for - webcast - Politics Girl - guest Andrea Chalupa - Organizing against Trump's Authoritarian regime - to - Andrea Chalupa - website - fighting fascism

to - Andrea Chalupa website - https://hyp.is/z4ddwLJpEe-416e2v5yeKw/www.andreachalupa.com/

for - climate crisis - Youtube - climate Doomsday 6 years from now - Jerry Kroth - to - climate clock - adjacency - Tipping Point Festival - Indyweb / SRG complexity mapping tool - Integration of many fragmented bottom-up initiatives - The Great Weaving - Cosmolocal organization - Michel Bauwens - Peer-to-Peer Foundation - A third option - Islands of Coherency - Otto Scharmer Presencing Institute - U-labs - Love-based (sacred-based) mini-assemblies interventions to address growing fascism, populism and polarization - Roger Hallam - Ending the US / China Cold War - Yanis Varoufakis

YouTube details - title: climate Doomsday 6 years from now - author: Jerry Kroth, pyschologist

summary - Psychologist Jerry Kroth makes a claim that the 1.5 Deg C and 2.0 Deg C thresholds will be reached sooner than expected - due to acceleration of climate change impacts. - He backs up his argument with papers and recent talks of climate thought leaders using their youtube presentations. - This presentation succinctly summarized a lot of the climate news I've been following recently. - It reminded me of the urgency of climate change, my work trying to find a way to integrate the work of the Climate Clock project into other projects. - This work was still incomplete but now I have incentive to complete it.

adjacency - between - Tipping Point Festival - Indyweb / SRG complexity mapping tool - Integration of many fragmented bottom-up initiatives - The Great Weaving - Cosmolocal organization - Michel Bauwens - Peer-to-Peer Foundation - Islands of Coherency - Otto Scharmer - Presencing Institute - U-labs - Love-based (sacred-based) mini-assemblies interventions to address growing fascism, populism and polarization - Roger Hallam - Ending the US / China Cold War - Yanis Varoufakis - and many others - adjacency relationship - I have been holding many fragmented projects in my mind and they are all orbiting around the Tipping Point Festival for the past decade. - When Indyweb Alpha is done, - especially with the new Wikinizer update - We can collectively weave all these ideas together into one coherent whole using Stop Reset Go complexity mapping as a plexmarked Mark-In notation - Then apply cascading social tipping point theory to invite each project to a form a global coherent, bottom-up commons-based movement for rapid whole system change - Currently, there are a lot of jigsaw puzzle pieces to put together! - I think this video served as a reminder of the urgency emerged of our situation and it emerged adjacencies and associations between recent ideas I've been annotating, specifically: - Yanis Varoufakis - Need to end the US-led cold war with China due to US felt threat of losing their US dollar reserve currency status - that Trump wants to escalate to the next stage with major tariffs - MIchel Bauwens - Cosmolocal organization as an alternative to current governance systems - Roger Hallam - love-based strategy intervention for mitigating fascism, polarization and the climate crisis - Otto Scharmer - Emerging a third option to democracy - small islands of coherency can unite nonlinearly to have a significant impact - Climate Clock - a visual means to show how much time we have left - It is noteworthy that: - Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Hallam are both articulating a higher Common Human Denominator - creating a drive to come together rather than separate - which requires looking past the differences and into the fundamental similarities that make us human - the Common Human Denominators (CHD) - In both of their respective articles, Yanis Varoufakis and Otto Scharmer both recognize the facade of the two party system - in the backend, it's only ruled by one party - the oligarchs, the party of the elites (see references below) - Once Indyweb is ready, and SRG complexity mapping and sense-making tool applied within Indyweb, we will already be curating all the most current information from all the fragmented projects together in one place regardless of whether any projects wants to use the Indyweb or not - The most current information from each project is already converged, associated and updated here - This makes it a valuable resource for them because it expands the reach of each and every project

to - climate clock - https://hyp.is/R_kJHKGQEe28r-doGn-djg/climateclock.world/ - love-based intervention to address fascism, populism and polarization - Roger Hallam - https://hyp.is/wUDpaKsAEe-DM9fteMUtzw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKWCHAcS7E - ending the US / China cold war - Yanis Varoufakis - https://hyp.is/Yy0juqmrEe-ERhtaafWWHw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BsAa_94dao - Cosmolocal coordination of the commons as an alternative to current governance and a leverage point to unite fragmented communities - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/AvtJYqitEe-f_EtI6TJRVg/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation - A third option for democracy - Uniting small islands of coherency in a time of chaos - Otto Scharmer - https://hyp.is/JlLzuKusEe-xkG-YfcRoyg/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b - One party system - oligarchs - Yanis Varoufakis - https://hyp.is/CVXzAKnWEe-PBBcP5GE8TA/www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BsAa_94dao - What's missing is a third option (in the two party system) - Otto Scharmer - https://hyp.is/M3S6VKuxEe-pG-Myu6VW1A/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b

for - fascism, polarization and climate crisis - interventions - love and listening strategy for climate crisis - Roger Hallam - Trump winning US election - is an opportunity - Roger Hallam - perspectival knowing - Deep Humanity - mini assemblies - Roger Hallam - listening - fascism - social intervention - from - Illuminem article - Proximity: The antidote to fascism - Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov - on horizontal and vertical decision-making

Summary - Roger Hallam advocates for a new strategy for the rise of fascism, populism, polarization and the climate crisis - love - He believes that we need a new social strategy based on love, on reaching out to the other side with compassion and listening to them - He cites numerous research studies that show that this can be transformative, for instance, citing pyschologist Carl Rogers - SRG complexity mapping tool, Deep Humanity and Indyweb could be synergistic to this program because both depend on: - diversity and - perspectival knowing

from - Illuminem article - Proximity: The antidote to fascism - Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov on horizontal and vertical decision-making - https://hyp.is/0Tv_Rqr3Ee-_-X8fKkCfpg/illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/proximity-the-antidote-to-fascism - Medium article - An Emerging Third Option: Reclaiming Democracy from Dark Money & Dark Tech Seven Observations On 2024 and What’s Next - Otto Scharmer - cutting across political lines / https://hyp.is/exS8dKtNEe-pfz-IhQFiZA/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b

for - love-based strategy for addressing fascism and polarization - listen and befriend - Roger Hallam - adjacency - Deep Humanity - Common Human Denominators - the intrinsic sacred - love-based strategy for addressing fascism and polarization - Roger Hallam - question - love-based strategy to address fascism - what about FAFO? - F around and Find Out - in which liberal women are separating from their Maga partners?

