Massimo Palma
Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli (massimo.palma@unisob.na.it; orcid: 0000-0001-7810-9725)
Leopardi’s low materialism: Hypothesis on the waste of nature
Abstract: Over the course of the 20th century, Leopardi’s materialism has repeatedly been at the centre of critical debate, from Luporini to Timpanaro to Negri. A key concept in Leopardi’s reflections is the idea of a human nature that – starting with a judgement deriving from the “love of its own happiness” – pursues the “study of its own preservation” (Zibaldone, 5-6 April 1825). The aim of this contribution is to compare Leopardi’s conception of nature, as it emerges from the Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander and from various entries of the Zibaldone, with a much later vision, of nature as generative in excess, characteristic of Georges Bataille’s thought from the early 1930s onwards, from the moment when he applied the concept of dépense, to nature seen as an economico-political system. The intention, going through Bataille texts and also finding some hints in W.G. Sebald’s novels, is to test the presence, in Leopardi, of a hypothesis of “low materialism”, which could direct his vision of the natural as an inauspicious “spectacle” “of so much copy of life” towards a dialectical interpretation.
Keywords: Destruction; Leopardi; Monsters; Nature; Volcano.