12	“MAD, UTTERLY DESPERATE STUDY”

In 1964 Pareyson shifted to theoretical philosophy, and I took over the course in esthetics. At age twenty-eight I was one of the youngest lecturers in the whole Italian university system.

In 1967 my book Ipotesi su Nietzsche (Hypothesis on Nietzsche) came out; I was dumped by a girl I was very seriously engaged to; Palazzo Campana, the heart of the University of Turin, was occupied at the end of November, and I was initially unsure what to think about the student movement; Michele Pellegrino became archbishop of Turin and this had a picaresque impact on my public / private life (it led me one night to the Valentino, the park along the Po where a lot of homosexuals cruise, and from there into the police files); and I suffered a devastating ulcer.

Of both my doubts about the student protest movement—based partly on Pasolinian antibourgeoisism, partly on what Lukács would call romantic anticapitalism—and my ulcer, which wasn’t a minor illness back then, I was cured within a few months. Between March and July 1968 I had my own personal ’68. As for being in the police files, I don’t suppose I was ever cured of that; it’s generally a chronic malady.

In fact, I had always worked like crazy ever since I was eighteen. This is no doubt the (very proletarian) reason—along with the way I had lived my homosexuality until then—for the ulcer that plagued me for several years.

During the months when I wasn’t at Heidelberg, but also before going there and after coming back, I worked like a beast. I had to work. I was a real proletarian. Private lessons were no longer enough. Mornings I taught children in a state-recognized school run by the Rosminians, three afternoons a week I held office hours at the institute of esthetics—I had rapidly become assistant to Pareyson, but only on contract, which had to be renewed every year and paid a pittance—and the other afternoons I devoted to my book on Heidegger.

Another cause of my ulcer was certainly the Enciclopedia filosofica, a doorstop in six volumes that is still around, edited by the Centro Studi Filosofici in Gallarate in collaboration with another Catholic center at Padua. Pareyson was in charge of the historical section, and I worked with him. I’ll never forget the long argument about who was going to handle the entry on “God.” Was “God” a historical entry or a theoretical entry? In the end it was the Padua crowd who won out. God was a theoretical entry.