Flower of the Desert by Antonio Negri

Author:Antonio Negri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Sarcasm; or Concerning Politics

It is good to establish right away the frame of reference for the analysis of Leopardi’s relationship with the Risorgimento, with politics in the proper sense. The political world is not merely the world of illusion, but the world of absolute illusion, of the maximum loss of power [depotenziamento] of existence. The entire evolution of Leopardi’s regional phenomenology leads up to this point. Every material a priori of politics has been eliminated. It is the world of pure senselessness and vulgarity. If there was irony in relation to the psyche and love, if the cultural fabric and knowledge [sapere] possessed a solidity and an efficacy that were paradoxically strengthened by deception (which they precisely represented), political objectivity on the contrary is immediately “other,” the other of absolute negativity and dead life. Ethics, presenting itself as rupture, has nothing to do with all this. The Risorgimento is reaction; the liberals and the legitimists all take part in this mystified, cruel but ontologically weak objectivity, subject to chance and stupidity, to the emptiest of human passions. Sarcasm alone is the key to a knowledge [conoscenza] of politics, an arrogant knowledge [conoscenza] that separates itself from a real that it despises and whose extreme characteristics it throws into grotesque relief. It defines an irreducible distance between ethics and politics, between subject and world. Constantly radicalizing itself further, it reaches the level of insult and, in its ferocity, eliminates all possibility of pacification, every “effect of abolition” in the denunciation of “the dissonances of degraded being.”99 This framework will remain stable and firm in the late Leopardi. There is no internal alternative to this evaluation and the relationship between ethics and politics remains insoluble. Unless politics is completely recast in an ontologically pure and radically different sphere, unless politics is rediscovered beyond everything that is real, unless. … We must of course return to this possible passage.

Now, however, before analyzing the mature phase of Leopardi’s judgment on politics, we must immediately set aside a possible objection or rather a possible explanation of the absolute character of Leopardi’s refusal of politics. This consists in referring his thought to an irreducible individualism that would not permit him to appreciate the collective form of social living. We know, the lyric poet is always solitary, and so on! Obviously this is rubbish. Nevertheless, this argument raises a serious problem, which consists in considering insoluble the crisis that occurs between an individualistic and self-referential morality and the rules of behavior vis-à-vis the human community. In particular, the quest for glory and social esteem opens up to the individual a contradictory path and lures him/her into real paradoxes; sometimes, faced with an obstacle or with the senseless circularity of social references, it drives the individual back into solitude, toward the definition of an extreme self-differentiation. But this rejection reverberates through society, or at least through those organized forms of social morality that politics especially embodies.100 Furthermore, if the discovery of objective moral conflictuality registers the subjective quest

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