Abstract
Venice, June 1973: the city was overrun by the national Festival dell’Unità, the yearly festivities of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party.1 Venice itself was transformed: in every campo (square) there were red flags, bookstalls, public speeches, food, wine, music, songs, compagni (comrades) from everywhere, Italy and abroad, of every age, every social class. One could hear a lot of discussion, a mixture of voices and accents from various regions of Italy, with different local political experiences and also different political lines, following the tendency of a given Federazione, or even Sezione (the hierarchical organizations of the Communist Party, active at the level of the nation, region, city, town, suburb). In the city there was a sense of feast, the pleasure of the crowd, of community life, of the polis, of political debates. Venice was ours; it was the ‘red city’ for a few days, in spite of the Christian Democratic tradition of the Veneto, the most ‘white’ region of Italy. Maybe the Revolution — a word used in those years, not yet bereft of its sound and meaning — is like a great Festival dell’Unità in an unreal city like Venice, a huge coming together, a vast Communist International, workers and intellectuals together, as if there were no gap. We were all there at the culminating moment of the Festival, when the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer, spoke.
Ne suis-je pas un faux accord
Dans la divine symphonie,
Grâce à la vorace Ironie
Qui me secoue et qui me mord?
(Am I not a discordant note
In the divine symphony,
Thanks to the voracious Irony
Which shakes me up and bites into me?)
Baudelaire, ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’, from Les Fleurs du Mal
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This chapter was first published as the introduction to Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. ix–lviii.
See Cacciari, Metropolis. Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel (Roma: Officina, 1973). This essay, constituted by materials discussed in Manfredo Tafuri’s seminars at Venice’s School of Architecture, is the introduction to selected texts by the German sociologists and the German architect (August Endell) mentioned in the Italian title.
See Antonio Negri, ‘La teoria capitalistica dello stato nel ’29: John M. Keynes’, Contropiano, 1 (1968), pp. 3–40; and Mario Tronti, ‘Estremismo e riformismo’, pp. 41–58. Works by Antonio Negri published in English include: The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century, trans. James Newell (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, Blackwell, 1989); Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1984).
On the question of economic development of the Veneto region, see Silvio Lanaro, ed., Storia d’Italia: Le regioni dall’unità a oggi: Veneto (Turin: Einaudi, 1984).
See Cacciari, Ciclo capitalistico e lotte operaie. Montedison Pirelli Fiat 1968 (Padua: Marsilio, 1969), pp. 21–22.
Cacciari, ‘La Comune di maggio’, Contropiano, 2 (1968), p. 462.
Alberto Asor Rosa, ‘Rivoluzione e letteratura’, Contropiano, 1 (1968), pp. 235–6.
Alberto Asor Rosa and Cacciari, ‘Editorial’, Contropiano, 2 (1968), p. 238.
In 1988 Alberto Asor Rosa wrote a preface to a new edition of the 1964 Scrittori e popolo, a controversial book that was seminal for an entire generation in Italy. He alluded to the weight of time and the changes in politics and expectations: ‘Twenty years have gone by since that time [the publication of his book]: but they seem many more. Something of enormous importance happened in the meantime: at that time we thought that the factory working class would take power; today we think that, in the social displacements that took place in these twenty years, no class is able to take and control power: for the good reason that there is no longer a class that would be capable of taking power.’ Alberto Asor Rosa, ‘Vent’anni dopo’, Scrittori e popolo (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. vii.
Cacciari, ‘La Montecatini-Edison di Porto Marghera’, Contropiano, 3 (1968), pp. 579–627, and 2 (1969), pp. 579–627; ‘Sulla genesi del pensiero nega-tivo’, Contropiano, 1 (1969), pp. 131–200.
See Cacciari, Krisis (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976); Dallo Steinhof (Milan: Adelphi, 1982); Icone della legge (Milan: Adelphi 1985); L’Angelo necessario (Milan: Adelphi, 1986); Dall’Inizio (Milan: Adelphi, 1990). Earlier works by Cacciari include his preface to Georg Lukács, Kommunismus (Padua: Marsilio, 1972), his preface ‘Negative Thought and Rationalization’, for Eugene Fink, Nietzsche (Padua: Marsilio, 1973), and Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione (Venice: Marsilio, 1977).
Cacciari, ‘Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo’, Contropiano, 1 (1969), p. 138.
Antonio Negri, ‘La teoria capitalista dello stato nel ’29: John M. Keynes’, Contropiano, 1 (1968), p. 7.
‘The “irrationalism”of the romantic period here analysed is only apparent.’ Cacciari, ‘Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo’, Contropiano, 1 (1969), p. 133.
See Cacciari, ‘Il problema del politico in Deleuze e Foucault’, in Franco Rella and Georges Teyssot, eds, Il dispositivo Foucault (Venice: Cluva, 1977), pp. 57–69. Asor Rosa stressed his distance from Herbert Marcuse’s position, which he labelled ‘political romanticism’. See Asor Rosa, ‘Dalla rivoluzione culturale alla lotta di classe’, Contropiano, 3 (1968), pp. 472–4.
Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, Oppositions, 21 (1980), p. 107, trans. Stephen Sartarelli.
See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Intellectual Field and and Creative Project’, Social Sciences Information, 8 (1969), pp. 89–119; and
Fritz Ringer, ‘The Intellectual Field, Intellectual History, and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Theory and Society, 19 (1990), pp. 269–94.
A critique, from a Nietzschean perspective, of the persistence of a redemptive ideology in the conception of art, is offered by Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
On the question of alienation as the foundamental form on which is constructed the radical concept of the State during the Enlightement, see Cacciari, ‘Entsagung’, Contropiano, 2 (1971), p. 411.
