survival

The city of pigs. by Gerardo Muñoz

When describing the ideal archaic and primitive polity of basic needs at the beginning of The Republic (371e-373), Socrates willingly accepts Glaucon’s definition that this society will amount to a “city of pigs”. In the English translation of F.M. Cornford, just after Socrtates says that “(these people) lead such a healthy life in peace, they will naturally to come to a good old age, and leave their children to live after them in same manner”, his interlocutor responds that “That is just the sort of provender you would supply, Socrates, if you were founding a community of pigs” [1]. That the ideal of the polity resembles a community of pigs is bathed in an important irony here, since as Leo Strauss once noted, this animal community is one in which there are no pigs, since this a community that is strictly vegetarian (the influence of archaic Orphic culture should not be ruled out from this passage).

But just like sluggish and stagnant pigs that roam a piece of land, this archaic form of city life is a proto-form of the kallipolis or the beautiful city, whose enchantment does not derive from external garments, but rather from a mediation of Justice that maintains social stasis or harmony within the passions. In this sense, the city of pigs is beyond a regulatory meditation of production understood as accumulation (although there is some exchange between goods and services), and for that matter it is a form of life that is beyond poverty and wealth. In fact, it is absence of a cycle of inequality either in the form of abundance or scarcity that defines the first communities in The Laws. Thus, we read in Book III 679c:

“Because of all of this, they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the provining lack of gold and silver. Now the community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally produce the finest characters, because tendencies to violence and crime, feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise. So these men were good, partly for that that very reason, partly because of what we might call their ‘naivete’ [2].

The kallipolis that characterizes the beautiful city is thus the memory of the retreat from the machinery of legal expansion – the “too much law” syndrome that according to the Judge Neil Gorsuch characterizes the current state of empire of the administrative state – that for Plato took the form of continuous lawsuits and party strife in order to “hurt each other by word and deed” [3]. This means that the Beautiful City where pigs roam in the open is oriented towards Justice because everything is under the constraint of proportionality that mediatites between the soul and the body, and between actions and the good inherent in things due to their limitations in use. In other words, the city of pigs is an early emblem of the paradigm of the “rule of proportion”, a condition in order to nurture a healthy politeia. Thus, proportionality is a notion that allows not just for the metabolic organization of social life, but perhaps more fundamentally to the sensible understanding of nomoi as revolving around the territory, the attunement to music, and to the lawgiver’s institutional design to preserve a form of life.

If we can understand the city of pigs as a memory rather than as a construction of a future utopian society, it is because only in accounting for proportionality can the nomoi asymptotically enter in relation to Nature that has long been severed from the experience of human beings and the gods. This is why for Plato the truth of the kallipolis staged by the city of pigs belongs to the memory of the ‘Age of Cronus’ and not to that of Zeus. As the Athenian says in Book IV of The Laws: “The story has a moral for us even today, and there is a lot of truth in it: where the ruler of a state is not a god but a mortal, people have no respite from effort to imitate the life men are said to have led under Cronus; we should run our public and our private lives, our homes and our cities, in obedience  to what little spark of immorality lies in us, and dignify this dispensation of reason with the name of ‘law’” [4]. In this determination, the nomos is a memory of the happy life that strives to organize the community beyond the purpose of hostility and strife, abstract quantification and normative obedience (even though there might be necessary elements of these in the polity). Yes, it is true that law is always backwards looking – the process of adjudication needs a prior norm or principle to consider – but the sense of nomoi here is accounting for a priori of proportionality between separate regions of human experience.

The laws or nomoi as justice is not defined by the attempt to construct morally rational norms for adjudication, but rather to coordinate the proportionality dispensed (dianomē) between reason (nous) and the sensibility of the soul (daimones). Rather than thinking of the good as substance and fact, what is good is only in the proportion between soul and reason. Hence, the possibility of naming (eponamazo) of nomos cannot be understood as mere force of adjudication of any given legitimate authority, but as the mediation that guards against the unrestrained force of sad passions (greed, jealousy, resentment), as well as the disastrous consequence of political injustice through mere the exercise of public force that has been understood as the enactment of police powers to curb illicit actions.

