Thomas J. Harrison

Reason, madness, suicide. What is the relation between these terms? It is certainly a mad logic that leads one to kill oneself, though a logic nonetheless; suicide is a perverse application of practical reason. Or is it the opposite: a rational rejection of perversion and madness? Albert Camus and others have attempted to sort out these problems on a theoretical plane; in the work and life of Carlo Michelstaedter we witness their dramatic entanglement. In the age of high nihilism to which he (1887-1910) belongs, characters both fictitious and real pursue reason to the limits of exhaustion, succumb to insanity, commit suicide with prolific regularity. And yet, with the exception of Otto Weininger, only Michelstaedter enacts the entire plot of the play, fully submitting to the entanglement of the terms. 1 By killing himself on the day that he finished his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, the twenty-three-year-old student insisted on an absolute unity of theory and practice. Having tied a nihilistic knot, he refused to loosen it by means of a last-minute hope or theoretical twist. No, such is the evasion equally shunned, at least in word, by Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Camus. Once the knot is tied as tightly as Michelstaedter ties it-the [1013] knot of reason, the knot of his age, on which he refuses to loosen the tension-no twist will help. The knot can only break by the force of this pull, in suicide or madness. Philosopher, poet, and, by his own reckoning primarily a painter, Michelstaedter began his short and exemplary life in 1887 as a member of an educated and prosperous Jewish family in Gorizia, on the Italian outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 2 He ended it in 1910, after completing his thesis in philosophy at the University of Florence. Published five times between 1913 and 1982, 3 this thesis was to have been a study of the concepts of per­suasion and rhetoric in the works of Plato and Aristotle. But from the start Persuasion and Rhetoric leaves both its philosophers and the literal meaning of its terms behind. Yes, rhetoric denotes meth­ods of persuasion, but in the very broadest sense of those methods, namely, the entire spectrum of ethical and intellectual discourse available to the citizen at any given moment, from political and economic cliché to the norms of social interaction. In its analysis of cultural rhetoric at large, Michelstaedter's dissertation proves to be one of the most trenchant critical documents of our time, bearing remarkable similarities to the work of Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School. 4

Even so, Michelstaedter traces the ramifications of rhetoric only to defend the possibility of persuasion. Traditionally conceived, persuasion is the goal of the art of rhetoric. In that respect persuasion [1014]

suasion involves the influencing of oneself by another. Once again, however, Michelstaedter makes the word overreach its own limits, taking as its first connotation a Kierkegaardian conception of the subject's relation to itself. Persuasion means self -persuasion, or knowing what one wants, coincidence of thought and deed. It implies a transposition of intellect into ethics. In the terms of St. Augustine, a thinker never far from Michelstaedter's mind, per­suasion means that absolute self-possession in which the splitness of the will is transcended. 5 The difference between persuasion and rhetoric is thus essentially a difference between "authentic" and "inauthentic" living. 6

The outcome of Michelstaedter's search for persuasion beneath the wiles of rhetoric is that in any and all situations the means (rhetoric) vitiate the end (persuasion), a tragic disjunction inviting comparison with similar paradoxes in the work of such contemporaries of Michelstaedter as Luigi Pirandello, Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages, and Robert Musil. Rhetoric is persuasion's eternal opposite, the fossilized forms of the spirit inevitably betraying the soul. The latter, Michelstaedter is forced to conclude, fails discourse and all but the most paradoxical of existential expressions. While Michelstaedter's work was to have discovered a viable model of persuasion by recourse to Plato and Aristotle, it turned into a study of the impossibility of persuasion and the inescapable ubiquity of rhetoric in every age.

Of course, Michelstaedter's opposition between persuasion and rhetoric is anything but new in the history of philosophy. It is the heritage of a series of antinomies that originate the whole enterprise of metaphysics: truth and error, reality and illusion, being and becoming, essence and appearance. Metaphysics is the effort to bore through the second elements of the pairs to reach the first. When the project is taken to its logical and final extreme the result is nihilism, according to a progression recounted by Nietzsche and Heidegger. 7 The initial step on this nihilistic route is to posit an [1015] imaginary world beyond the historical one, in which "being," "essence," "unity," and "meaning" are fully at home. In so far as the efforts of mind and will are now redirected toward this ideal reality, this ascetic step represents a type of ethical nihilism which refuses to affirm the value of experience as it stands. The second step is that of philosophical nihilism proper. Here the desire to assert the truth about experience is taken so far that no outposts whatsoever remain standing for "truth," not even the notions of "meaning" and "essence." The positive terms of the metaphysical antinomy cede to the negative ones. All being appears meaningless, illogical, and unredeemed.

