In Elio Vittorini’s short travel book Sardegna come un’infanzia (1957), entirely composed of painterly vignettes of his visit in the thirties, there is one of them that immediately jumps out at the reader, because it is the only moment where the radiance of the image and the possibilities of thought touch each other without any reservation. It is almost the moment in which the senses of what is felt and seen mysteriously touches a region that is not entirely political, even though it figures as the highest ‘political moment’ in Vittorini’s chronicle.

Vittorini is observing the ordinary lives of the common people in Sardinia when all the sudden he writes the following: “Now, and in spite of everything, those sitting down, almost drowsy and without much to do, are in life. The others in the struggle are not, especially if they fall into consciousness by the struggle and the movement, without understanding any other pleasure than that of the full warehouse. The secret is to struggle for existence, but without being colonized by the struggle’s idealism…in this way, there will be true life in the very roaming path. I have always understood activism for activism’s sake as the business of flies that, once they have taken off, they begin to scratch their head or sharpen their legs” [1]. It is almost as if written the parable of the fly is written for our times, where so many are blinded by the secularization of a Jesuit figure of the militant. The activity of fly, just like that of the political militant, falls into the pretense, thanks to the allure of his self-consciousness, that something moves in spite of its complete paralysis. The fly only moves in the metaphysical abstraction from ideal projection to material outcome and preconceived ends that it knows beforehand. Nothing moves and nothing ever can amount to a discovery or an event. The fly will recurrently miss the world because it has become obsessed by the illusion of its movement, convincing itself that flying over fresh dung is something entirely different.

The political subject is primarily the subject of the accumulated freedom, but it can rarely grasp ‘a way out’, as Peter Red claims in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”. Vittorini’s roaming and inert path is the sentiment of true life (“the serene truth of life”, he will say in a few pages later), which is always on the predicated on the possibility of experience against the crust of ideological falsification – even when this process is narrated from the point of view of the proletariat as the motor of the dialectic of history of its self-overcoming to completion. The ‘secret is to struggle for existence’, which entails how to grasp life as utterly outside that can only be shaped by a contact with the world. Perhaps by “sensing” the world without ever becoming its master; rather, what’s involved is a task of a cultivation that must remain singular by virtue of its own irreductibility. 

And in a way, this was Vittorini’s own heterodox understanding of communism where there is according to him there was no “collective building of the soul, but rather the destitution of false differences so that once those regulated differences are abolished, new possibilities of absolute differences can flourish” [2]. This is why Vittorini could not find solace in the political militant or the engaged intellectual, except as figures already acting as smugglers of the planned obsolescence of a civilization overtly defended by those facilitating its own demise [3]. In the landscape of Sardinia – by the most passive of roles, he was merely a theōrós after all – Vittorini unravels the metapolitical blackmail of the epoch in order to conquer the most essential and inapparent: the time of existence in a minuscule world within worlds – and thus, always in a permanent state of infancy – that treasures something immense because it will be forever remain unknowable.

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Notes 

1. Elio Vittorini. Sardegna come un’infanzia (Mondadori, 1957), 64.

2. Dionys Mascolo & Edgard Morin. “Une interview d’Elio Vittorini”, Les Lettres françaises, 27 juin 1947: https://entetement.com/une-interview-delio-vittorini/ 

3. Elio Vittorini. “La civilización no es algo que defender” (1937), in Diario en público (Gadir, 2008), 86.