What Plato calls the “little spark of immortality in us” is the very memory of the city of pigs; that is, a nomoi that refuses to conflates the community with the world, and that for this very reason it can imagine life beyond the regime of predatory and service driven social reproduction. If according to Oskar Panizza in his mythopoetic treatise, the pig in Western culture has stood as as paragon of fear, power, and untamable desire, it is not less true that the mythological animal was first and foremost symbol for what appears and shines first: “the pig is the Sun” [5]. And yet, for Plato there is a need for the nomoi because there is an archaic memory of the life beyond time and strife, which is the life of pigs that freely roam the perimeter of a space (a correspondence to the Gemeinwesen perhaps). It is this paradoxical emblem of archaic illumination and obscure remembrance that Plato registers as the “little spark of immortality”, where Justice survives not in the form of the restitution of a debt or injury (the principle of “owing what is one’s due”), but in the measureless proportion that binds soul and reason in order to keep on playing the music score of justice on Earth.

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Notes

1. Plato. The Republic of Plato, ed. F.M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1945), 371e-373a, 60-61.

2. Plato. The Laws, ed. T. J. Saunders (Penguin Books, 2004), 679c, 78.

3. Ibid., 679d, 79.

4. Ibidl., 714a, 126.

5. Oskar Panizza. The pig in poetic, mythological, and moral-historical perspective (Wakefield Press, 2016), 4.

Introduction to José Bergamín’s For Nothing in the World (1937). by Gerardo Muñoz

The essay “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, by Spanish poet and essayist José Bergamín, should be read as a wartime reflection on the historical impasse of the Spanish Civil War. First published in Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic journal Esprit in the 1937 April issue, the essay in its final version featured in Bergamín’s Mexican exile collection Detrás de la cruz: terrorismo y persecusión religiosa en España (Lucero, 1941). While on the surface Bergamín is responding to the struggle between secular political anarchism and traditionalist Spanish Catholicism intertwined at the heart of the civil war, the essay is also highly idiosyncratic in laying out the poet’s theological vision that permeates his entire body of work, and which can already be found, in nuce, in the fragments and aphorisms of his first book El cohete y la estrella (Índice, 1923). “Reality is the spirit, imagination, and thought…there is religiosity when it claims space positively”, he would write in the first pages of that book. 

The 1937 essay, along with his defense of illiteracy in “Decadadencia del analfabetismo” (1933), Bergamín argues for a living theology of the Spanish people (pueblo) that is neither imperial nor clerical, but rather always an excess to the imperial political theology that dominated the long historical narrative of Spanish modernity since the Reconquista. It was thanks to Bergamín’s genius that Catholicism appears connected to a habitual form of life of everyday people, their shared language, symbols, and experiences; and, ultimately the common imagination that grants them access to the world through the mystery of living and dying. In fact, as in “Decadencia” (1933), it is important to highlight the centrality of the term “pueblo”, which although translated as “people”, it coincides neither with the “People” of the unity of civil society nor the common historical identity of the Nation. For Bergamín, these determinations, in fact, were corrupted notions of pueblo. The pueblo is always the event that remains from the abstraction of political theology, and always pueblo minoría, a ‘minor people’ that dwells in the house of God within and beyond the mundane. This is why Bergamín would claim in the text that the pueblo is always ancilla mundi. In this light, Bergamín thought that political anarchism incapable of a revelation to the divine, and an imperial Church in charge of the administration of the “nothingness”, were two poles of the same vectorial force of modern nihilism. That was the color of his corruptio optimi pessima with clear echoes of Fridugisus’ De nihilo et tenebris. 