This is the nihilism of Michelstaedter and of the age he repre­sents, making fully explicit the madness implicit in a metaphysical tradition. For only the essentialist bias of metaphysics produces the feeling that "essence" and "truth" are somehow missing in life. The nihilist is an unyielding rationalist, who contends that there is no meaning to any empirical event only because he has made an in­tellectual commitment to those counters of meaning whose absence he now bemoans. "What is truth?" "What is the essence of a thing?" "Where is justice?" -Wittgenstein had already argued that such questions were senseless, theoretical hallucinations appearing plau­sible not so much to reason as to the structures of grammar. The metaphysician assumes that if a question can be asked, it must have meaning. But to apply terms like "meaning" to "life" and "essence" to the term "thing" is to ignore the more practical logic of signs 8 (or the logic of rhetoric). Michelstaedter falls into the trap of grammar, consider­ing its persuasions to be as important as life and death. His suicide, as Giovanni Papini pointed out nineteen days after the event, was a metaphysical one, a gesture of absolute intolerance towards apparent unreason, upholding the dream of bending life to thought. 9 Life, in this reading, is not life unless its nature is known; one wants to live only the examined life. But when taken too literally, met­aphysics causes the death of its own lifeblood, for this examined life refuses to yield to the categories by which it is judged.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, reason, like folly, becomes finally unable to distinguish the difference between its [1016] own categories of appearance and reality. Nietzsche's nihilistic har­binger of "the death of God" is accordingly a madman, as anyone is mad who attempts to rationalize chaos and announces that the eternal has ceased to be. 10 As reason refuses to abandon a methodology for truth that no longer works, it is led to conclusions that the meta­physician can only experience as a cause for frenzy. Only the thinker who has abandoned all interest in metaphysical knowledge-the nihilist "with a good conscience," for example-can settle on the philosophical softness of epistemological foundations as on comfortable turf. 11

It is thus under the rubric of an extraordinary exemplum that the progress of Michelstaedter must be read. In his life and death the romantic demand that ethics should coincide with reason finds its epitome and culmination. In fact, it is questionable whether Michelstaedter's Persuasion and Rhetoric would be hailed as one of the masterpieces of the century 12 if its crowning act had not been suicide. Without this proof, its nihilistic thesis would have lacked credibility, for the very legitimation of the principle that persuasion cannot live lies in the fact that Michelstaedter makes an ex­ample of himself. Cynical though it may sound, if Michelstaedter had not killed himself, his philosophy would have lacked its central feature. The "heroic nihilism" 13 of his unified life, work, and death articulates an immanent logic of its era, representing an unrelent­ing confrontation with the slippage of intelligence into madness and of truth into fiction that haunts at least two generations of Michelstaedter's contemporaries, from Nietzsche, van Gogh, and Dostoevski to Trakl, Campana, and the brothers Wittgenstein.

If Michelstaedter's suicide is an intimate aspect of his thought, so is the form in which it is written-a dissertation. Michelstaedter recognizes the disadvantage this genre poses, to the point of disallowing [1017] him to say anything meaningful. "I know I am speaking because I am speaking," he writes in the first sentence of his preface, "but I will not persuade anybody" (35). The only evidence that speech is taking place is the emission of words, not the transmission of persuasive significance. An essay that aims to defend persuasion from the wiles of rhetoric could not have a more inauspicious beginning. Michelstaedter admits that this is a negative point of de­parture, "but rhetoric anagcazei   me   tauta   dran   bia GREEK TEXT [compels me to it]" (35). The vital significance of the words he would write had already been presented in unique and expressive ways-by Hera­clitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles; by Ecclesiastes, Socrates, and Christ; by Beethoven, Ibsen, and Leopardi. It never was heard. How likely is it to succeed now when Michelstaedter repeats it "in a way that cannot entertain anybody, neither with philosophical dignity nor with artistic concreteness, but as a poor pedestrian who measures the terrain with his tread"; "I pay no entrance fee to any of the established categories-nor do I set a precedent to any new category; in the best of cases I will have written... a doctoral dissertation" (36).

What is the "law" governing this genre which makes Michelstaedter despair of achieving his goal? Is it that the dissertation is exclusively concerned with verification? That it means bypassing style and art to articulate the essence and logic of one's topic, to present its causes and effects in the form of objective description and expository argument? The dissertation enlists language in the service of rational explanation. Poetry, disorder, whim and feeling are its arch-antagonists. It is appropriate that Michelstaedter's es­sentialist project should issue not only into death but also into the rhetoric of the dissertation, a rhetoric that enacts the plot of insist­ing so much on the truth that one ends up by saying nothing. The dissertation proves doubly deadly, forcing Michelstaedter to spell out the nihilistic logic of his age (which others avoided through art) by imposing upon him the method that yields such logic. Both victim and victimizer, reason here insists on battling its own mad­ness directly, a battle that can only end in its own defeat.

