Monica Jansen

Introduction: From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia, from Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?

This introduction critically addresses the historical development of operaismo/autonomism into “postautonomist” thinking. First, it argues that the very history of postautonomism allows for criticizing the notion of the “history” (or lack thereof) of theorists associated with postautonomist Marxism, such as Antonio Negri. It argues that the “all-or-nothing” characteristic of autonomism lives on in postautonomist theorys denial of mediation (Negri, Berardi), which in fact falls short because of it. Current developments within postautonomist theory, however, offer an alternative to this bipolar logic by redefining notions of subjectivity (Virno, Pasquinelli). The emphasis in this strand of postautonomism given to bio- and anthropo-politics—a new political anthropology –implies a new form of (academic) knowledge production, performed by what Jack Bratich calls the “machinic intellectual.” In this sense, postautononism in fact urges the rethinking of the very idea of the “autonomy” of “self-valorization.”

Raccontare la giustizia

Dalle varie riflessioni critiche sul rapporto tra letteratura e giustizia e tra narrazione e legge si può dedurre che alla letteratura venga attribuita la facoltà di “fare giustizia” e alla legge il potenziale di produrre delle storie. Anche se le opinioni divergono sull’effettivo valore trasformativo della letteratura di fronte alla legge, nel panorama italiano sembra prevalere l’idea che la letteratura possa offrire uno strumento conoscitivo per raggiungere una giustizia poetica e fare esperienza della verità. Tale compito etico, che viene attribuito a una narrativa che svolge la funzione di “estetica documentale”, si collega al complicato passaggio dalla Prima alla Seconda Repubblica, riassunto comunemente con la formula di “memoria divisa”. Gli esempi letterari presi in esame dagli anni Sessanta ad oggi, si caratterizzano attraverso le loro ibridizzazioni di genere, le dimensioni transmediali, performative e metanarrative. Da Giuseppe Fava a Gianrico Carofiglio, da Franco Fortini a Giampaolo Pansa, si trasmette il bisogno di una giustizia sociale che si concretizza attraverso un’indagine critica dell’apparato giuridico e attraverso la formulazione di una giustizia metaforica. Anche la raccolta di racconti Giudici e il fumetto Carlo Giuliani. Il ribelle di Genova dimostrano come la letteratura usi la transmedialità e la performatività per coinvolgere il lettore e arrivare a una giustizia che sia anche un “atto culturale”.

Life as Art, Art as Life, and Life’s Art: the ‘Living Poetics’ of Italian Modernism

Abstract This article studies the key concept of ‘life’ within the context of Italian modernism, understood in the broad sense of a network of cultural responses in the period from 1861 until the mid-1930s. Following Roberto Esposito’s suggestion that the transversal category of life is distinctive for Italian “living thought” (Esposito), the ‘living poetics’ here exposed focuses on three key literary moments in which the crucial relationship between life and art is radically redefined. D’Annunzio’s ‘life as art’ aesthetics develops a ‘lifestyle’ with an individualist as well as nationalist dimension with its climax in the First World War. Futurism, starting from the axiom that war is the sole hygiene of the world, develops instead an ‘art as life program’ with which to revolutionize not only present life but also the afterlife. Finally, the young realists of the 1930s bring back absolutist notions of life to their realist and private proportions in order to create a poetics of reconstruction after the trauma of the Great War. A comparison between these literary moments shows how the concept of life not only is a constitutive element of an Italian ‘living poetics,’ but also that literary change entails a constant redefinition of autonomist and heteronomous aspects of the paradoxical tension between art and life.

Televisionismo: narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica

Con ‘televisionismo’ il presente volume intende la produzione del dramma storico televisivo che, a partire dagli anni Novanta, ha riscritto da un’ottica revisionistica i momenti chiave del passato nazionale che hanno determinato una memoria ‘divisa’ della nazione italiana. La forma popolare e fruibile delle fiction promuove la condivisione del passato, ma potrebbe anche manipolare la verita storica trasmessa. E su quest’ambivalenza che vertono i contributi in cui si analizzano le serie televisive prodotte dalla Rai e da Mediaset.

Introduzione: Televisionismo: narrazioni televisive della storia italiana negli anni della seconda Repubblica

Con ‘televisionismo’ il presente volume intende la produzione del dramma storico televisivo che, a partire dagli anni Novanta, ha riscritto da un’ottica revisionistica i momenti chiave del passato nazionale che hanno determinato una memoria ‘divisa’ della nazione italiana. La forma popolare e fruibile delle fiction promuove la condivisione del passato, ma potrebbe anche manipolare la verita storica trasmessa. E su quest’ambivalenza che vertono i contributi in cui si analizzano le serie televisive prodotte dalla Rai e da Mediaset.

