| 37 | TERRACES |
If I let the memories flow, I realize that some happy and important moments in my life have had to do with terraces: the terrace at Cetraro, the terrace of the house in Heidelberg, the terrace at Santorini. Even here in Via Po, where I live now, there’s a small terrace full of plants.
But there is another terrace that has caused, and still causes me, a bit of hurt as well as anger, a metaphorical yet very concrete terrace, the “Roman terrace,” which is a familiar Italian codeword for a certain blend of social, cultural, and intellectual snobbery.
I believe that is the main reason for the violence of the attacks on me and on weak thought, or on weak thought and me, which comes to the same thing. There are others, but that’s the principal reason. My international standing, the conferences, the books translated into dozens of languages, even my outing, my media presentability (certainly not any striving for media presence), the “prestigious” friendships that I have gained over time and with my work, have all opened a bit of a breach, no doubt. But the “Roman terrace” is always there and it keeps on trying. Doesn’t give up, doesn’t let go.
Who in Italy cares about philosophical speculation? To whom do you think it matters—unfortunately—if thought is weak or strong?
And yet it took Carlo Sini about one minute to start saying that weak thought was rubbish. As for Massimo Cacciari—let’s not even go there.
A day doesn’t pass without somebody taking a swipe at it in public. Maybe they don’t see the paradox, but what they’ve achieved is to make me the only Italian philosopher well known to the public, and well known for his own original elaboration, for his thought, not because he’s the mayor of someplace or a participant in a reality show.
In 1985 Gianpiero and I always used to watch Renzo Arbore’s Quelli della notte, one of the most successful shows on Italian television. And every evening Roberto D’Agostino would repeat this tagline: “pensiero debole, debolismo reaganiano” (weak thought, Reaganite debilism). Gianpiero and I laughed, naturally. But I still don’t know how dozens of my colleagues kept from bursting with envy. Maybe they never knew. Distinguished philosophers don’t watch Renzo Arbore.
And I’d like someone to show me an analogy, from the last hundred years, to what happened with weak thought. How many people go to a book presentation, a debate about a philosophical concept (excluding the festivals, which are trendy and recent)? Twenty people. Fifty when it’s a deluxe affair. But in the middle of the 1980s the debates on weak thought were jammed with people. You could have charged admission. True, it was full of people who were protesting: “It’s shameful, it isn’t true that thought is weak, neocapitalism, blah blah blah.” But they came. They got worked up. The “enemy” was never them.
When I was running for the European Parliament, Francesco Merlo saw fit to deride me mercilessly in the pages of Corriere della Sera.
Recently someone mentioned Carlo Ginzburg to me. Because when he did an interview with La Repubblica, the first question (without naming me explicitly) just happened to be about weak thought. Ginzburg, looking down his nose: “Oh . . . yes . . . weak thought,” as though it were obvious that it was an idiocy that wasn’t even worth dwelling on. Ginzburg wears a majestic air, and he does some interesting research certainly, perhaps a bit otiose, but that’s his business, I don’t have any objection. But when I publicly urged Adriano Sofri not to accept a pardon from Berlusconi—you’ve held out this long, stand firm a little longer, I told him—well, Ginzburg rushed indignantly to call my position shameful.
And Toni Negri, in his little book La differenza italiana, calls me a poor chap who is just passing by.
In 1977 I went to the famous conference against repression at Bologna. I went with a pair of extremist friends and a few other scruffy types in my red Volkswagen, and the police searched us down to our underwear. I waved to Gilles Deleuze from a distance, and nearby was Giulio Einaudi. Such an elegant revolutionary, with his leather jacket.
Some hostilities are intellectual, arising out of different schools and styles of thought, and they don’t necessarily turn personal. I’ve had those with Emanuele Severino, Mario Perniola, Valerio Verra, Carlo Sini, Vittorio Mathieu, Massimo Cacciari, too, when it comes right down to it. And naturally that hard-bitten Thomist, Umberto Eco. And those are one thing.