Consider the choice that Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and other art­ists of the period made to flee the traps of rational persuasion. Their intuition? That dialectical reason could not but lead to specious findings, to conclusions unacceptable by the rules of the game (the principle of non-contradiction above all). Both the method and the import of the deductions of reason came to strike Wittgenstein [1018] and Nietzsche as intolerable. Like their counterparts in the artistic avant-garde, they preferred a species of creative madness to thought's annihilation, choosing to write in a "para-essentialist" mode of fragments, hints, essays, parables and paradoxes rather than that of the treatise. "If I were sometime to see quite new surroundings from my window instead of the long familiar ones," writes Wittgenstein, "if things, humans, and animals were to behave as they never did before, then I should say something like '1 have gone mad'; but that would merely be an expression of giving up the attempt to know my way about [ mich auszukennen ]. 14 The way of perceptual defamiliarization is the typical reaction of the various avant-gardes of the age to philosophical logic. But this defamiliarization necessitates the discovery of new and alogical id­ioms (the reinvention of rhetoric). Wittgenstein abandons his youthful project to enclose the world in a system: "I should like to ask not so much 'What must we do to avoid a contradiction?' as 'What ought we to do if we have arrived at a contradiction?'" (Zettel, ¶688 ). Michelstaedter, on the other hand, was unwilling to forego the law of contradiction. At every turn of Persuasion and Rhetoric we see him struggling with the constraints of dialectical logic, attempting to supplement its deductions with parable and irony. In fact, this melding of styles ends up producing one of the most unusual works of the century, unique and unprecedented after all. The first Italian since Leopardi of truly European stature, as Campailla puts it, 15 Michelstaedter is in fact an extraordinary expressionist thinker; but the logic prevails in the end.

      *             *             *

After subverting his own master concepts in the preface-"I know that I am speaking ... but I will not persuade anybody" (that is, I am engaging in rhetoric)-Michelstaedter launches his disser­tation with a bold and personal assertion: " I know that I want [voglio] and do not have what I want." He substantiates the claim by means of an allegory:

                              1019

A weight hangs on a hook, and, in hanging, suffers that it cannot descend; it cannot get off the hook for, being a weight, it pends and, pending, depends [ quant'è peso pende, e quanto pende dipende ] .

We want to give it satisfaction: we free it from its dependence; we let it go so that it may satisfy its hunger for what is lowest and may inde­pendently descend to the point to which it is pleased to descend. -But it is not pleased to stop at any point it reaches and would like to keep descending, for the next point is even lower than the one it occupies at each moment. But no future point will please it, and be necessary to its life so long as a lower awaits (ora an menh auton) ( GREEK TEXT ); 16 each time it is made present, every point becomes void of attraction, not being still lower; thus at every point it lacks lower points, and these attract it all the more; it is always held by the same hunger for what is lower, and its will to descend stays infinite.

For if everything were finished at a given point, and if at one point it could possess the infinite descent of the infinite future-at that point it would no longer be what it is: a weight.

Its life is this lack of its life. If it no longer lacked anything-but were finished, perfect: if it possessed itself, it would have ceased to exist. The weight is its own impediment to the possession of its life, and its inability to satisfy itself depends on itself alone. The weight can never be persuaded. (39-40)

Many are the claims and allusions here, even more the implica­tions that need unravelling. Let us begin with the first proposition, "I know that I want [or desire: voglio ]," for it prefigures an impasse that will return later. The epigrammatic quality of this assertion has the features of an essential definition, articulated in a stark and elliptical style characteristic of the whole dissertation. It forces the reader to interpolate its unspoken assumptions, a foundational logic in the body of the text, which nevertheless prevails against the pro­fuse accompanying intuitions which, had Michelstaedter lived, might have led him down other, more interesting paths.

One of the assumptions of this first tenet, "I know that I want" is that an "I" underlies the act of willing. The second is that this activity of willing is single (as the gravitational force of masses, or of Michelstaedter's weight, was then thought to be) instead of double, as in the Freudian psychology of eros and thanatos, or multiple, as in [1020] the conjunction of forces of Nietzsche's will. The third is that the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire are one and the same; it is apparently the same "I" that knows and wills. This is an identification that Schopenhauer called the Weltknoten, or the knot of the world, for it was impossible to prove. 17 If these interpolations are correct, then the opening of Michelstaedter's dissertation places him squarely within a Cartesian tradition which Heidegger traces as far forward as Nietzsche and interprets as the heritage of Platonism. 18 This tradition measures reality from the standpoint of an "I" and comes ultimately to posit the activity of willing as the essence of this "I." As eclectic as Michelstaedter's sources are, the main affiliations of Persuasion and Rhetoric are consonant with Heidegger's reading, stretching from Ecclesiastes, Parmenides, and Plato through the voluntaristic Christianity of St. Augustine, St. Francis, and Petrarch, to Schopenhauer, Leopardi, and Nietzsche. The beginning of Michelstaedter's dissertation anticipates what he shares with the later developments of this tradition: a concern with the essence of human nature, or more particularly, with the essence of the human subject. By the nineteenth century, the essence of this subject that the Platonic and Christian tradition had considered to be animated by divine pneuma is equated with will.