for - fascism - intervention - mini assembly format - Roger Hallam

fascism - intervention - mini assembly format - Roger Hallam - first, everyone introduces themselves - their name, - background, - life journey, - reason for attending mini-assembly - second, ask what they think is not going well - community where they live, - their country, - the world - third, similarities between people - fourth, each person shares a list of 3 or 4 priority things they think should change: - policies - ways of organizing - big issues - fifth - invite each person to run their own mini assembly

for - stats - Perato's law - social transformation - fascism, polarization and climate crisis - climate communication - 80% will change if we listen, 19% will require deeper conversations - 1% will not change - Roger Hallam

for - fascism and polarization intervention - scalability - Roger Hallam

for - fascism, polarization and climate crisis - climate communications - social intervention - new movement that can be 10x the size of Extinction Rebellion - apply Carl Rogers discovery of listening - Roger Hallam

for - fascism - antidote - question - what is a common way to transform fascist men? - answer - they get a girlfriend - Roger Hallam

for - to - a proposal for a love-based intervention for addressing the emergence of fascism, populism, polarization and the climate crisis - Roger Hallam

to - a proposal for a love-based intervention for addressing the emergence of fascism, populism, polarization and the climate crisis - Roger Hallam - https://hyp.is/wUDpaKsAEe-DM9fteMUtzw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKWCHAcS7E

for - commons - new definition - pathological conservatism - new definition - benign conservatism - new definition - beneficial conservatism - adjacency - citizen assemblies - cosmolocal - community organization - horizontal and vertical decision-making as cosmolocal - Fair Share Commons - FSC - pathological conservatism - hypocrisy of modern conservatism that cannot acknowledge first nations - TPF as a vehicle for citizen assembly in each ward and district of a city - to - Youtube - Trump won, now what? - Roger Hallam - to - Substack article - - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens

adjacency - between - citizen assemblies - cosmolocal - community organization - citizen assemblies - horizontal and vertical - Fair Share Commons - FSC - town anywhere - TPF - one per city ward or district - progress traps - wicked problem - pathological conservatism - deep conservatism - ECOnomy is a subset of ECOlogy - Modernity has many forms of shallow, pathological conservatism - Indigenous and first nations peoples practice deep, beneficial conservatism - adjacency relationship - One of the biggest progress traps is pathological conservatism when - a technology has become popular and ubiquitous but an unintended consequence becomes exposed - In that case, incumbents who profit from the established supply chain will defend it at great cost, even if the harm it causes becomes increasingly obvious. - They will do this until it reaches a point that the harm is so great that it can no longer be defended. - Often, great harm is done before that point is reached, if it is reached. - Misinformation, gaslighting and fascism can emerge as a form of pathological conservatism in an attempt to preserve the harmful aspect of the status quo. - Fossil fuels, internal combustion engines and the climate change they cause are an example of this, creating a wicked problem in which those trying to solve the problem are also contributing to it - Citizen assemblies are a bottom up response and counterweight to centralized power that is driving pathological conservatism - In contrast to the pathological conservatism, environmental awareness is a practice of benign and beneficial conservatism - the conservation of our natural environment - In fact, many who call themselves conservatives and nationalists are hypocritical because - if they went further in their conservativism logic, they would have to acknowledge the first nations people who came before them - The natural resources that were part of indigenous peoples lives for millenia that colonialists have built their entire fortune on represents even greater degree of conservatism, yet the hypocrisy is that - modern conservatives often cannot acknowledge this reality of a deeper form of conservatism as it threatens their false entitlement - This brings into question their claim of practicing conservatism - pathological conservatives act as if the ECOlogy is subordinate to the ECOnomy when in fact, the ECOnomy cannot exist without a functioning ECOlogy - citizen assemblies can be implemented in each ward and district of a large city - On top of these, Fair Share Commons and community cooperatives can be built as formal structures to drive specific projects - In order for participatory democracy to work effectively requires education on Deep Humanity and conflict resolution, otherwise risks low resiliency due to internal conflicts and derailment of vision - In order to scale, it requires both horizontal and vertical components or organization. This implies a cosmolocal strategy: - horizontal decision-making with local group is local, whilst - vertical decision-making with non-local groups based on broader issues is cosmo - A global Tipping Point Festival that employs social tipping point theory to emerge a global network of citizen assemblies / commons assemblies / people's assemblies in each ward and district of a city to relocate healthy power back to the people

to - Youtube - Trump won, now what? - a love-based approach to replace power-based approach for dealing with fascism and polarization - Roger Hallam - https://hyp.is/wUDpaKsAEe-DM9fteMUtzw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKWCHAcS7E - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/wlywbqkTEe-ROXfhSmA3bA/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation

for - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens - from - Illuminem article - Proximity: The antidote to fascism - Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov - on horizontal and vertical decision-making

article details - title: A global history of societal regulation - publisher: Substack - date_ 2024, Nov 20 - author: Michel Bauwens

Summary - Michel presents a history of economic and societal coordination and makes the claim that the commons has an important role to play in maintaining a wellbeing species that balances: - human activity - health of the natural environment - peace between different human groups - In particular, he observes the important role that cosmolocal coordination may play - Michel takes us to a journey through history to explore the various different systems that different cultures used in the past - It's very interesting that in modernity, we have a system which is seen as absolute but a study of history shows how relative it is - That raises the question of why the current system feels so intractable? What gives it its entrenchment - Perhaps it's that the global spread of neocapitalism around the globe has made it "too big to fail"? - and it will actually require failing before a new phoenix can emerge from the ashes? I hope not!

from - Illuminem article - Proximity: The antidote to fascism - Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov on horizontal and vertical decision-making - https://hyp.is/0Tv_Rqr3Ee-_-X8fKkCfpg/illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/proximity-the-antidote-to-fascism

which descended into fascism quickly.10yrs after authoring the Futurist Manifesto he authored the Fascist Manifesto, and was a key figure in fascism in Italy. Agitated for Italy's involvement in WW1, died during WW2 in '44 of heart attack. Prisco is not concerned with the moral pedigree of things it seems. See photos https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/10/week-notes-22-39/ on flickr.

for - interview - author - Tristan Snell - book - Taking down Trump - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/756546/taking-down-trump-by-tristan-snell/

summary - Snell is a lawyer who successfully prosecuted Trump, representing a class action lawsuit by the former students of Trump University - The book documents how he was able to successfully prosecute Trump and the challenges him and his team had to overcome - It provides a fascinating picture of how pathological elites operate, and how a perversion of power allows elites to effectively by silence, until the damage inflicted is so severe that - It sheds light on how corruption cultivated in business can scale to become political fascism. This is how fascism develops, silently and incrementally, until it becomes too late and entire society then pays - In the age of elites, Donald Trump, who comes from the elite class himself, is able to distort truth to such an extent that the very class that his class (elites) exploits the most (the working class) are convinced that he is their savior. - It also shows the dynamics of how power corrupts. Ideological synergy enables his allies to look the other way and ignore the extreme ethical baggage he carries, reinforcing the cliche - "the means justifies the ends"

I just wanted to let Columbia Gas of Ohio and Amanda DePerro know that not only is it poor etiquette to disable comments on posts (they obstruct customer feedback), but it's also pointless because people can just use tools like Hypothes.is to respond regardless.

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?

To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).

Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli 2022, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).

That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante

ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).

With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.

Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?

CLL

Dante is one of Primo Levi’s most important cultural touchstones. Levi's use of the Commedia, across multiple works, reflects a sophisticated and intimate reading of the poem. It may come as some surprise that Dante does not appear in Levi’s 1981 literary anthology, La ricerca delle radici, which provides a highly eclectic collection of some of his preferred authors and texts, from Homer to Darwin and Rabelais to Celan. However, Levi justifies this omission on account of the medieval writer’s universal importance: Dante, Levi states in an interview from the same year, is ‘part of any reader’s heritage’.

