California Italian Studies

In the course of its existence, California Italian Studies has published essays by living Italian philosophers who were luminaries in the field, including Umberto Eco and Franco Cassano (now both deceased). Somehow, however, the pages of this journal never until now have hosted any contribution by Gianni Vattimo, the great Italian philosopher who passed away in September 2023 at age 87. Vattimo was a beloved teacher, a mentor, and a friend to several of the founding members of CIS, myself included, so it seems particularly appropriate for us to offer a posthumous homage to him in this open-theme issue of volume 13. I will offer just a few personal reminiscences here, as both Maurizio Ferraris and Simonetta Moro address in their respective essays the core tenets of Vattimo’s philosophy. Vattimo’s brief 1985 essay on myth and truth is included here because it so succinctly summarizes and illustrates the strand of his work for which he is most remembered today, namely il pensiero debole or “weak thought.”

Philosophical thought about the presence of myth in the contemporary world cannot be founded upon an essential or metaphysical definition of myth. This is due in part to the fact that the dream of philosophy as a rigorous science has been definitively ausgeträumt. More specifically, though, it is due to the fact that the theme of myth itself appears to us today in an uncertain light. No satisfactory theory of myth—one that would define its nature and its connection with other forms of relationship to the world—exists in contemporary philosophy. Nevertheless, the term and the concept of myth, even if not carefully defined, have wide currency in our culture today. At least since the appearance of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, mass culture and its by­products generally have been analyzed in terms of mythology; and the presence and place of myth in political thought have generally been conceived in terms of the now distant but still important work of Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, in which myth appears as the sole agent capable of moving the masses to action. Even Claude Lévi-Strauss, who approaches myth from a specialized anthropological point of view, states in Anthropologie structurale that “nothing resembles mythic thought today more than political ideology. In contemporary society the latter has in a certain sense replaced the former.”[1] Although Lévi-Strauss cannot be accused of making only vague use of the term “myth,” a claim such as the one made here—that is, that political ideology has replaced mythic thought for us today—depends in the last analysis upon a rather stereotypical understanding of the term. Indeed, in the later Mythologica, when Lévi-Strauss applies a more precise and specific concept of myth to the question of its possible survival in the contemporary world, he makes reference instead to music and literature as the elements of experience in which myth—in no matter how faded a form—endures today.

*This text originally appeared in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetic no. 9 (Spring 1985): 29–95. It is reprinted in California Italian Studies 13, no. 2 by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

Over the course of fifty years, Gianni Vattimo was a friend, teacher, and adversary for me. I must resist the temptation to speak here of my own memories of him in order to provide readers of this brief essay with what I think is destined to endure after Vattimo’s death, the essence of which can be found in the collection of his writings entitled Scritti filosofici e politici (Philosophical and Political Writings).

Conversation is a term of which Gianni Vattimo was particularly fond. Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and one of his former students and collaborators, put it at the center of his obituary of the Italian philosopher in the Los Angeles Review of Books published on September 19, 2023, the day of Vattimo’s death at age 87. It was part of Vattimo’s particular way of thinking philosophy and the exchange of ideas, and it is very significant that this editorial project, The Vattimo Dictionary, began with a series of conversations with Santiago Zabala in various locations, both physical and virtual. One of these locations was the Vattimo Archive, hosted at the Pompeu Fabra University, of which Zabala is the supervisor, inaugurated in 2016 after Vattimo donated his papers, manuscripts, course materials, letters, notes, and photographic material to the Catalan institution. The first international presentation of this volume took place there on November 7, 2023, in the context of a commemoration of the philosopher. The archive certainly played an important role in identifying the key terms for the Dictionary, as well as in gaining access to published and unpublished material that proved essential to the task of writing the introduction. Even more so in my own case, as I could not claim a direct knowledge of the philosopher beyond his publications, contrary to many contributors to the volume, who had known Vattimo as colleagues, former students, friends, or scholars. In fact, I first met Vattimo only in 2018, at the presentation of Essere e dintorni (Being and its Surroundings) at the Circolo dei Lettori in Turin, a book that was largely the outcome of the work of collecting the archival material for Pompeu Fabra University, as Zabala himself confirmed in one of those conversations. Yet it seemed to me that I had known Vattimo more intimately for much longer, so much was he a familiar figure in the Italian cultural panorama, thanks also to his numerous television appearances in cultural programs (often directed by him), of which he was a pioneer through his work for RAI and other networks from the 1950s onward, and through his publications in newspapers and magazines. This willingness to follow different paths for the diffusion of knowledge, which until recently were considered very unorthodox and even openly snubbed by the Italian academic world, paired with his generosity in listening to various interlocutors, seems to me to be one of the most memorable and captivating traits of Gianni Vattimo, who immediately put those who spoke with him at ease—as it was the case with me on that day six years ago.

Today the term "control" is ubiquitous, appearing ever more frequently in public discourse and in newspaper headlines. The term, which originated in medieval Latin within accounting practice, has been applied over time to various fields. Yet "control" is articulated in many ways, and the same goes for its opposite. On the one hand, control and non-control are indeed united in an unbreakable relationship: it would make no sense to exercise some form of control over the world, over oneself, and over others if these areas did not also present something vitally uncontrollable – namely, something contingent, unpredictable, unknown, incalculable. An enhancing interplay between control and non-control is an essential element of any living and vibrant society. However, this relationship seems to be fraying today, and the two poles that constitute it tend to exclude one another, generating phenomena of obsessive control ("the society of control," "surveillance capitalism," etc.) or of (self-)destructive uncontrollability. This essay looks in particular at contemporary Italian society and the right-wing Meloni government's efforts to manage the relationship between these two poles of experience.

