contains on Michelstaedter are called "Interprétation de Michelstaedter" (pp. 63-86) and "La lutte 'sur' Platon: Michelstaedter et Nietzsche" (pp. 87-110). The first essay had appeared in Italian in the Rivista di estetica 22 (1986): 21-36.
[v] The idea of Michelstaedter as a precursor of Heidegger is first systematically argued, if not all that convincingly, by Ioachim Ranke, "Il pensiero di Michelstaedter: Un contributo allo studio dell'esistenzialismo italiano." Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 41, no. 4 (1962): 518-39. Additional links are explored by La Rocca, Brianese, and Cacciari in the studies cited above. Ties between Michelstaedter and Wittgenstein, also problematic in my view, have been drawn not only by Bini but also by Cacciari and La Rocca in the aforementioned studies, as well as by Gianni Carchia, "Linguaggio e mistica in Carlo Michelstaedter," Rivista di estetica 21 (1981): 126-32.
[vi] Carlo Michelstaedter, La persuasion e la rettorica , ed. by Sergio Campailla (Milan: Adelphi, 1982), p. 87. Hereafter citations from this text (abbreviated PR) will be identified parenthetically.
[vii] It is worth noting that on his list of countless deluded types who function rhetorically—scientists and shopkeepers, educators and athletes—Michelstaedter hardly finds room for priests and prophets.
[viii] Carlo Michelstaedter, "Risveglio," lines 22-33, Poesie , p. 69.
[ix] Mario Perniola, "Beyond Postmodernism: Michelstaedter, Strong Feeling, the Present," Differentia 3-4: 40. References to this and Perniola's other essay on Michelstaedter (fully documented above) will henceforth be identified in parentheses, where the volume number of Differentia is followed by page numbers (thus, here, 3-4: 40).
[x] Even in the inorganic realm of chemicals, the very principle of life (as expressed, for example, in the tendency of hydrogen to "lust" after chloride and thus form the lethal compound hydrochloride) is suicidal (PR, 46-47).
[xi] See Cacciari's penetrating study of Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and a dozen other compatriots of Michelstaedter in Dallo Steinhof: Prospettive viennesi del primo Novecento (Milan: Adelphi, 1980).
[xii] Massimo Cacciari, DPAN , p. 102 (full reference above). Hereafter page numbers will appear in the text parenthetically.
[xiii] In his edifying Del sentire (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), Perniola elaborates at much greater length the aesthetic implications of this type of ethic.
[xiv] Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), in Collected Essays , vol. I (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 319-37. Page numbers will now follow parenthetically.
[xv] Woolf's essay, of course, deals only with the "Georgian," or avant-gardist, writers in English, not mentioning expressionism at all. However, it is only where the pathos of truth and essence is truly preserved in art—or in the expressionist dimension of the avant-garde—that the struggle inherent to language has an intensity comparable to the sort we find in Michelstaedter.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks