Flower of the Desert: Giacomo Leopardi's Poetic Ontology (Suny Contemporary Italian Philosophy)

Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition--a uniquely Italian one--that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt. Contents 8 Translator’s Note and Acknowledgements 10 Translator’s Introduction: Leopardi and Us 12 Notes 17 Preface to the French Translation (2006) 20 Preface to the First Edition: The European Leopardi 24 Chapter 1: The Catastrophe of Memory 34 Time of the Dialectic 34 Experimenting with the Infinite 51 The Critical Question 62 Chapter 2: The Web of Sense 76 Solid Nothingness 76 Pain and Desire 100 Imagining 117 Chapter 3: Poetics of True Being 134 Metaphysics of Morals 134 The Sense of True Being 151 Grasping Nothingness 175 Chapter 4: Dialects of Illusion 196 Irony; or Concerning the Psyche 196 Deception; or Concerning Knowledge 214 Sarcasm; or Concerning Politics 233 Chapter 5: A Lyric Machiavelli 260 The Event of Critique 260 Ethics as Foundation 275 Materialism and Poetry 290 Notes 306 Index of Leopardi’s Works 432 Index of Names and Terms 436