Timpanaro

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

[Thanks to Jim Farmelant for bringing my (our) attention to this
commemoration of Sebastiano Timpanaro by Perry Anderson in the May 10, 2001
London Review of Books. The article is far too long and too resistant to
scanner processing to post in its entirety, but these concluding paragraphs
should motivate you to track down the whole piece. For those who can not
easily get their hands on the Review, contact me privately and I will send
you a copy of the article.

[I have admired Timpanaro for a number of years now both as a sharp critic
of Freud and as author of "On Materialism," which is a rejoinder to various
and sundry Western Marxists who sought to wed Marx to one or another
idealist philosophy. From Anderson's article I have discovered another
reason to admire Timpanaro. It turns out that although he was trained as a
philologist and wrote scholarly articles, he never made his living as a
professor but as a humble proofreader instead. Whether there is a
connection between how he made his living and the integrity of his ideas is
open to speculation. I believe, however, that the connection is real.

[This article is one of Anderson's best in recent years. There is a tension
in the article between his admiration for Timpanaro's plainspoken-ness and
resistance to intellectual fads and his tendency to overstate Timpanaro's
pessimism. This is obviously a function of Anderson's own rudderless drift
at the NLR, which might lead to the embrace of just the kind of idealist
radicalism that Timpanaro had no use for. On the upside, it is good that he
took the trouble to write such a powerful tribute to this Italian thinker
who did contribute to NLR on and off until his death.]

While the angle at which Timpanaro stood to the academic world in Italy was
never the same as that of his compatriots abroad there is a common element
in the style of this contingent of thinkers that is the obverse of the
atmosphere of murky intrigue and fustiness that still clings to many of the
peninsula?s universities. Just because higher education has never been
truly modernised in Italy, much of it remaining in a kind of suspended
dilapidation, academic professionalisation in the postwar Anglo Saxon sense
has never entirely taken hold. But that has also meant a relative
underdevelopment of baneful effects familiar elsewhere: peer group
fixation, index-of-citations mania, gratuitous apparatuses, pretentious
jargons, guild conceit ? everything that stands between mind and thought in
our culture. Absent much of this, Italian conditions can produce a
relationship to ideas of a sui generis purity and directness, unmediated by
any institutional protocols. This effect ? it could be called an advantage
of quasi-backwardness - also has something to do with the appalling quality
of Italian mass culture. TV shows capable of deterring the most dedicated
follower of folk-fashion have been a safeguard against populist
affectations that elsewhere are now a typical compensation for professorial
involution.

Without MLA or BBC, so to speak, the space for an older kind of imagination
has survived. Two features mark it out. The first is an ability to engage
with ideas of the past ? proximate or remote ? as if they were as immediate
as those of the present, without any strain of reference or exhibition of
learning. This is in part an effect of the second gift of this Italianate
mode, its distinctive clarity and economy of expression. Sartre once
remarked that the Italian language of the postwar period was ?trop pompeuse
pour être maniable?, like a decaying palace in which writers wandered
around at a loss, no longer knowing quite how to take up residence. A too
capacious syntax, permitting virtually any shape or shapelessness of
sentence, has been part of the sumptuous décombres. Anyone who has ever
heard a political speech, looked at an administrative document, or glanced
at a daily newspaper in Italy will have a sense of this. The writing of
what could be called, with some but not complete variation of meaning, the
enlightened counter-culture of this period has been farmed in reaction
against the euphuistic slackness of so much public discourse. What its
different practitioners have in common is a planed-down terseness and
transparency. More obviously than any contemporary variant of French, it
could be described as a classical prose.

Timpanaro belonged to this national set, though with traits that placed him
somewhat apart within it. Suspicious of any deliberate literary effect, he
wrote straightforwardly and forcefully, where necessary at the cost of
formal finish. Where he really differed, however, was in his complete
indifference to intellectual fashion - his considered rejection of every
consecrated school of thought in his time. Judging the overwhelming
propensity of the Western intelligentsia to be anti-materialist, In one
specious guise or another, he took his ground outside any consensus,
conservative or progressive. The claim that high culture since at least the
Belle-Epoque has always been predominantly idealist in tendency is a
sweeping one. Was he wrong? He came to  this conclusion long before the
high tide of post-structuralism in the arts and conventionalism in the
sciences: neither Kuhn nor Denida, let alone Geertz or Rorty, rates a
mention- in his verdict on the epistemological slide of the age. It could
well be thought that, as he denounced it, all he described was yet to reach
its paroxysm. 

