On the cover of the new book by Roberto Calasso, Ardor , you see the black stone sculpture of a girl in meditation. It is headless, as some Vedic scholars whose head has been handed down, exploding into a thousand pieces before sacrificial irresolvable conundrums. Western readers certainly did not come to this, but a slight headache or dizziness can catch him when he reads in Satapatha Brahmana treated ritual that dates back to the eighth century before Christ, as the gods of the beginning of time men tore the skin to cover the cows: "If you want to go to the source, this is therefore the natural state of man: the Scorticato, as in sixteenth-century atlases of anatomy."
The two images - the Renaissance anatomical table and the girl with no head - appear to agglutinate to compose a third, of course dear to Calasso: The Vitruvian Man beheaded by André Masson, which appeared on the cover of the magazine Acéphale , where in the late thirties Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois and reasoning of many things, but most of Nietzsche and sacrifice. Nietzsche and sacrifice, in fact: the time and the rock from which it is carrying out the thread of Calasso His work since the beginning of Monologue fatal.
If man, as stated in the prologue of Zarathustra, is a cable stretched between the animal and the Superman, the India of the Vedas seems to be nothing but a crushed between Gods and animals, a creature terrified and vulnerable, hunted by predators, which is first removed the skin off. Ardor back, obsessively, to the original point from which radiates the whole Our historical event: the moment when the man of prey became prey by imitation, eliciting chipped flints and arrows that could reproduce the fangs and claws of his killers. On this inaugural upheaval, perceived as a huge fault, is based the ritual of sacrifice, which is a repair and recovery time.
No civilization was able to put this node in the center tragic and dark as the India of the Vedas, which lost interest of military conquests and materials but left a great deal of international treaties, hymns, formulas that seem to rotate around the pivot of all Yupa , pole axis of the sacrifice and the world. Ardor - which is perhaps, along with K. , the highest point of the 'work being "of Calasso - offers commentary and swirling erratically, philologist surrealist, these obscure texts, closing the cycle opened in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch , which incorporates all the worries, the sacrifice as a rearrangement of the impossible 'balance of the world, the coexistence of devourer and devoured in the physiology of the same mind, the modern implementation of all the powers of the sacred in secular societies, "highest form of superstition."
But let's be serious, let's stop and cautiously at the outset : Ardor deserves better than a review. If we put together a few sentences evocative excerpt from the book and some very fine there, we would give the impression that this is one of the many new books that meet the fate alluded to Jonathan Swift: "Of the seven thousand products currently written in this renowned city, before the sun has made the next revolution, there will be an echo of some. " But this is not the case, especially since the "well-known city" of the Republic of Letters resembles today more than ever at the annual meeting of the village idiot in Love and Death Woody Allen: The player must maneuver in a Fair crowded with megalomaniacs and verbose buttonholer, each convinced of being Shakespeare, each convinced that his story deserves hours of valuable time. In this congregation of lunatics, the critic, rather than the priest as an intermediary between the Saints (the authors) and the people of the devotees, is the crafty friend who seeks to preserve and guide you from unpleasant encounters where it is worth stopping. Well, in friendship, Ardor deserves all the time who wants to extort.
It may be objected that a book of the Adelphi dominus does not run the risk of going unnoticed. His fate, however, is likely to resonate in empty, simply because the family always camped in the cultural our country have all the requirements for not understanding much of Calasso. Catholics give the gnostic and the destroyer Shiva - Avvenire he is even accused of being the instigator of the neo-pagan ritual of throwing stones from the flyover (bullies, of course, read books on Satapatha Brahmana).
The right look with suspicion on his aesthetics, like a sybaritic softness, and years ago accused him of corrupting the youth in cahoots with his teacher Elémire Zolla. Some Marxists who once affixing the stigma of irrationalism, today accused of snobbery - the implication being both charges of blackmail that while tsarist court of Adelphi delight you with the ethereal verses of Gottfried Benn, railroad workers and metal workers are crowded out of dirty grease that gives voice and conscience realist writer.
The accusation of snobbery, of course, is the weapon of the resentful, the ones who scour the books looking for mistakes that Calasso scratch his reputation as a great scholar: when he came Literature and the gods , for one thing, much talk of an unspecified date and a Latin adverb maltradotto. But nitpicking, to the fleas, behind the appearances is hostile servile practice: is the operation that makes the female baboon hamadryad the level of male dominance.
We lend ourselves to this game zealous and ungenerous, and noted that on page 436 of Ardor , about the extermination of the Jews and of human sacrifice, which is written in the language of war hesitated in front of that ' obscure event, so that in 1948 the historian Raul Hilberg found no better than to call his work the Destruction of European Jews, and that only a few years later he arrived at the designated sacrificial Holocaust. But Hilberg's book is not the 1948 and 1961, and the term Holocaust began to circulate, albeit muted, even in the late thirties.
And yet we are here to make Calasso praise, not bury him. And it is on another note we would like to conclude, all for the benefit of the reader for a walk in the Republic of Letters - that reader who, perhaps, not interested in much of the Vedas, Indian seers, cosmogony and intoxicating plants. Well, in the bottom Ardor Calasso said that the idea for the book arose "from the reckless to comment about the Satapatha Brahmana ', the treaty ritual that still exists in the only translation consists of 2366 pages divided into five volumes. The comment was thrown some light on the Vedic thought that Calasso calls "the most thoughtless and consequential attempt to order life in obedience only to the analogue mode ', ie at that pole of the mind that takes anywhere similarities, similarities, correspondences, deep links.
invite the reader to read this confession as involuntary autoallegoria, and see it Ardor remarks to a work that occupies more than 2366 pages, the catalog Adelphi, soliloquy - or monologue fatal - a fact of books and authors attempt "risky and consequential" to order the culture according to the pole analog of the mind, based on family resemblances often elusive or imperceptible. On the other hand, once wrote Calasso, art, publishing is a form of bricolage which consists of 'giving shape to a large number of books as if they were chapters in a single book. "
is precisely the case with Adelphi. The 'work in progress "of Calasso resides, so to speak, at the center of the Mandala, and gives us the key. Around, willing to corolla, his favorite authors - Nietzsche and Stirner, Kraus and Kafka, Walser and Wedekind - and those for which he wrote the back cover, collected in a small part in the Hundred Letters to a stranger : hence opens up the forest resounding with echoes, where René Girard and Julian Jaynes, Artaud and Daumal, even Wittgenstein and Kant (perhaps contraggenio) are like magnets and made to converge towards a single point magnetizing. What is this point, it reveals Ardor: is the Yupa , the pile of sacrifice
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