The Stranger as Friend. The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio E-Book

Franco Masciandaro

• Herausgeber: Firenze University Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger - what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" - which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.Franco Masciandaro is professor and Chair of Italian Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of La problematica del tempo nella "Commedia", Dante as Dramatist: The Myth of the Earthly Paradise and Tragic Vision, La conoscenza viva: Letture fenomenologiche da Dante a Machiavelli, and of essays on Cavalcanti, Boccaccio, and Ariosto.

Leseprobe

Studi e Saggi

– 117 –

Franco Masciandaro

The Stranger as Friend: The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio

Firenze University Press

2013

The Stranger as Friend : The Poetics of Friendship in Homer, Dante, and Boccaccio / Franco Masciandaro. – Firenze : Firenze University Press, 2013.

(Studi e saggi ; 117)

http://digital.casalini.it/9788866553618

ISBN 978-88-6655-360-1 (print)

ISBN 978-88-6655-361-8 (online PDF)

ISBN 978-88-6655-362-5 (online EPUB)

Graphic design by Alberto Pizarro Fernández, Pagina Maestra snc

Cover illustration: from a woodcut print, “La Commedia 28. Casella. From Purgatorio II”, by Tsugumi Ota.

***

Peer Review Process

All publications are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the FUP Editorial Board and the Scientific Committees of the individual series. The works published in the FUP catalogue are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house. For a more detailed description of the refereeing process we refer to the official documents published in the online catalogue of the FUP (http://www.fupress.com).

Firenze University Press Editorial Board

G. Nigro (Co-ordinator), M.T. Bartoli, M. Boddi, R. Casalbuoni, C. Ciappei, R. Del Punta, A. Dolfi, V. Fargion, S. Ferrone, M. Garzaniti, P. Guarnieri, A. Mariani, M. Marini, A. Novelli, M. Verga, A. Zorzi.

© 2013 Firenze University Press

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Firenze University Press

Borgo Albizi, 28, 50122 Firenze, Italy

http://www.fupress.com/

Printed in Italy

If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him.

You must count him as one of your own countrymen and love him as yourself – for you were once strangers yourselves in Egypt. I am Yahweh your God.

Leviticus 19:33-34

Now let each one of you remember unhappy Patroklos

who was gentle, and understood how to be kindly toward all men.

Iliad 17.670-671

I was a stranger and you made me welcome.

Matthew 25:35

Friendship cannot be separated from reality any more than the beautiful. It is a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracle consists simply in the fact that it exists.

Simone Weil, “Love”

For Scott Michael, Anna and Stuart (and Lorenzo), Heather and Nicola, and to the memory of my brother Michele, and of Robert S. Dombroski, my friend

Acknowledgments

In addition to my indebtedness to the literary critics and philosophers acknowledged in this book, I would like to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague, Norma Bouchard, who read the first draft of my manuscript, generously offering helpful suggestions. I thank my anonymous readers for Firenze University Press for their insightful commentary. I owe thanks to the FUP editor, Fulvio Guatelli, and to the copyeditor, Elisa Logli, for their support through the process of publishing my study. I thank the Book Support Committee and the Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Connecticut for contributing to the publication of this volume with a generous grant. I am grateful to my wife, Laurie, for her perceptive reading and creative criticism of portions of the manuscript. Finally, I am thankful for the gifts bestowed on me by all my friends, far and near.

Sommario

Introduction

Chapter 1

Friendship in the Iliad: Beyond the Ethos of the Warrior Society

Chapter 2

The Perversion of Friendship in Inferno

1. The vernacular as friend in the Convivio

2. Inferno I-II: Dante’s encounter with the Other

3. Inferno V: Lust as the Negation of Friendship

4. Inferno VI: Ciacco and the Lost Friendship with Fellow-Citizens

5. Inferno X: Farinata, Friend and Enemy

Chapter 3

Friendship, Private and Political, in Purgatorio

1. Casella

2. Sordello

3. Forese

Chapter 4

The Politics of Friendship and Erotic Passion in Paradiso

1. Charles Martel

2. Cunizza, Folco, and Rahab

Chapter 5

Friendship and the Creative Power of Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron

1. Ser Cepperello

2. Abraham and Giannotto

3. Saladin and Melchizedek

Works Cited

Introduction

The principal aim of my study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on friendship, as represented especially by the works of Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach that, supported by the praxis of commentary, focuses on the poetics of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron.1 As I examine these works, which in a unique way exemplify, respectively, three important periods in the Western tradition – Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the transition from the Middle Ages to Early Renaissance – I am guided by Aristotle’s notion that “friendship… is a particular virtue, or it involves virtue” and “it is something most necessary for life”, and by Cicero’s view of friendship as a complex communion, a lived experience and not just a philosophical idea.2

I began to reflect on friendship after the death of a friend. As I mourn the loss of my friend, more than ever I am keenly aware of the desire to explore both the meaning and the experience of friendship. Jacques Derrida has noted that “it is thanks to death that friendship can be declared”.3 We may recall Gilgamesh’s declaration of friendship as he mourns the death of Enkidu:

“Listen to me, Elders. Hear me out, me.

I [have been] to [you], Enkidu, your mother, your father; I will

weep for you in the wilderness.

For Enkidu, for my friend, I weep like a wailing woman,

howling bitterly’.4

David’s words of mourning addressed to his friend Jonathan also come to mind (2 Samuel 1:26)5:

Jonathan, in your death I am stricken,

I am desolate for you, Jonathan my brother.

Very dear to me you were,

your love to me more wonderful

than the love of a woman.

We are thus reminded of the deep link between mourning the loss of a friend and the desire to engage others in a conversation on friendship, as expressed in Cicero’s De amicitia, in which the death of Scipio Africanus Minor is mourned by his friend Laelius, and in Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship”, in which he mourns the loss of his friend Étienne de La Boétie.6

But what is the friendship that can now be declared? Is it possible to define it? And can I define the friend, my friend? While I am certain of the reality of both my friend and of our friendship, I am faced with an aporia similar to the one acknowledged by Socrates at the end of Lysis, Plato’s dialogue on friendship: “Well, Lysis and Menexenus, we have made ourselves rather ridiculous today, I, an old man, and you children. For our hearers here will carry away the report that though we conceived ourselves to be friends with each other – you see I class myself with you – we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend”.7 As Socrates admits defeat in discovering “what we mean by a friend”, he declares himself a friend of Lysis and Menexenus. In this affirmation of friendship, beyond definition, we witness an expansion of the singular love between two friends toward another, a love which is also implicitly extended to the “hearers”, the anonymous “third party” as a plurality of undeclared friends. Hence, we are made aware of the social and ethical ground of friendship, which Aristotle has elaborated in Books 8 and 9 of his an ethical ground upon which my discourse is beginning to take shape, for it involves an awareness of and ultimately a responsibility for the other, both as one who is near, and whom I face as my neighbor, and as distant, indeed infinitely remote.