      The assumptions of the first proposition of Persuasion and Rhetoric are borne out by its subsequent arguments. To live a life of persuasion is to recognize and actualize one's will. Persuasion is equivalent to self-possession, to being thoroughly advised (per + suadere) of who one is, to knowing and willing one's will. Dependent on both knowledge and power, persuasion means autonomy: "Persuasion does not live in him who does not live on himself alone" (42). Otherwise, as "son or father, slave or master of what surrounds him," a person will be only "a thing among things" (42) . Ordinarily a person "wants from other things in the future what he lacks in himself: the possession of himself: but in the degree to which he wants and is occupied by the future he flees himself in every present... What [1021] he wants is given within him, and wanting life he distances himself from himself.... His end is not his end, he knows not why he does

what he does" (41). To become self-determined, the individual must dissociate his will from all that presses in on it and deflects it from its proper course. A person at that point becomes "the first and the last, and finds nothing that was done before him." Nor, Michelstaedter adds, "does it avail him to believe that anything will be done after him ... he must create himself and the world, which does not exist before him: he must be master and not slave in his house" (73). Here lies an image of that final monadic autonomy that is the ultimate desideratum of the subjectivist tradition. As Sartre expressed it, the "first value and first object of will is: to be its own foundation." But unlike Sartre and other philosophers of the twentieth century, Michelstaedter was unwilling to acknowledge that the will is unable to be its own foundation, "thrown" as it is into a horizon for action that it does not determine. Michelstaedter insists on the possibility of self-grounding to the end, claiming that "he who is for himself (menei) GREEK TEXT needs nothing else to be for him (menoi auton) GREEK TEXT in the future, but possesses everything in himself" (41). To be its own foundation, the will must be self-sufficient.

This argument may be read as a literalization of various aspects of the metaphysics of will from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche. In Schopenhauer, will is a single, irrational principle distributed throughout the universe in a hierarchy of Platonic levels, from the blind forces of nature through organic impulses all the way up to its ultimate objectification in conscious human motivation. By the time this metaphysics reaches Nietzsche it has assumed more complex proportions. Nietzschean will is no longer a "will to God," nor a will to survival, but a will to power. Power, in turn, is always a relative arrangement, a product of forces in tension. Each force is a synthetic unity and a result of concrete action. Power is thus doubly synthetic, fluid and self-metamorphic by definition. It is not an objective quotient of power but a feeling of power (Kraftsgefühl). Nietzschean will, as will to power, is neither a commanding intention nor a "thing-in-itself," as it was for Schopenhauer and the voluntaristic tradition. It is the shorthand formula for what [1022] appears to be a historically commanding action, a configuration of

incomparably particular acts in specific times and spaces. 20

If Schopenhauer's will is a universal and originary metaphysical principle, Nietzsche's is a particular and functional result. Michelstaedter conflates their positions, understanding will as both originary and incomparably unique: What the subject knows is not that willing is the essence of all reality, but that I want, and that I am fundamentally equivalent to my desiring activity. The task of persuasion is that of realizing the fundamental individual will. "Become who you are!" is the Nietzschean injunction that Michelstaedter hears and tries to make possible along a model of persuasion. Like many of his contemporaries, however, Michelstaedter misreads this injunction, as though "becoming what one is" meant liberating some intrinsic essence instead of achieving a fruition of existence. 21

According to Michelstaedter, becoming what one is, or achieving persuasion, involves stripping the entire rhetoric of self-expression-customs, morality, prejudices, and education-to affirm the essential will as its own sovereign. In the self-presence of a persuaded life "potency and act are the same thing" (44). Time itself is arrested. Every instant of the life of such an individual is equivalent to "a century of the life of others,-as he turns himself into flame and succeeds in inhabiting the ultimate present" (89). Or, in still other terms: "Whoever wants to possess his life as his own for an instant, to be persuaded for an instant of what he does ...   must view every present as the ultimate one, as though it were sure beyond death: and create his life on his own in the darkness" (69-70). [1023] In this affirmation of self and present in a single act we recognize a literalized version of still another precursor idea: the affirmation of the moment in the eternal return of the same. This particular version envisions the abolition of that disjunction between essence and existence, doing and knowing, fact and value, which Sartre posited as the essence of alienation in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. 22 The will of the life-affirming individual is liberated from the impulse to negate the past, on the one hand, and to hanker after domination of the future, on the other-liberated, in short, from the "spirit of revenge" which wants to get even with all that is missing in the present. How else to understand Michelstaedter's coincidence of self and instant, in which the persuaded person loves everything that is, "not because it is necessary to his need, but for that which it is ... for in that ultimate present he must have everything and give everything: he persuaded and persuade, have, in the possession of the world, the possession of himself-be one, himself and the world" (82).