Allusions to Dante have been identified in Levi’s fiction, essays and poetry. However, it is here in SQ that we witness his most sustained engagement with the Commedia. The most explicit and celebrated use of the poem comes in the present chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, where Levi uses the famous Ulysses episode from Inferno 26 to teach some Italian to his friend and fellow inmate Jean, and skilfully incorporates into his text suggestive fragments of Dante’s own poem. The Ulysses canto, read in the secularised, Romantic tradition of Croce and De Sanctis, resonates powerfully in the context of Auschwitz and becomes a parable of human courage and self-emancipation. In particular, the Greek hero’s rousing words to his crew and invocation of their very humanity (‘Considerate la vostra semenza…’) resonate viscerally in the dehumanising world of the camp. The recollection of Ulysses sailing beyond the pillars of Hercules into the forbidden sea allows Levi momentarily to imagine breaking beyond the confines of the infernal Lager. The chapter ends, however, with the climactic words of Dante’s canto, describing the sea closing over Ulysses’ boat and the curtailment of his doomed journey, as Levi and Jean’s momentary taste of freedom ceases, and they must again confront the horror and banal misery of the camp. The omnipotent God of Dante’s tale of Ulysses, who punishes the voyager’s doomed attempt to reach Mount Purgatory without divine sanction, implicitly becomes here the Nazi regime that confines him.

In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Dante offers Levi a fleeting antidote to the horrors of Auschwitz. Elsewhere in the testimony, however, Levi draws on Dante as a kindred author of the infernal, adapting imagery from the medieval poet’s first cantica in describing his experience of an all-too-real Hell. In the book’s second chapter, Levi explicitly designates his new surroundings as a modern Inferno (‘Questo è l’inferno. Oggi ai nostri giorni, l’inferno deve essere così’). Thereafter, Levi often uses deictic expressions (‘sul fondo’, ‘lassù’, ‘laggiù’), some with Dantean resonance, that construct his experience of the camp as a kind of infernal descent. More specific narrative, topographical and structural echoes appear, too. Nazi guards are compared, both directly and more implicitly, to devils and guardian figures in Dante’s Hell. Different regions of Dante’s Hell (Antinferno, Limbo, Malebolge) are invoked in describing the different parts of the camp. Levi also seems to draw on the example of Dante’s Inferno as a model of confronting the negative limits of language and verbal communication. The topos of inexpressibility that features in the closing cantos of the Inferno also appears in SQ. Both writers imagine the existence of a uniquely ‘harsh’ language (‘rime aspre e chiocce’ | ‘un nuovo aspro linguaggio’) that might do justice to the horrors of their infernal experiences, but which they do not possess. However, while Levi may take inspiration from Dante in numerous ways, there is a powerful and bleak irony at stake when Levi establishes parallels between the medieval poet’s imagined account of a medieval Christian hell, founded upon an infallible notion of divine justice, and his own experience of the historical hell of Auschwitz, a place of the most extreme and barbarous injustice and racialised hate.

Levi’s use of Dante is all the more striking in light of the ways in which the Italian Fascist regime had appropriated and frequently distorted Dante and his poetry in the years prior to his deportation. In the Risorgimento and in liberal Italy, Dante had been endlessly appropriated as a kind of symbol and embodiment of the new nation. Under Fascism, however, there had emerged an even more heavily and crudely instrumentalised cult of Dante. The poet was invoked not only as a source of fervent cultural pride, but as a prophet of the fascist state and of Mussolini. He was given a central place in fascist schooling and was used in irredentist and expansionist campaigns, in setting out highly restrictive language policy, as a model of fascist virility, and on account of his imperial associations. In the late 1930s, passages from the Commedia even appeared on the cover of the magazine La difesa della razza, with Dante appropriated to support the regime’s later politics of racial purity and antisemitism. It is thus all the more striking that Levi makes such imaginative and deft use of Dante across his works. He found in Dante, a poet so freighted with nationalistic interpretations during the period in question, a powerful, personal and highly adaptable resource of language, meaning, and understanding.

TK

In geographic terms, of course, the sea that Ulysses traverses is the broader Mediterranean and, at moments, its inner seas (e.g. the Ionian, Aegean, or Adriatic). As in Homer’s epic, however, ‘mare’ possesses a polyvocality in Levi’s text that far exceeds its cartographic meanings. The Fascist regime famously instrumentalised and misused Italy’s classical heritage. As early as 1918, Mussolini had linked ‘romanità’ with the sea, declaring in a speech at Pavia, ‘Now the mission of Italians is in the Mediterranean’ ('Ora la missione degli Italiani è nel Mediterraneo'). Yet even as the Duce confidently proclaimed that Italy would rule over a revived Mare Nostrum, the sea itself retained a historically ambivalent – at points, even marginal – status within the modern Italian state (Fogu 2020).

In a 1985 Paris Review interview (only published in 1994), Levi spoke of the revelation of reading Melville during the time of Fascism. According to Levi, the fascist censors allowed Cesare Pavese to translate the book as ‘it had no political implications’, a judgement that ignored the work’s entanglements with American narratives of imperialism and race politics. In Levi’s estimation, Pavese’s translation ‘distorted it [Moby Dick], fitted it into the Italian language’ – and thus into an ambivalent Italian imaginary of the sea. Like many Italians, ‘[h]e wasn’t a seaman – Pavese – he hated the sea’, commented Levi.

Such ambivalence towards the sea resonates in Levi’s biography, as well. Like many 20th-century Italians and Europeans more generally, Levi was familiar with the seaside as a place for recreation and tourism. Indeed, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi claimed that Rudi, the Blockführer in Auschwitz, liked Italy and wanted to learn Italian; this desire dated back to a month-long holiday in Liguria before the war, a vacation presumably spent along the shore. In the chapter, Levi likewise refers to ‘una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’. Yet in his youth Levi embraced mountain climbing, with one biographer, Ian Thomson, claiming that on the eve of World War II Levi did not even know how to swim. For Levi, the sublimity of the peaks, rather than the sea’s vastness, symbolised freedom. In this, Levi was not alone. The classic terrain of both the Resistance and the civil war was resolutely a landscape (karst, forest, field, mountain) rather than a seascape.

In an indirect way, the project of Mare Nostrum threatened to shipwreck Levi’s own university hopes. In 1937, as Levi prepared for his ‘maturità’ exams, he received a demand to report to the Turin seaplane base. There he was accused of ignoring a draft summons for the Royal Navy. Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, insisted, ‘Maybe my brother’s name was on a Fascist National Service list, but he never received an Italian Royal Navy summons’ (Thomson 2003, 66). A compromise was struck, with Levi expected to enrol in the university branch of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN). Thus, unlike Ulysses, Levi was not destined to set forth on the open sea (in the latter’s case with the Navy). In the end, Levi never served in any branch of the Italian military or fascist militia. Rather, his brief three month career as a partisan played out in the mountain passes of the Valle d’Aosta, after Levi moved out of the Hotel Ristoro where he had initially sought refuge.

During those few months when Levi took up arms against the Fascists, there occurred an incident that profoundly demoralised Levi and his comrades: the execution at Frumy of two partisan brothers-in-arms, Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano on December 9, 1943. In the estimation of historian Sergio Luzzatto, this episode would continue to haunt not only Levi’s conscience but also his writings (non-fiction, his novel, and poetry) (Luzzatto 2016). The ‘ugly secret’ Levi harboured was that these partisans - long celebrated as the first partisans killed in the Valle d’Aosta - did not fall at the hands of the Fascists but of their comrades, who appear to have punished Oppezzo and Zabaldano for indiscretion and greed. Perhaps it was only fitting that Zabaldono’s nom de guerre was ‘Mare’, given that this partisan’s life – and death – embodied the ambiguity and fluidity of what Levi would later conceptualise as the ‘grey zone’.