In “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, Bergamín’s theological position emerges as a third way to exit this historical poverty of relating to the theos. As Giorgio Agamben observes in a 1973 entry of Quaderni (Quodlibet, I, 2024, 46-47), for Bergamín the divine entails a corporeal cohabitation of a demon and an angel that expresses appearance of life, and thus the sensible and poetic mediation with the world of forms. In this sense, Bergamín’s theology differs fundamentally from the rational and canonical traditions, fostering the sensorial path of dramatic and divine beauty. This goes to the kernel of the 1937 essay: the rise of the Totalizing State (historical Fascism), was a corrupting form of theos insofar as it aimed at regulating the “nothingness” against the possibility of appearance and truth. But the word of God and the angelic hymns linger in the time of wreckage and devastation in its impatient drift towards anger in the world, which is still very much our own. Ultimately, Bergamín was convinced that the pueblo’s mute voice, resurfacing from the depths of pain, could dodge the abysmal fall into the tribulations of radical evil always too congenial with the survival of ‘this world’.

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* This gloss was written to accompany the English translation of Bergamín’s “Por nada del mundo” forthcoming at New Personalism, summer 2025. 

American apocalypticism. On Pierpaolo Ascari’s Fine di mondo: dentro al rifugio antiatomico da giardino (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

Pointing to a methodological clarification, Pierpaolo Ascari’s Fine di mondo: dentro al rifugio antiatomico da giardino (DeriveApprodi, 2024) opens with an untimely advice: the threat of atomic extermination of human life can only be told and appealed through the irony deployed in all areas of consumerist culture. Undoubtedly, this fits pretty well to the case on point, since American modernization is both the hotbed of Hollywood and the atomic bomb, two poles of the regime of a vicarious life consisted with Henry Adams’ well-known assertion that, in spite of everything, America civilizational passion has always been generalized optimism. And it is not surprising that Stanley Kubrick, when asked about the thesis of Dr. Strangelove (1964), also claimed that the only possible form to tell a story about the bomb of total extermination was through a black comedy (Ascari 11). This self-serving optimism is tested in Ascari’s Fine di mondo (2024) by looking at the construction of an apocalyptic underworld fantasy; that is, in the garden of anti-atomic sheltering that reveals the true arcana of modern Americanism as a subterfuge – but also a civil current in plain sight – parallel to the rise of mechanized labor under the conditions of the triumphant Fordism. Of course, now that our farewell to Fordism has been longed trumpeted, it does not take much to see that what remains is the infrastructure of schizophrenia and general terror in the social fabric that colors the specific tune of American apocalypticism. Ascari’s book is a superb elaboration of this tonality as historically rooted and articulated, but also open to its (pseudo)theological mutations undergoing in our present. 

On the surface, Ascari’s Fine di mondo (2024) is a short compendium of the civil responses and techniques towards atomic destruction and survival; but, more deeply, is also a history of Americanism as a historical project committed to a long process of civil domestication, enclosure, and endurance of survival. Of course, the nuances here are important to grasp the subtle hypothesis of Ascari’s working scene, since we also know that modernity at large (considering both its contingency and contradiction as features of its emergence) was also a process of an optimized gnosis through alienation and the enclosure of private property towards commerce stabilization and productive growth (the nomos). But for Ascari the specificity of the American nomoi through the lenses of atomic sheltering and refuge implies a microphysis; that is, a “way of life” validated through theological premises tailored in the organization of subjective deificatio (Ascari 23). This means that the apocalyptic apparatus driving American philosophy of history is not just one of realization towards the absolute objectivation of the world – even if such endeavor is necessary and preparatory – but rather that the sheltering and self-imposed domestication of human existence has become naturalized as a threshold of the conditions of finite human life. The paradigm of sheltering as the unit of survival is a form of self-regulation of grace that is consistent with the evangelical dispensationalism and technical election analyzed in Monica Ferrando’s recent important book.

The concrete examples abound in Ascari’s short but densely illustrated book: from the Civil Protection comic to the details of the emergence of “do it yourself” assemble manuals (discussed in the correspondence between Adorno and Sohn-Rethel); from the Hulk to Godzilla in a post-atomic bombed world; form the resilient speeches on atomic menace by JFK to a 1950s study conducted at Princeton University that reassured that “fathers” will get to know their children better in conditions of total sheltering even if it results in an “ethics of the jungle” (Ascari 34). Following Guy Oakes’ groundbreaking The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994), what is distilled in Ascari’s pop culture puzzle is the panorama of the “Cold War” not as a war that did not take place between two imperial powers; but rather a total war that took place beneath the crust of the earth (and this is why the topoi of the refugee becomes so telling) and at the thicket of human existence waged as psychic management of the civil sphere. In fact, the “imaginary war” is nothing else than the stazion once social life that has yet to cease to exist in our days (Ascari 48-49). 

