This text was originally published in Mario Tronti’s La politica al tramonto (Einaudi, 1998). It appears in English here for the first time. In January 2024, a new edition of La politica al tramonto will be published by DeriveApprodi.
Umberto Coldagelli, introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Scritti, note e discorsi politici (1839–1852) (Bollati-Boringhieri, 1994), xvi.
Georges Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995 (Yale University Press, 1998).
Ingeborg Bachman, Il dicible e l’indicible (Adelphi, 1998), 21–22.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2003), 394.
Erwin Panofsky, Tiziano (Marsilio, 1992), 105. Also see the Titian chapter in Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts (University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Translated from the Italian by Robert Hurley.