Pellecchia, PaoloPellecchia, Paolo2025-12-042025-12-042024Pellecchia, P 2024, 'Boredom and Desire : When Locke Felt Uneasy and Leopardi Yawned', European Romantic Review, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 283-304. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2024.23448641050-9585unpaywall: 10.1080/10509585.2024.2344864https://hdl.handle.net/10641/6582Publisher Copyright: © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This article explores John Locke’s innovative reflections on desire and uneasiness, pleasure and pain, and investigates how Locke’s considerations affect Giacomo Leopardi and his theoretical work on the same categories. To justify this filiation, I emphasize Francesco Soave’s important translation of “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” as a mediating influence for Leopardi’s re-elaboration of these concepts. I firstly focus on the importance that desire and uneasiness acquire in Locke’s treatise and the relevance of these categories for eighteen-century hedonism. I then turn to Leopardi’s discussion of “teoria del piacere” and analyze how it dialogues with and diverges from Locke’s perspective. While Locke generally assigns precedence to uneasiness, Leopardi reclaims the prominence of desire through his specific understanding of noia. Rather than coinciding with an unpleasant discomfort to remove, Leopardi’s noia embodies the vibrating protension of desire toward a constitutionally unreachable infinite pleasure. By ascribing an a-dialectical character to noia, Leopardi subverts the stance shared by Locke, classic hedonism, and Romanticism with regard to desire and uneasiness, along with pleasure and pain. Indeed, Leopardi’s noia corresponds to a desire that is not sublated through the consummation brought about by either the delight of pleasure or the discomfort of pain.22280237enghttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Cultural StudiesLiterature and Literary TheoryYesyesjournal articleembargoed access10.1080/10509585.2024.2344864https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85195139368https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85195139368#tab=citedBy