Leopardi has learned from his own repressive religious upbringing that experience is above all observation of the self, of one’s own perceptions, passions, and reflections: but he extracted from these observations not so much a metaphysical system as both an attention to each individual psychological datum and a capacity to analyze moral issues. These are the very qualities that make him a descendant of both Pascal (whom Leopardi cites as early as Z 383), and of the great French moralists, with whom he shares his enthusiasm for the “character portrait” and the synthetic form of the pensée or maxime. We might say that a maxim is a thought that does not express a general law in abstract terms, but rather, synthesizes experience under the form of a rule; the constancy of the rule has been deduced from repeated experiences. We should read the maxims that run throughout the Zibaldone in these terms, above all in the reflections that open or close many entries; some of these will be reworked and gathered together in Leopardi’s posthumous small book Pensieri.
The diaristic and fragmentary form of the Zibaldone is in no way accessory to it; indeed, it is structurally necessary. The form reveals to what extent thought is dependent on the passage of time, both natural and existential, and how it is marked by the seasons and by the recurrence of public and private rituals—those events full of meaning in which, according to Walter Benjamin, the duration of human experience is crystallized. Significantly, Leopardi almost never registers the facts and events of daily life; rather, he concentrates completely on the sphere of perception and mental states. Thus his diary can be nothing other than the inscription of how the self perceives and reflects both the external world and its own interiority within the flow of time (Z 1376–77). Like the Romantics, Leopardi was aware of the distance between the élan vital of the ancients, absolutely natural and completely directed toward the external, and its modern version, oriented toward the internal (Z 76, 3938).
In fact, Leopardi actually did entitle one of his many autobiographical projects “The history of a human soul.” However, unlike many Romantics, Leopardi experienced this anthropological shift toward interiority as a decline; and perhaps it is because of this that we have only fragments of his many autobiographical projects. By contrast, the extensive length of the manuscript of the Zibaldone made it possible for Leopardi to clothe his thoughts in linguistic flesh and blood (Z 1657), almost crystallizing, as it were, its vital energy. These “thoughts” (the full title is precisely Zibaldone of Thoughts: see Z 4295) are at one and the same time the pulsations that the interior life transmits to the movement of the pen and the traces that are left behind on the paper. Gradually, as the ink dries, these are transformed into archaeological residues or fossils of a provisional state of the soul (self) that the future self will grasp as other than the self, at times not even recognizing the self in them (Z 1766–67, 2488).
For Leopardi, as for the other Romantic autobiographers, the continuity of time is no longer taken for granted; this intuition later becomes paramount for Proust, and we can already discern the seeds of a theory of involuntary memory in the Zibaldone (Z 185, 1455, 1733). Leopardi states that “good memory and discernment and attention” (Z 1766) are required in order to reconstruct the broken threads of a subjectivity that needs to be rediscovered with each and every encounter with the self and with others. One of his unrealized autobiographical projects of 1829 was entitled precisely “Colloquia with my former self, my ancient self, and my new self: that is to say, with what I was and what I am now.” Imitation and self-expression intertwine and overlap (Z 1254–55, 1697–98, 2184–86, 3941–42): the self can no longer be grasped except by approximation and by comparisons with a now lost origin. This in turn gives rise to a type of writing that grows by slow and successive stratifications, almost organically, page by page, and above all at the margins of the manuscript, with continual internal references that seek to connect the “former self” with the “new self.”
In 1827 Leopardi published, but without great success, the book that he held most dear, the Operette morali. The massive index of the Zibaldone, compiled between the summer and fall of that year, represents an enormous effort, silent and secret, to reach self-understanding—a rereading of the self that produced hundreds of new marginal notes. In that same year, 1827, Leopardi initiated yet another autobiographical project, “Memories of my life,” for which he would have recycled many of the notes that he had provisionally placed in the diary. And we find even more autobiographical traces from 1828 and 1829, the very years that mark the rebirth of his great poetry (“A Silvia,” 1828, and “Le ricordanze,” 1829). This second cycle of autobiographical idilli returns to the earlier themes of memory and hope, but conceived in larger, more universal terms. The year 1828 also marks the poet’s mature reflections on the birth of civilization, on oral culture, and on the poetry of Homer, by way of his study of Vico and the philologist Friedrich August Wolf: a return both to the origins of history and to the origins of the self. But by this date, Leopardi’s once fervent interest in the retrieval of the origins of knowledge exhausts itself; inevitably, the “system” begins to close in upon itself after Leopardi’s acceptance of a purely material world, without any meaning (see “Metaphysics, Theology, Philosophy”).