But someone like Marcello Pera, who when he wrote for La Stampa (the same paper I wrote for) never missed a chance to fling mud at the “weak thinker”—that’s different. I was about to quit the paper, but luckily he left first.
Carlo Augusto Viano had invented the expression “weak reason” before me, which I practically copied with my “weak thought.” When my definition came out, he dashed off a booklet against me—which soon sank from public notice—entitled Va pensiero (Go, thought). I shot back with an article called “Ma va là pensiero” (Ah, go on, thought) because it was an intolerable thing. This hostility, though, has faded away with the passage of time, to the point of vanishing.
The best I can hope for is a sort of friendly paternalism, such as I get from Aldo Cazzullo. He included me among Italy’s thirty-three “senior statesmen” along with Umberto Veronesi, Alberto Arbasino, Gino Paoli, Fernanda Pivano, Pietro Ingrao, Mario Monicelli, and so on, but he wrote, “Vattimo’s extraordinary intelligence ought to be protected against itself. He should be compelled to say no to a few of his countless interviewers. But the reprobate always answers.” Right. The next time I’ll say no to you, Cazzullo my friend. Look at the old driveller blathering away about Iraq and the Turin Olympics, Thales the philosopher and Paolo Bonolis the television host, writes Cazzullo, implying that for me there’s no difference.
One day I asked Cesare Cases: “Sorry, but why did you at Einaudi publish that fool Verrecchia while I had to go to all the way to Milan to publish my Nietzsche book with Bompiani?” Cases: “We decided that we needed an anti-Vattimo at our publishing house.” Ah. So there we have it. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t have the right credentials. And I didn’t have the necessary family background. Anacleto Verrecchia is one of those people who call Nietzsche a dolt because, unlike Schopenhauer, he didn’t frequent bordellos and wasn’t a suave socialite. Verrecchia wrote a biography of Nietzsche entirely built up around episodes such as Nietzsche losing his luggage, Nietzsche forgetting his umbrella, and so on. Verrecchia was a retailer of anecdotes, not a philosopher, but he published with Einaudi.
And where do you think I met Mario Mieli? At a march in front of Fiat? At a gay pride demonstration? No, not exactly. I met him at the home of Marco Vallora’s parents, highly respectable folk, musicians, people who knew the crème de la crème. And Mario Mieli was there with Giulio Einaudi. Of course Mieli could publish his Elementi di critica omosessuale (Elements of homosexual critique) with Einaudi: he was a cousin of Paolo Mieli. . . . For heaven’s sake, I don’t have anything against the Mieli family, but the point is that there are no other genuine reasons. It’s not even that I’m a fag. It’s a simple, unalloyed, straightforward question of social class.
There’s a sort of conventio ad excludendum on the part of those who come from the Communist Party, and even more on the part of those who left it at some point, like Giuliano Ferrara. I am convinced that Massimo D’Alema is a better friend to Giuliano Ferrara than to me, even though I was elected to the European Parliament for five years on the Democratic Party of the Left slate: D’Alema’s party, the Left Democrats, not Berlusconi’s. Ah, the unbearable susceptibility of the left, these personalities who, the more they quit walking the walk, the louder they talk the progressive talk, acting like they own it.
I admit it: they succeed in always making me feel a bit out of place. There’s nothing I can do. I feel like a parvenu, and I always will. Class tells, you could say, reversing the usual meaning.
I’ve always said that I’m someone who could go to dinner with the “Avvocato” (the late Gianni Agnelli), but couldn’t bring anyone with me. . . . Because I don’t have relatives, I’m not on the inside, and there is always this mental reserve, this web of impatience with respect to me. It’s class-based reserve; I’m a proletarian, it can’t be helped. An intellectual I may be, but first and foremost I come from the lower depths, I’m not well-born, I’ve come from nowhere, and as if that weren’t enough—I’m a miserable ex-Catholic.
My father was Calabrese. And he was a policeman.