And yet, the modal "must" of this passage already suggests a distance between Michelstaedter's and Nietzsche's affirmations of the self and the other in time. Michelstaedter insists on a seamless fusion of self and other; Nietzsche speaks neither of identity nor of moral "necessity," but only of harmony. Aiming as he does at a means by which to overcome the very finitude of existential forms, Michelstaedter seems here to effect another conflation of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer-a conflation of present affirmation with a transcendence of temporal difference itself. For, at bottom, Nietzsche's affirmation of the present is also an affirmation of the past and the future, or of "becoming" in a circle of difference and repetition. The "present" that is affirmed actually amounts to ceaseless temporal distension. One can affirm such a present only by giving up the conception of will as the faculty of single, auton­omous desire. In Nietzsche, to will is already to transcend (by de­siring more than) the present that is "given" at any particular mo­ment of life. The willingness of a life-affirming individual involves precisely an affirmation of the givenness of a given moment (the punctual "now" that Michelstaedter considers the only given) in a constructive-destructive cycle of circular time. 23 In this respect, [1024] Nietzsche's simultaneous affirmation of self-and-present depends on an ontology more like Georg Simmel's than Michelstaedter's. Life, in Simmel's formulation, always amounts to "More-Life [ Mehr-Leben ]," a flow of experience that "does not limit its reality to the present moment, thus pushing past and future into unreality." Rather, the "present of life consists of its transcending the present; ... in [the present] moment the future is reality." 24

It is clear, then, that the famous amor fati , the love of fate, that characterizes the Nietzschean affirmation of the present is based on a rejection not only of the traditional conception of time as a linear succession of mutually bounding moments but also of the will as an inherent subjective tendency. The self-realization of will shares nothing with a subjectivist rebellion against the objective conditions of life or an egoistic assertion of the principium individ­uationis . Will is a principle of superabundance, not appropriating an object of volition so much as expropriating its own subject, a subject now reduced to a link in a chain. Michelstaedter's subject and object, on the other hand, remain radically separate. The union of these two "autonomies" will turn out to fuse two nothings. Persuasion will be presented as the possibility of the subject to transcend historical positionality for the sake of a utopian realm. This is clear from the impulsion of the weight with which Michelstaedter exemplifies his second assertion, "I do not have what I want."

The image of the weight bearing downward moves from the idea of will as self-determined to an acknowledgment that such a will can never achieve its proper terminus. Imbedded in this parable is Aristotle's conception of sublunary dynamics, according to which all bodies of the world move in search of their natural place of rest. Fire and air tend upwards, water and earth downwards. 25 And thus the basis for frustration is laid, for the satisfaction of this inclination or will lies ever outside itself, in some other place, which, as Michel­staedter notes, can never he reached without the will relinquishing its own nature. Michelstaedter makes the longed-for achievement even more difficult by inverting another intertextual reference, namely, the principle of Augustine's pondus amoris , the gravitation [1025] of love that carries the will upwards to God-and away from its habitual and partial thirst for the bottom. 26 Michelstaedter's weight moves in an opposite direction. His will, unlike Augustine's and Schopenhauer's, is irremediably intra-worldly. Its inherent motion cannot be ascetically reversed.

Thus, if Michelstaedter's first proposition seems to offer a hope for self-realization, the second subtracts the offer. I do not have what I want because of the very context of desire-the context of life in the Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean acceptation of the word. Life remains life, and will remains will, only insofar as each reaches ever beyond its present condition. Michelstaedter here is decisive: such life is no life at all. "Life would be," he writes, "if time did not constantly distance being from it in every succeeding instant." Life would be "one, immobile, without form if it could consist in a single point" (43). We may notice here another Augustinian resonance, indeed a Plotinian one. The source of frustration is none other than a certain attitude to time, a symptom of what Michelstaedter calls the will's jiloyucia GREEK TEXT or love of life, which makes the will overreach itself. On account of its "over-active" na­ture ( polypragmon ) , the soul, writes Plotinus, always "seeks for more than its present stage" and thus always "moves on to a 'next' and an 'after' and to what is not the same but is something else and then else again." 27 Distended over a series of mores and lesses, of nows and laters deferring its own desire, the will cannot affirm the ulti­mate value of any present without relinquishing itself--no more than the weight can stop falling if it remains a weight.

