"Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction. Social Text, No. 18, Postmodernism. (Winter, ), pp

Transcription

1 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction Giovanna Borradori Social Text, No. 18, Postmodernism. (Winter, ), pp Stable URL: Social Text is currently published by Duke University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sun Jan 20 14:41:

2 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction GIOVANNA BORRADORI Rationality must de-potentiate itself, give way; it should not be afraid to draw back toward the supposed area of shadow, it should not let itself be paralyzed by the loss of the luminous, stable, Cartesian point of reference. "Weak thought" is thus certainly a metaphor and, to some extent a paradox.... It points out a path, it indicates a direction of the route; it is a way that forks from the no matter how masked hegemonic rationality [ragione-dominio] from which, nevertheless, we all know a definitive farewell is impossible. -Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovattil Within the plethora of contemporary continental philosophical discourses around the loss of the referent, the decentering of subjectivity, and the attempt to rebuild a theoretical categorization of the world without giving the "strength" of an ultimate and normative "foundation" (Grund) to thought itself, the Italian speculation around the notion of "weakness" has an interesting specificity: its effort to make operative, in a constitutive function, the self-awareness of the impossibility of a "definitive farewell" to reason, of the impossibility of a radical overcoming of that nexus between rationality and hegemony upon which, following Nietzsche and perhaps Marx as well, the whole of western metaphyics is based. In Italy this critical self-awareness of the impossibility of overcoming reason has led to the formulation of a new approach to the problematic of the "crisis of reason" which was the main focus of philosophical debate in Italy and France throughout the sixties and seventies. Here I should note that by "crisis of reason" I mean the critical reappraisal of that segment of European philosophical and aesthetic thought extending from Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to Wittgenstein which has been widely defined as "negative thought" (negatives Denken) insofar as it has been interpreted and criticized, as "the attempt to lay contradictions bare, as a concrete search for a re-fo~ndation."~ Poststructuralist theories in general embody the unequivocal reality that the "crisis of reason" can no longer be understood in terms of a "bad truth" for which a "better truth" can be substituted; rather it is the concept of crisis itself that must be understood within the idea of truth. From the perspective of poststructuralism, structuralism, as well as existentialist-marxian philosophies of the "new subjectivity," are

3 40 Giouanna Borradori theoretical events based upon "totallzing claims" and operating within the dialectically perverted mechanism of the reductio ad unum. "Weak thought" is similar to French poststructuralism in its opposition to the effort to give the human sciences "another" or "alternative" foundation (whether it comes from structuralism or phenomenology, the main strategies of the sixties). Yet as Vattimo argues, "most of the versions of French poststructuralism (from Deleuze's rhizomes to Foucault's microphyslcs of power) still seem to have too much nostalgia for metaphysics and do not seem to be able to take the experience of the oblivion of Being and the death of God, which Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular announced to our culture, to its extreme" (I1 pensiero, 9). Thus the Italian notion of "weakness" represents a solution to the problematic of the "crisis of reason" which differs significantly from that of French poststructuralism. The very specificity of the notion of "weakness" in fact inheres in its assertion that the "glorification of simulacra," which is immanent to most poststructuralist theories from Deleuze to Baudrillard, instead of being a way of escaping the metaphysical emphasis on "presence," feeds back into that confusion between ontos and Being, between representation and essence that, following Heidegger, western thought inherited from Plato. The use of the adjective "weak" thus refers to the necessity for "reason" to operate within a dimension of light and shade, within the chiaroscural, discontinuous, and indeterminate space indicated and circumscribed by the Heideggerian notion of Lichtung, the bare patch that irregularly interrupts the labyrinthine paths (Holzwege)intertwining in the forest of Being. Or, less l~terarily, it refers to the nature of truth at the point in time it lost, definitively, the characteristics imparted to it by the sphere of metaphysical "evidence." Insofar as philosophy subscribes to the problematic identification between Being and language that hermeneutics elaborated after Heidegger, "weakness" is thus the indication of a "direction of the route," to quote Vattimo and Rovatti. The identification between Being and language, however, should not be regarded as a way of recuperating "the originary, true Being, which metaphysics lost" (I1 pensiero, 9), but on the contrary as a way, if you will, of running into Being as well as of thinking Being, not in terms of globalization and totalization but in terms of an intimate fragmentariness. Being thus becomes a trace, a memory, a consumed and "weakened" piece of an incomplete puzzle that precisely because of its incompleteness is worthy of attention. Before elaborating a theoretical screening of the "philosophy of weakness," I will turn first to its historical context, or better, to the critical traditions in which these Italian thinkers were brought up and within which they are to some extent still working. The following brief attempt at contextualization does not claim by any means to be analytical, nor will it propose definitive historiographical categories of reference. It aims to suggest the conceptual philosophical framework in which this Italian version of poststructuralism places itself, a framework that is even more

