| 40 | THE WORLD |
To crisscross Italy, to travel round the world, to meet thousands of persons of every sort and in every continent, to give lectures, conference papers, debates—all this has been one of the nicest, luckiest parts of my life, and still is. It comprises an almost infinite spectrum of sensations: fatigue, amusement, gratification, affection, emotion, worry, novelty, intellectual stimulus.
One of my first conference papers outside Italy, maybe the first period, was at the Sorbonne in Paris, no less, where I met Mikel Dufrenne.
Then, in July 1964, I wasn’t even thirty, Gilles Deleuze invited me to the international conference on Nietzsche at Royaumont, and there—as well as getting to know Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, Henri Birault—I saw Karl Löwith, whom I already knew from Heidelberg, again. I also met Gabriel Marcel, whom I noticed crying with emotion during my talk. Oh God, I thought. Later they told me he always cried, he was elderly and couldn’t control his tears, and that put the matter a bit more into perspective.
There were the meetings of the International Aesthetics Committee, at one of which, still very young and quite involuntarily, of course, but through one of those pieces of carelessness that I regard as among the worst sins of my life, I revealed the political secret of a Romanian philosopher, a secret that was meant to stay secret.
There were choices that were, let’s say, extravagant. When you’re a young intellectual, the last thing you do is burden yourself with particular worries and scruples; today I would, of course. The first time I went to Spain as a philosopher, it was with Opus Dei. And in 1978, out of a lust for travel that Dufrenne and I shared, and also a bit out of playfulness, an urge to go and say revolutionary things even in an ultrareactionary milieu, I went with him, at his urging, to give a lecture in the United States at the Reverend Moon’s cultural institute. Knowing full well that nobody ever pays close attention anyway, which they didn’t.
Every encounter leaves some kind of mark on you. When I was invited to a major conference on Italian thought held at New York University, I met Francesco Pellizzi, the son of Camillo, the first Italian professor of sociology. Francesco, one of the owners of the publishing house Adelphi, a great friend of Roberto Calasso, put me up at his place, casually the first time and without knowing me, but then we became friends, and it often happened that he would go away for the weekend and leave the apartment to me, where I slept in a room with an Andy Warhol hanging on the wall. The building was on East 74th Street, near the Metropolitan Museum and close to where Woody Allen then lived.
This year I gave the opening address at the International Hegel Congress at Poznan, in Poland, and the Mediterranean Congress on Aesthetics at Portorose in Slovenia.
In Italy there were the so-called Perugia meetings for a few years, organized by American philosophers, to which we Italians were invited as well: Cacciari, Perniola, Severino, Verra, Vitiello, Sini, Vattimo. Sometimes Gadamer.
There was the Institute of Philosophical Studies of Enrico Castelli (full name: Enrico Castelli-Gattinara di Zubiena, if you take my meaning), who had money to spend, thanks to his Christian Democratic connections, but who at least organized a high-level, and very productive, international colloquy every year. Paul Ricoeur, Gadamer, Levinas, American philosophers, all came. I met a few of the theologians of the death of God there: Thomas Altizer and Gabriel Vahanian. I’m still in contact with Vahanian. Altizer I saw again at Stony Brook when I taught there for a spell.
In 1974 my book on Nietzsche came out, and in 1975 the left won the local and regional elections, so along with my university job, I began making the rounds of the local culture departments. Debates all the time. What I call “the Nietzsche circle” was formed, because we were always on the same bill: Cacciari, Bodei, Masini, Rella, Rovati, Vattimo. Naturally, mine wasn’t the only book that came out; the others published as well.
A few of these colleagues had become known through a collection edited by Aldo Giorgio Gargani of the University of Pisa, La crisi della ragione (The crisis of reason). As a Heideggerian, I wasn’t asked to contribute, but they did invite me to the debates.
And there was a really interesting period when I was sought out by specialists from other “territories” who thought I might have something to say from the philosophical point of view. Architects and psychoanalysts, essentially. I took these gatherings seriously, but it seemed to me I had more to learn than to teach. I was drifting close to postmodernism, and the architects took an interest when, in considering Paolo Portoghesi’s Via Novissima at the Venice Biennale, I dwelt on the free utilization of historical forms. For the architects—meaning Philip Johnson and Bob Venturi—this meant utilizing forms outside their context, or reviving anachronistic ones, freeing oneself from the cages of formal respect for history: pick and choose freely, history doesn’t constrain us anymore, it’s a repertory of forms we can freely utilize.