At this point, Leopardi starts to view the Zibaldone as merely a gigantic storehouse of memories that recall other memories. In this sense, the diary functions precisely like poetry itself. In a note of 1827, the poet states that “recollection” is the faculty that allows modern man, by now irredeemably distanced from his own origins, to return to an “almost” natal source (Z 4286–87). It is important to underscore in this passage the term almost because, as Leopardi already realized in 1821, memory “does not derive immediately from things” but is “a recollection, a repetition, a reechoing or reflection of the old image” (Z 515). For Leopardi, memory is but another image in an infinite process of regression that, as Jacques Derrida will say in reference to Rousseau, cannot exist outside writing itself. In one of the most arresting passages in the Zibaldone, Leopardi describes his own poems as relics (Z 4302). The self, the “I,” does not reside in that which is remembered, but in the very activity of remembering, which alone is able to bring back to life, as does the spirit, the dead letter of the text (Wordsworth, Prelude 8, 428–36). In this sense we can say that the Zibaldone is a completely private text, and that indeed it has only one reader. And so it would have been if a fortunate accident—an exception—had not saved it from destruction and total oblivion.
[FD]
History, Politics, Government
Leopardi’s most systematic account in the Zibaldone of the evolution of human societies, and the political structures that accompany them, runs over thirty-six dense pages (Z 543–79) penned in the space of a week (22–29 January 1821), followed by further reflections written in their immediate aftermath (29–31 January; Z 579–91). Already in this relatively early essay, he works from the premise that man is not a necessarily social animal (later, in October 1823, he will pin down this insight in implicit dialogue with Rousseau’s second Discourse: see Z 3773ff. and, for his direct and indirect access to Rousseau in the early Zibaldone, Z 56, note 3). If in the earliest times individual humans congregated and cooperated, this was for specific purposes, principally that of mutual defense against other animals, including other humans. The decisive strength of such a gathering was its oneness or unity. For this reason, Leopardi surmises, the original form of social organization must have been rule by a single person, absolute monarchy, for only in that way could the natural self-interest and mutual suspicion of individual humans be subsumed in a common purpose, and only by accepting the supremacy of a single ruler could individuals suppress their specific interests. But in order for the ends of that social unit to be achieved, in the absence of which society would have no purpose, the chosen ruler must be “an almost perfect prince” (Z 550). Within the limits of that “almost,” such a prince could be found at the origins in theory (“because virtue, and the illusions th
at produce it and preserve it, existed then”: Z 553) and perhaps in practice, too (Leopardi adduces historical and anthropological evidence to this effect). But the conditions of society in itself, a construction not foreseen by nature that favors the spread of consciousness and thought to the detriment of virtue, illusion, and enthusiasm, and the increasing difficulty for society to choose the (almost) perfect prince in a system (that of society) that is itself imperfect, so that its head is now selected by the accident of heredity, transforms absolute monarchy from the ideal form of government of society at the outset into its degenerate opposites, tyranny and servitude.
Leopardi is at one level fundamentally skeptical about all forms of social organization devised by man, each of them a greater or lesser departure from the natural state: they are all more or less imperfect and themselves the source of evil and unhappiness. But he also knows there is no going back to the natural state. Within history, there are choices to be made. Among all the wretched forms of government devised, “it is certain and obvious,” he argues, “that the free and democratic state, for so long as the people preserved sufficient nature to be susceptible, potentially and actually, to the virtue of heroism, to great illusions, to greatness of soul, and to good customs, was certainly the best of all” (Z 563). The republics of antiquity, Greek and Roman, remain Leopardi’s touchstone for the notion of liberty and democracy in ancient times, a form of state favored by, and itself favorable to, the beneficent breath of illusion, albeit constrained within a tight chronological frame (“Cicero’s Philippics contain the last voice of Rome and are the last monument to ancient liberty, the last written words in which liberty is defended and preached openly and fearlessly to the people of that time”: Z 459). But when he refers to the ancient sources—Aristotle’s Politics, for example, in September to November 1823—or to modern interpretations such as Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (June to July 1820), his substantive (broadly political) quotations focus principally, perhaps under Rousseau’s influence, on inequality between members of a single polity or on violence either toward the outsider or, when that is done, to subjects. If Xenophon had not specified that Cyrus oppressed the Assyrians but forbore from subjugating his own Persians with arms, he might have been mistaken for an ancient Machiavelli (Z 882; for Machiavelli as “founder of a profound, modern politics,” see Z 1858). In fact, the impossibility of maintaining the conditions of absolute equality necessary to true democracy, despite the best efforts of the lawgivers to curb individual greed and excess (Z 568), eventually opens the door to hierarchies, oligarchies, and ultimately a return of absolute monarchy, of the most degenerate kind. (There is perhaps an echo of Vico’s recourses here, although it is Aristotle in the Politics again that Leopardi will make note of: “We may almost take it therefore that all other political devices also have been discovered repeatedly, or rather an infinite number of times over, in the lapse of ages”: Z 3890, 18 November 1823.) Experimentation with constitutional monarchies, of the kind being tentatively explored in the Europe of the 1820s, is regarded by Leopardi as self-contradictory since such arrangements seek to mitigate the monarchical principle of oneness (the single “prince”) by distributing his authority, though they may be the best solution to the post-revolutionary crisis of governance in the short term (Z 576–79). And Leopardi does seem to glimpse the outline of a modern, emerging, “soft despotism,” anticipating Tocqueville by twenty years (Z 986, note 1, and cf. Z 163, note 2).