4 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The ltalian Departure from Deconstruction 41 important to consider given the overwhelming "literariness" that has characterized the "transcription" of poststructuralist discourse as a whole in the United States. For as soon as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the French as well as the Italian attempt to re-write philosophy within the Nietzschean and Heideggerian awareness of the "death of God" and the "end of metaphysics" lost its constitutive philosophical reference and became under the wide umbrella of Derridean deconstruction mostly a methodology of literary criticism. Two philosophical traditions, both of which functioned in an anti-fascist and anti-crocian context, dominated the Italian scene after World War 11:3 a) The marxian tradition. On one hand, it extends back to Gramsci's claim that the intellectual must have an "organic" relationship to the society in which he lives and operates; that is, the intellectual must be strictly engaged with a socio-political "project of eman~ipation,"~ to use a Habermasian expression. On the other hand, it draws on Galvano della Volpe's definition of aesthetics as "aesthetics of finitude" (estetica del finito). Opposed to any idealistic attempt (either Crocian or Hegelian) to depreciate the "material" essence of art, della Volpe instead argues that the particularity of artistic experience has to be recuperated at the level of its social and historical foundations as well as in the materiality of the instruments and the technical characteristics that define artistic praxis it~elf.~ b) The existentialist and phenomenological tradition. Strangely enough (or perhaps not strangely at all if one thinks of the depth of the roots of historicism in Italian thought since Vico), phenomenology never appeared in Italian thought in its originary and purely logical referentiality. On the contrary, phenomenology has by and large been used to support concepts variously connected with existentialist and marxian-existentialist matters, such as the idea of an "historical intersubjectivity" or the "constitutiveness" of the subject, within cognitive as well as social intentional processes. Antonio Banfi was the first person to introduce phenomenology in Italy, and to understand it as an anti-idealist and anti-crocian means. As a matter of fact, Banfi developed a definition of a basically "rationalist philosophy" in which, however, reason itself is not the principle of rigidly fixed categories but has, rather, a universalizing-critical f~nction.~ In his terms, if on the one hand the principal aim of philosophy is to unify "particular knowledges" in more complex cognitive structures, on the other hand the aim of philosophy is also to denounce and deny every dogmatic generalization. To this extent it is clear that Banfi pursues Husserl's effort (especially the late Husserl from the ldeen to the last Crisis) to point to ideological, historical, and positivistic mystifications of the meaning of the world, as well as to the mystifications of common sense, in an effort finally to "come back to things themselves." Husserl put this into practice by the means of "phenomenological reduction" (epoche), a "suspension of judgement" toward things that made them appear in "full

5 42 Giouanna Borradori evidence" or, as he put it, in their "flesh and bones." It is since Banfi's work that phenomenology loses its originary and purely logical referentiality in as much as it tries to reach the specific transcendency," of the realm of a "socialized" experience. It was Enzo Paci, however, who explicitly formulated the connection between the idea of a socialized experience (already understood in phenomenological terms in Banfi) and the notion of the social body (here the "concrete" existentialist contextualization of the Dasein in its historical and social s~rrounding).~ A student of Banfi and a scholar of Meileau-Ponty, Paci elaborated both an expansion and a radicalization of Banfi's "anti-dogmatic" position, referring not only to the cognitive realm but to a wider dialectic between life and reason, presence and value, in which a rigid hypostatization of the terms is not admitted. From this perspective Paci's connection with existentialism is clear. He refused, however, its nihilistic conclusions, elaborating instead a "positive existentialism" based on the affirmation of subjectivity in terms of a "concrete subject placed in time" and oriented toward the progressive emancipatory development of "freedom of choice." These two tenets of Paci's thought-the emphasis on the centrality of the subject in "constituting" his physical, social, and cultural surrounding, and the accent on the "concreteness" of the subject's historical nature, strongly rooted in and interacting with his present-have by and large shaped the Italian philosophical and critical scene after World War 11. Generally speaking, throughout the sixties and the seventies these tenets were adopted as a theoretical framework by the institutions that coordinated and practiced the cultural politics of the left. If Paci's conclusions can be inscribed in Merleau-Ponty's version of a "phenomenological existentialism" (which draws largely on the huge disordered archive of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts in Louvain8), the other branch of existentialism, which evolved in a more "ontological" direction, has been "transcribed" into the Italian context by Luigi Pareyson. Through his seminars (attended by Umberto Eco and Vattimo, among many others), Pareyson elaborated a theory of interpretation, introducing the problematics of contemporary hermeneutics into the Italian debate.' If we look synthetically at the two critical positions above, one intersecting concern continues in the latest developments of Italian hermeneutics, appearing in the conceptual framework of weak thought: an ethics of de-potentiation. An original and reiterated Leitmotif, it is essential to specifying the identity of weak thought within the heterogeneity of the poststructuralist galaxy of competing theories. As we have seen, it can be understood historically as the result of combining phenomenological, existentialist, and marxian perspectives and has to do with a basic understanding of subjectivity as the "constitutive centrality" of the functions of both knowledge and interaction, reading and writing, within any realm dominated by praxis, be it social, cultural, or political. Beyond its explicit connection with the Heideggerian project of