Life thus deposes me from myself, making me seek what is ever beyond me. Such life is a permanent deficit and a tragic drive, a contradiction in terms, a bios abios GREEK TEXT, or living death. Being themselves, all things affirm what they are not. "Their life is suicide" (46). Having hypostatized a "will-in-itself" at the bottom of one's qualities, Michelstaedter is unable to predicate anything of this essential will except an intrinsic nothing. Voluntas is noluntas . "My dream," he could have said with Montale, "is not in the four seasons":

My dream arises never from the womb

of the seasons but in the untemporaneous [1026]

that lives where reasons die

and God knows whether it was time;

or whether it was useless.

Or, in another formulation of Montale: "Only this can we tell you today / what we are not , what we do not want... 28 Persuasion can adhere only to those naked souls, divested of all worldly attributes, who inhabit the Blessed Isles. 29

Thus far the stipulations of Persuasion and Rhetoric may be sum­marized as follows: Willing is the essence of subjectivity; this willing is subjected to an alienating progression of exclusive moments; it must find its satisfaction in itself alone. The conclusion could not be expressed more poignantly than in some of the last lines Mich­elstaedter ever wrote-in a poem to a real object of his desire, his beloved Argia Cassini. Apostrophizing a person whom it refuses to engage in dialogue, this most intransigent of metaphysical love poems explains why there is no reason whatsoever to seek the actualization of the desire the words express:

Speak to you:, and before you are taken from me

forever, seize you completely?-for what reason?

for what reason, if I lost you completely

when, the day we first met, you were not mine?

Even if "by means of your will [ per volontà tua], " I were to win you, Michelstaedter continues, compulsively underscoring the hetero­determination that is his phobia, you would always remain sepa­rate, never fused with my being. The key to his reluctance to pur­sue his desire lies in the reflection that if "I do not know / how to create your life from within my own," the romance is useless. 30

[1027] Demanding that the will be autonomous, Michelstaedter is waylaid by the impassable barrier of the essentialist tradition. Having defined human being as its innermost subjectivity, this tradition comes finally to acknowledge such innerness as null. Michelstaedter discovers that the will in itself is empty, always filled by what it is not, no more than a dream of itself. And this is why people lament their solitude "for, being with themselves, they feel they are alone; they feel they are in the company of nobody" (41) . T o make matters even worse, the hero of persuasion still has to reckon with the problem alluded to by Schopenhauer as the Weltknoten, namely, the hypothetical identity of the knowing and the desiring "I." When no distance remains between these two functions of the self, the resulting unity is indistinguishable from madness. It is the Dionysian ideal of "being oneself"-of knowing what one wills and willing what one knows-notes Otto Rank, that lands Peer Gynt in the madhouse to begin with. 31 Michelstaedter conceives of this ideal under the aegis not of Dionysus but of Apollo and his Delphic adage, gnothi seauton, or "know thyself" (85). Sovereignty of will is contingent on knowledge. And yet, on the same page, Michelstaedter admits that self-knowledge is a chimera, a "seeking with negative data," a pursuit of a value that we cannot know. We can only know, or presume to know, that this self "should not he related to the irrationality of need" (85).

The existential problem is thus not merely "I do not have, and never can have, what I want" (not merely the distension of time and the extrinsic gravitation of the will), but even more originally, "I do not know what I want." The singular will lacks a reliable criterion by which to recognize its desire. As Wittgenstein was to show some years after Persuasion and Rhetoric, the mechanics of a private language would be equivalent to the gestures of a man who, to make sure that he understood the morning paper correctly, went out to buy another copy. While the Cartesian turn to the essential subject makes the "I" the measure of all things, there no longer exists any measure of this measure.

The difficulties Michelstaedter encounters in his argument are thus already inherent to his conceptual grammar. Once the subject is ontologically distinguished from its encompassing "objects," or once being is distinguished from becoming and substance from [1028] accident, the first set of concepts follow a progressive route of abstraction until, as Nietzsche remarks, they dissolve into vapor. 32   Essences cannot be abstracted from historical praxis without witnessing their own dissolution. When Nietzsche suspects reason of madness, he is content to forego an ideal realm of being for a world marked exclusively by becoming. Michelstaedter is not. He follows the Parmenidean itinerary, according to which being is and nonbeing is not, through to the end. Committed as he is to the prin­ciple of the excluded middle, he refuses to allow identity to be contaminated by difference, permanence by change, essence by appearance, the instant by the past or the future. But when one insists on defending the autonomy of the first set of terms against the effect of the second, the only reality that remains is the utopia of idea, the ontology of lack, the empty will. Possessing no content of its own, this will is not even a will, but rather a "will-to-will," a determination, Heidegger writes, "in which the metaphysics of subjectivity attains the peak of its development." 33 Murdered at the hands of metaphysics, Michelstaedter follows its way to non-being.

