Discussing the interrelationships between film and literature, Italo Calvino once wrote: “There remains the fact that the cinema is continually being drawn toward literature. In spite of having such power of its own, the cinema has always been afflicted by jealousy of the written text: it wants to 'write'.” There are strands to the respective histories of the twentieth-century Italian novel and the Italian cinema that at times come together to form a kind of Gordian knot, so to speak, so tightly harnessed are they. At such times as these historical strands cross over, literature and cinema can be said to enter into a form of dialogue with one another. This dialogue between the Italian cinema and literature is amongst the most complex, fluid, and multifaceted to be found in any culture. To appreciate its full scope one has to acknowledge it at a number of interrelated levels. First, there is the most immediate and most commonly discussed question of adapting Italian novels to film form.

Works by Lacan

A detailed chronological list of Lacan's publications and Seminars (with their transcriptions) is available in Elisabeth Roudinesco's Lacan, pp. 511-34. Since the focus of this Companion is on English translations, the texts quoted here are available in English. I quote all the titles of the Seminars (one can find a useful summary of Lacan's works in Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan: The French Contexts, trans. Anne Tomiche (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 139-249. There is an unpublished and unauthorized English translation of all the Seminars by Cormac Gallagher. The dates given in parentheses in the first section are those of the original publications or, in the case of the Seminars, of the date on which they were held. I do not list the texts that are available in Ecrits: A Selection.

Geography played a crucial role in defining the Italian experience of “modernity.” Italy's official modernist movement, futurism, was the offspring of the northern urban centers of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, cities in which the con- flict between modernization and cultural tradition was the most severe, while the Italian modernists discussed here all approached the complex question of modern subjectivity from standpoints conditioned to a significant degree by their own regional origins. The culture of Pirandello's preindustrialized Sicily, remotely distant from the modern industrial province of Svevo's Trieste, accentuated the playwright's terror of life falling apart in a world of paradox and contradiction, a fear that Svevo had under control, and Gadda, armed with the weapons of a scientific culture, sought to overcome in parody and satire. However, in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the “modernity” these writers faced each in his own unique way was one with the industrialization of production, the acceleration of the tempo of life due to developments in science and technology, and the emergence of new forms of class struggle. The ambiguity, anguish, and spiritual fluctuation, deriving from the breakdown of old hierarchies and the expansion of the capitalist market, were the general life-symptoms of a collective Western humanity, which the literary art of these authors at once incorporated and attempted to treat.

In 1902 Anna Franchi published Avanti il divorzio!, a largely autobiographical work that explored with frank directness the moral squalor engendered by the failure of Italian political leaders to pass divorce legislation. Franchi's radical and dramatic demand for an end to the sexual and economic oppression of women burst into a climate where few politicians dared challenge the legal status quo on the family, and where feminist demands focused more on the vote and improving women's working conditions than on a fundamental overhaul of social and family life. If Franchi's experience was a product of her times, her rebellion was ahead of her day. Almost thirty years later in La mia vita (My Life, 1940) she looks back on her youth and describes her life then as a curious mixture of the end of romanticism and the rise of new theories that seemed attractive to a younger generation of women. The “theories” she refers to obliquely are new political positions forming on the left associated with anarchism, socialism, and feminism that achieved comparatively little in terms of legislation but which had a substantial impact on social and cultural thought in Italy during the twentieth century.

Introduction. From fossils to Philosophy

Hippolytus, antipope in the early third century AD, has this to tell us in the course of the survey of pagan Greek philosophy he presents in the first book of his Refutation of all Heresies (exhibit A):

You might think that Xenophanes’ heresy was to have been someone who left God out of the creation story. But that does not seem to have been a point Hippolytus was wanting to make. What leaps out of his report is the picture it paints of Xenophanes as pioneer practitioner of the scientific method.

Few are those who willingly confess that among their shortcomings they lack a sense of humor. Likewise, I have not yet encountered the rare specimen who would admit to being a pervert. This unfortunate state of affairs is due, among other things, to the fact that perversion, even in the Lacanian era, has always remained an outsider. Perversion is not a structure of desire that evokes sympathy or kinship. Moreover, Lacan did not describe perversion with the same plethora of clinical insights that he provided for hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and phobia. He was able to extract from Freud's cases - Dora, the Rat Man, and Little Hans – those strategies that underlie all of psychic life and that therefore no longer need to be perceived in pathological terms: it is inevitable that the human subject will “choose” a neurosis (SE 1, p. 220) enabling him or her to negotiate the thin line between the need to attain erotic gratification and the fear of losing the ability to want. Hence neurotic compromises are deeply ingrained in the fabric of daily life and are therefore no less respectable than any other creative productions. What psychoanalysis can offer, to those who seek its services, are merely alternative pathways that can potentially disrupt the deadly routine of the repetition compulsion.