6 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction 43 overcoming metaphysics, weak thought and the ethics of de-potentiation must be understood within this particular Italian post-crocian and anti-crocian problematization of subjectivity. One of the major philosophical concerns of weak thought is theorized by Vattimo as the "ontology of decline."10 By placing the ethical issue at the center of the epistemological hierarchy, Vattimo advances a highly consistent argument in the debate about the construction and deconstruction, the placement and displacement, the potentiation and de-potentiation of subjectivity, thus directly engaging issues central to poststructuralism as well. "Ontology of decline" is derived from Vattimo's interpretation of Heidegger's "ontological" transcription of the meaning of the "Occident" (Abendland) as the land of sunset, assumed to be the sunset of Being. Vattimo's theoretical elaboration begins textually, and allusively, from a subtle shift in the reading of Heidegger's phrase. He argues that instead of "the Occident is the land of sunset, the sunset of Being," one should read "the Occident is the land of sunset and therefore of Being." Similarly in the statement "metaphysics is the history of Being," what should be emphasized is not the verb "is," but the article "the," so that it would read, in Vattimo's words: Not: metaphysics is the history of Being; but: metaphysics is the history of Being. There is not, out of metaphysics, another history of Being. Just as the Occident is not the land where Being sets, since it rises elsewhere.... the Occident is the land of Being, the only one, indeed because it is also, inseparably, the land of the sunset of Being. (Ontologia del declino, 51-52) What is at stake here is not as nominalistic as it might appear. Vattimo's emphasis, in my view, implies a reading of Heidegger that clearly addresses Derridean poststructuralism. Vattimo stresses that if metaphysics has definitely ended, then every possible history of Being has also ended. Moreover, if in the French context the end of metaphysics means a total liberation of experience from the metaphysical foundation of Being, then the problem of a new "non-ontological" foundation of knowledge arises: knowledge, in Vattimo's words, could then only "be oriented toward beings, and engaged in techniques of organization and planning immanent to their different realms" (Ontologia del declino, 61). Thus, Vattimo argues, "the same final form of authority" is attributed to beings "that past thought attributed to the metaphysical Being" (Ontologia del declino, 61). On the one hand, recuperating a "positive" concept of Being would avoid the French total emphasis on beings which entails subscribing to a form of knowledge strictly limited to "local" strategies, erasing a priori the possibility of any criticism of technology, limiting philosophy to a role of pure description. On the other hand, to assume that in Being and Time Heidegger had already gone beyond the conception of

