Rivista internazionale di studi leopardiani | 2020 | N. 13

Le direttrici presentano il volume, il taglio tematico, i saggi contenuti.

The essay highlights the consonances between Saint-Pierre’s Études de la nature and Leopardi’s works, proposing that the mixture of sensibility and sensationalism which inspired the treatise strongly influenced the poet’s attitude to nature. Leopardi’s idyll originated from that mood, which tended to persist, in some respects, in spite of his gradual distancing from the finalism of the Études.

XVIII century’s georgic texts chosen by Leopardi in his poetic Crestomazia represent Nature controlled by human knowledge. In particular, some verses from Coltivazione del riso (1758) by Giovan Battista Spolverini’s debate an ecologic topic and introduce a subject which is satirized in Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi but it is also fundamental in La ginestra o il fiore del deserto, that is the contemporary goundless arrogance and pride of the human being in front of Nature.

The paper retraces the relation between d’Holbach and Leopardi in order to bring out the transformation that occurred to the modern notion of materialism from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. This time frame sees a radical paradigm shift from the compact “system of nature”, neatly contained within the mechanics of Newtonian physics, to the emergence of life as an exception, upsetting the notion of matter. D’Holbach’s System, which Leopardi knew from the Dominican Father Antonino Valsecchi, should suffice to explain Leopardi’s Stratonism, with which he is familiar from childhood and to which he was to return from 1825 onwards with his, this time, unmediated reading of d’Holbach’s Good Sense. In this light, what appears to be fictional in the Apocryphal Fragment of Strato of Lampsachus can be re-read as a ‘half-truth’, expressive of the striking contra-diction of life vs matter. This clash is meant to undermine the anthropocen-tric narcissism developed against the background of the spectacular celestial apocalypses, which had already been anticipated by Bayle, Buffon, Robinet, Maupertius and others. But even beyond d’Holbach, the metaphorical death of the sun and the planets in Leopardi’s Apocryphal Fragment does not let nature, however shattered, still stay “always on its feet”. Rather, it shows the most bewildering side of the fall of nature: it opens “the door to chaos”, in the wake of a prophetical hypothesis about Strato first formulated by Pierre Bayle. It adumbrates the nihilistic ruination of the foundations of metaphysics.

The essay analyzes the presence of the IV Bucolica by Virgilio and of the Misopogon by Giuliano within the Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi (1835) as both relevant inner texts supporting Leopardi’s radical criticism to his contemporaries on the themes of society and education. The Palinodia has its core in the description of the child who builds and destroys little playhouses. This ancient picture has last through time, now represen-ting a naturalistic parable which discloses the undeniable truth of the natural evil in the simplicity of a child’s game.

The emphasis that scholarship has placed on the integral autobiographic character of Leopardi’s oeuvre draws his work near to the contemporary Romantic context, one defined by the conflicting relationship between a hypertrophic poetic human subjectivity and a natural nonhuman object that, deprived of its own autonomy, is reduced to a mere representational embodiment of human imagination. I intend to offer an alternative interpretation of Leopardi’s production by underscoring the crucial role that John Locke plays for Leopardi’s philosophical under-standing and aesthetic representation of nature. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, along with Francesco Soave’s translation of Locke’s treatise, in the first part I propose three reasons to justify the influence that Locke exerts over Leopardi’s materialistic speculations vis-à-vis the generally-agreed-upon role played by the French Idéologues. In the second part of the article, I show how under the implicit sway of Locke, Leopardi’s poetic production turns into an aesthetic space where proto-ecological responsibility becomes possible. I use Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia as a representation of a subjectivity intent to enfranchising nature and emancipating it from the hypertrophy that characterizes the canonically understood Romantic poetic subject. The result of such an effort is a kind of poetry that I call “of inquiry” through which the subject gives back to nature its voice, one that is constituted by the very silent presentiality of the matter that constitutes it.

Under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giacomo Leopardi meditates through his prose, poems and theoretical reflections on the primal scene of the “state of nature”. I argue that this construction serves both as a philosophical tool and anthropological reference, and that it shapes Leopardi’s original naturalism and critique of European social thought.

L’articolo riporta e commenta le traduzioni tedesche delle opere leopardiane citate nel titolo a cura di Friedrich Heinrich Bothe, e analizza l’alta qualità stilistica.