Università on manuel uberti

La realtà del patriarca

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Anche con l’aiuto del senno di poi, se devo indicare il punto più basso toccato nel mio percorso di laurea triennale il pensiero va sempre alla stessa aula e allo stesso docente. Quella stessa aula in cui quello stesso docente cercò di convincerci del valore letterario di un testo che ogni aspirante bigotto deve avere a portata di mano, ovvero Il cavallo rosso di Eugenio Corti.

In un’altra occasione il docente in questione, che spesso amava interrompere il flusso della sua esposizione con baldanzosi aneddoti sul suo conto alternati a divagazioni dallo sperato effetto umoristico, si lanciò in un’aggressione verbale rivolta ad alcune università inglesi e americane. Il nocciolo della sua polemica era che in quegli atenei erano stati rimossi dai curricula dei classici greci come Eschilo perché considerati inappropriati.

Lì per lì, lo ammetto, ci cascai. Guarda un po’, mi dissi, uno che ha capito che la cancel culture è dannosa. Poi però sono tornato più e più volte alle sue parole, specialmente dopo che mi si è rivelato fino in fondo attraverso Eugenio Corti, e due considerazioni hanno capovolto la mia posizione di partenza. Primo, per il docente problematizzare gli incesti e gli stupri nei testi era del tutto fuori luogo alla luce del valore estetico in gioco. Secondo, il fatto che la donna in quei classici non di rado emerga come fragile, subordinata, appropriabile e misurabile in termini di funzione del proprio corpo, era perfettamente in linea con quello che Corti, e di riflesso il docente, pensava delle sue donne.

Mi è tornato in mente tutto questo mentre leggevo Realismo patriarcale di Martina Miccichè, il nuovo libro di un’autrice la cui voce sulla contemporaneità è fra le più interessanti in circolazione. Ad un anno di distanza da Femminismo di periferia, Miccichè ritorna, se possibile, anche più furiosa e decisa nelle sue argomentazioni, ma perché si fa carico di un peso, direi, di molto maggiore.

In Realismo patriarcale, infatti, Miccichè estende il suo raggio di incidenza tematica in modo da completare il quadro che Femminismo di periferia aveva cominciato a delineare. Se nella prima opera si trattava di riposizionarci per capire il significato più profondo dei margini e di chi li abita e vive, qui quegli spazi e quelle vite vengono riarticolate in vista di un più ampio percorso lungo il complicato e pericoloso intreccio fra capitale e patriarcato. Ancora una volta, Miccichè non si nasconde e fa di piccoli, si fa per dire, episodi privati i momenti di avvio per perlustrare quel sistema di oppressioni interagenti, come lei stessa lo definisce¹, in cui esistiamo e ignorando il quale chi può permetterselo vede soltanto fin dove vuole vedere.

La trasparenza di Miccichè, che fa della chiarezza nella scrittura un vero e proprio atto politico, colpisce e sa fare male sul serio. Ciò rende Realismo patriarcale, ancor più di Femminismo di periferia, un libro facile da leggere e duro da digerire, come sottolinea giustamente Rachele Borghi nella prefazione, quasi Miccichè avesse preso alla lettera le parole di Kafka sul testo come ascia nel mare ghiacciato dentro di noi. Ma è proprio questo il metodo migliore per comunicare verità scomode ed essere sicure che non ci siano fraintendimenti. Quello che bisogna dire va detto in modo che chiunque lo possa comprendere. Se non scrivesse per tutte e per tutti, Miccichè tradirebbe se stessa, e a me non sembra un’autrice interessata a contraddirsi per ora.

La categoria realismo patriarcale trova il suo compimento letterario ne Il cavallo rosso. Non so se Martina Miccichè abbia letto o meno Eugenio Corti. In caso negativo, mi verrebbe da consigliarle di starne quanto più possibile alla larga, ma penso che non abbia alcun bisogno di me per annusarne il fetore reazionario e reagire di conseguenza. Quello che conta è che, invece di lasciarci con un voluminoso e irrilevante monumento alla propria chiusura mentale, Miccichè preferisce intavolare un discorso faccia a faccia con noi per costringerci a riprendere in mano la storia, a trasformare il presente senza che il passato sia un impedimento in vista del futuro che davvero vogliamo.

Miccichè, Realismo patriarcale, p. 156. ↩︎

My 2024

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024 has been a mixed bag of delight, anger, frustration, joy, and disappointment. A year of questions, connections, and self-determination. There have been many beautiful things that I know I’m going to treasure, but unfortunately they didn’t come alone.

It’s fair to say then that 2024 has pushed me to reconsider many things, myself included. How far this is going to get me it’ll be next year’s real challenge.

Anonymous for the Voiceless

In terms of emotional turmoil this has to be the central experience of my 2024.