To give men "life itself here and now, completely, so that they no longer demand" (81)-this is impossible. Yes, Michelstaedter admits, impossible, but "the courage for the impossible" is "the light that disperses the fog," the fog, that is, of rhetoric. Liberated from all that is "merely possible," he who enters the heralded "new day" of persuasion will create his own legs for walking "and walk where there is no road" (73), tasting "in the impossible, in the unbearable," a joy in which "hunger is not hunger, and bread not bread" (86). But how can one fail to recognize that this fog-dispersing light is indistinguishable from the light of self-delusion, the glow of Heraclitus' lantern that "man lights for himself by night" (54) and that Michelstaedter uses to characterize rhetoric? Or the glow of those Augustinian sinners who, "imagining that the nature of the soul is what God is, want to be light, not in the Lord, but in themselves?" 34 Michelstaedter's metaphors for an impossible achievement must be taken literally. The persuaded person has no life at all; there is "no bread for him, there is no water, there is no bed, there is no family, there is no country, there is no god- he is [1029] alone in the midst of the desert" (70) . And being alone, once again, is being in the company of nobody.

Thus Michelstaedter makes explicit the nihilism inherent in the subjectivist tradition. Once consciousness refuses to forego its quest for a meaning that is no longer available, it is left to affirm nothing but voiceless passion. That is the point at which "man would rather will nothingness than not will at all." 35 Suicide becomes the self's only proper act, its sole affirmation, the form of a transcendent and impossible identity. As documented by Eduard von Hartmann (to whom Michelstaedter is certainly as indebted as to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) the "philosophy of life" that inherits the metaphys­ical project induces cosmic suicide. 36 And this explains the cryptic parable that appears on the first, blood-stained page of Persuasion and Rhetoric. Having sketched an oil lamp in the process of extinc­tion, Michelstaedter glosses it with these words in Greek: "The lamp goes out for lack of oil. I, overflowing at the brim, extin­guished myself."

Michelstaedter's suicide does not attest to the failure of persuasion, as one might be tempted to read it. It enacts it. For the suicide, as Schopenhauer argues, does not will death. The suicide "wills life ... and is only dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has presented itself to him. ... Just because the suicide cannot give up willing, he gives up living." 37

NOTES

1 Otto Weininger took his own life at the very same age as Michelstaedter a few months after completing one of the monuments of Austrian nihilism. Geschlecht und Charakter (1903), trans . Sex and Character (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1906).

2 A lucid and well-balanced study of Michelstaedter's work as a whole can be had in the study by Daniela Bini, "Michelstaedter tra 'Persuasione' e 'Rettorica,'" Italica 63 (1987): 346-60. The most complete study of Michelstaedter's thought in relation to its time may be that of Cristina Benussi, Negazione e integrazione nella dialettica di Carlo Michelstaedter (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizarri, 1980). Michelstaedter's pictorial work is collected in Carlo Michelstaedter, Opera grafica e pittorica , ed. Sergio Campailla (Gorizia: Istituto per gli Incontri Culturali Mitteleuropei, Arti grafiche Campestrini, 1975).

3 The latest edition, which I shall use in this study, is Carlo Michelstaedier, La persuasione e la rettorica , ed. Sergio Campailla (Milan: Adelphi, 1982). (Page refer­ences to this edition will be parenthetically included within the text.) Maria A. Raschini's edition (Milan: Marzorati, 1972) includes the six Critical Appendices in which Michelstaedter performs actual readings of Plato and Aristotle, but lacks Michelstaedter's preface, from which I shall cite.

4 "Michelstaedter," writes Alberto Abruzzese, "is the single and most isolated example in Italy of an anticipation of the 'Frankfurt thinkers'; his interweaving of negative thought and Marxian sensibility made him already capable of being acutely aware of the destiny of capitalist civilization.' Alberto Abruzzese, Svevo, Slataper, Michelstaedter: Lo stile e il viaggio (Venice: Marsilio, 1979), p. 8. For further treatment of the affinities between Michelstaedter and the Frankfurt School see Abruzzese, pp. 30-37, 203-40, and Marco Cerruti, Carlo Michelstaedter (Milan: Mursia, 1967).

5 Augustine, Confessions , VIII, viii-x. trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963).

6 Giorgio Brianese, L'arco e il destino: Interpretazione di Michelstaedter (Padua Francisci Editore, 1985), p. 18.

7 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1969). Third Essay, and The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), Books One and Two; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche IV: Nihilism , trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982).

8 For a study of Wittgenstein's relation to the post-Saussurian critique of meta­physics, see Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

9 Giovanni Papini, "Un suicidio metafisico," Tutte le opere di Giovanni Papini: Filosofia e letteratura (Milan: Mondadori, 1961), pp. 817-22.