7 44 Giovanna Borradori Being as "foundation" (or "value," as Nietzsche said) and therefore was already involved in the attempt to overcome nihilism, means that the "historical" character of Dasein must be recalled. The nature of subjectivity would thus include not only a textual-hermeneutical dimension but a historical dimension as well. If we understand Vattimo's definition of "ontology of decline" in the light of these considerations, a contradiction emerges: Vattimo's proposal to recuperate a positive conception of Being as well as his attempt to re-place subjectivity in an historical setting (albeit in Heidegger's sense of history) seem convergent efforts to give back to philosophy a constructive (non-constitutive) elan. Why then the use of such hazy terminology as "ontology of decline"? Why return to the metaphor of the sunset? At this point the question of the modes of overcoming metaphysics opens again: how to overcome metaphysics and at the same time preserve a "positive" concept of Being, that is, the ontological foundation of metaphysics itself? how to preserve "metaphysics as the history of Being" as well as "the Occident is the land of sunset (and therefore of Being)"? how to preserve metaphysics as the history, the tale of Being in its own narrativity, as well as Being as the sunset itself? The only way to overcome the metaphysical nihilist tradition is to run along it again, to re-experience its contradictions, to re-write it. By so doing, a positive concept of Being will emerge since within this new frame Being will lose its strength and power and become a function of remembering (funzione de-potenziata e rammemorante) no longer capable of any constitutive foundation. That new "sense" of Being, already suggested by Heidegger in Being and Time, must, in Vattimo's words, "be understood as a 'direction' in which Being and beings happen to be on the same path, seem to be involved in a common movement that will lead them not to a stable basis, but to a further dislocation, in which they'll find themselves dispossessed and deprived of any center" (Ontologia del declino, 56). The problematization of the "sense" of Being as "direction," as the movement in which Being and beings happen to have gathered together, avoids both the idealist and marxian necessity of a "critical overcoming" and suggests the possibility of an overcoming based on a "re-writing" of metaphysics itself. Such re-writing can be concretely explicated only in the definition of a new philosophical space which Vattimo describes as derived from the two Heideggerian concepts of Verwindung and Andenken. By Verwindung, Heidegger means a mode of overcoming which is "improper," in the sense that it has abandoned all the characteristics of the dialectical (idealist and marxian) Aufhebung. The means of this "improper overcoming" (Verwindung) is Andenken (to recollect), which allows one to look at the tradition from the point of view of the Ge-schick, destiny or historical destination. If Ge-schick could literally be translated as "destiny," playing on the meaning of the radical "schick" that forms the verb schicken (to send) and on the prefix "ge," Heidegger argues that Ge-schick represents the historical and cultural modality of the her-

8 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction 45 meneutical Being; in other words, Ge-schick would mean that which is sent to us from history, the fact that our historical destination is, in Vattimo's words, "to experience the world through several layers, a series of echoes, of linguistic resonances, of messages coming from the past, from others."" The awareness of our Ge-schick, the consciousness of being historically sent on a hermeneutical mission, brings with it a sense of predestination and subverts the meaning of the tradition. Tradition, as metaphysics, is not something that has to be dialectically overcome, since it happens beyond the lines of all the texts that on a large scale can be read within the conceptual and cultural frame of "modernity." Instead, the person viewing the tradition from the standpoint of the Ge-schick sees it as something that has now to be re-collected, re-used, re-accepted. The dialectical procedure of the Aufhebung is thus replaced with that of Andenken, with "re-collection." Vattimo argues, moreover, that this is indeed the theoretical standpoint on which postmodernism can evolve since it is based on Verwindung and possesses an awareness of an "end of history," or a post-histoire, as Arnold Gehlen puts it. This particular philosophical and aesthetic condition of "being posthumous" is rooted in the dissipation of Being as novum which specifically characterizes Nietzsche's definition of nihilism (reduction, as we have already seen, of Being to the sphere of the novum and value) and its transformation in "event" (Ereignis). This means that Being opens up, discloses its own hermeneutical nature, as soon as we assume the point of view of our historical destination, or our Ge-schick. Or, in other words, Being will open up only if we subsume knowledge as an effort to understand reality in terms of a "hermeneutical ontology," in the Gadamerian sense. Indeed the notion of "weakness" is itself a quotation from Gadamer's hermeneutical intertext. In Gadamer's Truth and Method we read, "weakness is considered the correct attitude that subjectivity has to hold in its relationship with language."12 In Gadamer's hermeneutical ontology, language is not an instrument of communication but the only "dimension" in which the dialogue between man and history can take place. In other words, Gadamer solves the hermeneutical problem of understanding and interpreting artistic witnesses from the past by identifying the constitutive historicity of human existence with "language." It is thus through, and within, the "dimension" of language itself that man's existence "opens up" to truth; and, analogously, whatever occurs to man, no matter if it is a literary text or an event, is understandable only if it lets itself be perceived as language and within language. "The being that can be understood is language," writes Gadamer; "who has language has the world" (542). In La fine della modernita, his latest collection of essays, Vattimo explores the link between the definition of "weak thought" as an attempt to provide truth with a non-metaphysical foundation and its aesthetic cbte. If this definition implies and aims at the abandoning of every model of scientific knowledge, it also confers a central

