Review article

Traces of the political in Antonio Tabucchi

Dean Trdak ; Zagreb

Abstract

In her study Postmodern Ethics: The Reappropriation of Committed Writing in the Works of Antonio Tabucchi and Leonardo Sciascia 1975-2005, Elizabeth Wren-Owens observes that literary critics have traditionally perceived only two Tabucchi’s novels as politically committed, Sostiene Pereira and La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro, while reading his other texts as typically postmodernist. However, Wren-Owens claims that all Tabucchi’s writing could be described as committed, although the commitment in question is very different from traditional impegno. This article proposes to study this “new” type of commitment in light of the concept of political difference, that is, the difference between “politics” and “the political” as conceived by Carl Schmitt and then developed by other authors, and the concept of the “retreat” of the political proposed by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Any discussion of the relationship between literature and politics would, of course, be incomplete without Jacques Rancière and his concept of the “distribution of the sensible”. “The political” has retreated into literature and now, rather than in its content, it resides in its form. The traces of “the political” in Tabucchi’s prose are hidden in his famous “rovescio” and where one would least expect it - in saudade.

Keywords

Antonio Tabucchi; commitment; impegno; politics; political; traces of the political; game of reverse; distribution of the sensible

Hrčak ID:

191610

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/191610

Publication date:

28.12.2017.

Article data in other languages: croatian italian

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