Cantata di Strapaese, such is the title of a satyrical poem by the Tuscan poet Mino Maccari, who edited the review symptomatically titled Il selvaggio from 1934 until 1943. ‘Selvaggismo’ is the trend of some Italian twentieth-century literature (Papini, Soffici and Malaparte) completely focused on a rural, anti-urban ideology. On the Italian attachment to a rural tradition, see Asor Rosa’s exhaustive Storia d’Italia. Dall’unità a oggi, vol. 4, pt 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975).
Asor Rosa, ‘La teoria marxista e le altre’, Le due società. Ipotesi sulla crisi italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 88.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology’, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986: Syntax of History, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 48.
See Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1938); and The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Nuova Corrente, a review where Cacciari published many of his articles, published several translations of Raymond Williams’s work, and mainly of essays that became part of his The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
See Stuart Hall, ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’, October, 53 (Summer 1990), pp. 11–23.
See Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia (Bari: Laterza, 1973); Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). See also ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica’, Contropiano, 1 (1969), pp. 31–79.
Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Austro-marxismo e città: das Rote Wien’, Contropiano, 2 (1971), p. 259.
Manfredo Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968). Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (New York,: Harper and Row, 1980).
See a similar argument in Roland Barthes, ‘History or Literature?’, On Racine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 154–5.
Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-Elia, Manfredo Tafuri, The American City. From the Civil War to the New Deal, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), pp. x–xi.
Tafuri, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 1968), p. 25.
See Renato De Fusco, Storia dell’architettura contemporanea (Bari: Laterza, 1974, 1988) pp. 127–30. In ‘Loos and His Angel’, Cacciari writes that it is ‘fundamentally impossible to assimilate him into the currents of progressive rationalism, in architecture and elsewhere’ (Architecture and Nihilism, p. 173).
Aldo Rossi, Introduction to Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void, Collected Essays 1897–1900 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Oppositions Books, 1982), pp. viii–xiii. Rossi perceives no contradiction between the Loos of ‘Ornament and Crime’ and the creator of the Chicago Tribune project, and feels in it the presence of that metropolis that Loos discovered in New York. Tafuri and Cacciari consider, in the words of Tafuri quoted by Cacciari, ‘that in 1922 Loos seemed to have lost touch with the clarity of his prewar attitudes’ (Manfredo Tafuri, ‘The Disenchanted Mountain’, The American City, p. 432). If we reread today Tafuri’s words in Theories and History, we can say that, unlike Rossi, he hinted at a postmodern element of the Chicago Tribune: ‘The Doric column planned by Loos for the Chicago Tribune competition, as a first and violent experiment in extracting a linguistic element from its context and transferring it to an abnormally sized second context, is the anticipation of a caustic and ambiguous Pop Architecture’ (p. 84).
‘Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanical language of orthodox Modern architecture.’ Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museun of Modern Art, 1966), p. 16.
The real loyalty to negative thought cannot be completed nihilismus, nor ‘weak thinking’, as Gianni Vattimo calls the postmodern thought that abandons any systematic attempt to organize the world. See Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, eds, Il pensiero debole (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984).
Massimo Caccciari, Dallo Steinhof (Milan: Adelphi, 1980), p. 31. At the end of a chapter on Trauerspiel, Cacciari quotes Roberto Bazlen: ‘True life means: to invent new places on which to be able to shipwreck … ; every new work is nothing but the invention of a new death’ (p. 49).
See Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977). For a critique of this postmodernist immediacy, see
Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 292. See also
Anthony Vidler, ‘Academicism: Modernism’, Oppositions, 8 (1977), pp. 1–5.
Manfredo Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto: avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70 (Turin, Einaudi, 1980); The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly. (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1987), p. 4. Cacciari expresses the same type of fear abour the sense of multiplicity when he talks about the revêtement character of linguistic games (Architecture and Nihilism, p. 163).
See Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
See Michel Vovelle, Idéologie et Mentalités (Paris: François Maspero, 1982); Ideologies and Mentalities, trans. Eamon O’Flaherty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).
Tafuri, ‘Réalisme et architecture’, Critique, 476–7 (1987), p. 23. Tafuri posits the problem similarly to the historian Paul Veyne. See Paul Veyne, L’Inventaire des différences (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 48–9.
On the question of orthodoxy, the conflict over expressionism between Benjamin and Lukács is important. See Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Whitstable, 1977), including Fredric Jameson’s ‘Reflections in Conclusion’, pp. 196–209.
Lucien Febvre, ‘Avant-propos’, in Charles Morazé, Trois essais sur histoire et culture (Paris: Cahiers des Annales, 1948), p. vii.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Anchor Press, 1956), p. 157.
Cacciari, Dallo Steinhof (Milan: Adelphi, 1980), p. 31.
This is the title of a chapter of Claudio Magris, Il mito asburgigo nella letter-atura moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), pp. 185–260. See also
Claudio Magris, L’anello di Clarisse (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), especially the essay ‘La ruggine e i segni. Hofmannsthal e La lettera di Lord Chandos’, pp. 32–62.
Cacciari, ‘Intransitabili utopie’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, La Torre, trans. Silvia Bortoli (Milan: Adelphi, 1978), p. 158.
Roland Barthes, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’, The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), p. 286.
Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, Oppositions, 21 (1980), p. 114.
See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), and George Schwab’s introduction, pp. 3–16.
Cacciari et al., ‘Sinisteritas’, Il concetto di sinistra (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), p. 12.
See Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, Oppositions, 21 (1980), pp. 113–14.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2003 Patrizia Lombardo
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lombardo, P. (2003). Massimo Cacciari and the Philosophy of the City. In: Cities, Words and Images. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286696_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286696_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40206-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28669-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)