For Ascari this implied an interiorization of the ‘sublime’ in the reification of the social fabric, which cannot be divorced from the lobotomized subjectivity of the crisis of “social man” that Gianni Carchia identified as the steering project of post-enlightenment Romantic negativity. In the turbid vaults of the self-made man we encounter the liquidation of everything that is living and the projection of fictitious death that clings into “salvation” in spite of absolute destruction; because, after all, those that survive total destruction are only there to confirm the soteriological greatness of the American destiny (Ascari 78-79). The thorough “Ubu” dimension of American psychic political power definitely speaks to this well sedimented conviction of sacrificial subjectivity. Who does not remember the glorious chants for resilience and isolation of the American political elites during the peak of the COVID19 crisis management? If it came to no one’s surprise that a large majority of Americans accepted the pandemic arbitrary rules (monetized whenever needed, it goes without saying), it was because the American subjectivity has been adapted for quite too long to the ongoing separation of refugee and domestication. After reading Ascari, in fact, we think whether the emergency policies were not just another episode in the history of American sheltering now extended at a planetary scale.

There is another idiosyncrasy to American apocalypticism that must be accounted for. And this is introduced towards the end of Fine di mondo (2024), when Ascari quotes Ernesto De Martino about nuclear war; mainly, that when it comes to atomic annihilation there is no longer the symbolic mythic-ritualistic process of reintegration, but rather the mere technification of the hand that gathers scientific knowledge in convergence with the death drive” (Ascari 81). In other words, this technico-apocalypticism brings to absolute unity the originary response of the human species (the movement of the hand) with the organization of scientific rationality that, like Günther Anders saw, brings no re-symbolization of the principle of reality, but rather it can only reaffirm the layering of the principle of reality to govern over it (Ascari 85). In a way, if it as if the essence of American apocalypticism is instituted as if beyond time, since the endurance of a “time of the end” means that the triumphant death (and the dead fueling the demagoguery of its process) foreclosing the symbolization without an exit. Indeed, an apocalypse without redeeming kingdom. For Ascari the only anticipation – primordial mechanism of anthropological capacity – is that of “money”, and hence the dominance of the principle of general equivalence entails gaining the temporal illusion of some distance from the ongoing production of death. But it is evident to anyone today, as it was said not long ago, that the true dead are those petit bourgeoisie living in the American suburbs. And they keep coming as the embers of domestic happiness try to ferociously shut down the latency of a piercing pain. 

Yes, the nature of permanent apocalypticism confirms that the true and final object of techno-capitalist force has always been the possibility of multiple life worlds. And its erosion implies the endless possibility of ordering the life of the city, as Elon Musk just a couple of weeks ago told the former president of the Republican Party: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and now they are full cities again. Yeah, it is not as scary as people think”. If the enterprise of civilization has largely been understood as springing from the crust of the earth upwards, one of the important lessons of Ascari’s Fine di mondo is that it trains us to look downwards and inwards as the cruxes of America’s persistent government over the garden of our souls. 

Hunger and gluttony after civilization. by Gerardo Muñoz

It could easily be argued that one of the central immaterial characters of Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947) is the constant state of hunger. It is the more telling that Antelme – and it is also surprising that most of his relevant critics have been unattentive to this problem – does not reflect explicitly about the nature of hunger in his account, as if already hunger as “facticity” of the destruction of human experience in the camp was enough to show how the crisis of effective symbolization with the world means, ultimately, the struggle for the maintenance of the nutritional condition for survival [1]. It is a particular state of nutritional privation that colors not just every community or social relation in L’espèce humaine, but also every thought, passive meandering, and even moral clarity of the deportee life in the camp. The pathetic struggles over pieces of bread or scoops of putrid soup while deposing the human race from the world brings them back, at the level of consciousness, to the raw origins of its anthropological self-affirmation. And this means that every bite of food and every bit of  protein digested by the human being is only the antecedent of the future need to meet the elemental nutritional gain for survival. The ‘consciousness towards hunger’ colored in the camp becomes the mirror image of the incessant eating disorder of hypermodern social adaptation as two forms of predatory struggle over the exchange goods of the world. 

