Rivista internazionale di studi leopardiani | 2022 | N. 15

Le direttrici della rivista presentano il volume tematico, dedicato alle Operette morali.

With the project of the Operette morali Leopardi intends to create a new repertoire of myths. By taking on different meanings, myths become a “cardinal point”, orienting the reader in the text through their underlying references. Beginning with the analysis of two of the most well-known dialogues, this contribution examines the mythological and logical structure of the Operette by means of an anthropological perspective and focusing on post-apocalyptic suggestions.

In 1821, a year of significant political events in the slow-mov-ing process of Italian independence, Leopardi identified Machiavelli as the political pendant of those who have «truly changed the face of phi-losophy», namely Galileo, Descartes, Locke, and Newton. Meanwhile, imbued with a project of literary and social reform, he wrote a series of prosette satiriche in an effort to create a new genre of moral and philosoph-ical satire. As he composed the prosette and prepared the Operette morali, Machiavelli remained an enduring influence. This study explores the inter-nal history of the Machiavelli-Leopardi interaction through an analysis of the Novella Xenophon and Niccolò Machiavello to understand Leopardi’s own reformulation of ‘Machiavellism’ and its historically specific meanings. Rather than an ‘effacement’ of Machiavelli in both the Zibaldone and the Operette morali, I argue that his moral philosophy has fused with Leopardi’s own vision of the relationship between ethics, politics, and the purpose of literature.

In the context of a firmly materialistic philosophy and in relation to the eighteenth-century theme of the plurality of worlds, the Dialogo della Terra e della Luna is structurally founded on the recognition of diversity as vital resource. This concept relies on the tendency of matter to aggregation, communication, and thus to the search for the new and the different. The essay aims to show how, even from an intertextual point of view, Leopardi enacts a dialectical confrontation between the principles of uniformity and diversity, which reflects the relation between literature and science and affects the dialogic form of the Operetta.

The essay investigates the phenomenological foundations of spaces in which Operette’s characters actualize themselves, and how these foundations accord to the author’s Lebenswelt, hence to that relation between the self and the world that, leading to the modern subjectivism, is verified on a sensitive and sentimental level other than on a rational and scientific, especially Newtonian, one.

A link between ecolog y and pessimism has emerged strongly in recent years, in philosophers such as Thacker, Ligotti, and Morton, or even in the reflections carried out on the writings of eco-terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. The intent of this proposal is to apply the categories and theories of pessimistic thought on the environment to some of the texts in the Operette, such as Dialogo della Natura e un Islandese, Il Copernico, or Dialogo di un Folletto e di uno Gnomo.

In light of recent scholarship on the posthuman, this contri-bution asks a specific question: how to approach, today, Leopardi’s Operette morali in order to take up the question of his anti-anthropocentric dis-course? In order to answer this question, the essay takes as its object Leopar-di’s articulation of the tension between organic and inorganic – a distinction which is central to scientific discourses and literary representation between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. In particular, the essay examines the ways in which, in the Operette morali, Leopardi decenters the human subject through the representation of the inorganic. It shows how Leopardi’s understanding of the the organic/inorganic dyad develops from his evolving materialism and converges with key issues in his philo-sophical reflection. From a posthumanist perspective, Leopardi’s critique of anthropocentrism takes on new meaning when seen in the context of the opposition between organic and inorganic. It emerges as a practice that questions the centrality of the human through a conceptual redefinition that explores the cognitive and biological limits of human beings.

The essay intends to present the results of a broader ongoing research dedicated to the ‘leopardian’ doctor Francesco Puccinotti (1794-1872), focusing on the predilection he constantly professed, up to the years of his late maturity, for the Operette morali. About the «Dialoghi» (as he al-ways preferred to mention them), Puccinotti was immediately enthusiastic, revealing an intimate adherence to the profound substance of the text and becoming an active promoter even after having been transferred to the Uni-versity of Macerata, in January 1826. The importance of this appreciation, sometimes expressed in clear-cut and radical terms, represents a useful testi-mony in the definition of a first, selected group of ideal readers of the work.

The essay analyses the Operette morali with reference to the categories of monologism and dialogism with reference to the two bakhtin-ian categories of monologism and dialogism. Starting from the assumption that Leopardi is perceived by his readers as a monologic author – one whose voice, even in its variations, remains clearly ascribable to the author himself – Caesar makes this perception interact with the effects of the dominant dialogic form of the Operette, and with the models that shaped the history of this literary genre. By carefully categorizing the interlocutors of Leopardi’s dialogues, he shows how the most famous monologue of the Operette, the one in which Leopardi’s alter ego Filippo Ottonieri takes the stage, powerful-ly delineates the dialogical dimension of an open thinker and writer.