The overall balance of intellectual forces is another matter, however.
There were many signs, as the century approached its end, that the tables
were being turned. Most conspicuously, the new genetics has started to have
the same kind of cultural impact as the old in the age of Darwin.
Evolutionary models borrowed from everywhere: in economics, psychology,
literature, sociology, international relations ? the talk is all of
adaptation, exaptation, mutation, replication. Popularisers like Gould or
Dawkins rival the fame of Spencer or Huxley in their day. Even in
philosophy, traditional nursery of every refinement of idealism,
neurophysiology now has belligerent champions. Lent confidence by the
spectacular successes of the natural sciences over the past twenty-five
years, stretching from astrophysics to the genomc, positivism ? not the
name, still faintly ungratefül, but the thing? is back in force. How far
its return in these forms would have been a source of satisfaction to
Timpanaro is imponderable. Certainly it has not been accompanied by any
displacement to the left in the political world; famously, the reverse. But
then he had never equated intellectual with social progress.

For Timpanaro, Leopardi had at his best represented a synthesis of firm
republicanism. and unswerving atheism. Timpanaro conceded that the poet's
republican convictions had receded as his cosmic despair -- ?existence is a
disfiguring birthmark on the face of nothingness? -- deepened, prompting
sporadic expressions of political indifferentism. But by the end, he
argued, Leopardi had reached some kind of difficult equilibrium between
them. Yet it was true that this understanding of society always remained
limited ? it was absurd to present him as a proto-socialist. Still more
absurd was the attempt to make of him an ecologist ante diem. One of
Timpanaro?s last major polemics was with his friend Adriano Sofri, once a
leader of Lotta Continua, now in jail for the duration in Pisa on
trumped-up --pentito-- charges. At the time Sofri was a theorist of Green
politics, who had sought to annex Leopardi for what Timpanaro saw as an
emollient environmentalism, rising above class conflict in a rescue mission
to save Mother Nature, in which all could impartially join. Leopardi?s
vision of nature as malign stepmother, visiting ills ?infinite and
immedicable? on human beings, was the antithesis of such a conception. His
pessimism could not be put to any kind of Gaean service. 

What of Timpanaro?s? He made no secret of its biographical sources. It was
not an expression of political withdrawal or bookish influence, but the
product of ?direct, personal reflection on all that vast part of human
unhappiness that is not related to man?s social but his biological being?.
>From a number of scattered passages, it is clear that his father?s long,
painful illness and death were deeply traumatic for Timpanaro, bringing him
close to breakdown. His own psychic disabilities, however related to this
experience, must have reinforced the intellectual effects of it, and would
have drawn him to Leopardi anyway. Suffering from another kind of
deformity, he arrived at a parallel pessimism, equally impersonal, equally
reasoned. It was not because Timpanaro had so much stronger a sense of
social oppression and injustice, above and beyond our natural caudacity. At
times, in the scales of misery, society seemed of small account to Leopardi
and beggar alike pitched into the grave. So conceived, philosophical ways
risked becoming-political defeatism. Timpanaro was not subject to this
temptation. He was intensely ? even on occasion he admitted, too
vehemently? political. But he was also quite free from the of
?pan-politicism?, as he once called it. The ideas of historical progress
and natural catastrophe were not at odds in him. Yet perhaps time played a
trick on him all the same. He had started out believing that an egalitarian
revolution was possible, and amendment of our natural condition impossible.
Ironically, today it is the opposite opinion that holds sway: capitalism
cannot be abolished, but infirmity might be. In the 17th century, Descartes
was sure that science would soon let people live for ever. His confidence
shows signs of returning Timpanaro died, he was termed an enemy of the 20th
century by another philologist In such conditions, how could he remain
actual in the new one? He would ha no truck with the question.
'"Actuality," he once wrote, ?is a reductive, anti-historical and
philistine criterion of judgment.' 


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/