My journey with Anonymous for the Voiceless was what I needed to finally engage with activism. It also led me to meet awesome people who make me fell less alone in my resistance to a status quo that doesn’t understand how to care.

At the same time something didn’t seem quite right to me, and when everything fell apart I understood the true nature of this organisation and decided to leave.

However, I don’t intend to stop with my activism because of this sad outcome. I only need a better project to do it, so I’m exploring options.

Bluesky

Despite all my doubts and concerns I joined Bluesky last month and so far I’ve been enjoying the experience. I found a rich community of philosophers and academics sharing worthwhile content most of the time.

On the other hand, it doesn’t appear to be an entirely safe space. I also tend to get tired rather quickly with social media, especially if I feel like I’m wasting hours following nothing in particular.

Therefore when my next round-up comes I may not be on Bluesky any more.

Books

I thought over and over again about my favourite books of 2024. It hasn’t been an easy task and I already know I’ll regret leaving some great reads out.

In order to avoid any further crime, I’m going to use a basic alphabetical order to list the most relevant titles, hence no real preference will be expressed. Here we go:

Animali si diventa (Federica Timeto)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Calibano e la strega (Silvia Federici)
Checkout 19 (Claire-Louise Bennett)
Cospirazione animale (Marco Reggio)
Del governo degli animali (Benedetta Piazzesi)
Dialoghi sulla religione naturale (David Hume)
Elizabeth Costello (J. M. Coetzee)
Estinzione (Thomas Bernhard)
The Fortnight in September (R. C. Sherriff)
Letteratura come utopia (Ingeborg Bachmann)
Lettere dal carcere (Antonio Gramsci)
A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)
Malina (Ingeborg Bachmann)
Perturbamento (Thomas Bernhard)
Poesie (Paul Celan)
Under the Skin (Michael Faber)
L’uomo senza qualità (Robert Musil)

Random notes:

Ingeborg Bachmann should be a mandatory read everywhere in the world;
every book I read about non-human animals makes me a better human one;
Paul Celan will keep me busy for at least another life;
Robert Musil is the perfect excuse to avoid direct sunlight;
Claire-Louise Bennett is the right writer at the right time;
Liberazioni has become my favourite periodical.

Missing from the list are a couple of books I spent a good chunk of hours on: the first volume of Karl Marx’s Il Capitale and György Lukács’ Storia e coscienza di classe. I have yet to recover from these challenging and deeply rewarding works, but everything I’ve been learning will stay with me.

Cinema

Overall I had great times with my old passion for cinema this year. The following selection is not strictly related to 2024 films because there is always something I missed from previous years. Anyway, here it is:

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)
The Animal People (Denis Henry Hennelly, Casey Suchan)
La Bête (Bertrand Bonello)
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-ke)
Challengers (Luca Guadagnino)
The Dreamed Ones (Ruth Beckermann)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard)
L’étè dernier (Catherine Breillat)
Food for Profit (Giulia Innocenzi, Paolo D’Ambrosi)
Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki)
Here (Robert Zemeckis)
Judas And the Black Messaiah (Shaka King)
Sex (Dag Johan Haugerud)
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Soi Cheang)
The Young Karl Mark (Raoul Peck)

Random notes:

nothing has come close to the devastating effect All of Us Strangers has had on me, and I won’t forget it any time soon;
Food for Profit should be a mandatory watch everywhere in the world;
sometimes a giant monster is all I need to be happy;
yes, Soi Cheang, I love Hong Kong cinema too;
if Karl Marx was as sexy as Peck’s version of him, why isn’t everyone a sworn Marxist yet?

Heart of Clojure

Beside confirming itself as the best conference I’ve ever been to, Heart of Clojure has had the perhaps unintentional side effect of forcing me to rethink my position in the IT world. I’ve been working on this ever since I got back from Leuven, but I have a long way ahead of me.

Other questions arose as well. Maybe one day I’ll come back to them with the proper state of mind and I’ll share my findings.

Music

What follows is a chart as temporary as any other, apart from the first two spots which are by miles the records I needed the most this year. Without further ado, then:

SEI ALMENO UN PO’ FELICE? (Olympia Mare)
Diamond Jubilee (Cindy Lee)
Brat (Charli XCX)
This Could Be Texas (English Teacher)
All of This Awaits You (Swami And the Bed of Nails)
stillness stop: you have a right to remember (Any Other)
Make It Fit (Karate)
Light Sides (Angie McMahon)
A Polaroid for Christmas (Memoria Polaroid)
Revival of a Friend (Sour Widows)
Searching (Staples Jr. Singers)
Where Next? (Sandwell District)

Random notes:

the deluxe edition of The Get Up Kids’s Something to Write Home About made me cry ten seconds after the vinyl started spinning;
a Marta Del Grandi’s concert proved that she is truly from another planet;
I’ve been listening to Pinegrove for an insane amount of hours in the last few months. I miss them so much.

