La lingua greca e il ruolo dell’Antico nell’opera di Carlo Michelstaedter

Abstract

In order to promote a renaissance and a renewal of Rhetoric in Italy, this essay proposes to start with Carlo Michelstaedter, one of the authors who, at the beginning of the 20th Century, appear to have decreed its death. On closer examination, however, we can see that the philosophical path followed by Michelstaedter on persuasion and rhetoric is not just a pars destruens against worn-out, stereotyped, traditional knowledge, but a proposal to revitalize thought by means of a renewed form of language able to talk about life using a form of persuasion developed by the ancient Greeks. The originality of Michelstaedter’s book La persuasione e la rettorica, which was his degree thesis that he never presented due to his suicide in 1910, lies in the construction of an osmotic language based on Italian, with fragments of Greek (also sometimes German) which create original syntactic and semantic links. For Michelstaedter, Greek becomes a language of the re-composition of the fragment of a deflagrated modernity; it becomes a new and possible language – or more precisely, a new way to appropriate ancient thought and sensibility that it is still possible to use and is helpful for understanding modernity. This use of Greek has thus not just the function of a “quotation”, of an endorsement, of a cosmetic, but is presented as being the only possible way of saying something that otherwise would be inexpressible.

Keywords

• rhetoric
• persuasion
• Michelstaedter
• Greek language
• philosophy of language
• education