Excessive eating and nutritional deficiency are, in this sense, two pothistorical temporal circuit of human beings as a species of hunger and gluttony. About a decade ago a book entitled Hunger: the oldest problem (2014), written by Martín Caparrós, stood out as a proof of a materialist conception at a planetary scale, which for the novelist could easily be solved by drafting the legibility of material inequality and charting the regional disproportionate asymmetries between the “good eaters” (and good feeders), and those in permanent hunger, malnutrition, localized famine, and potential starvation. For Caparros, given the height of our “civilizational progress”, hunger revealed the “original plague of humanity….which now can be solved through a political decision” [2]. The substance of the “political decision” for hunger of the human race was as empty as the very nauseating fatigue of real starvation, although as a rhetorical ploy it does contribute, even against its own presuppositions, to the civilizational paradigm that structures the poles of gluttony and hunger that sustains the domestication of the human species in conformity – under the terror imposed by the glacial tonality of nihilism – with a ‘good enough life’, as an American cultural scholar univocally upheld it [3]. A deconstructed Michelin rated restaurant is as much of the ‘good enough life’ as the oversized pots of soup delivered by World Central Kitchen in any of the ongoing war zones.

A ‘good enough life’, always marching towards the absolute postponement of an absolute hunger in any part of the planet, whose most recent avatar (not the final by any means) is the well wrapped brown bag of “food app delivery” that is silently placed in front of your house door. The food delivery package, very much like the breadcrumbs of the concentration camp described in  L’espèce humaine, enter full circle even if the arrangement of symbolic reality says otherwise. It does not matter that there are human hand struggles for dregs in the camp while in civil society there is a seemingly untouched brown bag; what makes them equivalent is how the autonomization of hunger and gluttony have been deprived of everything except its own functionalization. In other words, the absolutization of gluttony and hunger as abstract nexus of social reproduction entails the complete devastation of commensality, and all features of experiential sharing that in the ancient tradition is gathered in the banquet or in wine festivities [4].

This absolute autonomization turns its back to the world, which has now been transformed as a mere reserve and container. This is why the analogies with the wild cornucopia of the elastic worlds of Gargantua or Pantagruel, or even the mythical land of Cockaigne fall short, and can only contribute to fetichize the problem of the “true hunger” of the human species beyond nutritional and biological  arrangement. The dialectical movement at work in the alleged returned to the primal anthropological condition comes at a price: the sensible and meaningful relation, which is no longer to be invented but rather to be renounced in the elaborate thickening of a social space organized through depredation and adaptation. In his Manuale di sopravvivenza, Giorigo Cesarano noted that the problem of hunger exceeded the political and biological determinations, since hunger was first and foremost the problem of the completion of nihilism – the only hunger was that of the wandering of the human species reveals the hunger of meaning as a the true double negation: 

“At the end of prehistoric times, the most ancient problem signals the return of the negative instinct: hunger. But this time is about the hunger of meaning  that exceeds, while bringing it to synthesis, the anxiety of survival as merely an animal and its false resolution as a life that transcendentals the idealist forms of the human “ideal”. …both the negative instinct and the rational separation, having conquered some coherence in its praxis, from a possible totality seeks to insert being in a real university in order to be known truly as such” [5].