10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin­tage Books, 1974), ¶125.

11 Taken from Nietzsche's Human, All Too unman, the phrase "with a good conscience" is one of the formulae proposed by Gianni Vattimo as an ethical cor­relative to his post-nihilistic "weak ontology." See his La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), trans. by Jon Snyder as The End of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

12 Claudio Magris, "Things Near and Far: Nietzsche and the Great Triestine Generation of the Early Twentieth Century," in Nietzsche in Italy, ed. Thomas Harison (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1988), p. 297.

13 "To, avoid no reef, one day that will be called 'heroic nihilism,'" Hans Blumen­berg, Shciffbruch mit Zuschauer Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979), Ch, I.

14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), ¶ 393. Compare his statement in Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. yon Wright, in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1984), p. 56e: "I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around [ in der sie sich unmöglich auskennen können ]."

15 Sergio Campailla, "Introduzione," La persuasione e la rettorica, p. 24.

16 The Greek translates the previous phrase, "as long as it is awaited." Michelstaedter has recourse to the Greek in order to develop the opposition between the transitive sense of menein [GREEK TEXT] (to await someone or something) and the intransitive one (to stay, to endure, to persist, to consist).

17 "Now the identity of the subject of willing with that of knowing by virtue whereof (and indeed necessarily) the word 'I' includes and indicates both, is the knot of the world [ Weltknoten ] , and hence inexplicable." Arthur Schopenhauer, The Four­fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1974), p. 211.

18 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche IV, pp. 58-182.

19 Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries: November 1939-March 1940, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 110.

20 Nietzsche's most extensive published passage on will may be that of ¶19 of Beyond Good and Evil . See also the entire chapter, "The Will to Power in Nature," in The Will to Power, among which ¶666 argues that every phenomenon of conscious­ness. including the idea of intention or aim ordinarily associated with will might best be seen as "an epiphenomenon in the series of changes in the activating forces that bring about the purposive action ... a symptom of events, not... their cause." Cf. also Hannah Ardent's explication of the Nietzschean conception of will in The Life of the Mind II: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 158-72. On additional connections between Michelstaedter, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer see the cited works by Benussi, Brianese, and Cerruti.

21 The responsibility for the misunderstanding is ultimately to be located in Nietzsche himself, in the rhetorical power with which he invests some of those Sprichworter in which he posits a "spiritual fatum" at the bottom of each of us, "In me,'' says Zarathustra, "there is something invulnerable and unburiable, something that explodes rock: that is my will . Silent and unchanged it strides through the years." Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche , ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), p. 224.

22 This reading of Nietzsche's eternal return is best exemplified by Gianni Vattimo, Il soggetto e la maschera: Nietzsche e it problema della liberazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1979), pp. 251-81.

23 See, once again, Hannah Arendt, especially pp. 169-71

24 Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Munich and Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. 1922), pp. 12 and 10.

25 De Caelo, Book One.   Esp. 1.9. 279b1-2.

26 Confessions , XIII, ix.

27 Plotinus, Enneads , III, 7, II . The passage is a commentary on Plato's Timaeus, 37c-38b , "On Time and Eternity."

28 Eugenio Montale, "Le stagioni" and "Non chiederci la parole." L'opera in versi, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini (Turin: Einaudi 1980), pp. 381-82 and 27. Although no full length study of the remarkable relations between Mich­elstaedter and Montale has yet been written, links have been noted by Brianese p. 92; Cerruti, pp. 156 and 175; and Sergio Campailla, Pensiero e poesia di Carlo Michelstaedter (Bologna: Patron, 1973), pp. 156 and 175.

29 The Orphic-Pythagorean myth to which Michelstaedter refers on page 42 con­cerns the judgment of the dead. Zeus decides that before a judgment is passed on a person who has died, the soul should be divested of the body to be seen exactly for what it is . See Plato's Gorgias, 523a-524a.

30 Carlo Michelstaedter, "[A Senia, VII]," Poesie, ed. Sergio Campailla (Milan: Adelphi, 1987), pp. 95-96. We might note that the depiction of love in this poem is opposite to that willing of the other's independence paraphrased by Arendt in the above-cited work: "there is no greater assertion of something or somebody than to love it, that is, to say: I will that you be- Amo: Volo ut sis" (p. 104).

31 Otto Rank, Truth and Reality, trans. Jessie T aft (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 61.

32 See Martin Heidegger's discussion in An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 29-33.

33 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche IV , p. 237.

34 Augustine, Confessions, VIII, x.

35 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals , p. 163.

36 See especially The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), trans. William Chatterton Coupland (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1893).

37 Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea. I, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 515-516.