9 46 Giovanna Borradori constitutive role on the experience of art and the pattern of rhetoric since indeed "a postmodernist experience of the truth (meaning, following Heidegger, a 'postmetaphysical' one), is an aesthetic experience."13 Vattimo's search for aesthetic "foundations" for postmodernism lies at the center of today's Italian philosophical debate. Insofar as he assumes that the concepts of "truth" and "history" can only be reformulated by "going beyond metaphysics," as Nietzsche and Heidegger urged, Vattimo calls Nietzsche and Heidegger themselves the first "postmodernists": they were in fact the first ones to describe the essence of modernism in terms of the reduction of Being to the category of the nouum. But if one is to go beyond metaphysics, uncovering the basis of modernism becomes a necessity. The postmodernist debate asks "if beyond metaphysics, where to?" But the question cannot be answered unless one first knows "where from." The same question I analyzed before within a purely theoretical framework rearticulates itself now, homologously, within the aesthetic framework. How is it possible to "overcome" modernism and its postulate of Being as nouum and value? How can one overcome in something other than a dialectical sense without going back to a further form of modernism? Is "overcoming" possible without "innovating"? What is the means by which art may be liberated from the series of dichotomies (subject-object, theory-praxis, past-future, tradition-innovation) that metaphysics legitimized as the foundation of western culture as well as of artistic experience? "Weak thought" places itself within this impasse. It suggests that by re-defining the theoretical basis of modernism itself, it will be possible to "overcome" its very tradition. If the point is to avoid going back to a previous form of modernism, we must give up appeals to "suprahistorical" values (the hautes histoires, as Lyotard calls them) and "live till the end the experience of the necessity of the error, to rise for a moment above the process; that is, to live the error with a different attitude" (La fine della modernita, 179). In other words, if we want to get rid of modernism, we have to go right into the middle of the "tradition of the error" (which corresponds to metaphysics in Heidegger), as well as into the heart of modernism, assumed as its last and ultimate outcome. If the mode of this "overcoming" must involve neither a complete acceptance of the "errors" that constituted the metaphysical tradition nor a "critical overcoming" in the marxian or idealist sense, it must be emphasized that within an aesthetic frame this mode does not represent a mere querelle. From the poetic standpoint it implies in fact the way in which any creative praxis must deal with its own past tradition, not only in terms of iconography but also in terms of its identification within the history of a literary genre. If going straight into the middle of modernity, read extensively 'as "tradition of the error" which from a Heideggerian perspective means the tradition of western thought since Plato, if going straight to this point is the paradoxical but ultimate strategy of its own overcoming, this involves wide-reaching and consistent

10 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction 47 implications: it implies a radical revaluation of "re-making'' and "re-writing," no longer considered pure techniques of learning a la manisre de, but becoming categories of aesthetic production. If re-making and re-writing become the poetic criteria of relating present artistic experience to history, art becomes a rhetorical predication of the Western tradition assumed as a "linguistic tradition." Indeed, then an essential interpenetration between "critical" and "creative" genres takes place, and the only layer left available for the aesthetic discourse is that hermeneutical space in which the strategies of quotation can articulate themselves. Aesthetics is thus involved in a metamorphical process which leads it to abandon its transcendental nature and to find a new identity in a "dimension," in Gadamer's sense, between man and history: the ontological dimension of language. Abandoning the concepts of Being as novum and of truth as an available and operable phenomenon subverts the scene of time: the present no longer defines itself on the basis of its break from the past. Instead, its links to the past are based on a "quotationist" attitude which springs from the constitutive strength of "re-collection" Andenken). In a "postmodernist," or "post-metaphysical," or "post-historical" perspective, historiography must not only be replaced by a new word, but also by a new attitude toward history itself, an attitude that Vattimo characterizes as pietas (literally, from Heidegger, "piety of thinking"). Pietas is indeed the way of going backwards along the "tradition of the error," the means by which it becomes possible to "overcome" modernity, in order to "re-collect" the main junctures of western metaphysics and to rethink them. Hence pietas makes possible a total "freedom" in reading the messages and the images from the past because it involves no "innovative" or "ideological" intent which would distort them or obstruct their interpretation. From another perspective pietas can be seen as the attempt to give a "setting" back to narration. Since Foucault's Les mots et les choses, narration seemed to have lost, irreparably, its setting, that is, all that has seemed possible is a sequence of clear heteropies that a priori destroyed, in Foucault's words, "not only the syntax with which the sentences are constructed, but also the less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together."'14 In this context, pietas embodies the effort to regain a "setting" for narration, which could be called a "setting of weakness" insofar as "it does nothing else, but present the aporia of every modality of thinking that claims to look radically into its own conditions of being."15 Trying at last to characterize the notion of the "aesthetics of quotationism" (which can be read as the aesthetic vista of the concept of weakness itself), we see that it reformulates completely the modernist approach to truth. Truth is no longer tied to the necessity of being "transmitted." It no longer represents that sphere of "operability" which, in the modernist tradition, embodied the Promethean effort "to change the world." The "weak" approach to truth, which is the most recent Italian contribu-