In this dense moment of his book, Cesarano seems to be arriving at an important inflection point: that is, the primal instinct of hunger, precisely as fealt and maximized in the new existential poverty of the human experience, is already compensatory to the concrete realization of an absolute hunger of meaning that emerges in both the privative stage of hunger, and in the consummation of any imaginable and desirable meal. Hence, the return to the facticity of the prehistoric stage of instinct negativity is ultimately the final exclusive dish: the nothingness of nihilism to retain the illusion of, in the words of Antelme’s poem “The soup”, going to far (or as far as it needs to be that the “world doesn’t end” [6]. The anthropophagic energies are the last tools of self-burial of the bicameral man in the wake of intramundane extinction [7].

But the dialectical vengeance in the epoch of real subsumption is hereby expressed in its uttermost kernel: the material world can only take the image of a predatory park of hunters and preys, of eating and being eaten. In the privation of death, the fictitious life of being is already a form of expropriating death as ongoing struggle for survival and self-conquest of life’s own organic illness, as it appears in Anatole France’s fragment: “No, I would rather think that organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet. It would be intolerable to believe that throughout the infinite universe there was nothing but eating and being eaten” [8]. The poverty of a restricted vitalist self-reflection can only described the organization of the world as a civilization that resembles a Pac-Man maze of the circulation of the equivalent. It is not difficult agree with Adorno that this is a perfect image of the integral society without any residue – as it continues to be in any point of the planet – is the last possible well administered utopia.

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Notes 

1. See the essays in the volume On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries (The Malboro Press, 2003), 55-203.

2. Martín Caparrós. Hunger: The Oldest Problem (Melville House, 2020).

3. Avram Alpert. The Good-Enough Life (Princeton University Press, 2022).

4. Albert Hirschman. “Melding the public and private spheres: taking commensality seriously”, in Crossing Boundaries: Selected Essays (Zone Books, 1998), 11-28.

5. Giorgio Cesarano. Manuale di sopravvivenza (Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), 70.

6. Robert Antelme. “The Soup”, in On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race: Essays and Commentaries (The Malboro Press, 2003), 36.

7. Julian Jayne. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Msriner Book, 2000).

8. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2020), 83-84.

Humanity’s way out: antinomies of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945). by Gerardo Muñoz

In an early review of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), Renato Poggioli noted that one of the important merits of the novel was that in spite of the authort’s political commitment, the narrative was “neither partisan nor ideological. I dare to say it is not political; the author even apologizes for this at the end of the volume” [1]. Poggioli, of course, is referring to Vittorini’s Postscript where he states, favoring a thin notion of the autonomy of art, that the end of art is to “seek in art the trace progress of humanity is altogether different from fighting for it upon the political and social terrain” [2]. This is enough evidence to bring to bear Vittorini’s humanist project grounded in a faith in the “progress of the human species” that he wrestled with throughout his life, and that he never really abandoned according to Franco Fortini [3]. Of course, Vittorini’s ‘progressivism’ is not bounded to ironclad guidelines of political economy and the science of a materialist history, rather his position is the attempt to flee from it, to undertake a different path in which humanity and inhumanity could enter into an improper and inconspicuous relationship towards presence. 

Here we can part ways with Poggioli’s suggestion that Uomini e no (1945) is not “sufficiently political” because the characters do not dare to make political slogans or identify themselves with a concrete political party line (the Communist Party that Vittorini himself identified with in spite of having written a non-political novel) during the underground resistance during the years of fascist domination in Milan during the interwar years. If Uomini e no (1945) drifts aways from engaging in a formal political identification to mobilize the narrative persuasion it is because for Vittorini there is an original struggle for “life” that necessarily precedes subjection and political action: it is the struggle of human species to confront the difficulty of its own inhuman threshold, which becomes necessary to account for in any materialist conception. The whole tension of the novel hinges on the unnerving formal composition of the narrative with the asphyxiating dread and angst of the character that embodies the existential the practice of an incarnated struggle beyond survival. 

