2023-09-09 21:28:08
by ANTONIO POLITO
Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, George Orwell: released on 12 September for The Ship of Theseus «My Heroes», a tribute to three great non-aligned intellectuals
Pierluigi Battista’s new book is a dizzying hymn to “beautiful souls”. To three intellectuals, whom the author defines from the title as “my heroes”, stubbornly capable of remaining intact in the “darkest and most incandescent and tragic years that bloodied the twentieth century” and for this reason blamed and accused of “desertion”. A tribute-homage, out on 12 September for The Ship of Theseus, to Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, George Orwell. Plus various forays into the story of the lives, loves and betrayals, the arguments and fights, the baseness and greatness of a large company of other “irregulars” like them: Mary McCarthy, Simone Weil, Nicola Chiaromonte, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Koestler. All people – writes Battista – who resist the “ideological lever” of totalitarianism, who have refused to subordinate “every moral hesitation to the pursuit of a superhuman objective: remaking the nature of human beings”.
The “beautiful soul”, born in the romantic atmosphere and celebrated by Goethe, became an epithet from Hegel onwards: “Having History taken the place of God, whoever went against it, obstructing its path marked by inevitable but salvific crimes with doubts, disputes, distinctions or even moral resistance” attracted the accusation of putting oneself “in flight in the face of destiny”, revealing oneself to be “incapable of acting in the world, sterile, a useless burden on those who instead intended to serve History” . At best, therefore, «a naive fool, a deluded person, a cloud catcher, a narcissist who puts himself on a pedestal, a naive pain in the ass, a hypocrite who uses purity as a pretext to justify his own disengagement. In the worst case scenario… an objective enemy.”
Let’s take Albert Camus. In 1957 he went to Stockholm to collect the Nobel. He goes there reluctantly. Because tuberculosis gives him no respite. And because “the etiquette of the ceremony prevents him from introducing himself, together with his wife Francine, with his lifelong lover Maria Casarés and with his new flame Mi, twenty-two years younger than him”. The fact is that during a public meeting an Algerian student asks him why he is reticent about the Algerian war. He replies that he is not, that he has been and continues to be “a supporter of a just Algeria, a supporter of a dramatic and total reparation towards a people whose defense I have defended all my life”. He then adds: «But I have always condemned terrorism that is practiced blindly and could one day affect my mother and my family. I believe in justice, but before justice I will defend my mother.” This sentence, this personal note from a “pied-noir” whose family members lived in Algeria, is enough to provoke him into a chorus of indignant reactions: “The philosopher of justice makes fun of justice and prefers his mother to it”, he writes sarcastically the director of «Le Monde». How can you put the fate of a relative before the “ruthless grandeur of History”? And instead that phrase – writes Battista – far from invalidating Camus’ commitment in defense of the Algerian people, “meant to say that there is a stopping point, a moral injunction to stop an centimeter before the abyss, a refusal to fall in the precipice of horror where the inviolability of people is eliminated and justice turns into its opposite.” Camus will not give in to “censors who have always placed their seats in the name of history”: “I want to fight for justice. Not for the punishment of some and the revenge of others.”
Or let’s take George Orwell, another for whom «betraying one’s belonging so as not to betray oneself was a natural habit». He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War “alone, a maverick, not affiliated with any political group”. He happens to see a fascist who is jumping out of a trench to escape a sudden bombardment. He hadn’t had “time to get dressed, he was holding up his trousers with both hands”, he says. He can shoot, knock him down easily, but he doesn’t do it: «I had come to hit a fascist, but a man who holds up his trousers that are about to fall off is not a fascist, he is evidently one of our peers, and this thought took away all my thoughts. desire to shoot him.” Battista comments: «The lesson of my three cultural heroes is respect for human beings in their concreteness, and not as material to be sacrificed in the name of a higher purpose».
On the other side of the fence there is Brecht, who writes: «Embrace the executioner but transform the world, it needs it». There is Sartre, who in Dirty Hands has one of the protagonists say: «How you care about purity, boy! How afraid you are of getting your hands dirty! You guys find an excuse to do nothing… I have dirty hands. I sank them up to my elbows in blood and shit.” Here is the “moral blackmail that beautiful souls proudly reject”. Orwell was indignant at WH Auden for two stanzas of the poem ‘Spain’ about ‘consciously accepting guilt for necessary murder’. For him, assassination could never be necessary. He rejected what Finkielkraut called the “idealism of cruelty.” He hated Ezra Pound for his fascist infatuation, but he fought against those who wanted to deny him a literary prize for his political blunders: «The hunt for the traitor is one of the most morally disgusting things that war leaves us as a legacy».
And finally Hanna Arendt, the author of the “sacrilegious analogy”, because in the Origins of Totalitarianism she dared to include in the same category both Nazism, from which she fled because she was Jewish and which took away her German citizenship, and communism. You defined yourself as a “cold war propagandist” for not having accepted “a hierarchy of acceptability between mass graves” and concentration camps. She was excommunicated and ostracized for her reportage on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, where she had gone to understand the profound mechanisms of abjection and she had seen what appeared to her to be “the banality of evil”. They said that with that book she had demonstrated that she “hated her people”, that she had “slandered the victims and exonerated the SS”, that she had made Eichmann “acceptable”. The Anti-Defamation League invited America’s rabbis to preach against the book for the Jewish New Year. Golo Mann advised against its publication in advance. The French weekly «Nouvel Observateur» asked: «Est-elle nazie?». Really. Barbara Tuchman reached the pinnacle, calling Arendt “Hanna Heidegger.” She maintained that the writer had defended Eichmann, and that she had done so to protect Heidegger, her philosophy professor and secret lover, whose support for Nazism she had despised, but that she had never managed to stop to love and desire. Because even beautiful souls – says Battista – “are souls full of contrasts, they are fickle and stubborn at the same time, they contradict themselves, they are unhappy, ambiguous, complicated”. But they taught us to “never allow dreams of a perfect world to distract us from the demands of men who suffer here and now” (Karl Popper).
The presentations
On Thursday 14 September Pierluigi Battista will present the book in Turin with Elena Loewenthal (Circolo dei Lettori, 6pm). On Wednesday 27th he will be in Rome with Annalena Benini (Teatro Vittoria, 6pm). Among Pierluigi Battista’s books: Books are dangerous, therefore they burn them (Rizzoli, 2014); for Mondadori My father was fascist (2016) and About Marta (2017); for The Ship of Theseus The Guilt of Doctor Zhivago (2018), Books at the stake. Culture and the war on intolerance (2019) and The house of Rome (2021).
September 9, 2023 (modified September 9, 2023 | 9:22 pm)
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