PB

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

Scholars tend consistently if not quite unanimously to emphasise the ambiguity of Levi’s term ‘gigantesco’. The discussion of Dante’s Ulysses is ‘broken off’, as Hayden White puts it, before Levi can tell us ‘what we are supposed to conclude’ (2015, 12). As a result, ‘there is no final manifestation of the message, of the meaning that Levi is so desperately trying to grasp and communicate’, argues Giuseppe Stellardi (2019, 715). ‘Nessuno potrà mai affermare nulla con sicurezza’, assert Alberto Cavaglion and Paolo Valabrega (515). The lack of certainty regarding the term’s meaning is perhaps responsible for the substantial divergence between the critical interpretations that this passage has inspired.

There are those who argue that Levi’s ‘gigantic’ discovery when reciting Dante in Auschwitz is an unconquerable ‘faith in his culture’ (Hartman 1996, 52), and those who claim, conversely, that Levi instead recognises how ‘behind the gas chambers, the ovens, the starvation rations, and the astonishing otherworldly everyday viciousness and cruelty can be found at the heart of Western culture’ (Feinstein 2003, 365). In other words, while some hold that Levi finds in Dante the antidote to Auschwitz, others argue that he finds the cause.

Levi’s subsequent glosses on this passage have done little to alleviate the uncertainty. In the version of SQ that he prepared for a 1964 radio broadcast, he clarified the meaning of the quoted phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ (OC I, 1237); for the 1973 Schools edition of SQ, intended for an audience of Italian students, he provided footnotes explaining the term ‘anacronismo’ and the phrase ‘il perché del nostro destino’ (OC I, 1417-18). In both instances, Levi left ‘gigantesco’ undefined. This apparent authorial reticence should inspire some restraint in our critical exegesis. There is no need to pursue false certainty where the text offers legitimate ambiguity.

What we may note, however, is that elsewhere in SQ, and with significant frequency in Levi’s subsequent writing, the term ‘gigantesco’ serves to identify the monstrosity of the Lager. In the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he describes Auschwitz as ‘una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale’ (OC I, 217). In the aforementioned school edition of SQ, he explains the historical shift in Nazi policies that transformed concentration camps into ‘gigantesche macchine di morte’ (OC I, 292). In a 1955 article celebrating the tenth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he describes how the Nazis ‘[h]anno lavorato con tenacia a creare la loro gigantesca macchina generatrice di morte e di corruzione’ (OC II, 1293). In a 1968 preface to a book on Auschwitz, he argues that the vital question remains ‘per quali ragioni e cause, prossime o lontane, abbia potuto nascere in questo civile continente una gigantesca fabbrica di morte’ (OC II, 1357). In the 1975 article ‘Così fu Auschwitz’, he describes what he calls the Nazis’ ‘costituzione di un gigantesco esercito di schiavi, non retribuiti e costretti a lavorare fino alla morte’ (OC II, 1374). In a 1979 response to the broadcast of the TV mini series Holocaust, he notes how the public seemed to focus on the question of why the genocide of the European Jews had occurred, ‘e questo è un perché gigantesco, ed antico quanto il genere umano: è il perché del male nel mondo’ (OC II, 1456). The accretion of these examples is by no means definitive; the ‘qualcosa di gigantesco’ that Levi discovered in discussing Dante with Jean may well differ from the ‘perché gigantesco’, the ‘perché del male nel mondo’, on which he deliberated decades later. Nevertheless, there would appear to be a pattern.

It is a pattern, moreover, that obtains well beyond Levi’s own work. To cite just one relevant example, the Italian anti-Fascist expatriate Giuseppe Antonio Borgese entitled his 1937 study of the totalitarian movement in Italy Goliath: The March of Fascism. And in that text Borgese lay the ultimate blame for the enormity of Fascism not on the Duce—‘it is futile […] to explain Fascism as if it were the creation of a single man, Mussolini’—but rather on another ‘gigantic individuality’ in the Italian national pantheon: Dante, who ‘distorted the soul of his people’, giving rise to ‘Nationalism and Racialism’ (46). Many Fascists, too, claimed Dante as the founder of their movement (Albertini 2013). Not for nothing did ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist anthem, boast that ‘la vision dell’Alighieri, | oggi brilla in tutti i cuor’ (Pugliese 2001, 55). A 1927 study of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini argued that the Duce’s Italy was closer than ever to Dante’s ideal (7-8). The Fascist Party’s own 1940 Dizionario di Politica made the same claim (735). ‘Che Dante sia Fascista lo dimostrano tutte le sue opere’, insisted one of the regime’s intellectuals; ‘solo oggi possiamo riconoscere in Dante il profeta del nostro destino’, maintained another (Scorrano 2001, 92-93, 198).

It is perhaps tempting to hear the echo of such sentiments in Levi’s epiphany that in Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is to be found ‘il perché del nostro destino’. After all, Levi had learned his Dante in an Italian school system that had been turned to Fascism’s totalitarian aims. If he is indeed suggesting to Jean that abuses of Dante - the appropriation of tradition to support the arrogation of power in the present; the fraudulent claims to a divine warrant for violence - bear responsibility for the Häftlinge’s tragic fate, he has good reason.

Yet those who interpret Levi’s Dante lesson in a more liberatory manner have good reason as well. If the inhuman contrapasso of eternal damnation ‘come altrui piacque’ is to be found in Dante, so, too, is Ulysses’ call for an innate and inviolable human dignity: ‘considerate la vostra semenza’. Borgese in Goliath recognised this duality (12). So, too, I suspect, does Primo Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Perhaps this is the ‘gigantic’ discovery that Levi has made in his meditation on Dante’s Inferno: that in our cultural inheritance are to be found both the roots of Fascism and the seeds of resistance.

CLL

Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?

To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).

Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).

That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante

ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).

With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.

Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?

CLL

Scholars tend consistently if not quite unanimously to emphasise the ambiguity of Levi’s term ‘gigantesco’. The discussion of Dante’s Ulysses is ‘broken off’, as Hayden White puts it, before Levi can tell us ‘what we are supposed to conclude’ (2015, 12). As a result, ‘there is no final manifestation of the message, of the meaning that Levi is so desperately trying to grasp and communicate’, argues Giuseppe Stellardi (2019, 715). ‘Nessuno potrà mai affermare nulla con sicurezza’, assert Alberto Cavaglion and Paolo Valabrega (515). The lack of certainty regarding the term’s meaning is perhaps responsible for the substantial divergence between the critical interpretations that this passage has inspired.

There are those who argue that Levi’s ‘gigantic’ discovery when reciting Dante in Auschwitz is an unconquerable ‘faith in his culture’ (Hartman 1996, 52), and those who claim, conversely, that Levi instead recognises how ‘behind the gas chambers, the ovens, the starvation rations, and the astonishing otherworldly everyday viciousness and cruelty can be found at the heart of Western culture’ (Feinstein 2003, 365). In other words, while some hold that Levi finds in Dante the antidote to Auschwitz, others argue that he finds the cause.

