Ferraris, Maurizio

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Ferraris, Maurizio Enrico Vittorio

Institutional Research Information System University of Turin

14 December 2021AperTO - Archivio Istituzionale Open Access dell'Università di TorinoOriginal Citation:Alive as You and MeTerms of use:Open Access(Article begins on next page)Anyone can freely access the full text of works made available as "Open Access". Works made available under aCreative Commons license can be used according to the terms and conditions of said license. Use of all other worksrequires consent of the right holder (author or publisher) if not exempted from copyright protection by the applicable law.Availability:This is the author's manuscriptThis version is available http://hdl.handle.net/2318/1795066 since 2021-07-26T14:47:13Z26/7/2021 Alive as You and Mehttps://journals.openedition.org/estetica/7684 1/4Rivista di estetica76 | 2021 Rethinking Philosophy, Semiotics, and the Arts with Umberto EcoSection one | PhilosophyAlive as You and MeM        F       p. 75-81https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.7684Note della redazioneThis text was presented by the author at the commemoration of Umberto Eco during the Festivaldella comunicazione held in Camogli in September 2018.Testo integraleLaughing with the Dead«Only one boy was capable of laughing while Derossi was declaiming the funeraloration of the king, and Franti laughed.» We must be aware of this: our remembranceof Umberto Eco risks bringing back Franti, who laughed at the funeral of anotherUmberto, killed in Monza by Gaetano Bresci. Of course, it’s not exactly the same thing,because Franti was laughing at the dead man, or at least at the obsequies, and maybe atDerossi and his way of expressing them, while we are trying to laugh with the deadman, as if he were still here, but the essence doesn’t change much.1Compared to Franti, we have both an aggravating and a mitigating factor. Theaggravating circumstance is that Franti’s Umberto, the good king, was not good at all,and had on his conscience at least Dogali, Adua and the Bava Beccaris massacre.Instead, not only would we be unable to reproach anything similar to our Umberto, butwe are grateful to him for having given us so much, including indeed In Praise ofFranti, a work that is very critical of king Umberto’s world. In point of law, however,Article 69 of the Penal Code leaves no doubt: aggravating factors prevail overextenuating circumstances.2Laughing at a dead person, in short, is simply not done, even if this laughter is drivenby the best intentions, assuming that laughter can ever come from good intentions.Indeed, this is far from obvious, at least if we follow Jorge de Burgos in The Name ofthe Rose (Il nome della rosa, a book that Bompiani wanted to immediately print in80,000 copies, worrying Eco that it would turn into The Name of Surrender, Il nomedella resa). The great inquisitor sees laughter as a clumsy remedy, a lesser evil, aconsolation for a radically fallen and insufficient humanity–indeed, let us face it, a326/7/2021 Alive as You and Mehttps://journals.openedition.org/estetica/7684 2/4Monumental ComedyAntiquarian Comedydeficient humanity. But this consolation becomes inadmissible if «the function oflaughter is reversed, it is elevated to art, the doors of the world of the learned areopened to it, it becomes the object of philosophy».Jorge here is talking about Aristotle’s book of Poetics on comedy and laughter, foundby William of Baskerville. This is where I would like to start in order to justify thelegitimacy of laughing with the dead. Eco has done just that: to reverse the function oflaughter, to open the doors of the world of the learned, to make it the object ofphilosophy. More precisely, to borrow three categories proposed by Nietzsche–someone who wouldn’t be caught dead laughing, so to speak – in Eco we find threeforms of comedy: monumental, antiquarian, and critical.4Monumental comedy is about finding and giving great examples of comedy. Indeed(to stick to the genre) what can be greater than Nabokov’s saying «To leave is to die alittle, but to die is to leave a little too much»? Are we sure that Euripides would havedone better? Gadda, Beckett, as well as the unsuspected Manzoni and the unbearableLeopardi, all have great comic moments. Moving from literature to philosophy, evenQuine is credited with a memorable joke: «I do not remember what my illness is called,Althusser or Alzheimer, but since I cannot remember it, it must be Alzheimer».5Eco made an essential contribution to the monumentalisation of comedy. FromMisreadings (Diario Minimo, which despite its title is one of his greatest works) toHow To Travel With A Salmon, Eco has managed to give humour the same space thatother philosophers give to the tragic and the sublime. In doing so, he followed astrategy that was both coherent and charitable. Rejecting Wittgenstein’s “Whereof onecannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, Eco embraced the view that whereof onecannot speak, thereof one must tell a story.6Now, since not everyone can write The Name of the Rose, and since many writerprofessors would have done better to follow Wittgenstein’s precept, Eco suggested anexit strategy: whereof one cannot speak with total philosophical certainty thereof onecan fool around. And this is within the reach, if not of everyone, of most, as long as theyare equipped with a minimum of common sense – failing which they will be left withthe extrema ratio of empty words.7Antiquarian comedy, like antiquarian