This essay looks at the four-year period Indro Montanelli spent as a journalist, writer, and Fascist government representative in Estonia, Poland, and Finland between 1937 and 1941: four years during which the map of Europe was permanently redrawn. Much of the research is new. It complements the two-volume life of Montanelli by Sandro Gerbi and Raffaele Liucci (issued as a single volume in 2014 as Indro Montanelli: una biografia (1909–2001), and Marcello Staglieno’s earlier biography, Montanelli: novant’anni controcorrente, from 2001. Montanelli was at times undoubtably a great journalist. The reports he filed from Helsinki on Finland’s 1939–40 Winter War with Russia acquire a bitter topicality today in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine (for the first time since 1945 a state-on-state war has come to Europe.) In Montanelli’s Helsinki dispatches it seems that history—the great unforeseen—was repeating itself already from Tsarist times.

Montanelli was banished to Estonia by the Fascist regime in 1937 as “punishment” for the insufficiently pro-Franco reportage he produced in Civil War Spain. In his Baltic exile he found himself at the crossroads of future East-West antagonisms, for if there is a West Berlin equivalent in today’s so-called “Second Cold War,” it is Estonia, which is vulnerable to Russian attack on NATO’s eastern flank. In his Estonian journalism, Montanelli intuited that Stalin did not think the Soviet Union could survive as an East Slavic superstate and bulwark against German territorial aggression without eastern Poland and the Baltic states subordinate to the USSR. Putin’s own pseudo-Tsarist vision of a Greater Russia one and indivisible—his Russky Mir, “Russian World”—has its roots in the Hitler-Stalin conflict to which Montanelli bore witness.

The essay argues that Montanelli was enamored of certain aspects of Italian Fascism to the end of his days, and that his divorce from Mussolini’s regime after 1937 was not as clean as he cared to make out in later years. Montanelli was often attracted to right-wing demagogues and “strong men” of one stripe or another, among them the Norwegian collaborator Vidkun Quisling and Marshal Mannerheim of Finland (both of whom Montanelli was pleased to meet). New light is shed in the essay on Montanelli’s relationship to Estonia’s fiercely anti-Soviet Baltic German community (of which Hitler’s chief race ideologist Alfred Rosenberg claimed to be a part). The historical archives of La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera—the newspapers for which Montanelli wrote in his Baltic period—have supplied new information on what Estonia and the Estonian people meant to Montanelli.

The bibliography on Montanelli is vast. It includes book-length interviews conducted by Italian journalists with Montanelli himself, as well as Montanelli’s own journalistic memoirs (notably I cento giorni della Finlandia [One Hundred Days of Finland], published in 1940), together with his semi-fictional autobiographies (what we might now call “autofiction”), such as Qui non riposano (Here They Do Not Rest) from 1945. Much of this bibliography has been consulted for the essay. The Italian newspaper archives, however, provided me with the most compelling new information. From them I was able to recreate the details of Montanelli’s movements in the autumn of 1941 in Nazi-conquered Tallinn (which no biography has described). The Estonian state archives yielded previously unseen information on the White Russian source Montanelli used in order to write his extraordinary La Stampa “scoop” on Stalin’s purge of the Red Army in 1937. His name was Boris Engelhardt and, like Montanelli, he was far from straightforward.

The 1978 documentary Processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape) marked the first time a trial was broadcast on Italian state television. Directed by six feminist filmmakers, the film documents a trial for gang rape and exposes the secondary victimization experienced by women who take their rapists to trial. The encounter between feminism and the new technology of videotape enabled an unprecedented production of film language: in accordance with the idea that the feminist presence in male-dominated spaces would serve to monitor the men in power, the directors produced an observational documentary. Though determined to promote viewers’ autonomous reflection, they also strategically twisted the observational mode to show that reality is never objective and that it must be critically accounted for.

After reflecting on the 1970s Italian feminist approach to images, this article addresses the impact of the editing strategies via the visual close readings of certain sequences. More precisely, I argue that the combination of long, distant shots with detailed ones unveils the asymmetry between the abstract claim of “equal justice” and the specific application of the law to bodies whose gender, ethnicity, and class matter. My contribution juxtaposes the story of the violence of the judicial system as narrated in the documentary with another institutional violence, this time perpetrated by the information system which effectively censored the film. Despite this, the dissemination of the documentary within independent circuits impacted the Italian social system, promoting the reformation of laws against sexual violence. Even today, after forty years, Processo per stupro represents one of the most successful encounters between art and activism.

This article aims to reconstruct the origins of the carboneria order in the Kingdom of Naples, identifying them in the context of Europe-wide republican conspiracy. In this way the substantial political-ideological continuity after 1815 between Freemasonry and the carboneria emerges into view. To better understand this phenomenon from the inside, this essay examines the individual experience of a significant, though now almost unknown, figure in the Neapolitan carbonaro world of the early nineteenth century and the document trail that he produced, now held in French and Neapolitan archives. Giuseppe Basile de Luna, maternal uncle of Carlo Pisacane, was at once a carbonaro, Bourbon secret service spy, and secret informer for Austria and France. The pages that follow will attempt to show how the carboneria was born in Naples from the complex political, sociological and ideological processes through which southern Italian republicans, after their defeat in 1799, turned their attention to the masses in order to lure them away from Sanfedism in support of the nationalist cause.