Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, translated from the Italian by John Shepley (Minneapolis: U. oF Minnesota Press, 2001) (From "On Public Opinion": "The most obscure history is the history of the obvious. There is nothing more obvious than public opinion, a term that public opinion holds to be innocuous and that's come to comprise in itself huge areas of what can be said: The vast pastures of public opinion are the pride of civilization. And yet public opinion is a fearful thing, whites undergone tortuous, ridiculous vicissitudes until its triumph in the present. There was a time when philosophers used to start with facts, which have now fled among the unicorns. Public opinion remains: mistress of all regimes, shapeless, everywhere, and nowhere, its oversized presence is such as to allow only a negative theology. With the fall of divine rule and the debasement of the vicariate of metaphysics, public opinion has been left in the open as the last foundation stone t cover swarms of worms, some iguanas, and a few ancient serpents. How does one recognize it? Or rather, how does one recognize what is not public opinion? There is no map of opinions, and even if there were it would not be of any use. For public opinion is first of all a formal power, a virtuosity that grows endlessly and lacks any material. Its hoax is to accept any meaning, thereby preventing it from being recognized for whatever ideas it has to offer. Indiscriminate, perinde ac cadaver, public opinion swallow up thought and reproduces it in similar terms, only with a few slight modifications." Id. at 186, 186.).
Roberto Calasso, K, translated form the Italian by Geoffrey Brock (New York: Knopf, 2005).
Roberto Calasso, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, translated form the Italian by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1998).
Roberto Calasso, La Folie Baudelaire, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008, 2012) ("From "The Dream of the Brothel-Muse": "There is something incongruous. even hilarious, about the solemnity with which the dreamer approves his own metaphysics. But perhaps this is the crux of all Baudelaire. He could not substantiate his thought except in dreams, precisely because only dream admitted and prescribed the 'most monstrous paralogisms.' In the waking state, his thought could issue only sporadically, with sudden and circumscribed eruptions on the page. In this way, little by little, Baudelaire's oeuvre was composed." Id. at 129, 149.).
Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, translated form the Italian by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 2001) (From "Incipit paradia": "While he was writing The Birth of Tragedy, sketching out the shape of a civilization that had been radically renewed, Nietzsche was also preparing The Future of Our Schools, the most formidable attack ever launched on what is the foundation of the modern conception of culture: education. Nietzsche's premise was that the very institution that ought to represent the culture of the time in its most severe and exemplary form--the illustrious German high school--in fact bore witness to a 'growing barbarity in the duties assigned to culture.' Nietzsche saw only the ferocious determination of the state--and first and foremost the German state--to breed reliable employees. 'The factory rules,' he noted, summing up the century to come in just a few words. Whenever we claim that culture must serve some purpose, he goes on, then sovereignty passes from culture to utility: 'You only need to start thinking of culture as something useful and all too soon you'll be confusing what is useful with culture. Generalized culture turns into hatred against true culture.' Hence, precisely in its most enlightened and celebrated endeavor, its attempts to bring education to everybody, the modern world was actually guided by a profound aversion to culture." Id. at 51, 67-68.).
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks (New York: Knopf, 1993) ("How can Achilles, 'for just one girl!' turn down the seven girls of Lesbos, plus 'some even better ones,' together with a host of other gifts Agamemnon is offering to keep him sweet. Phoenix, in his tribal devotion, can't even conceive of the claim to uniqueness. But it is precisely to Achilles that the poem gives the speech that for the first time announces this discovery, this emotion that will put its stamp on history from that moment on and has survived intact to this very day: a foothold in the vast shipwreck of ideas, the only thing still self-evident to everybody, blasphemous and devout alike, in this age that no longer manages to be either blasphemous or devout. This is what Achilles says: 'Fat sheep and oxen you can steal; cooking pots and golden-maned horses you can buy; but once it has left the circle of his teeth, the life of a man [andros psyche] can be neither replaced, nor stolen, not bought.' Not only have these words never been confuted with the passing centuries, but they have gathered further intensity and urgency, as beliefs and principles withered away all around to leave them standing alone. Today, whenever somebody who doesn't belong to any creed refuses to kill, Achilles' words live on in him." Id. at 116-117. "Initiation involves a physiological metamorphosis: the circulating blood and thought patterns of the mind absorb a new substance, the flavor of a secret wisdom. That flavor is the flavor of totality: but, in the Spartan version, it is the flavor of the society as totality. Thus we pass from the old to the new regime." "Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn't be able to conceive of the idea if it weren't structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it--and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite." "That moment is Sparta. The Spartans were above all homoioi, 'equals,' insofar as they had all been initiated into the same group. But that group was the entire society, Sparta; the only place in Greece, and in all European history since, where the whole citizenry constituted an initiatory sect." Id. at 250-251.).
Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, translated from the Italian by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 1994) ("'Meanwhile Gauthier was finishing his speech, with these words: '. . . but there are no Americans in France.' ''Take a little tradesman from Rouen or Lyon, greedy and without imagination, and you will have an American!' 'Ah, how you grieve me!' cried Gauthier, sadly rising to leave, as it was striking one." Id, at 23-24.).
Roberto Calasso, Tiepolo Pink, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen (New York: Knopf, 2009).
