Toward a Minor Michelstaedter

Abstract

Carlo Michelstaedter (1987–1910) is mostly known for his tragic suicide and for his undefended tesi di laurea, titled La persuasione e la rettorica. He has thus been commonly regarded as a marginal, peripheral thinker, and his work has been often placed on the outskirts of the Italian philosophical and literary canon. In this article I focus precisely on Michelstaedter as a minor author, and on his work as an example of minor writing, but in light of what Deleuze and Guattari have called “minor literature,” a concept they first enunciate in their work on Kafka. A comparison between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories and Michelstaedter’s oeuvre does not in fact confirm Michelstaedter’s purportedly marginal position vis à vis canonical Italian culture. Rather, it allows, first, a reassessment of the potential of the attribute minor that overturns the negative connotations attached to Michelstaedter’s peripherality, and, second, a literary and pragmatic interpretation of his work capable of both preserving its uncanny intensity and underlining its socio-political implications.

Keywords:

• Michelstaedter
• Deleuze and Guattari
• minor literature
• philosophy and literature
• multilingualism
• La persuasione e la rettorica

Notes

¹ See Benevento (1992: 59–60) for a brief account of most of these early reviews.

² The only Italian philosophers who devote some space to Michelstaedter in their anthologies of philosophical thought are Garin (1997: 35–7), Giannantoni (2006: 435), and Cambiano/Mori (2014: 266–7). Others, such as Abbagnano, Reale, Esposito, Antiseri, Pancaldi, and De Bartolomeo, just to name the authors of some of the most common Italian anthologies used in universities and high schools, simply ignore him.

³ For an overview of the scholarship on Michelstaedter up to 1987, see Muzzioli 1987.

⁴ Two examples of scholarly work which pay equal attention to Michelstaedter’s artistic, poetic, and philosophical production are Perego, Storace, and Visone 2005, and, more recently, Hütter 2014.

⁵ See, as a few examples of recent scholarship, Pieri, 2010; Campailla, 2012; and Calabrò and Faraone, 2013.

⁶ For an example of three different disciplinary approaches and criticisms to Deleuze (and Guattari), see respectively Badiou, 2000 (who, however, does not engage with the concept of minor literature), Casanova, 2007 (especially 203–4, where the scholar does tackle the concept of minor literature), and Edmunds, 2010 (who critizes Casanova as well for his political reading of Kafka).

⁷ For the distinction between “molar” and “molecular” in Deleuze and Guattari, see see Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 41.

⁸ On the difference in Deleuze between minor and major processes, see also Larose, 2002.

⁹ Michelstaedter draws a lamp extinguished by too much oil on the first page of the manuscript of La persuasione e la rettorica. On the symbolic significance of this drawing, see what Campailla writes in Michelstaedter, 1982: 197.

¹⁰ On Michelstaedter’s idea of “concretezza artistica,” see Benevento 1991.

¹¹ On Michelstaedter’s ambivalent feelings toward his family, see “Meglio l’odio che l’affetto della famiglia” (Michelstaedter 1958: 742).

¹² Michelstaedter (1982: 72, emphasis in the original): “Ma gli uomini dicono: ‘Questo va bene, ma intanto, intanto bisogna ben viver’ – Intanto! Intanto che avvenga che cosa? – in tempi andati cantavano nel Veneto: ‘Se spera che i sassi / diventa paneti / perché i povareti / li possa magnar. // Se spera che l’acqua / devenia sciampagna / perché no i se lagna / de sto giubilar. // Se spera sperando / che vegnarà l’ora / de andar in malora / per più no sperar.’ Proprio così!;” and 162 (emphasis in the original): “Così piegandosi, aspettando, transigendo e, per non impegnarsi a fondo così da compromettere tutto il futuro in un punto, dimentico e irresponsabile – l’uomo sociale trae la vita (el se tira avanti) ignorandola – finché Giove non lo libera.”

¹³ For the full text of Alberto Michelstaedter’s booklet, Sermone paterno, see Campailla, 1988: 10. For an analysis of the Sermone and in general of Carlo’s relationship with his father, see rather Campailla, 1974: 25–67 and Micheletti, 2007: 8–28.

¹⁴ For the concept of micropolitics in Deleuze, see also Stivale, 2005: 88–97.

¹⁵ Michelstaedter, 1982: 164: “L’uomo nel sogno è nudo e davanti a dio così com’è – e pesa per quanto vale – tutte le forme, gli ingegni, le parole che non sono sue e cui s’è adattato secondo la convenzione – cadono. Nell’intimità del sogno egli è come i suoi antenati che vivevano soli e nudi. – Difatti gli uomini se si mettono nella posizione come quando vogliono comunicare quelle misteriose sensazioni dei sogni, allora si trovano davanti all’impossibile, ‘non trovano parole’ per ‘esprimere quello che sentono’.”

¹⁶ For an overview of this topic, see Luperini, 1976; Campailla, 1981; and Muzzioli, 1987.