Levi’s subsequent glosses on this passage have done little to alleviate the uncertainty. In the version of SQ that he prepared for a 1964 radio broadcast, he clarified the meaning of the quoted phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ (OC I, 1237); for the 1973 Schools edition of SQ, intended for an audience of Italian students, he provided footnotes explaining the term ‘anacronismo’ and the phrase ‘il perché del nostro destino’ (OC I, 1417-18). In both instances, Levi left ‘gigantesco’ undefined. This apparent authorial reticence should inspire some restraint in our critical exegesis. There is no need to pursue false certainty where the text offers legitimate ambiguity.

What we may note, however, is that elsewhere in SQ, and with significant frequency in Levi’s subsequent writing, the term ‘gigantesco’ serves to identify the monstrosity of the Lager. In the chapter ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he describes Auschwitz as ‘una gigantesca esperienza biologica e sociale’ (OC I, 217). In the aforementioned school edition of SQ, he explains the historical shift in Nazi policies that transformed concentration camps into ‘gigantesche macchine di morte’ (OC I, 292). In a 1955 article celebrating the tenth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from Fascism, he describes how the Nazis ‘[h]anno lavorato con tenacia a creare la loro gigantesca macchina generatrice di morte e di corruzione’ (OC II, 1293). In a 1968 preface to a book on Auschwitz, he argues that the vital question remains ‘per quali ragioni e cause, prossime o lontane, abbia potuto nascere in questo civile continente una gigantesca fabbrica di morte’ (OC II, 1357). In the 1975 article ‘Così fu Auschwitz’, he describes what he calls the Nazis’ ‘costituzione di un gigantesco esercito di schiavi, non retribuiti e costretti a lavorare fino alla morte’ (OC II, 1374). In a 1979 response to the broadcast of the TV mini series Holocaust, he notes how the public seemed to focus on the question of why the genocide of the European Jews had occurred, ‘e questo è un perché gigantesco, ed antico quanto il genere umano: è il perché del male nel mondo’ (OC II, 1456). The accretion of these examples is by no means definitive; the ‘qualcosa di gigantesco’ that Levi discovered in discussing Dante with Jean may well differ from the ‘perché gigantesco’, the ‘perché del male nel mondo’, on which he deliberated decades later. Nevertheless, there would appear to be a pattern.

It is a pattern, moreover, that obtains well beyond Levi’s own work. To cite just one relevant example, the Italian anti-Fascist expatriate Giuseppe Antonio Borgese entitled his 1937 study of the totalitarian movement in Italy Goliath: The March of Fascism. And in that text Borgese lay the ultimate blame for the enormity of Fascism not on the Duce—‘it is futile […] to explain Fascism as if it were the creation of a single man, Mussolini’—but rather on another ‘gigantic individuality’ in the Italian national pantheon: Dante, who ‘distorted the soul of his people’, giving rise to ‘Nationalism and Racialism’ (46). Many Fascists, too, claimed Dante as the founder of their movement (Albertini 2013). Not for nothing did ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist anthem, boast that ‘la vision dell’Alighieri, | oggi brilla in tutti i cuor’ (Pugliese 2001, 55). A 1927 study of Dante Alighieri e Benito Mussolini argued that the Duce’s Italy was closer than ever to Dante’s ideal (7-8). The Fascist Party’s own 1940 Dizionario di Politica made the same claim (735). ‘Che Dante sia Fascista lo dimostrano tutte le sue opere’, insisted one of the regime’s intellectuals; ‘solo oggi possiamo riconoscere in Dante il profeta del nostro destino’, maintained another (Scorrano 2001, 92-93, 198).

It is perhaps tempting to hear the echo of such sentiments in Levi’s epiphany that in Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ is to be found ‘il perché del nostro destino’. After all, Levi had learned his Dante in an Italian school system that had been turned to Fascism’s totalitarian aims. If he is indeed suggesting to Jean that abuses of Dante - the appropriation of tradition to support the arrogation of power in the present; the fraudulent claims to a divine warrant for violence - bear responsibility for the Häftlinge’s tragic fate, he has good reason.

Yet those who interpret Levi’s Dante lesson in a more liberatory manner have good reason as well. If the inhuman contrapasso of eternal damnation ‘come altrui piacque’ is to be found in Dante, so, too, is Ulysses’ call for an innate and inviolable human dignity: ‘considerate la vostra semenza’. Borgese in Goliath recognised this duality (12). So, too, I suspect, does Primo Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Perhaps this is the ‘gigantic’ discovery that Levi has made in his meditation on Dante’s Inferno: that in our cultural inheritance are to be found both the roots of Fascism and the seeds of resistance.

CLL

In geographic terms, of course, the sea that Ulysses traverses is the broader Mediterranean and, at moments, its inner seas (e.g. the Ionian, Aegean, or Adriatic). As in Homer’s epic, however, ‘mare’ possesses a polyvocality in Levi’s text that far exceeds its cartographic meanings. The Fascist regime famously instrumentalised and misused Italy’s classical heritage. As early as 1918, Mussolini had linked ‘romanità’ with the sea, declaring in a speech at Pavia, ‘Now the mission of Italians is in the Mediterranean’ ('Ora la missione degli Italiani è nel Mediterraneo'). Yet even as the Duce confidently proclaimed that Italy would rule over a revived Mare Nostrum, the sea itself retained a historically ambivalent – at points, even marginal – status within the modern Italian state (Fogu 2020).

In a 1985 Paris Review interview (only published in 1994), Levi spoke of the revelation of reading Melville during the time of Fascism. According to Levi, the fascist censors allowed Cesare Pavese to translate the book as ‘it had no political implications’, a judgement that ignored the work’s entanglements with American narratives of imperialism and race politics. In Levi’s estimation, Pavese’s translation ‘distorted it [Moby Dick], fitted it into the Italian language’ – and thus into an ambivalent Italian imaginary of the sea. Like many Italians, ‘[h]e wasn’t a seaman – Pavese – he hated the sea’, commented Levi.

Such ambivalence towards the sea resonates in Levi’s biography, as well. Like many 20th-century Italians and Europeans more generally, Levi was familiar with the seaside as a place for recreation and tourism. Indeed, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi claimed that Rudi, the Blockführer in Auschwitz, liked Italy and wanted to learn Italian; this desire dated back to a month-long holiday in Liguria before the war, a vacation presumably spent along the shore. In the chapter, Levi likewise refers to ‘una qualche spiaggia estiva della mia infanzia’. Yet in his youth Levi embraced mountain climbing, with one biographer, Ian Thomson, claiming that on the eve of World War II Levi did not even know how to swim. For Levi, the sublimity of the peaks, rather than the sea’s vastness, symbolised freedom. In this, Levi was not alone. The classic terrain of both the Resistance and the civil war was resolutely a landscape (karst, forest, field, mountain) rather than a seascape.

