Abstract:
Words Against Words is the first book to consider the philosophical works of Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910) from a stylistic point of view. It focuses on the links between poetic and rhetoric in Michelstaedter¿s major work, La Persuasione e la Rettorica, well known for its original multilingualism, embodiment of subgenres, dialogues, apologues and parables, technical jargons. In the context of the early twentieth century `crisis of language¿ in Central Europe, Carlo Michelstaedter, a young Italian speaking Jew from Gorizia who left the Austro-Hungarian territory to study in Florence, articulates one of the most radical examples of `negative thought¿, while at the same time struggling to define a way to regain freedom from contingency, unity of meaning, and the absolute state of `persuasion¿. Malcolm Angelucci¿s book reads La Persuasione e la Rettorica, against itself, demonstrating how it is in the practice of signification, in the `writing¿ of a philosophy and a poetic, that the challenge against the inadequacy of words is played out, in one of the most interesting examples of Italian speculation of the period. Angelucci¿s post-structuralist approach and analysis of rhetorical figures adopts and reworks the Bakhtinian concept of `dialogism¿, in order to demonstrate the peculiar `loss of centre¿ of Michelstaedter¿s text, and the relativisation of the pretences of the hero/narrator in ways which are coherent with the best examples of early Central European Modernism.