University

There is little I can add to what I wrote already, so let me just say one thing. A younger version of myself couldn’t understand the value of studying at university. That boy had to undergo trials and errors, but he got there eventually. So much so he can’t really stop now.

To be honest in the last month I’ve had some doubts about what I really want to pursue with my studies. I’ll come back to this as soon as my mind is clear. For now, I see interesting paths in front of me.

An MA is on its way

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 06:12:50 +0000

Many people have to be persuaded that studying too is a job, and a very tiring one, with its own particular apprenticeship - involving muscles and nerves as well as intellect. It is a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort, tedium and even suffering.

— Antonio Gramsci

Although a couple of months have passed already, my BA in Philosophy feels like yesterday. I am still processing this achievement, and yet I have decided to pursue an MA in order to continue the wonderful journey as a part-time student, mostly because I feel like I have only touched the surface of a vast ocean of knowledge. Therefore, next week I will be back in the classroom and once again ready to spend my evenings with more books than usual.

I have often been asked why I am doing this and how it is going to affect my professional career, but this is the wrong way to look at my endeavour. Usually one’s studies are strictly related to one’s future job(s). However, not everything we learn has to be measured in terms of money. I have always, always loathed this simplistic view that reduces all knowledge to a bag of tricks one can leverage to earn a salary. Put otherwise, what is wrong with learning for the sake of learning?

This is something many find hard to digest, accustomed as we are to a society that links price and value of something inextricably together. Moreover, I work in a field where philosophy is either frowned upon or used just as an abstract label for self-help literature or the misleading words of online moralists.

I am in no way interested in fixing this situation. First of all, I keep my day job as a Clojure developer and my philosophy student’s life separated. I respect my co-workers for their programming skills, but I would never embark in a discussion about Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations with them, much like I do not expect the person next to me in the classroom to appreciate the finesse of my Emacs configuration.

Furthermore, I have never considered philosophy as a standard school subject. How it has changed me is not related to the amount of concepts I have memorised nor the pleasure I experience when reading it. The change in me is the result of the combination of theoretical exercise and thoughtful practice. Since I started to understand what philosophers mean in their writings, I have also started to think and act differently. I find myself more concerned with the world around me and at the same time capable of comprehending it a bit better. This immediately translates into tangible consequences: I see problems where I did not before and I know I can do something about them.

An MA is the obvious prosecution along this path of ethics and praxis.

Philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

A part-time journey to a BA

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 06:12:50 +0000

Now that I officially earned a BA in Philosophy, it is time to sit down and think about this long and wild journey. I say long because it took me five years instead of the standard three that a regular student is accustomed to here in Italy. I say wild because, well, let’s start from the beginning to understand why.

Back in summer 2019, I was watching Astra Taylor’s What Is Democracy? and missing the point of almost all of its philosophical inquiries. Nonetheless, I was intrigued. I was so intrigued, in fact, that in the following days I asked my partner whether me going back to university sounded like a mad man’s project. It would have meant trying my luck with university again, but I do not want to dig into my past failures. The obvious truth is that trying serious studying with the wrong mindset is a rather pointless endeavour.

Anyway, this time my mind was really set. In order to start the courses in September, though, I had to pass an entry test to certify some basic knowledge of philosophy.¹ Coming from a software developing background meant spending a couple of months on high school manuals to get a general idea of more than two thousand years’ worth of Western thought. The test itself was based on a book with key philosophical concepts, most of them unknown to me. I had to pick a subset of these terms and explain them along with the motivation for my choice. I still remember me and about fifty kids² sitting everywhere outside the professor’s office, raising our anxiety bar every time we randomly revised the material. I waited for hours, but eventually my turn came and in about ten minutes I was out again. One question, one answer, another question, another answer. Done. I felt like a door was opening for me right there. I was ready to begin.

The first real exam was a deep dive into Plato’s and Aristotle’s works. On the one hand, it was the right course at the right time. What better way to start than back at the origins of Western philosophy? On the other hand, it made me realise the extent of my ignorance. This is why I will always treasure a tip a kind student gave me on my first days on the campus. They recommended two courses with a specific professor from whom I would learn an invaluable approach to philosophical texts. Admittedly, halfway through the first of these courses I was struggling to keep up. The now-retired professor was well known among students for taking no prisoners whatsoever. His were two of the most difficult exams I had to prepare, but to this day very little comes close to what I learned with him.

