Since you are talking of Italy I feel compelled to say something on
Balestrini. He is given for granted by a section of Italian intellectuals
that mainly rotate in the big towns, especially in the center south, and for
the very first time in my life I agree with Eco. At least with your
quotation of Eco. He recently (maybe 2 years ago) was here in town. My idea
of him did not change and I wrote a couple of lines on the event but I am
sure nobody will be able to recognize whom I am talking about.
Giacomo Feltrinelli was an enlightened editor. Up to three decades ago,
Feltrinelli was a good signature and you could go ahead and buy the book
even if you did not know the author. As much as all the publications by
Adelphi. I think they are still trying to emulate the choices of the
previous editor (can you remember his name?) who spent his life reading to
have his picks translated to be published, but I am not up-to-date with
their publications. You could _at the time_ just go out to buy another
Adelphi book and you knew you were coming back home with a treasure.
This so much for history.
In Italy there are great intellectuals, mainly hidden. You have to consider
that compulsory education, exception made for what was the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, came after the 2nd World War. Just imagine on your own what has been
going on in this half century in this land and is probably still going on.

I agree with your quotation of Malerba and Adorno. I understand what you are
saying and I think you are overpraising Balestrini, or projecting what does
not belong to him.



On 1/18/07, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Going back to Frederick's earlier post on pronouns...
>
> <snip>
> "I" has feelings; "he" or "she" has meanings. And duties; all
> ethical thought, conservative or critical, involves this transposition.
> [FP]
> <snip>
>
> This is a distinction between the connotative and the denotative, between
> intension and extension, more or less. However, I would also point to a
> line
> of ethical thought which involves _recovering_ subjectivity in some way.
> Think of Rousseau upon sovereignty v representation, for example, or
> Council
> Communism, or *autonomism* in Italy.
>
> As to political narrative, Nanni Balestrini, who is a poet, novelist and
> visual artist, might be relevant: on the emblematic Turin Fiat strike of
> 1968 (*Vogliamo tutto* / *We Want It All*); on Italian political violence
> in
> the late 1970s, plus (most probably) the 1980 Trani prison rebellion (*Gli
> invisibili*; translated as *The Unseen*, though I'd call it *The
> Disappeared*), and on the death of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, friend of
> Pasternak and Che Guevara and subsequently amateur terrorist, in 1972
> (*L'editore* / *The Publisher*).
>
> All three novels present themselves in the first person and use (only?)
> found material. (Eco said that Balestrini gave the impression of being one
> of the laziest writers ever because he wrote not a single word.) *Vogliamo
> tutto* conveys without overt commentary the politicization of those
> migrating to Northern industrial plants, *Gli invisibili* (inter alia) the
> split between *autonomism* and the sort of coercive violence represented
> by,
> for example, the Red Brigades. However, the underlying material is
> reworked
> into short, overlapping paragraphs involving some sharing of content,
> three
> or so to a page, so that the effect, a sort of narrative voluntarism on
> Balestrini's part, is that of _drift_, of being pulled rather than
> pushing,
> with no settled point of view. And the inevitable, multiple ironies within
> what's narrated by the speaking I serve to alienate the reader not from
> the
> I's points of view but from any point of view which goes beyond those
> individual points of view or which pretends to be overarching,
> comprehensive
> or extensive, leaving a residue, a sort of pure, *individual* subjectivity
> which struggles with the forms imposed by the *social* subjectivity of
> which
> it forms a part but by which it is also constituted. If that makes any
> sense...
>
> Anyway here is Adorno: 'A concept doesn't exhaust the thing conceived of.'
> And here is Luigi Malerba (the character is considering shooting a
> villainous criminal/political Moriarty): 'The search for unity brought me
> fatally into the territory of abstract individual definitions. No, I
> didnt't
> want to become the concept of myself, I didn't have to give in to that
> conceptual trap.'
>
> ... Should that makes things any clearer, which I doubt.
>
> Balestrini, incidentally, was published by Feltrinelli, worked for
> Feltrinelli was one of those who went into exile during Italy's *years of
> lead*. And he's a good example of someone whose working methods (or what
> appear to be his working methods) really do reflect his ethical
> perspective.
>
> At any rate I shall stop.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'It was really only in spelling out the decrees of the high
> command that we came to understand ourselves'
> - Kafka
>