This was a postmodern attitude, in my view. I always cite Nietzsche’s image of modern man wandering around in history as if it were a theme park or a storehouse of theatrical masks. Putting them on, taking them off. Nietzsche meant it as denigration, but at the end of his life, when he was already crazy—but how crazy was he, really?—he wrote, and this is incredible: “I am all the names of history, I am the Pharaoh Cambyses, I am Alois Negrelli (the planner of the Suez canal), I am Alessandro Antonelli (who built the Mole Antonelliana in Turin).” That is, he discovers that his own youthful objection against historicism, which was that “things are all mixed up today,” is, on the contrary, the only salvation: to ransack history, without caring in the least about determined and determining belongings.
The other aspect of the postmodern is the impossibility of a totally rational construction. At a Michigan university, I’ve seen a campus built with a play of so many perspectives that your gaze can’t take it in all at once.
Psychoanalysts, especially the Milan group around Diego Napolitani, warm to another of my crucial themes: interpretation, in place of the nude, crude, putatively objective, fact. They essentially work with interpretation too. Napolitani has read Gadamer, my introduction to Verità e metodo (Truth and Method). It was actually from Gadamer that I learned how every experience of truth is an interpretative experience, a theme developed further by my master, Pareyson, than by Gadamer himself. An act of knowing is an affair that concerns both you and the object you are interpreting: the person of the other, the work you are reading. You yourself change as you interpret that thing, but the thing changes too, because a new interpretation is stuck onto it. This approach has led me to a vision of history that I’ve held to ever since, not just of human finiteness to be accepted positively, but also of a certain randomness in history, which should also be lived positively: there are authors whom I will never understand, or understand only vaguely, and that is not terrible but beautiful. There are works that pass into history and others that don’t, but that doesn’t mean that objectively the former were better than the others that vanished.
I’ve always thought that philosophy should be useful and closely interwoven with life. With these types who aren’t philosophers I always feel a bit ill at ease, fearful I won’t have anything to say. I know I’ve learned. From the psychoanalysts, for example, the art of staying quiet, waiting a bit, saying things that may not pertain directly, because that’s what they do. Ill at ease as well because I, a philosopher, have a systematic mind: I always have to know where we are starting from, where we’ll wind up, the how and the why. They have encouraged me to go ahead and try things out, discuss, experiment.
Yet the event that moves me most in memory was a major Catholic conference at Rome, to which Pareyson, naturally, brought me along. In coming to terms with my Catholicism and my Maoism, I had begun to think that Karl Barth’s “totally other” God was perhaps really the “future God” of Ernst Bloch. Even just to refer to Bloch was revolutionary and scandalous for official Catholics.
So in 1969 this big meeting of the association of Catholic university instructors, headed by Gabrio Lombardi, Augusto Del Noce, and Vittorio Mathieu, was held at Rome. My whole paper focused on liberation theology. Blazing scandal. The only reason they didn’t hurl rotten tomatoes at me was because the protocols of this solemn gathering didn’t allow for it.
We were in a small theater in Borgo Pio. Only one person defended me (apart from Pareyson, who sat there shivering quietly). He was named Santino Caramella, and later I came across him in some history of Sicilians on the left . . .
Del Noce and Mathieu kept insisting that what I had said was inconceivable. Gabrio Lombardi didn’t even say a word.
But it was great, above all because I went to Rome by car with my new companion, Gianpiero, whom I’d known since the previous autumn. We had a lot of fun.
By 1969 I no longer cared. I was shortly to make full professor, but I had already been a tenured assistant professor for a year, which gave me self-confidence and serenity. It meant they couldn’t get rid of me unless they caught me trying to burn the university down. They couldn’t take away my job. I had Gianpiero. I was happy.
We stayed in a pensione in Piazza Campo Marzio, an ex-bordello to which a Roman friend had directed me because there I could come and go as I wished, with whom I wished, when I wished. The Nuovo Olimpia movie house was close by, and so was the lower house of the Italian Parliament. If the film had suddenly broken and the lights had come on, there would have been a whole lot of trousers and underwear being pulled up.