Nevertheless, a good chunk of the courses left me with many impressive insights, and this is especially true for the most demanding ones. The hours devoted to unpacking Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right will never be forgotten,³ but I will also remember fondly the energy put into preparing presentations on beloved topics, not to mention the emails exchanged with kind professors luckily never tired of my relentless enthusiasm.

Being a part-time student meant using what was left of the day after work for lessons and actual books, something requiring a sort of discipline to achieve. This is not to say that I have never been on a trip in the past five years, of course. Still, evenings, weekends, and Christmas holidays all became victims of my studying schedule. In retrospect, I could have taken some exams more lightly, enjoying some breaks more. Over and over again I pushed myself harder than necessary because I wanted to learn as much as possible and not just for that great mark.⁴

However, in the end the overall experience has been highly rewarding. I can read Hegel, for instance, and as anyone already familiar with the German philosopher knows, this is a wonderful achievement in itself. I fell in love with Spinoza, the true driving force of my thought in the years following our first encounter. Wittgenstein hypnotised me multiple times and I can only think of Plotinus as a question mark, fascinating and lonesome just like Simone Weil. I have much to learn yet from Kant and Adorno, from Deleuze and Derrida, from Hume and Schopenhauer.

They are all there, right where I can see them now. They are all there waiting for me to catch up.

OFA (Obbligo Formativo Aggiuntivo), as it is called at Ca’ Foscari. ↩︎
Even after my last exam, I felt old and out of place in the classroom. ↩︎
Although my partner does not want to have anything to do with Hegel any more. ↩︎
Saying magna cum laude out loud does feel good, though. ↩︎

Thesis frontispiece with LaTeX

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Usually when I start writing a new document I am not immediately interested about the output layout. This may sound unorthodox to one accustomed to the WYSIWYG likes of Microsoft Word, but since I mainly write in Markdown and LaTeX, I like to focus on what I want to say first and think about typesetting the text later. The look of the output matters, though, so eventually I have to deal with it.

For example, while working on my BA thesis with LaTeX I was faced with the problem of the frontispiece. Ca’ Foscari university provides a template that students can slap in front of their documents, but the choice is limited to a couple of popular file formats: DOC and ODT.

The quick and dirty solution could have been along these lines:

edit the ODT template;
export it to a PDF file;
add it to the front of my final document.

However, I decided to stick with AUCTeX and accept the challenge. The following is a working example based on my thesis that can be saved to a frontispiece.tex file:

\documentclass[12pt]{book}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{xcolor}

\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}

\newgeometry{top=1cm,bottom=1cm,right=1cm,left=1cm}
\fontfamily{lmss}\selectfont
\includegraphics[width=0.15\textwidth]{cafoscari-logo}\par\vspace{1cm}

\begin{center}
\LARGE{Corso di Laurea triennale in \colorbox{gray!10}{indirizzo}\par}
\vspace{1cm}
\LARGE{Tesi di Laurea\par}
\vspace{1.5cm}
{\huge\bfseries \colorbox{gray!10}{titolo}\par}
\LARGE{\colorbox{gray!10}{sottotitolo}\par}
\end{center}
\vspace{2cm}
\vfill
\textbf{Relatore}\\
\colorbox{gray!10}{nome e cognome}\\[0.5cm]
\textbf{Laureando}\\
\colorbox{gray!10}{nome e cognome}\\
\colorbox{gray!10}{numero matricola}\\[0.5cm]
\textbf{Anno Accademico}\\
\colorbox{gray!10}{0000/0001}
\vfill

\end{titlepage}

\end{document}

The only missing bit is the Ca’ Foscari university logo, referenced above as {cafoscari-logo} as per the name of the image file I used, which is cafoscari-logo.png. Here it is:¹

Now, getting a PDF is simply a matter of placing the .tex and the .png files in the same directory and run something like pdflatex frontispiece.tex.

On the other hand, I have AUCTeX and PDF Tools on my side. From the comfort of Emacs I can then set TeX-view-program-selection to '((output-pdf "PDF Tools")) and then press C-c C a to create and display the desired PDF output.

One last remark for any Ca’ Foscari student reading this. To the best of my knowledge supervisors in the Philosophy department usually ask for drafts in DOC format. Although this may not be true for other departments, unless LaTeX is a requirement make sure your supervisor and assistant supervisor, if any, accept PDFs when you want their valuable opinion on your draft.

The logo comes from the ODT template, which is publicly available on the university website. I just extracted it to a PNG file using LibreOffice Writer. ↩︎

It exists therefore I am

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 07:12:50 +0000

Setting reason aside is not something we welcome gladly, is it? After all, acting according to feelings is acting irrationally, and if we open that door we are going to let in the possibility of regrets and sorrow as well. Since we do not always feel ready to face regrets and sorrow, we prefer applying our mind on every worthwhile occasion. Or so we believe. Why do we act like we must reduce everything to reason, anyway?

