Manuela Marchesini

From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity

Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda
In a 1996 essay entitled ‘Comedìa’, Giorgio Agamben argues that Dante’s title accounts for the comic but reparable ontological split of the Christian Middle Ages, which is intrinsically opposed to the tragic, irreparable conflict proper to ancient classical theatre. The Italian philosopher leaves aside the traditional explanations of comedy (a sad beginning with a felicitous ending, a mixed literary style). He finds Dante’s ‘poema sacro’ to be a ‘comedy’ because its Christian framework allows for redemption, the reconciliation of the Adamic fracture, which was unavailable to classical culture. At the core of the Comedy lies the ‘comic’ experience of Dante the Pilgrim: ‘the justification of the culprit’, instead of the ‘tragic culpability of the innocent’ characteristic of Virgil’s Aeneas. Dante’s firm position within a medieval Christian context makes Dante the Pilgrim’s adventure ‘parodic’, according to Agamben, instead of ‘figural’, as Auerbach claimed. The composition of the ontological split, he continues, warrants the anti-tragic quality of Christian life on earth. Christ has come to wash away humankind’s sins, thereby mending an ontological fracture that dates back to the Adamic fall. Now humankind can be redeemed and made one again. In contrast, in ancient Greek culture the split between maschera and persona was in principle not amendable, and as such it marked the birth of theatre. For Dante the Pilgrim therefore, Agamben continues, getting ready to face Heaven as he does in Purg. XXXI means not only acknowledging his own sins, showing contrition, and being subject to cleansing, but also dropping the tragic pretences which Oedipus had nurtured in favour of the natural innocence to which the Christian human being can be restored.
Keywords: Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia; productive reception; Italian literature; Gadda, Carlo Emilio –Pasticiaccio
Part of Metamorphosing Dante Containing:
Frontmatter / Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart
Metamorphosing Dante / Fabio Camilletti, Manuele Gragnolati, Fabian Lampart
Dante’s ‘Strangeness’: The Commedia and the late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon / Federica Pich
Irish Dante: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett / Piero Boitani
Dante as a Gay Poet / Nicola Gardini
Dante’s Inferno and Walter Benjamin’s Cities: Considerations of Place, Experience, and Media / Angela Merte-Rankin
‘Il mal seme d’Adamo’: Dante’s Inferno and the Problem of the Literary Representation of Evil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom / Florian Trabert
‘Una modesta Divina Commedià’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò / Tristan Kay
Reclaiming Paradiso: Dante in the Poetry of James Merrill and Charles Wright / Rachel Jacoff
‘Perché mi vinse il lume d’esta stella’: Giovanni Giudici’s Rewriting of Dante’s Paradiso for the Theatre / Erminia Ardissino
Per-tras-versionidantesche: Post-Paradisiacal Constellations in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto / Francesca Southerden
Human Desire, Deadly Love: The Vita Nova in Gide, Delay, Lacan / Fabio Camilletti
Wives and Lovers in Dante and Eugenio Montale / Rebecca West
Man with Snake: Dante in Derek Jarman’s Edward II / James Miller
Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro / Manuele Gragnolati
‘Misi me per l’alto mare aperto’: Personality and Impersonality in Virginia Woolf’s Reading of Dante’s Allegorical Language / Teresa Prudente
‘Hell on a Paying Basis’: Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935) / Nick Havely
From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity: Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda
Literary Heresy: The Dantesque Metamorphosis of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka / Dennis Looney
Transferring Dante: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for the Inferno / Antonella Francini
‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis / Davide Luglio
A Cardboard Dante: Hell’s Metropolis Revisited / Ronald de Rooy
Backmatter / Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, Fabian Lampart
Title
From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity
Subtitle
Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda
Author(s)
Manuela Marchesini
Identifier
Description
In a 1996 essay entitled ‘Comedìa’, Giorgio Agamben argues that Dante’s title accounts for the comic but reparable ontological split of the Christian Middle Ages, which is intrinsically opposed to the tragic, irreparable conflict proper to ancient classical theatre. The Italian philosopher leaves aside the traditional explanations of comedy (a sad beginning with a felicitous ending, a mixed literary style). He finds Dante’s ‘poema sacro’ to be a ‘comedy’ because its Christian framework allows for redemption, the reconciliation of the Adamic fracture, which was unavailable to classical culture. At the core of the Comedy lies the ‘comic’ experience of Dante the Pilgrim: ‘the justification of the culprit’, instead of the ‘tragic culpability of the innocent’ characteristic of Virgil’s Aeneas. Dante’s firm position within a medieval Christian context makes Dante the Pilgrim’s adventure ‘parodic’, according to Agamben, instead of ‘figural’, as Auerbach claimed. The composition of the ontological split, he continues, warrants the anti-tragic quality of Christian life on earth. Christ has come to wash away humankind’s sins, thereby mending an ontological fracture that dates back to the Adamic fall. Now humankind can be redeemed and made one again. In contrast, in ancient Greek culture the split between maschera and persona was in principle not amendable, and as such it marked the birth of theatre. For Dante the Pilgrim therefore, Agamben continues, getting ready to face Heaven as he does in Purg. XXXI means not only acknowledging his own sins, showing contrition, and being subject to cleansing, but also dropping the tragic pretences which Oedipus had nurtured in favour of the natural innocence to which the Christian human being can be restored.
Is Part Of
Place
Vienna
Publisher
Turia + Kant
Date
2011
Subject
Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia
productive reception
Italian literature
Gadda, Carlo Emilio –Pasticiaccio
Rights
© by the author(s)
This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Bibliographic Citation
Manuela Marchesini, ‘From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity: Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 285–303 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_17>
Language
en-GB
page start
285
page end
303
Source
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 285–303
Format
application/pdf

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Cite as: Manuela Marchesini, ‘From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity: Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 285–303 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_17>