Change of Scale

From the micro to the macro and vice versa, modernity appears to have brought about multiple changes of scale in the way humans measure, map, and make sense of the world. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi offered extraordinary insights into these changes of scale and their implications for the modern world. It is no coincidence that sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy identifies Leopardi’s cosmopolitanism as a precursor to the planetary solidarity he advocates in Postcolonial Melancholia (2004), nor that philosopher Eugene Thacker turns to Leopardi, among others, to conceive a cosmic pessimism of a ‘world-without-us’ in Infinite Resignation (2018). Engaging with Leopardi from the perspective of the shifts in scale implied by these and other concepts sheds new light on his work and brings it into dialogue with current debates on spatial, temporal, and social scales.