11 48 Giovanna Borradori tion to postmodern debate, corresponds instead to the election of a "horizon and a background in which, discreetly, it is possible to move around" (La fine della modernita, 179). In the age of the "loss of the referent," be it historical, social, political, cultural, or even ontological, the attempt of philosophy, as weak thought suggests, should be to make available new spaces of referentiality in which art and particular knowledges can operate. And this could be the right strategy, I believe, by which to avoid the two connecting vicious circles, or contemporary obsessions, of "selfreferentialitym and the "metanarrative" nature of theoretical discourse. NOTES 1. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds., Forward, 11 pensiero debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983), 10. Hereafter referred to as 11 pensiero. All the translations from the Italian are mine. 2. Massimo Cacciari, Krisis: saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), I do not include semiotics here, one of the maln developments in Italian thought today, because semiotics, as well the whole "structural" issue in general, has been brought into Italy from France and the United States by scholars who for the most part belong to the same generation as those who are identified with weak thought. Moreover, I am interested here in pointing out the characteristics of the "philosophy of weakness" which distinguish it as autonomous and original within that heterogeneous ensemble named French poststructuralism. 4. See Antonio Gramsci, Gli intellettuali e l'organizzazione della cultura (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), Letters from Prison, trans. Lynne Lawner (1947; New York: Harper and Row, 1973), and Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985). 5. See Galvano della Volpe, Crisi critica dell'estetica romantics (Messina: G'd'Anna, 1941), Per la teoria di un umanismo positivo: studi e documenti sulla dialettica materialista (Bologna: C. Zuffi, 1949), Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar (1966; London: NLB, 1987). 6. See Antonio Banfi, Principi di una teoria della ragione (Torino: G. B. Paravia, 1926), L'uomo copernicano (Milan: Mondadori, 1950), La ricerca della realta (Firenze: Sansoni, 1959). 7. See Enzo Paci, 11 nulla e il problema dell'uomo (Torino: Taylor, 1950), The Function of Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen (1963; Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972), and Idee per una encrclopedia fenomenologica (Milan: V. Bompiani, 1973). 8. The discovery of the Louvain Husserl archive, an event of major importance w~thin the world philosophical academy, actually to some extent subverted the destiny of phenomenology which through this very discovery had been re-actualized in a reciprocal relation to existentialism and marxism. See Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962). 9. See Luigi Pareyson, Esistenza e persona (Torino: Taylor, 1950) and Estetica: teoria della formativita (Torino: Edlzioni di Filosofia, 1954). I do not pursue the question of Pareyson's theory of interpretation here because it did not have a direct effect on the theories concerning or connected with the problematic of "weakness." 10. The notion of the "ontology of decline" is "structural" to Vattimo's philosophy and its impl~cations can be found throughout his work. He did, however, dedicate an entire essay specifically to its definition. See Gianni Vattimo, "Verso una ontologia del declino," A1 di la del soggetto: Nietzsche,

12 "Weak Thought" and Postmodernism: The Italian Departure from Deconstruction 49 Heidegger e l'ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), Hereafter referred to as "Ontologia del decline." 11. Gianni Vattimo, "Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole," 11 pensiero debole, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translation edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernita: nihilism0 ed ermeneutica nella cultura postmoderna (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), Michel Foucault, The Ordet. of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xviii. 15. A. dal Lago, "I1 luogo della debolezza" ("The setting of weakness"), Aut-Aut (June-July 1980), 21.