Furio Jesi E-Book

Furio Jesi

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 69

Beschreibung

 Der Text im vorliegenden Notizbuch ist ein Auszug aus Furio Jesis Buch Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta (Spartakus. Symbolik der Revolte), das er 1968/69 verfasst hat.  Jesi beschäftigte sich mit der Wechselwirkung von Mythos und Politik, und sein Denken beruhte auf der Auseinandersetzung mit den Thesen des Mythenforschers Karl Kerényi (1897–1973). Die Revolte des Spartakusbundes, die mit dem Reichskongress am 29. Dezember 1918 in Berlin begann, bildet für Jesi den Ausgangspunkt für eine Reflexion über die spezifische Zeiterfahrung der Revolte im Unterschied zu der einer Revolution oder Partei.  Im Augenblick der Revolte suspendiere die historische Zeit und wiche einer symbolischen Raumzeit, in der ein gesamtes Kollektiv Zuflucht finden könne. Dennoch würde nach ihr wieder die »normale Zeit« eingeläutet, die dem herrschenden politischen System in die Hände spielt. Dieses »Unzeitgemäße« der Revolte, wie Andrea Cavalletti es in seinem Vorwort nennt, ist eine paradoxale kollektive Erfahrung, die Jesi zu einer scharfsinnigen politischen Theorie anregte.    Andrea Cavaletti (*1967) lehrt Ästhetik und Zeitgenössische Literatur an der  Università Iuav di Venezia.          Furio Jesi wurde 1941 in Turin, Italien, geboren und starb 1980 in Genua. Er lehrte deutsche Literatur an der Universität Palermo.    Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch 

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº069: Furio Jesi

The Suspension of Historical Time /

Die Suspendierung der geschichtlichen Zeit

Introduction / Einführung: Andrea Cavalletti

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Member of Core Agent Group, Head of Department /Mitglied der Agenten-Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

Editorial Assistant / Redaktionsassistentin: Cordelia Marten

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Melissa Larner

Proofreading / Korrektorat: Stefanie Drobnik, Sam Frank

Translations / Übersetzungen: Barbara Kleiner, Alberto Toscano;

Introduction / Einführung: Johanna Bishop, Barbara Kleiner

Graphic Design / Grafische Gestaltung: Leftloft

Junior Graphic Designer: Daniela Weirich

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Monika Klotz

E-Book Implementation / E-Book-Produktion: LVD GmbH, Berlin

Text excerpt from / Textauszug aus: Furio Jesi,Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta, © Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino

English edition forthcoming from / Englische Ausgabe in Vorbereitung bei Seagull Books, London; translation / Übersetzung © Alberto Toscano

© 2012 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Andrea Cavalletti

llustration / Abbildung: p. / S. 1: II. documenta, 1959, Orangerie, installation view with / Installationsansicht mit Norbert Kricke,Raumplastik, 1958 (detail / Detail), photo / Foto: © Günther Becker/documenta Archiv; © Nachlass Norbert Kricke

documenta und Museum Fridericianum

Veranstaltungs-GmbH

Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.documenta.de

Chief Executive Officer / Geschäftsführer: Bernd Leifeld

Published by / Erschienen im

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern

Germany / Deutschland

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

www.hatjecantz.com

ISBN 978-3-7757-3098-3 (E-Book)

ISBN 978-3-7757-2918-5 (Print)

Gefördert durch die

funded by the German Federal

Cultural Foundation

We cannot be held responsible for external links; the content of external links is the full responsibility of the operators of these sites. / Für externe Links können wir keine Haftung übernehmen. Die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich von deren Betreiber zu verantworten.

Introduction

Andrea Cavalletti

The text we are presenting here, “The Suspension of Historical Time,” is drawn from the bookSpartakus: Simbologia della rivolta, which Furio Jesi wrote between 1968 and 1969. Jesi was born into a partly Jewish family in Turin in 1941 and died in Genoa in 1980; despite this early demise, he was one of twentieth-century Italy’s most important and original thinkers and essayists. A trueenfant prodige, he got his start as an Egyptologist when he was barely fifteen. In the early 1960s, he turned to the study of mythology and the science of myth, or rather, of how ancient myths re-emerge in the modern era, at times in distorted and treacherous form.