Introduction: Television and the fictional rewriting of history in Italy's 'Second Republic'

The media have become ever more dominant in the production of national and global memories. These are de facto increasingly mediated. Accordingly, scholarly debates have focused on the way history and memory — on a national as well as on a global scale — are shaped by the media, among which television has perhaps had the strongest impact on the construction of memories. Since the 1990s, history programming for television in Europe has increased, although research on the subject has long remained in the margins. In fact, it was not until the 2000s that a number of publications set out to tackle the issue of historical and narrative production on television, establishing cross-European and transnational comparisons, and investigating the plurality of actors involved in history production on television, the construction of public memory, and the rewriting of national identity. In these international studies, the specific case of Italy has been largely overlooked. Yet, television has had a very strong impact on the production, diffusion, and reception of national histories and memories in Italy, especially since the collapse of the domestic film industry in the 1980s. Due to the influence of Italian political parties on television programming, the role of television in shaping people’s ideas about the past, present, and future has indeed become a crucial feature of Italian culture and politics. The rewriting of national history through television programmes can thus be said to be a specific feature of Italy’s transition to the Second Republic, in the early 1990s. The Italianist, 34. 2, 142–155, June 2014

« Tante idee dell’India »Un dialogo tra Antonio Franchini e Antonio Tabucchi,due viaggiatori « inconsapevoli »

Cette contribution part d’une confrontation entre deux recits de voyage sortis en 2010, Signore delle lacrime d’Antonio Franchini et Viaggi e altri viaggi d’Antonio Tabucchi. Tabucchi, reflechissant a nouveau sur la genese de son roman Nocturne indien (1984), affirme qu’il ne l’aurait pas ecrit s’il avait eu la quantite de renseignements sur l’Inde qu’il a rassembles depuis lors, et que c’est veritablement l’inconscience qui est son sauf-conduit devant l’inconnu. Franchini aussi, a la fin de son voyage-meditation le long du Gange, atteint un etat d’inconscience. Mais il y a entre eux des differences fondamentales. Tandis que le paradoxe de la multiplicite est pour Tabucchi une verite a laquelle on peut feindre de croire – et dans ce cas l’inconscience est une construction –, le paradoxe de Śiva apprend a Franchini que l’imperfection fait partie de la creation, et donc que l’inconscience est un modus vivendi immanent. Dans les deux cas le voyage est avant tout une reflexion sur la mort qui permet de retablir le contact entre vivants et morts.

Futurism and the Technological Imagination

The ‘Editor’s Foreword’ of this volume on Futurism and the Technological Imagination states that its primary aim is to offer a contribution to the 2009 centenary of Futurism with ‘a balanced and multifaceted account of the Futurist technological imagination’ (p. viii). This means first of all counterbalancing Futurist technophilia of the first phase with the flipside of the coin, maturated in the second phase: the ‘machine angst’ professed in the 1920s and the Futurist Naturist Movement that was shaped in the 1930s. Are the celebratory and apocalyptic facets of the ‘myth of the machine’ at odds or are they constitutive of a Janus-faced Futurism? The fourteen chapters and their abstracts provide different answers. Wanda Strauven speaks in terms of ‘ambivalence’ in Marinetti’s fascination with cinema, and Domenico Pietropaoli in terms of a ‘culture of consilience’ when dealing with the artistic movement’s attraction to science. Both authors thus locate the opposites of the contradiction within the dialectic spirit of Futurism. Others analyze a progressive evolution in time, for example of Futurist photography (Regnani) and radio (Fisher) or of ‘Words-in-Freedom’ towards electronic literature (D’Ambrosio). Those future-oriented perspectives envision a full realization of the Futurist project with the tools and conditions offered by our contemporary postmodern Internet age, and therefore attribute to Futurism a prophetic meaning. Still others focus on singular figures and phenomena – Loie Fuller’s ‘serpentine dance’ (Veroli), Bruno Munari’s ‘useless machines’ (Antonello), Émile Verhaeren’s protoFuturist technological epic (Castiglione), the contradictory concept of Futurist Machine Art of 1922 (Versari), primitivism and the vernacular in Futurist and Rationalist architecture (Sabatino), the Futurist Naturist movement of the 1930s (Härmänmaa) – all complicating the image of a unitary technology-driven Futurism, ‘Futurisms’ being more appropriate a term to do justice to the multiple images of the movement. And, finally, there are some contributions that attempt to get hold of the phenomenon with an all-embracing historical approach (Berghaus) or a conceptual approach, focusing on the central concepts of sensibilità/sensibility (Milan) and epiphany (Griffin) as indices of possibly conflicting crossroads. Starting with the first chapter by Berghaus, one of Futurism’s leading scholars, one gets the impression that technophilia and machine angst can be ordered along chronological lines that are of a pace with technological and political developments of the period. If in the first phase Marinetti advocated openness towards technological innovation in order to speed up Italy’s industrial backwardness, in the second phase, after World War I, dissenting voices within the movement were heard that resulted in Vasari’s play Angoscia delle machine (1927), and that culminated in Marinetti’s conversion from an android-perspective to a spiritual interpretation of progress in harmony with nature, as was expressed by the Futurist Naturist Movement of 1934. In Marja Book reviews

Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini: un’ottica infantile sulla guerra e sulla violenza in Come prima delle madri di Simona Vinci

Per divertire la noia della loro morte dovra innocente recitare una commedia pervertita dove il segreto ultimo che confida sembri infine a lui stesso una favola di tradimento.Elsa Morante, Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini. Introduzione: infanzia, storia e violenza Narrare la guerra non e piu narrare una storia di eroi ma piuttosto narrare una storia di eroismo inutile. Come osserva Alberto Casadei a proposito del Partigiano Johnny di Fenoglio: «Ogni eroismo e ormai inutile, e il destino di tutt...