In an indirect way, the project of Mare Nostrum threatened to shipwreck Levi’s own university hopes. In 1937, as Levi prepared for his ‘maturità’ exams, he received a demand to report to the Turin seaplane base. There he was accused of ignoring a draft summons for the Royal Navy. Levi’s sister, Anna Maria Levi, insisted, ‘Maybe my brother’s name was on a Fascist National Service list, but he never received an Italian Royal Navy summons’ (Thomson 2003, 66). A compromise was struck, with Levi expected to enrol in the university branch of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN). Thus, unlike Ulysses, Levi was not destined to set forth on the open sea (in the latter’s case with the Navy). In the end, Levi never served in any branch of the Italian military or fascist militia. Rather, his brief three month career as a partisan played out in the mountain passes of the Valle d’Aosta, after Levi moved out of the Hotel Ristoro where he had initially sought refuge.

During those few months when Levi took up arms against the Fascists, there occurred an incident that profoundly demoralised Levi and his comrades: the execution at Frumy of two partisan brothers-in-arms, Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano on December 9, 1943. In the estimation of historian Sergio Luzzatto, this episode would continue to haunt not only Levi’s conscience but also his writings (non-fiction, his novel, and poetry) (Luzzatto 2016). The ‘ugly secret’ Levi harboured was that these partisans - long celebrated as the first partisans killed in the Valle d’Aosta - did not fall at the hands of the Fascists but of their comrades, who appear to have punished Oppezzo and Zabaldano for indiscretion and greed. Perhaps it was only fitting that Zabaldono’s nom de guerre was ‘Mare’, given that this partisan’s life – and death – embodied the ambiguity and fluidity of what Levi would later conceptualise as the ‘grey zone’.

PB

Very often, when we think about ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we tend to recall only the most famous pages in which Levi tries to remember Dante’s canto. The depth and sense of urgency of the Ulyssean passages are so overwhelming and passionate that they may distract us from other elements in the chapter. However, if we go back to the text and read it closely, we cannot avoid noticing that, after a brief opening in which Levi introduces Pikolo and narrates how he came to be Pikolo’s ‘fortunate’ chaperone to collect the soup for the day, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ also dwells quite significantly on a moment of domestic memories. While going to the kitchens, Levi writes: ‘Si vedevano i Carpazi coperti di neve. Respirai l’aria fresca, mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’. This is the first moment in the chapter in which Levi refers to the mountains as something that revitalises him and makes him feel fresh and light, both physically and mentally.

This moment foreshadows another, also in this chapter, when Levi goes back to his mountains, those close to Turin, and compares them to the mountain that the protagonist of Dante’s canto, Ulysses, encounters just before his shipwreck with his companions:

... Quando mi apparve una montagna, bruna

Per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

Che mai veduta non ne avevo alcuna.

Sì, sì, ‘alta tanto’, non ‘molto alta’, proposizione consecutiva. E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano... le montagne... oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono. Pikolo attende e mi guarda. Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare ‘non ne avevo alcuna’ col finale.

The significance of the mountains in Levi’s narration is confirmed in this passage. For him, the mountains represent his experience of belonging, his youthful years, and his work as a chemist – the job he was doing when he commuted by train from Turin to Milan. At the same time, Levi’s own memories of the mountains intertwine and overlap with another mountain, Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Here, a deep and perhaps not fully conscious intertextual game starts to emerge and to characterise Levi’s writing. The lines that Levi does not remember are these:

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,

ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque,

e percosse del legno il primo canto.

For Dante’s Ulysses, Mount Purgatory signifies the final moment of his adventure and his desire for knowledge. The marvel and enthusiasm that Ulysses and his company feel when they see the mountain is suddenly transformed into its contrary. From the mountain, a storm originates that will destroy the ship and swallow its crew: ‘Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, | Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso | E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque’. Dante’s Mount Purgatory, so majestic and spectacular, represents the end of any desire for knowledge that aims to find new answers to and interpretations of human existence in the world without God’s word.

Going back to Levi’s text, we find that, instead, in a kind of reverse overlapping between his image and that of Ulysses, the image of the mountain of Purgatory suggests to Levi a very different set of thoughts that, although seemingly and similarly overwhelming, opens up new interpretations: ‘altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. For a moment, it is almost as if Levi, a new Dantean Ulysses in a new Inferno, stands in front of Mount Purgatory and forgets the terzine and the shipwreck. Maybe Levi cannot or does not want to remember those terzine because the mountain in Purgatory represents something very different for him than for Dante’s Ulysses. Levi’s view of the mountain does not lead to a moment of recognition of sin, as it does in Dante’s Ulysses. For him, the mountain, like his mountain range, is the gateway to knowledge, enrichment, and illumination and to a world that lies beyond the imposed limits of traditional, constricting, and distorted views and that awaits discovery (‘qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto’). Something about and beyond the Lager.

To better understand how the mountains are central in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we have to remember that Levi’s view of the mountains strongly depends on his anti-Fascism, which he expressed particularly vigorously in two moments of his life: during his months in the Resistance, just before he was captured and sent to Fossoli, and, even more intensely, during the adventures of his youth, when he was a free young man who enjoyed climbing the mountains surrounding Turin. As Alberto Papuzzi has suggested, ‘le radici del suo rapporto con la montagna sono ben piantate in quella stagione più lontana: radici intellettuali di cittadino che cercava sulla montagna, nella montagna, suggestioni e risposte che non trovava nella vita, o meglio nell’atmosfera ispessita di quella vita torinese, senza passato e senza futuro’ (OC III, 426-27). Indeed, reports Papuzzi, Levi confirms that:

Avevo anche provato a quel tempo a scrivere un racconto di montagna […]. C’era tutta l’epica della montagna, e la metafisica dell’alpinismo. La montagna come chiave di tutto. Volevo rappresentare la sensazione che si prova quando si sale avendo di fronte la linea della montagna che chiude l’orizzonte: tu sali, non vedi che questa linea, non vedi altro, poi improvvisamente la valichi, ti trovi dall’altra parte, e in pochi secondi vedi un mondo nuovo, sei in un mondo nuovo. Ecco, avevo cercato di esprimere questo: il valico.

The heart of that epic story made its way into the chapter ‘Ferro’ in Il sistema periodico. The discovery of this (brave) new world, ‘mondo nuovo’, is an integral part and a direct achievement of Levi’s experience in the mountains. The mountains open a new understanding and a new perspective on the world.

Something that escapes common understanding is revealed through the experience of the mountains, both in Levi’s memories of his youth and in his literary recounting of Auschwitz. Reciting Dante in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is therefore not only an intertextual exercise for Levi. Only by inserting Levi’s literary references in the complexity of his own experience – before, during, and after Auschwitz – can we fully capture the depth of his reflections. Levi mentally and metaphorically brought to Auschwitz not only Dante but also his ‘metafisica dell’alpinismo’. Together, they contributed to his attempt to come to terms with that reality.

VG

Dante is one of Primo Levi’s most important cultural touchstones. His use of the Commedia, across multiple works, reflects a sophisticated and intimate reading of the poem. It may come as some surprise that Dante does not appear in Levi’s 1981 literary anthology, La ricerca delle radici, which provides a highly eclectic collection of some of his preferred authors and texts, from Homer to Darwin and Rabelais to Celan. However, Levi justifies this omission on account of the medieval writer’s universal importance: Dante, Levi states in an interview from the same year, is ‘part of any reader’s heritage’.