The word Trinity is a time-honoured shorthand for speaking about the unique claims of the Christian understanding of God. Because Christians believe that there is only one God, they have typically been classified with other monotheists, such as Jews and Muslims. But, unlike the adherents of these faiths, Christians believe that God has entered fully and directly into the created order, and has become concretely embodied in the world, in two ways: God became incarnate in the womb of a Jewish woman named Mary; she gave birth in Palestine some two thousand years ago, and her child was named Jesus. In addition, God has also been poured out on the world, into the communities of believers known as Israel and the church; this concrete embodiment of God is called the Holy Spirit. These two concrete manifestations of God are considered sufficiently different from the One who forever dwells in “light inaccessible” that the designation “monotheism” may simply be inadequate as a description of the Christian faith. For Christians, the one God is also three: the Father or Source, who is the origin of all things; the Son or Word, who comes forth from God and takes on human flesh; and the Spirit, the “Giver of Life,” who dwells in human hearts and animates the believing community.

The Platonic Corpus

From any perspective, Plato's dialogues are extraordinary. Others have tried to write philosophical dialogues, frequently in imitation of his. Indeed other associates of Socrates had already used the genre before Plato adopted it; bits and pieces, along with titles, remain. But the Platonic dialogues remain essentially sui generis, whether taken singly or as a whole. There are somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five genuine works which, while always returning to ethics and politics, between them cover a vast range of topics, and cover them in often startlingly different ways; always, however, using a cast of characters that excludes the author, even in disguise. A main feature is that they define - and would later be taken as having defined - what philosophy itself is, not just in terms of its subject matter but in terms of method and attitude or approach. This they do chiefly by exhibiting philosophy in action; or rather, typically, by exhibiting a philosopher - usually Socrates - going about his business, often in confrontation with others (teachers of rhetoric, sophists, politicians, poets) who dealt with the same subject-matter but in different, non-philosophical ways.

In 1970s America, at the crest of second-wave feminism, Sigmund Freud was the man women loved to hate. They were not without reason. The medical specialty practiced in Freud's name by American analysts (mostly men) devoted itself not to helping patients (mostly women) discover their desire, but to enforcing ideas about “normal”femininity. To those beginning to question the conventions of domesticity and heterosexuality, psychoanalysis, with its talk of “female masochism” and “penis envy,” seemed the enemy of women's liberation. Freud's words were plucked out of context to prove it.

But in 1974, the British feminist Juliet Mitchell published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which would have enormous impact on a generation of women, both academic and activist. Mitchell wrote: “[a] rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud’s works is fatal for feminism. However it may have been used, psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one. If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to neglect it.”

An overview of the early Italian novel might well begin with the observation that Italian writers never felt too comfortable with the novel as a literary form before the nineteenth century. Therefore, many literary historians came to the inevitable conclusion that the birth of the Italian novel takes place in 1827 with Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi. Such an assessment makes sense only if it implies that detecting a unified pattern of development in the Italian premodern novel leading to the “rise”of the “modern” novel would be very difficult. To put it another way, the Renaissance Boccaccian novella does not “evolve” into the bourgeois novel of the eighteenth century. In the Italian canon, there is no Astrée after Sannazaro's Arcadia, and the historical novel of the seventeenth century does not constitute an antecedent of the early nineteenth-century historical novel. Yet so vast a literary output cannot fail to stimulate the curiosity of the reader interested in the history of the genre and in the relationship between literature and the society that produced it.

The fourteenth century

Giovanni Boccaccio is generally considered to be the founder of modern narrative as it emerged in postmedieval Europe. He stands out in the history of modern European culture as a reviver of the literary tradition, of the pastoral allegory and biography as well as the various forms of fiction: the novella, the longer narrative poem, and long prose fiction. Just as his friend Francesco Petrarca created the language of the new lyric, so Boccaccio, gathering up the entangled but vigorous threads of the medieval tale and novel, established the types and prose style of European narrative.

Theology is the determination, delineation, and articulation of the beliefs and values, as well as the meaning of the symbols, of a particular faith community. The task of Christian theology is to set forth what might be called the “mosaic of beliefs” that lies (or should lie) at the heart of the Christian community. This mosaic consists of the interlocking doctrines that together comprise the specifically Christian way of viewing the world.

Although Christian theology has always been “church dogmatics” in this sense, the “churchly” aspect of “church dogmatics” has become even more crucial in the postmodern context. In a world characterized by the presence of a plurality of communities, each of which gives shape to the identities of its participants, the Christian community takes on a new and potentially profound theological importance as the people who embody a theological vision that sees the divine goal for humankind as that of being the bearers of the image of the God who is triune.

In 1982 a group of American theologians, schooled in philosophy of religion (particularly the death-of-God thinking from Hegel and Nietzsche and the linguistic turn taken by Wittgenstein and Heidegger) encountered the work of Jacques Derrida and saw the potential of deconstruction for furthering their project of announcing the end of theology. A book emerged, Deconstruction and Theology, edited by Thomas Altizer, featuring essays by the most prominent of them: Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mark C. Taylor, Robert Scharlemann, Charles Winquist, Max Meyer, and Carl Raschke. In the same year Mark C. Taylor published his full length study Deconstructing Theology, to be followed in a collection under his editorship Deconstruction in Context in 1986. Of course, Derrida's work (along with Paul de Man's) was taking the American literary world by storm from the mid seventies when English translations of his work began to appear. And the influence of Derrida's thinking on those schooled in hermeneutics, and primed for the next move that might be made following Gadamer's Truth and Method, was beginning to be felt earlier than 1982.