John M. Coetzee taught me that it is impossible to subject the richness of our everyday experience to the rules of reason alone. He did so through one of his most beautiful and complex characters, one whose presence by now is almost tangible to me: Elizabeth Costello. And as it often happens with the best things in one’s life, Coetzee and Costello entered mine by chance, that is by way of a casual mention during a course at my university which set off the same irrational drive that led me to Ingeborg Bachmann.

Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian woman, a renown writer whose fame, contrary to her will, is an outcome of the success of one of her early novels. Over the course of Coetzee’s book, she is invited to give speeches on a wide range of topics around the world. She complies, even though her distress is something she will not overcome easily. Eventually, she will have to deal with the consequences of her words, standing by her opinions, and questioning her own beliefs.

As in other Coetzee’s works, taking into account the existence of non-human animals and how we live with and next to them is unavoidable. Coetzee’s ethics are much too complex for me to deal with right now,¹ so I will just single out a passage from Elizabeth Costello which I would like to expand upon.

Both reason and seven decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking. And if this is so, if that is what I believe, then why should I bow to reason this afternoon and content myself with embroidering on the discourse of the old philosophers.²

I do not think that I could find better words to explain why, as I am close to get my BA in Philosophy, I am struggling to cope with some of what I have learnt so far.

Do not get me wrong, I value my time at Ca’ Foscari and there is no end to what opening my mind to philosophy has done to me.³ And yet I wish I had known Coetzee and Costello back when I was following a course on moral philosophy. It has been more than two years since that exam, but I have never been able to shake off the feeling of contempt it has left on me, its questionable attempt at winning students over to a specific worldview. It became even clearer a couple of months after the exam, but obvious hints triggered me way before that.

More specifically, while discussing the role of the human soul in Aquinas, the professor decided to share his opinion on animal rights. He did so by oversimplifying his arguments against the likes of Tom Regan and Peter Singer, while talking about animal rights movements without acknowledging how they have evolved since they were first born. It was baffling to notice how conveniently he avoided any practical matter. Why should we care about intensive farming and moral justifications for hunting when we can sit down and discuss about the human soul from the comfort of our classroom?

This whole approach served his purpose rather well. Eventually, he singled out the possibility of reasoning about infinity as humans’ defining trait. Human life, he added, follows an arc trajectory, open to the transcendental, whereas animals’ is a cycle. And so what? How is that even relevant when one looks a bit more closely at how humans have been treating animals over the course of history? More importantly, how is his discourse of any relevance to the lives of non-human animals?

I put forward my opinion to the teacher’s assistant during a seminar, but the conversation was cut short because, I can only assume, he sensed no way out from the circularity of his arguments. Are we not to be held accountable when we decide of the lives of other living beings? Is human reason so peculiar that it can be excused from thinking about the implications of all our actions and not just the ones we deem worth of moral judgements? Who are we to decide what is morally justifiable to do to living beings we share our lives with?

I believe philosophy must teach us how to live in a world greater than us. We exist only because the world exists, not the other way around. We are born humans, we argue with humans, but we find more than humans out there. If we are still discussing the human soul and otherness in human terms, then we still have to move past the old philosophers Elizabeth Costello refers to.

I suggest starting with J. M. Coetzee and Ethics to get a general idea. ↩︎
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 67. ↩︎
As I wrote other times, I will return to my experience at Ca’ Foscari later this year. ↩︎

The irresistible tension of language

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 07:12:50 +0000

My life is over, for during the deportation he has drowned in the river, he was my life. I loved him more than my life.

— Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann¹

My career at Ca’ Foscari is coming to an end, at least in terms of my BA in Philosophy. I will write about this long and wild journey another time, but today I want to expand upon a brief talk I gave in class last Tuesday as part of an assignment for the Philosophy of Literature course.

The professor asked us to work in groups on one of the essays we have to study for the final exam, free to develop its contents in any feasible direction. For reasons I am not entirely able to explain I was drawn to Aldo Gargani’s Il pensiero raccontato, a marvellous study about Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann. Two other students soon joined me and we pleasantly lost ourselves in her words as well as among the ones by Paul Celan, Thomas Bernhard and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I was particularly fascinated by Gargani’s focus on the tension in Bachmann and Bernhard writings. This tension is not just the reader’s feeling as they turn the pages, albeit there are passages in Bachmann’s Malina and Bernhard’s Gargoyles² perfectly capable of shaking one’s own psychological grounds. The tension that Gargani highlights is within the actual language used by these authors. More specifically, the tension is between what is shown by the language and what cannot be said. Where does this tension lead?