Despite Leopardi’s oft-repeated disdain for politics, he is condemned as a modern man of letters not to ignore it. Very seldom does he comment in the Zibaldone on contemporary events. His disparagement of “sects” because they are harmful to the interests of the nation as a whole, within an entry dated 30 March–4 April 1821 (Z 894), and thus coming in the immediate wake of the defeat of the insurrectional movements in Piedmont and Naples which was to lead to serious doubts among patriots about the effectiveness of the carboneria, is striking. Striking, too, is his description of political science, as a dimension of the endeavor of eighteenth-century philosophy to make up for the void left by nature, as “the most interesting, most valid part, with the greatest and most general influence upon human affairs” (Z 575). At the same time, reason—as the antagonist of courage, virtue, enthusiasm—is integral to the debility of modern society, an ally of the interests of the despotic ruler. If in the earliest disposition of society, individuals under a single command formed a common bond against an external enemy, and went to war on that account, and if in the virtuous republics there was active democracy and decisions were taken on the strength of debate in the assembly, in the states of today governed by a sole ruler not chosen by the people, and at most by the cabal surrounding him, the inhabitants of that state neither have a common identity as a nation nor express their views in open council, but have the status solely of subjects whom their ruler directs for purposes, as in war, that are not clear to them, while power itself is for the most part hidden and hallucinatory: “we can see events unfold and do not know their causes, and the world is like one of those machines which move by some hidden mechanism or those statues which are made to walk by someone hidden inside them” (Z 120).
The sequence described above does not correspond to a linear progression of “civilization.” Human history is a succession of the unforeseen. Culture in all its aspects, from the apparently most essential materials of social life—fire, glass—are in large part the product of chance, of accident; as are the makers of culture themselves, the discoverers (Z 835–38; for glass, see Z 2602–607). And thus, alongside and within Leopardi’s master narrative of decline or, more radically, exclusion from “nature,” there are numerous interruptions and returns. Barbarism is one such, and has particular resonance in the political sphere. The more refined, subtle, planned, and organized a society is, the more it is vulnerable to conquest by the barbarian. “What does it mean that the so-called barbarians, or peoples who have not yet attained to anything more than a modest or even inferior civilization, have always triumphed over civilized peoples, and over the world?” Leopardi asks rhetorically (Z 866; for modest, what Leopardi elsewhere calls “middling,” civilization, see Z 2332–33). Nature and illusion trump science and civilization, but that is because civilization, as it progresses, is subject to creeping impotence. Action will always win out over thinking, but action will give way to thinking in its turn. In a move that seems to foreshadow Nietzsche, or a form of social Darwinism, Leopardi confidently predicts that “Europe, though completely civilized, will fall prey to those half-barbarians who threaten it from the depths of the North,” with the important rider that “when they are no longer conquerors and become civilized, the world will come back into balance again.” That is, until civilization itself dissolves into barbarism or into a return to nature, but by the path of corruption as in the late Empire, or takes a route that not even Leopardi’s power of prophecy can foresee, and “the world will then set out on another course, and virtually another essence and existence” (Z 867).
This uncharacteristically apocalyptic vision notwithstanding, Leopardi’s idea of history is in broad terms a cyclical one, like Vico’s, but it allows also for stops and starts, and particularly for what Leopardi calls risorgimenti, rebirths or resurgences. He generally has one of two modern historical events in mind when he uses this term. The first is a preeminently cultural one and corresponds to a wider chronological span, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, than that usually understood by the later term “Renaissance.” It is the period in which the rediscovery of classical culture in particular by modern Europeans, led by Italians, put paid to the barbarism of the middle ages (nearly always despised by Leopardi, but with an important exception made for aspects of Byzantine culture: see Z 2697, note 1) and by returning, moved forward. The second is the French Enlightenment, and the forms of politics it took in the Revolution, an event whose inherent weakness—because its instrument
was philosophy, not nature—Leopardi recognizes, but which he credits with confronting the decadence of the absolute despotism established by Louis XIV, and with stimulating a tentative return toward nature by setting in motion “great and powerful passions” and restoring some sense of nationhood, “a certain palpitation,” in dead nations, by a means that Leopardi calls “half-philosophy,” which is undoubtedly fleeting, but is yet something (Z 1077–78; cf. 2334–35).
The elasticity of Leopardi’s terminology, between “nature” and “civilization,” “civilization” and “barbarism,” and the intermediate variants of the latter terms, which is further explored in “Nature, society, culture,” is particularly visible in his treatment of social organization across time. It allows for significant fluidity of thought, which is also psychologically and intellectually persuasive in a text that is itself marked by the passing of time, but also the recuperation and reconsideration of that past. The radicalization of Leopardi’s thought, marked by the “Everything is evil” entry written in Bologna on 19 April 1826 (Z 4174ff.), points forward to the trajectory of his great satirical poem, Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, where the frantic deliberations of the Florentine liberals facing defeat in 1830–31 dwindle into a vision of the afterlife from outer space, and a hollow laugh.
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