Avant-guarde took that to Earth. Caruso, Martini and the Futurist redemption of Matter

Abstract

Because of its implications with Fascism, Futurism experienced a long critical misfortune, slowly regaining ground only from the end of the 1950s. Luciano Caruso, initially flanked by Stelio Maria Martini, made fundamental contributions to this re-evaluation along an intense twenty-year long activity. His profound commitment has in fact made it possible to read and get to know many theoretical and poetic texts of the first Italian avant-garde that had long remained ignored and to understand or rethink some of its most critical junctions. Caruso associated the redemption of Futurism from its fascist connotations with a re-evaluation of paroliberismo not only from a historical-critical point of view but also from an aesthetic-philosophical one: the poet, in fact, acknowledged the merit of having tried to heal the too clear fracture that had occurred over the centuries between "words and things" by reintroducing the expansive forces of matter into the circuit of language. The contribution intends to retrace the main points of this critical rehabilitation by placing the reflection of Caruso and Martini on the relationship between writing and matter within the aesthetic and epistemological horizon traced by Jean-François Lyotard (Discourse, Figure, 1971) aimed at the revenge of the sensitive on the secular Western logocentric paradigm.

Keywords

• luciano caruso
• stelio maria martini
• futurism
• words-in-freedom
• visual poetry
• lyotard