According to Gargani the tension is always aimed at the reality we live in, its purpose nothing less than being the cause of a “moral leap”, as Bachmann puts it in her Frankfurt lessons.³ Bachmann wants us to understand that in order to confront the present we are thrown into and survive, we have to look at it through lenses that are not, and cannot, be set once and for all. The past is always transforming the present just as the present never sits still. There is nothing, then, that we can seriously take for granted. Bachmann creates a language that forces us to constantly look at where we are now and, at the same time, gaze into where we really should be. This is why in her view literature must be capable of influencing any present, the one we are currently in and every present that is yet to come.⁴

The quote from Malina I put at the beginning of this writing is the same one I used in class. To me it is the perfect example of what Gargani so acutely finds in Bachmann. In it she is conflating the tragic experience of Nazi Germany⁵ and the suicide of Romanian poet Paul Celan,⁶ thus keeping alive the horrible connection between the past, hers and ours, with the present, hers and ours. Furthermore, she is pushing us to look for implicit and explicit connections within the text and outside of it. Bachmann is fully aware that her book should not matter just for the people alive at the time of her writing. For it to be of any value to all the possible readers that will get to it eventually, its language has to keep renewing itself for every reader, creating tension between different times and different spaces.

As Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin wrote, this can only be done by using live, dynamic affinities instead of channeling static similarities.⁷ This means that language must not act as a homogenising common denominator. It should not be a universal item that subsumes concepts, historical processes, and cultural events under one, giant umbrella. If we lose heterogeneity, we lose the possibility of seeing beyond ourselves. If we cannot see beyond ourselves, we will never be able to change, and only the dead never changes.

The English translation of Malina from New Directions uses “transport” instead of “deportation”, whereas the Italian translation published by Adelphi goes with “deportazione”. I prefer the Italian version because it makes the not so subtle reference to the concentration camps clearer. ↩︎
The German title, Verstörung, translates as something like confusion or derangement, whereas the Italian title is Perturbamento, which is closer to the original meaning. ↩︎
I am referring to Letteratura come utopia. Lezioni di Francoforte published by Adelphi, but there is an English translation as well titled The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann. ↩︎
See: Letteratura come utopia. Lezioni di Francoforte. ↩︎
Her father was a member of the Austrian National Socialist Party. ↩︎
The relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan was so intense and incredible it deserves a much better writer than myself. To get an idea I highly recommend starting with Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan and then watching Ruth Beckermann’s The Dreamed Ones. ↩︎
See Derrida’s Des tours de Babel and Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?, and Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator and On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. ↩︎

The privileged classroom

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday all the students at Ca’ Foscari university received an email from the Educational Programmes and Student Services Area Manager of the school. The key content of the email is the following:

2022/2023 classes at Ca’ Foscari university of Venice will be delivered exclusively in person.

Emergency teaching methods such as dual, synchronous or asynchronous lessons will not be provided.

I have been thinking about this email since I first read it. Despite being predictable behaviour from an institution which has never really wanted to act differently, there are other things to consider.

First, Ca’ Foscari is blatantly ignoring the new peaks of COVID-19 infections in order to be “consistent with the values that we have always recognised and upheld in recent years: the relationship between students and faculty . . .”. However, how much do they really value this “relationship”? The email states that the classroom capacity will be back to 100%, and yet without any rule in place to enforce the use of masks I am left to wonder why security and health are so easily overlooked. What’s even more fascinating is that the Italian healthcare institute released an official bulletin documenting the raising numbers of infections on June 24, right within the range of days when the Conference of Italian Universities Rectors (on June 22) and then the Regional Monitoring Committee (on June 27) agreed upon delivering classes exclusively in person.

Furthermore, it’s not clear what is going to happen to the technology and the services that have been built and maintained during the last two years. Most of the professors are openly against remote classes and lesson registrations, so they did it reluctantly and, more often than not, without bothering to learn how to use the tools at their disposal. Students did not help in this regard either. Among the ones online with me during the lessons, many participated with both camera and microphone turned off the entire time, thus forcing teachers to stare at walls of black squares on their Zoom window. The problem here, as I see it, is two-fold: on the one hand, if you are a teacher and your university forces you to use certain tools it also has to provide decent training. I cannot expect all the professors in humanities to be familiar with multiple screens or Zoom breakout rooms, for instance. However, Zoom is not Emacs. If you are still hitting the wrong button after, say, ten lessons, then the issue might be found somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. On the other hand, students not willing to be a part of the lesson from remote should just be kicked out of the session. I know this sounds brutal, but I took time off my daily job to do my best and be at every possible online lesson, asking questions, interacting with professors, and in general making the most of it. I seriously doubt that every student with a black square in their place was actually unable to do something about it.