The term “postmodern” raises a number of vexing critical questions, not the least of which concerns the meaning of the “modernism ” to which postmodernism must logically be related. Italian literary history departs, in some respects, from the standard treatment of twentieth-century literature in other European literatures and in American criticism because of an important current of Italian critical thought that employed the term il decadentismo (decadentism) to define what other literary cultures would have called modernist. The major authors of Western modernism, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, or Jorge Luis Borges (to mention only a few) were less influential forces in Italian culture before World War II than elsewhere, although in the postwar period their works were widely read, imitated, and analyzed. While, in the past, Italian critics sometimes overlooked connections between native writers today regarded as modernists (Luigi Pirandello, Eugenio Montale, Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda) and their counterparts in the rest of Europe or America, contemporary critics, both within Italy and abroad, have been unanimous in regarding Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco as postmodernist masters. Their works enjoy enormous audiences throughout Europe, the United States, and the English-speaking world, and they have achieved this widespread popularity in large measure because they have been perceived as exemplary expressions of the postmodern bent in contemporary culture, a cosmopolitan literary style that seems to transcend national boundaries.

Life

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a wealthy native of Stagira, a Greek coastal city on the Chalcidice peninsula of Macedonia, not far from modern Thessaloniki. His father, who died in Aristotle's childhood, was physician to the Macedonian king. In 367 Aristotle was sent to Athens, at the age of seventeen, to complete his education at Plato's school, the Academy. Instead, he remained there until Plato's death in 347, studying, writing and lecturing over a wide range of philosophical subjects having roots in Plato's own work - the theory of rhetorical argument and persuasion, logical theory, ethics, and questions of metaphysics, among others. At Plato's death he, together with Xenocrates, another of the leading members of the school, left Athens for the north-western coast of Asia Minor, where the local ruler Hermias (whose daughter Aristotle married - later the mother of his two children) established them at the town of Assos. Aristotle continued his work there, and afterwards for a time at Mytilene on the nearby island of Lesbos, where he apparently first collaborated with the younger philosopher Theophrastus: it appears that his most important researches on sea animals date from this period. In 343 King Philip II of Macedon called him (accompanied by Theophrastus and others) to the royal court to become tutor to his son Alexander (‘the Great’).

The first question to be posed in an essay addressing Lacan's Marxism must be: can such a thing be said to exist? In the absence of any profession of socialist allegiance on Lacan's part, and given his notorious allergy to institutionalized political commitment, the relevance of Marxist doctrine or methodology to Lacan's theory cannot be presumed but must rather be interrogated and qualified. Do those elements of Marxist theory - individual concepts and broader paradigms alike – that are scattered in Lacan's discourse find their way back out again with all their force and defining political impetus?

Slavoj Žižek , the figure most often identified with a combined Marxist-Lacanian approach to cultural politics, has acknowledged the need to dispel some uncertainty on this point. It is worth exploring in some detail the roots of what may be called Žižek ’s “Lacano-Marxism,” since one may safely assert that it is because of the strong impact and infectious charm of Žižek ’s many books that Lacan’s name has remained so popular in English-speaking countries and has moreover weathered the anti-theoretical storm of the nineties. After having explored Žižek ’s unique visibility as a self-appointedMarxist Lacanian, I want to then go back in time and engage with Louis Althusser, whose unorthodox, not to say heterodox tendencies in the sixties were all but confirmed, in the eyes of the French Communist Party, by his dalliance with the “decadent” enterprise of psychoanalysis.

The two most popular works of Italian fiction written between Italian Unification (1860-70) and World War I were Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, 1883) by Carlo Collodi, the pen name of Carlo Lorenzini (1826-90); and Cuore (Heart, A Schoolboy's Journal, 1886) by Edmondo De Amicis (1846-1908). The poles between which both books shuttle are the home (family) and school, although in the case of Collodi's ambivalently constructed protagonist (the boy/marionette) there is much straying. It cannot be surprising that these should be the institutions invested with the greatest authority and responsibility in creating a “new” citizenry for the new nation which until then had been a land made up of various regions, each of which had its own dialect and customs. The slogan of the time was “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” The church of Rome was not prepared to participate in a state it felt had usurped much of its authority and land, but religious values were essential to character-building, the goal of the age. It is well to remember also that, except in some of Italy’s northern regions and Tuscany, literacy was a rarity. And the values and virtues being proclaimed were in the cause of a productive, middle-class ethic. The “popular” fiction and culture in general referred to here were created, primarily at least, for and by Italy’s bourgeoisie, not for and by peasants and the proletariat, although under the impulse of verismo of varying degrees it did not shy away from depicting the latter classes, sometimes in a way meant to point to supposed virtues that the petite bourgeoisie might embrace.