Allusions to Dante have been identified in Levi’s fiction, essays and poetry. However, it is here in SQ that we witness his most sustained engagement with the Commedia. The most explicit and celebrated use of the poem comes in the present chapter, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, where Levi uses the famous Ulysses episode from Inferno 26 to teach some Italian to his friend and fellow inmate Jean, and skilfully incorporates into his text suggestive fragments of Dante’s own poem. The Ulysses canto, read in the secularised, Romantic tradition of Croce and De Sanctis, resonates powerfully in the context of Auschwitz and becomes a parable of human courage and self-emancipation. In particular, the Greek hero’s rousing words to his crew and invocation of their very humanity (‘Considerate la vostra semenza…’) resonate viscerally in the dehumanising world of the camp. The recollection of Ulysses sailing beyond the pillars of Hercules into the forbidden sea allows Levi momentarily to imagine breaking beyond the confines of the infernal Lager. The chapter ends, however, with the climactic words of Dante’s canto, describing the sea closing over Ulysses’ boat and the curtailment of his doomed journey, as Levi and Jean’s momentary taste of freedom ceases, and they must again confront the horror and banal misery of the camp. The omnipotent God of Dante’s tale of Ulysses, who punishes the voyager’s doomed attempt to reach Mount Purgatory without divine sanction, implicitly becomes here the Nazi regime that confines him.

In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Dante offers Levi a fleeting antidote to the horrors of Auschwitz. Elsewhere in the testimony, however, Levi draws on Dante as a kindred author of the infernal, adapting imagery from the medieval poet’s first cantica in describing his experience of an all-too-real Hell. In the book’s second chapter, Levi explicitly designates his new surroundings as a modern Inferno (‘Questo è l’inferno. Oggi ai nostri giorni, l’inferno deve essere così’). Thereafter, Levi often uses deictic expressions (‘sul fondo’, ‘lassù’, ‘laggiù’), some with Dantean resonance, that construct his experience of the camp as a kind of infernal descent. More specific narrative, topographical and structural echoes appear, too. Nazi guards are compared, both directly and more implicitly, to devils and guardian figures in Dante’s Hell. Different regions of Dante’s Hell (Antinferno, Limbo, Malebolge) are invoked in describing the different parts of the camp. Levi also seems to draw on the example of Dante’s Inferno as a model of confronting the negative limits of language and verbal communication. The topos of inexpressibility that features in the closing cantos of the Inferno also appears in SQ. Both writers imagine the existence of a uniquely ‘harsh’ language (‘rime aspre e chiocce’ | ‘un nuovo linguaggio aspro’) that might do justice to the horrors of their infernal experiences, but which they do not possess. However, while Levi may take inspiration from Dante in numerous ways, there is a powerful and bleak irony at stake when Levi establishes parallels between the medieval poet’s imagined account of a medieval Christian hell, founded upon an infallible notion of divine justice, and his own experience of the historical hell of Auschwitz, a place of the most extreme and barbarous injustice and racialised hate.

Levi’s use of Dante is all the more striking in light of the ways in which the Italian Fascist regime had appropriated and frequently distorted Dante and his poetry in the years prior to his deportation. In the Risorgimento and in liberal Italy, Dante had been endlessly appropriated as a kind of symbol and embodiment of the new nation. Under Fascism, however, there had emerged an even more heavily and crudely instrumentalised cult of Dante. The poet was invoked not only as a source of fervent cultural pride, but as a prophet of the fascist state and of Mussolini. He was given a central place in fascist schooling and was used in irredentist and expansionist campaigns, in setting out highly restrictive language policy, as a model of fascist virility, and on account of his imperial associations. In the late 1930s, passages from the Commedia even appeared on the cover of the magazine La difesa della razza, with Dante appropriated to support the regime’s later politics of racial purity and antisemitism. It is thus all the more striking that Levi makes such imaginative and deft use of Dante across his works. He found in Dante, a poet so freighted with nationalistic interpretations during the period in question, a powerful, personal and highly adaptable resource of language, meaning, and understanding.

TK

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

Connection between IG Farben, the Nazis, Deutsche Bank and the US.

Mattei, Clara E. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html.

I've always wondered why the United States never used the phrase austerity to describe political belt tightening.

Κάποιες Χρυσαυγής πειράζει τα περασμένα αρχεία "τι λε ρε" (archived).

Για τη μυθολογία της ακροδεξιας και του σωτηρα Μεταξά.

Μηχαιλήδης για το πρωτοφασιμό του Κωνσταντίνου.

Πρωτο-φασιστικά στοιχεία, βια, μιλιταρισμός, ηρωισμός & απαξία της ζωής, αρχηγική λατρεία, αλλοά δεν εφτασαν σε κανονικό φασισμο οι Επιστρατοι λόγω της αντιβενιζελικής στόχευσης..

Δεσποινα Παπαδημητρίου, «Οι επίστρατοι στα χρόνια του πρώτου πολέμου:πολιτική βία και 'ακροδεξιές' συμπεριφορές» (2014)

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Η σχεση των [[Επίστρατων]] με τη βια εχει ιδια συσπειρωτική λειτουργία με αυτη των οπαδών τηε [ΧΑ].

Ανοδος του ανορθολογισμού μετά από ήττες (όπως του 1897).

• σελ.146: η έμφαση στη βασιλοφροσύνη και εν μερει στο ιδεολογικό κληροδότημα του μεταξικού καθεστώτος είναι εντονότερη στο λόγο των ακροδεξιών οργανώσεων σε σχέση με εκείνβν των "εθνικών οργανώσεων" εν γένει.
• σελ.146: Η αντίθεση των "τίμιων και αγνών πατριωτών, των Νέων Ελλήνων Εθνικιστών" [της "Χ"] προς το παλαιοκομματικό συγκρότημα εξουσίας, στοοποίο συγκατατάσσονται οι βενιζελικοί, οι αντιβενιζελικοί και οι κομμουνιστές "φαυλοκράτες" πολιτικοί, ...

Το ακροδεξιό κίνημα στην Ελλάδα, 1936-1949: Καταβολές, συνέχειες και ασυνέχειες», στο Η Ελλάδα '36-'49. Από τη δικτατορία στον Εμφύλιο. Τομές και συνέχειες.

• Σελ.140-141: ο βενιζελισμός συχνά βέβαια ωςσυνοδοιπόρος του κομμουνισμού, ώς "σύνμπραξη της Μόσχας με τους βενιζελικούς κεφαλαιοκράτοες" ή τελος, ως στυλοβάτης της αβασίλευτης δημοκρατίς που συνιστούσε τον "προθάλαμο της κομμούνας".
• σελ.144: Οργανώσεις βασιλοφρόνων - οι αγγλόφιλες Οργανώσις Βασιλοφρόνων Αγωνιστών (Ο.Β.Α.) και Εθνικοκοινωνική Επανάστασις (Ε.Ε.) του Νίκου Αντωνακέα, η Ένωσις Βασιλοφρόνων Εθνικιστών Νέων (ΕΒΕΝ) και η "Χ", ...έδρασαν επί Κατοχής, κυρίως όμως ή αποκλειστικά εναντίον του εσωτερικού εχθρού
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• archive url

Ο Βενιζελος προσπαθησε να μιμηθει τον Χίτλερ to 1935.

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• amealib

Βλεπε pdf annotations.

Μελετη για την ιδεολογία προ της Χούντας, από μια ιστορικό που εχει αναδείξει την σχεση της με τη σημερινή ακρας-δεξια.far

archive url

via Muggeridge and Adam, Beatrice Webb: A Life, 1967, p.225.