Eventually Ca’ Foscari is about to forget the progress it has made in the last two years by enabling students such as myself to be seriously engaged with the faculty. It’s fairly obvious to me that when they talk about “the relationship between students and faculty” they have a precise idea of who these “students” should be. This unwillingness to compromise is making me question my willingness to compromise. I was willing to accept their Google-owned platforms and their Zoom because, despite the poor technological choice, work was being done to bring people in instead of keeping them out. Am I willing to continue with the compromise now?

The Red Horse

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote about my favourite reads of 2021, I also wrote that starting this year I would share my thoughts on the books I enjoy. My intention was to go longer on specific titles instead of collecting small paragraphs in a round-up post in December. However, I cannot really say that I enjoyed the book I am about to discuss. What makes it still worth of some words is the fascination I found myself in when researching its origins and its author. A fascination that soon became an obsession because the more I dug the less I found. I am writing this piece out of an urge to put an end to the affair between Eugenio Corti’s Il cavallo rosso (The Red Horse) and me.

Il cavallo rosso came to my attention last year when a professor at Ca' Foscari university mentioned it during one of their lessons. Theirs was more than a title-drop, though. They went as far as calling it one of the best books of the twentieth century, and this really took me by surprise. I had never heard of Eugenio Corti and his work before. Why had such a work of art by an Italian author born not too far from my hometown always eluded me? I wanted a copy of that book as soon as possible. After about a month with its 1080 pages¹ I turned the last one feeling confused and offended. I couldn’t possibly understand why Il cavallo rosso should be praised as a masterpiece and why a university professor should suggest it as a notable work to their students. Unless I was missing something, that is to say.

Il cavallo rosso is divided into three parts. Corti writes about his experiences during the Second World War on the Russian front in the first two, and how his life turned out to be after the war in the third one. In doing so he does not put himself directly into his pages. Instead, he splits ideas and different moments of his life among a set of closely related characters. Just like the author, all of them were born and raised in Brianza, an area between Milan and Lake Como which Corti depicts as an earthly paradise of Catholic traditions and pious solidarity. I use the word “Catholic” carefully here, because Il cavallo rosso cannot be read without taking into account what Corti wanted to achieve with it in terms of religious view. I would venture to say that it’s next to impossible to accept this book for what it is without sharing its author’s point of view on Catholicism and faith.

What is Corti’s view on Catholicism, then? Corti distinctively puts himself into a conservative position when it comes to religious matters, promoting a reactionary tale of the present which, according to the character of Michele Tintori, Corti’s closest alter ego, has diverged too much from the pure sanctity of the Middle Ages. The key to understand Corti’s version of reality is the third section of Il cavallo rosso, where the writer forgets about the depths of his male characters by reducing them to little variations of the same notion. The notion being that Communism and everything that has led to it are the prime sources for the moral decadence of the world we live in. Tintori condemns Marx multiple times, reassuring the reader that he studied his books when he was in a concentration camp, while at the same time conveniently forgetting about the differences between Marxism, Soviet Communism, and Chinese Communism. The same character later justifies the Inquisition, a noble cause that only Christians have the right to judge, and defends fascist censorship because it spared Italians the trouble of reading bad literature. At a certain point I lost count of the times Partisans and the Italian resistance movement are ridiculed, but the blind compassion for German soldiers and the hanged body of Mussolini did not escape me either. The more we proceed through the third part of Il cavallo rosso, the more Corti insists on the obstacles that an Italian government scared of Communist and Socialist propaganda placed on his younger self’s way to stardom. Again, it does not matter how Communism and Socialism differ from each other. What matters is that anything other than Catholic faith is inherently wrong and opposed to Tintori/Corti and his success.

I have to admit that Tintori’s tirades, angry and emotionally charged, can easily appeal to people who identify with his opinions. In this regard, Il cavallo rosso is basically a pamphlet of Catholic stances, a literary exercise in dogmatism for the sake of a cause the moral grounds of which cannot be argued with. The real problem with Il cavallo rosso is that only one on Corti’s side, and who basically thinks like him, can in all honesty consider this book a great artistic achievement.² As much as Corti’s experiences on the Russian front are telling of the horrors and the misery of the soldiers and the prisoners, shining a light on events which may not be always remembered as they actually deserve, it’s hard to applaud the third section of this book for the writing style or the content. For instance, Corti is incapable of portraying female characters. He measures them in terms of beauty and devotion to God and to their male partners. More so than with men, women have no real meaning here except serving as reminders of what a good Catholic mother and wife is supposed to be. In a couple of occasions Corti links one of this women, Alma, to Alessandro Manzoni’s Lucia Mondella. Is he trying to create a bridge between Manzoni and himself? If so, Corti fails miserably at it. Lucia is rich with inner turmoil and fear. In I promessi sposi, we witness her becoming a woman every time her unshakeable faith is put to test. Her chastity is not her pedigree, it’s not something to show off. It’s one and all with her intimacy, a private matter altogether. References to Manzoni are not enough to save a character as poorly developed as Alma, whose inexpressive look, a trait so peculiar the reader has to be constantly reminded of, is the only thing one can eventually remember her by.