history according to Nietzsche, guards andworships small things. As we all know, Eco was an extraordinary collector and teller ofjokes. Sometimes, back in the days of the telephone, he would call just to tell a joke;indeed most of the time the first thing he would say, even before saying hello orengaging in any pleasantries, was a joke.8This is not at all obvious, for a philosopher. Philosophers, who for an unfortunatetradition–from Hegesias exhorting people to suicide, to the many thinkers who havedone so – are supposed to be very serious and gloomy, are credited at best withaphorisms enunciated with a pince-sans-rire that leaves one somewhat puzzled. Take §147 of the Passions of the Soul: «A husband mourns his dead wife, though he would besorry to see her brought to life again». This passage composes a perfect diptych with thetitle that young Achille Campanile, writing for Il Messaggero, gave to the news of awidow who died on her husband’s grave: «the pitcher goes so often to the well…».9Most of the time, however, philosophers at most indulge in reflections on jokes, likeWittgenstein’s consideration that one could write a very serious philosophical bookmade only of jokes (Žižek tried to put Wittgenstein’s idea into practice, but the result isnot too serious, and I am not sure whether it is a success or a failure). Instead,philosophers who tell jokes are very few. I’m thinking about Croce, who told at least onejoke to mock sociology; Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; and1026/7/2021 Alive as You and Mehttps://journals.openedition.org/estetica/7684 3/4Critical ComedyPer citare questo articoloNotizia bibliograficaMaurizio Ferraris, «Alive as You and Me», Rivista di estetica, 76 | 2021, 75-81.Notizia bibliografica digitaleMaurizio Ferraris, «Alive as You and Me», Rivista di estetica [Online], 76 | 2021, online dal 01mai 2021, consultato il 26 juillet 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/estetica/7684; DOI:https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.7684AutoreMaurizio FerrarisArticoli dello stesso autoreThe Dog Schema [Testo integrale]Apparso in Rivista di estetica, 76 | 2021Prima pagina [Testo integrale]Apparso in Rivista di estetica, 73 | 2020Hysteresis - Metaphysics of the Web [Testo integrale]Derrida who, being a great joke teller in private, wrote a wonderful booklet startingfrom a joke: God asks Abraham again to sacrifice Isaac, adding, this time «Above all, nojournalists».The third (and, worry not, the last) side of history, for Nietzsche, is critical history,which destroys idols. This is also the third dimension of comedy for Eco. Everythingdeserves to die, and laughter, besides sinisterly propitiating the death of others, as inthe saying “a laughter will bury you all”, can facilitate a good death, or at least a deathwithout regrets. This was Eco’s advice in a memorable 1997 article: the only way to diepeacefully is to become convinced that the world we leave behind is populated byassholes.11Now, the snarky Latin saying that “laughter abounds in the mouths of fools” (risusabundat in ore stultorum) often overlooks the fact that the person who utters it with anair of superiority is in fact an asshole who has just said something ridiculous. AsWilliam of Baskerville used to say in reply to Jorge da Burgos, «And now I say to youthat, in the infinite whirl of possible things, God allows you also to imagine a worldwhere the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeatswords learned long ago».12Eco and I had actually envisioned an anthology of philosophical humour. Umbertohad a plan for it as well as some material: «I can get quotations from Hegel and Crocefrom Lacerba’s Sciocchezzaio, there is some authentic Gentile in Vita Finzi’s parodies; Ithink with Heidegger it suffices to pick at random, like the medieval did with Virgil, andI have a letter from Galileo that could have been written by Benigni». It is a pity that wedid not complete it, but others will be able to do so, adding new foolish remarks andhopefully not forgetting the two original curators, the illustrious and the less illustrious.13And anyway, it’s better to laugh, because in the end we all have to die. This is theadvice that Montaigne takes from Plutarch, according to whom the Egyptians had agreat image of death brought to the banquets, with a herald announcing “Eat and enjoy,this is what death shall be like”. As far as I know, Eco has never organised suchbanquets, although he did write about Finnegans Wake, which after all is a funeralservice. Yet, it turns out that back when he taught in Bologna, at a dinner withcolleagues and students, when, after chatting about academic quarrels anddepartmental gossip, silence would fall, Eco would say, with a cigarette in his hand:«And then, of course, there is the problem of death».1426/7/2021 Alive as You and Mehttps://journals.openedition.org/estetica/7684 4/4Apparso in Rivista di estetica, 74 | 2020Prefazione. Documanità [Testo integrale]Apparso in Rivista di estetica, 71 | 2019Like giants immersed in time. Ontology, phenomenology, and Marcel Proust [Testointegrale]Apparso in Rivista di estetica, 70 | 2019L’ermeneutica giuridica come tecnica [Testo integrale]Apparso in Rivista di estetica, 67 | 2018Tutti i testiDiritti d’autore Rivista di Estetica è distribuita con Licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale -Non opere derivate 4.0 Internazionale.

Alive as You and Me

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Alive as You and Me

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