Ο αγωνας ειναι ανισος, αλλα κ ασσυμετρος - όσο δεν ητταται το αντιφασιστικό από τη συντονισμενη επιθεση φασιτών-αστυνομίας-εισσαγελέων, κερδιζει.

Το προβλημα στον εκφασισμό της ελληνικής Δικαιοσύνης ειναι ο θεσμός των εισσαγγελέων - πρεπει να αντικατασταθεί απο συμβούλια πολιτών, με συμμετοχή νομικών. Και οι πρόεδροι δεν πανε πισω βεβαια...

(web archive link)

Avery Trufelman ends her podcast series, Nice Try! with these words in an episode entitled, Germania: Architecture in a Fascist Utopia.

Τα φασιστικά κόμματα στηρίχθηκαν από τους βιομηχάνους.

Fukuyama, F. (2020, June 15). The Pandemic and Political Order. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-09/pandemic-and-political-order

I read for me first. I read my way second. We all have reading blind spots. I think reading laterally reduces these blind spot, but it adds others. When I read people like Green it puts my back up and I say, "Who the fuck made you king of the lateral reading hill?" Another expert/sociopath rises up to keep me down. I teach to make people more powerful. Reading tools help, but the idiosyncratic ways we use those tools are grandly variably. I want it that way not one way.

More on that here.

I'm reminded here of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"--the ways that language is manipulated to evoke feeling or a widespread reaction although it may not be grounded in feeling or reaction. One of Orwell's examples is fascism.

And yet somehow we see these movements anew in America and around the world. What is the difference between then and now?

So the idea of zero tolerance under the stated policy is that we don’t care why you’re afraid. We don’t care if it’s religion, political, gangs, anything. For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you.

...

So if you cross any other way besides the bridge, we’re prosecuting you. But . . . you can’t cross the bridge.

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The zero-tolerance policy really started with Jeff Sessions’s announcement in May.

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And so we saw about six hundred children who were taken away from October to May, then we saw an explosion of the numbers in May. It ramped up. The Office of Refugee Resettlement taking in all these kids says that they are our children, that they are unaccompanied. It’s a fabrication. They’re not unaccompanied children.

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the idea that these parents don’t have the ability to obtain very simple answers—what are my rights and when can I be reunited with my kid before I’m deported without them?—is horrible. And has to go far below anything we, as a civil society of law, should find acceptable.

The belief that sexism is at the root of fascism, although well founded, causes hyperactivists to censor scientists.

Voir Antonio Gramsci et ses ennemis

I also wonder if digital can work to consolidate power. We tend to think of disruption as a move towards more equality but what if it is a move towards fascism?

Millions of Americans believe (or are willing to claim that they believe) insane bullshit. So what happens if Mueller finds evidence that Trump committed a crime, and the right-wing media says he didn't, or it doesn't matter?

Sebastian Gorka's claimed PhD might be bogus.

Shepard's Address

Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser, is a formal member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S. State Department as having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II, leaders of the organization have told the Forward.

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Gorka’s membership in the organization — if these Vitézi Rend leaders are correct, and if Gorka did not disclose this when he entered the United States as an immigrant — could have implications for his immigration status. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual specifies that members of the Vitézi Rend “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

This and the parenthetical, written only 5 years after Hitler's suicide, seems really important for how we perceive Hitler (and all authoritarians). We have a tendency to accept their own logic, to assume that Hitler was a commanding, forceful leader instead of someone often suffering from internal indecisiveness and inter-organizational sniping. "Made the trains run on time" and all that, even though Hitler and Mussolini's fascist regimes were consumed by bureaucratic infighting and disorder.

Steve Bannon is fond of a racist novel called The Camp of the Saints that is popular among white nationalists.

Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, and Trump.

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

-- Jonathan Rust, Cambridge University Psychometric Centre

The Munich Post versus Hitler -- and similarities between Hitler and Trump.

we first need to see the Russian state for what it really is. Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. This freed the Russian security state from its last constraints. In 1991, there were around 800,000 official KGB agents in Russia. They spent a decade reorganizing themselves into the newly-minted FSB, expanding and absorbing other instruments of power, including criminal networks, other security services, economic interests, and parts of the political elite. They rejected the liberal, democratic Russia that President Boris Yeltsin was trying to build.

Following the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that the FSB almost certainly planned, former FSB director Vladimir Putin was installed as President.

Nigel Farage is a piece of shit.

If anybody has a right to speak out about the dangers of hatred and extremism in modern Britain, it is Jo’s bereaved husband, Brendan.

On Tuesday morning, hours after a truck was driven into a Berlin Christmas market, Nigel Farage spotted an opportunity. “Terrible news from Berlin but no surprise,” he wrote, not even bothering to separate his horror and his vindication with a comma. “Events like these will be the Merkel legacy.” Brendan Cox’s response – “blaming politicians for the actions of extremists? That’s a slippery slope Nigel” – was logically flawless.

Farage’s response in turn – that Cox “would know more about extremists than me” because of his links to the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate – is shocking on a number of levels. First, he is talking about a widower whose wife was murdered by an extremist six months ago. Second, he smeared an organisation that exists to drive back racism – at a time when hate crimes have surged after a referendum campaign made inflammatory by politicians including Nigel Farage.

A report on Putin's tactics in France, Germany, and the UK.

Trump's character and America's recent political climate are familiar to people who have lived in or studied authoritarian states. Russia is using the same tactics on us that they've used, and continue to use, in Europe.

More about Google search results being dominated by extremists, hate groups, and conspiracy theorists.

Let's hope this holds up.

From 27 July 2016, Masha Gessen recognizes Donald Trump as a dangerous fascist. She also recognizes that Trump is "a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy."

But the top point of the article is to dismiss the idea of connections between Trump and Putin. Bullshit.

Putin assisted the Trump campaign with hacking and propaganda. The only questions are exactly how much the Russians did, and whether they actually hacked the election itself. We need to investigate ties between Trump, his associates, and Putin, and we need a thorough audit of the election.

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

From 11 Oct 2016, Donald Trump and his followers fit all 14 of Umberto Eco's criteria for Ur-Fascism.

Also note that many of the videos of Trump doing and saying horrible things come from pro-Trump YouTube channels. His fans love that he’s a fascist. It’s what they want — a strong man who will take care of them, scare off the bad people and tell them what to do.

Donald Trump is using the methods of tyrants to control the media. He was already doing this during his campaign, and he has only gotten worse since becoming President-Elect.

• Berate them directly.
• Refuse access to those he disapproves.
• Turn the public against them.
• Condemn criticism and satire aimed at him.
• Threaten them with lawsuits and potential new laws.
• Limit media access.
• Speak directly to the public. (There has been mention of Trump continuing to hold rallies. He likes the instant gratification and adulation of a cheering crowd.)

http://robertreich.org/post/153748549760

What you can do to fight tyranny, by historian Timothy Snyder. Originally a Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/timothy.david.snyder/posts/1206636702716110

Don't forget "narcissistic blowhard dunce".

Good article on the definition of fascism.

Quotes from scholars:

• The Nature of Fascism, Roger Griffin
• The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton
• Fascism: Comparison and Definition, Stanley Payne
• A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, Stanley Payne

And historical fascists:

• Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
• The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini