Calvino's Non-Knowledge

Abstract

This essay proposes a psychoanalytic reading of several works by Italo Calvino. Indebted to Octave Mannoni and Slavoj Žižek for their theorization of fetishism as a logic that binds together a knowledge and a non-knowledge, and in particular to Mannoni's formulation of that logic in the phrase 'Je sais bien, mais quand même', the essay tracks the theme of the 'void' in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Le Cosmicomiche, and La strada di San Giovanni, and examines the model of desire as 'universal cannibalism' in 'Sotto il sole giaguaro'. It reads the thematization of the 'void' as an attempt to master the constitutive lack that ideological fantasy works to cover over, and argues that the fantasy of reciprocal cannibalism is an attempt to render transparent an opacity in language that the desiring subject cannot know.