However, what is beyond survival? What comes after the desert of a world that soon enough – in the words of Theodor Adorno at the height of the mid century – will turn human life into “mere functions within a monstrous social machine in which “life does not longer lives”…in which what grows is the scope of socialization and its functions. What I want to say is that liberty has become a mere pretext to enhance the ways of domination” [4]. If politics is the religion of modernity (political theology suturing the void with authority), the accumulation of liberty can only be understood as the moment of expansion and reproduction of effective domination. In a way, the metropolitan scenario in Uomini e no (1945) foreshadows the evolving historical epoch of this ‘monstrous socialization’ as a civil war or stasis, in which the mere survival of political struggle is proportional to the dispensation of death of humanity as the last dialectical movement of humanity against itself; that is, towards the concrete extinction of the human. For Vittorini the swerving black sun of fascism and political militancy (in its idealized version invested in the paradigm of sacrificial structure of history) can only amount to the realization of epochal nihilism and the fertilization of the expansive desert in the novel at the expense of sacrificing the erotic mediation with the world, which entails the liquidation of the sensibility external to human: “Love, in those deserts, is at its most squalid; it is not that life is absent from but the life it has is not alive. You are thirsty and have a chance to drink; there is water. You are hungry, you have a chance to eat; there’s bread. There is a spring and alms around, just the one you are looking for. But it  is only a mirage, it is not the thing itself” [5]. The fundamental question posed by Vittorini is never truly resolved by Uomini e no (1945): crossing the desert to achieve something like an erotic distance with the thing itself as ultimately the confirmation of one’s irreductible destiny. No doubt, there are moments where this emerges in strange ways, at the limit of narration and as a linguistic declaration. This is scripted through the exchange with the old lady Selva on happiness: “We work in order that men be happy. Isn’t that what we are working for?…Men need to be happy. Would there be any point to our clandestine newspapers? To our conspiracies?” [6]. 

Is happiness a subterfuge to return to the world, or is happiness, authentic non-compensatory happiness, the stimmung of life as it retreats from the delegated representations of civil society? The suspended dialectical closure at the level of form in Uomini e no (1945) provides a preliminary resolution to the question of happiness amidst wreckage; a collapse that speaks to Vittorini’s impossibility to bring into synthesis political action and existential authenticity. The narrative texture of Uomini e no (1945) is a preparatory exploration – showing the false exists in the meantime – towards the possible liberation of man’s passions, even against the premises of a reconciled ‘Humanity’ capable of leaving behind the antinomies of humanism and antihumanism at the service of the ‘communist way’. And we know that for Vittorini the commitment to ‘Communism’ was inscribed not in the idea or the organizational tactics but in the notion of the “way” (una via), capable of opening possibilities to counter the coercive efficacy of the administrative social apparatuses that turn historical progress into a totalizing desert [7].  How to do so – is there any legible index to the “via comunista”? As a novel Uomini e no is preparatory towards this retreat from the confusion of the inhumanity of the human on the one hand, and the total humanization of the world to deface the possibility of happiness and experience with the world itself. 

In this sense, Fortini is right in describing the lyricism of the novel as attuned to a funeral oration or song (“canto funebre”), which is also a prolonged farewell to the ideals of Vittorini himself as a moral humanist; that is, as someone committed to the ideals and abstraction of redemptive self-sacrificial christology and the self-serving autonomous action of the pardon as man’s last hope to absorb the inhuman kernel into the vita nova of a redeemed universal Humanity. And in fact, these are two “endings”’ of Uomini e no (1945): the self-immolation and sacrifice of the protagonist N2 waiting to confront the Nazi official Cane Nero, and the final sequence of the worker that refuses to murder a German soldier because he looked “sad” even when standing on occupied soil, even when he occupies the role of the protectorate of the nomos of the earth [8]. These are the novel two preparatory distinct actions in the dense fog of the interregnum: the Christological path of sacrifice of N2  – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, which according to René Girard’s defines the advent of the Christian sacrificial  practice- seeks a last action of resistance holding on to “humanity’s internal weakness”, which carries the elevation of secularized mythic discharge of subjective martyrdom [9]. On the other, the milanese worker offers redemption as a form of secret forgiveness (without a justification and without a why) to the occupier, and in this way integrate the inhuman into the human species as the solution to the repeated rumination over the movement of struggle and resistance: “Why, without being in any way forced to do so, had they entered this duel to the death, and why did they continue to wage it?” [10]. 

