Person: Pellecchia, Paolo
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Item Nothing to Say but the Unsayable: How Locke’s Linguistic Functionalism Turned into Leopardi’s Analogical Language.(Comparative Literature, 2023) Pellecchia, PaoloThis article explores the so-far-uncharted filiation of Leopardi’s understanding of language from Locke’s linguistic theory outlined in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In following Kristeva’s belief that language theories are predicated upon theories of the subject and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the communicative power of the body, the article looks at the reverberations that Leopardi’s teoria del piacere (understood as an anthropological system) exerts on his theory of language and builds a neck-to-neck comparison with Locke’s linguistic functionalism. In underlining Locke’s important role for Leopardi’s theory of language, this work shows how the latter distances himself from the functionalism of An Essay by theorizing a language built on semantic vagueness and indefiniteness. This language is based on the epistemological conviction that ideas do not exist as immaterial products of the mind but rather are always incarnate in the physicality of language. In defining this kind of language as analogical, the article argues that for Leopardi the linguistic act takes the shape of a bodily gesture: language, then, is not just the concrete translation of a mental process, but the movement of an embodied mind. In this sense, rather than expressing the mathematical coincidence of signifier and signified of a langue des calculs, Leopardi’s language voices the leftovers of expression, the semantic excess that Locke’s functionalism generally considers to be an error of an unsuccessful communicative act.Item Under Pinocchio’s Skin: The Uncanny Woodenness of a Permanent Body.(Italian Studies, 2023) Pellecchia, PaoloCarlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio has undergone an extraordinary number of manipulations, showing the great malleability of a text whose protean capacity echoes that of its main character. I analyse Pinocchio from a psychoanalytical standpoint, considering the Unheimlich – uncanny – as a pivotal stylistic element of the story and exploring its function in Collodi’s critique of the Risorgimento’s prescriptive moral code. The uncanny pertains to a class of frightening experiences that lead back to what is known and has been removed by repression. In this light, Pinocchio emerges as a tale deprived of any morally successful teleology: instead of engendering a new bourgeois life, the transformation of the puppet into a ‘bambino perbene’ exposes the contradictory phenomenology of this metamorphosis, subtly announcing Pinocchio’s radical death. Pinocchio’s dead wooden body reveals the ineffectiveness of the moral-teleological project of the Risorgimento, which renounces its inability to restrain those unsettling forces that destabilise it from within.