Interestingly enough, Alessandro Manzoni is one of the writers Eugenio Corti is compared to in the reviews collected on the last pages of the edition of Il cavallo rosso in my possession. This is a baffling comparison, because even if it’s true that they both write from a profoundly religious perspective, Manzoni does not shy away from the wrongdoings of the Church, revealing the shallowness of don Abbondio over and over again. The only way for Corti to criticise a priest is by attacking his progressive views. But even if Manzoni did stand alongside the Church — think of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo — just take the arrival of Renzo Tramaglino in a Milan devastated by famine and weigh it against Corti’s description of life in a concentration camp. Manzoni judges but does not forget the scene in front of him, whereas Corti, in order to state his position on Communism, does it at every turn of the page. He spends an incredible number of words in detailing war scenes, which is probably the one thing he does really well, but prisoners are just good or bad, much like women are just beautiful or ugly for him. In Manzoni we sense the mob, we see poverty, and we feel anger because what Renzo sees is what Manzoni wants us to see. We know what Manzoni thinks because he lets the readers grasp it without force-feeding them. With Corti, however, we only wait for the next iteration of his commentary against Communism. This can obviously be a specific choice of his. Corti may be more concerned about the cause rather than the effects of the horrors around him, but then critics who make use of the comparison with Manzoni are either doing so mischievously or are ineptly trying to raise Corti’s status to that of a classic without securing solid grounds for their statements.

While reading and researching I kept asking myself: what are the praises for Corti and Il cavallo rosso based upon? Why is it that these praises seem to focus only on the poignancy of the historical content and blatantly avoid its more controversial aspects? Try it for yourself. Try to go onto your favourite search engine and look up “Eugenio Corti” or “Il cavallo rosso”. Unless you first hit some comments on Amazon which are openly against this book, you are going to find Catholic zealots rambling about the transformative power of these pages or the methodical removal of this literary talent from the history of Italian literature. The only piece of criticism you may find is Il nobel al provincialismo, which refers to a more interesting article on the now defunct Infonodo.³ You will also note that most of the positive reviews are vague about the writing style and prefer to drop names such as Alessandro Manzoni, Lev Tolstoj, Vasilij Grossman and J. R. R. Tolkien to give you a general idea of the book without actually telling anything useful. Why should I think of Tolkien when reading Corti? The English writer hides Christianity away in the The Lord of the Rings and there is no single meaning consistently put forward. It’s up to the reader to decide what to take away from it. Furthermore, none of these writings on Corti questions the facts or his rather few ideas, and this only means that there is a common ground from which a specific worldview is thrown at the reader’s face. These are not studies on Il cavallo rosso. It’s not even proper criticism. At most it qualifies as advertisement.

In order to counter my theory one could point to the comments on Corti that have been published on paper. For example, on the pages of Il Timone, a Catholic-oriented Italian magazine, one can find various entries about him. Most of them come from Paola Scaglione, who also seems to be the only person to have published books about Corti in Italy.⁴ What I find even more fascinating is that not only Corti wrote on this magazine, but the professor who led me to Il cavallo rosso published something here as well. Which brings me back to their advice. I am struggling to understand why someone who has taught philosophy for a long time felt it necessary to recommend so narrow-minded an author. I want to believe that there is more than a moral cause behind their words, because I want to believe that when one invests their life in philosophy one is always open to different contexts and ideas. Differences matter. Eugenio Corti, on the other hand, is all about removing them in favour of just one point of view: his.

Resources

The following are the most relevant resources in Italian I consulted when researching for this piece:

Il futuro di uno scrittore di razza
Forum dei cattolici romani su Cornelio Fabro
L’eredità di Corti - Radio Radicale
Il Timone
Commento di Paolo Gulisano
Commento e intervista di Paolo Smeraldi
Commento di Benedetto Chieffo
Recensioni su Feltrinelli
Il nobel al provincialismo and the related “Eugenio Corti: come la destra cattolica ha costruito artificialmente la fama letteraria dello scrittore promuovendolo alla candidatura per il Nobel”

I have this edition. ↩︎
A heartfelt thank goes to professor Valentina Ciciliot for helping me put this thought into better words. ↩︎
It’s still available through the Wayback Machine, although I made a copy (including all the comments at the bottom) to not let it disappear any time soon. ↩︎
See Eugenio Corti: come la destra cattolica ha costruito artificialmente… in Resources. ↩︎