In his early reading of Uomini e no (1945) Franco Fortini offered a thesis that I am tempted to call the domestication of the wolf argument; an inversion of Hobbesian anthropology and the Christian felix culpa in which struggle’s optimism will ultimately transfigure the internal wolf unto the human’s heart [11]. But we know that the homo homini lupi depends on a thick notion of anthropology, of the human’s unfathomable deficiency in relation to ‘object reality’ so that any domestication of the wolf within humanity is also an anthropological quest; perhaps the last “route” of negating humanism through substantive acts (sacrificial sacrifice and forgiveness) in the attempt to reconcile the wolf with man. But this is the very enterprise of civilizational techniques of adaptation proper to the tooling of political anthropology – that is, the domestication of the savage wolf entails its conversion to the passive dog. Could there be a way out to the final verdict of dialectical form beyond struggle, and the reconciliation of humanity with its negation? Perhaps this is only registered as the unthought in Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945); an experience that prepares a return to the world through the conatus essendi, or  the preservation of each thing’s being as their are. This is registered in only instances of the novel in the backdrop of a landscape; indeed, outside the subject of self-reflection, and beyond the premises of radical evil proper to moral platitudes. And the moment reads like this in chapter CXXX: “The long dusty road, the drowsiness, the hay, the stitches where the cicadas were: everything that was, and that, along with everyone who is lost, still wants to be. And the sky filled with kites? The sky that was filled with kites” [12]. The perseverance of the conatus essendi puts to rest what the delegated forms that politics and morality have to offer as temporal substitutes for dragging the historical promise of humanism within epochal nihilism. 

In this suspended imagery of an arid landscape, Vittorini descends to the preservation of things as they open to their manifestation of another sense of freedom – no longer tied to the paradigm of historical liberation nor to the assumption of synthetic anthropological determinations to sooth pain – comes upwards, always silently, through the order of description outside the human. And is not in this description what Gianni Carchia would call “the non-human…a gesture of farewell to the idealist movement; a farewell to the exaltation of the human up to the highpoint of its explosion. The refusal to substitute the dead god for a human that in the depredatory scope of totality crosses every limit, every transcendence, and infinity” [13]? This transposition of this  proximity with this “other-than-humanity” ( what Humanity can no longer hold on to) is the secret to Vittorini’s infrapolitical impasse in Uomini e no (1945) that holds the key to his insistence on a notion of “freedom” against the subject incapable of overcoming itself in the face of the abstraction (morality) or ideological  reassurance (militancy) [14]. One could assume that the worker’s last line in Uomini e no (1945) – which also coincides with Vittorini’s mimetic repetition in his “Postscript” – in the form of a promise (‘I’ll learn better’) registers the final attempt to grasp what remains on the exterior fog of humanity: a notion of freedom that, in seeking ‘a way out’, insists in the possibilities of establishing contact with the world. Thus, the program of historical liberation can only be achieved against historical and civilizational fixation; traversing the polarity of humanity and inhumanity, and thus deposing the sublimated sentiment of pain that social domination can administer as an unending process of degenerated and moribound humanity as mere continuation of the fictive life.

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Notes 

1. Renato Poggioli. “Review of Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini”, Books Abroad, Vol.20, N.4, 1946, 393.

2. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 199.

3. Franco Fortini. “Ma esisteva Vittorini?”, L’Expresso, 4, 2 febbraio 1986, 86.

4. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. “El mundo administrado o la crisis del individuo”, Pensamiento al margen: revista digital de ideas políticas, N.19, 2023, 200.

5. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 34.

6. Ibid., 13. 

7. Elio Vittorini. “El comunismo como vía”, in Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 279.

8.  Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 50.

9. René Girard. Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 65. 

10. Ibid.,  196.

11. Franco Fortini. “Che cosa può l’uomo: Uomini e no” (1945), in Saggi italiani (1987), 253.

12. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985),190. 

13. Gianni Carchia. “Glosa sull’umanismo”, L’erba voglio, N.29-30, 1977, 9.

15. Elio Vittorini. “La libertad es difícil” (1956), en Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 382.