In 1964, Jesi began corresponding with Karl Kerényi, a scholar whom he always admired and took as a model. In that very period, Kerényi had given a lecture in Rome, about genuine myth and its “technicization,” which identified the true mythic experience, i.e., inspired contact with theechter Mythos(Kerényi also calls itUrphänomen, an expression borrowed from Goethe), as something that only poets are capable of in our era. Above all, he drew a distinction between “genuine myth” and the exploitative, distorted adoption of ancient mythemes for political ends: a dangerous use, or technicization, that he saw in both totalitarian propaganda and the ideas of Georges Sorel.

From this point on, one could say that Jesi focused his entire attention on critically re-examining this distinction of Kerényi’s and taking it to both profound and ironic extremes. The differences in theory and politics between the young student (who identified with the radical Italian Left) and his mentor (a bourgeois humanist who was a friend of Thomas Mann’s) grew into an open rift four years later, when the dialogue between the two scholars brusquely came to an end. It was May of 1968. Jesi later went to visit the Paris of assemblies and barricades. Upon returning to Italy, he began a new book, his book on revolt.

On the night between the eleventh and twelfth of December 1969, he wrote to a friend:

I can make the glorious announcement that an hour ago, I finished rereading the full manuscript ofSpartakus: Simbologia della rivolta. It’s done. . . . It’s about Rosa Luxemburg, but there’s also quite a bit about Dostoyevsky, Storm, Fromentin, Brecht, and, of course, Thomas Mann! It is much more “fragmentary” thanGermania segreta: the “links” are reduced to a minimum, in a monologue that—with all duecréances—bears more resemblance toFinnegans Wakethan toThe Accumulation of Capital.

Although it deals at length with the events that shook Berlin in 1919, almost mimicking them with the intense rhythm of its prose,Spartakusis not a history of that movement or insurrection, but a true phenomenological investigation of revolt. Jesi saw the relationship between myth and politics as both a cognitive and an existential question, analyzing it as a problem related to time.

While revolution is presented as a strategy that can be long-term in nature, entirely focused on creating the conditions for changewithinthe historical process, revolt is instead defined as asuspension of time. In this suspension, where destruction, knowledge, and collective appropriation take place, where “the city [is] really felt as one’sowncity,” every act counts in and of itself, not in terms of its consequences; today is not a preparation for tomorrow, but rather, an “untimely” moment (in the Nietzschean sense), the instant epiphany of an alternative and utterly new time. Revolt breaks the sequence of “normal time,” that is, of daily life marked out by the pace of work, which is the result of a “bourgeois manipulation of time,” while adopting and spreading the language of “genuine propaganda,” through the words and actions of the rebels.

In these two definitions one can see a new use of Kerényi’s terminology: “technicization” becomes the “manipulation of time,” and what is deemed “genuine” is not the experience Kerényi reserved for poets, but the very propaganda he so harshly criticized. For Jesi, it is not a question of separating the time of myth from political action, but, on the contrary, of rendering access to this alternative time truly collective and enduring, to free the revolt from the temporal and spatial boundaries of Berlin in 1919 or Paris in 1968.

Kerényi had once explained that the “festival,” the sacred, celebratory event that for the ancients was a point of contact between history and myth, a moment for renewing the community within a truly alternative time, remains an impossible, ungraspable experience for modern man. Jesi’s ingenious response was to extrapolate a political theory from this impossibility.Spartakuswas discovered among his papers and published only after his death, in 2000. In 1976, however, he had written that the impossibility of the festival as a truly collective moment derives from the characteristics of bourgeois society, and that the study of myth also lies within those bounds. It is necessary to tear down the barriers of this culture, he added, to break through its boundaries rather than just trying to bend them. The epistemological problem and political problem merged, as he saw it, in the destructive paradigm of revolt.

Andrea Cavalletti (b. 1967) teaches Aesthetics and Contemporary Literature at Università Iuav di Venezia.

Einführung

Andrea Cavalletti

Der hier präsentierte Text, »Die Suspendierung der geschichtlichen Zeit«, entstammt Furio Jesis BuchSpartakus. Simbologia della rivolta(Spartakus. Symbolik der Revolte), das er 1968/69 verfasst hat. 1941 als Spross einer teilweise jüdischen Familie in Turin geboren und 1980 vorzeitig in Genua gestorben, war Jesi einer der wichtigsten und originellsten Denker und Essayisten Italiens im 20. Jahrhundert. Als wahres Wunderkind tat er sich bereits fünfzehnjährig als Ägyptologe hervor. Ab Anfang der 1960er Jahre widmete er sich der Untersuchung des Mythos und der Wissenschaft vom Mythos, genauer gesagt, der Art und Weise, wie antike Mythen in der Moderne wiederbelebt werden können, und sei es auch in verzerrter und gefährlicher Form.