Morto lo scrittore

Morto lo scrittore Umberto Eco. Ci mancherà il suo sguardo sul mondo. Aveva 84 anni. E' stato filosofo, semiologo e grande esperto della comunicazione. Non ha mai perso la voglia di osservare la politica.

A great loss to Italy, literature, philosophy, and the world. It's not often that I personally mourn the death of a public figure, but to the extent that I had an intellectual idol, it was him.

He was as brilliant in person as he was in print, but he was also friendly and even charming. He was not merely kind to his intellectual inferiors and his awestruck fans, he was patient and generous. And although his later novels never reached the heights of his first two, those two, Il Nome della Rosa and Il Pendolo di Foucault are two of the greatest ever written in the Italian language.

He was one of the few modern immortals and I am deeply saddened that he will write no more. Addio dottore.

Eco on the animal soul

Umberto Eco reviews an anthology of ancient works devoted to considering the ensoulment of the animals:

On the animal soul

Acording to the ancients, animals possessed rational knowledge. But they also had feelings. And, according to this theology, they can therefore go to Heaven.

Einaudi published a lovely anthology of ancient writings on “The Soul of the Animals” (at 85 euros it is an expensive book but it is a really nice one.) It is not only we of contemporary times who are preoccupied with our dog or decide to go on a vegan diet in order to avoid killing animated beings. The ancients already considered the problem of when an animal possessed reason. In his Historia animalium, Aristotle said that in many animals could be seen traces of the quality of soul, by which animals demonstrated gentleness and courage, timidity, fear, and slyness, and even something that bears some similarities to wisdom.

It is in a stoic form that an argument appears, unanimously attributed to Chrysippus of Soli, that was destined to be of great popularity. It exists in two versions, but we will cite the more notable, that of Sextus Empiricus, in which he recounted a dog that, upon arriving at the meeting point of three paths and recognizing with its sense of smell that the prey had not taken two of them, deduced that it must have gone the third way. He thus proved that the dog knew reason according to the principles of logic.

Another fundamental text is “de sollertia animalium” by Plutarch, in which it is admitted that animal rationality is less perfect than human reason, but also notes that diverse grades of perfection are also found amongst human beings (an elegant way of insinuating that we are beings who reason like the animals.). In another text, “Bruta animalia ratioe uti”, to those who objected that one could not attribute reason to beings that did not have an innate notion of the divine, Plutarch responds by recalling that Sisyphus, too, was an atheist. It is on that basis that he rejects a carnivorous diet, albeit with many exceptions,

We have a radical vegeterian thesis in the “De abstinentia” of Porphyry. For Porphyry, the animals express the ideal interior state and the fact that they don't understand us is no more embarrassing to them than the fact that we don't understand the language or the thought of the Indians or the Scythians.

It is too bad that the Einaudian account ends with Porphyry, although the volume has more than 500 pages as it is. It would have been interesting to have an anthology series in multiple volumes that contained the succeeding discussions, from the beautiful pages of Montaigne refuting Cartesian mechanics to the long and protracted polemics involving Leibniz, Locke, Cudworth, More, Shaftesbury, Cordemoy, Fontenelle, Bayle, Buffon, Rousseau, Condillac and others.

I don't know if all dogs go to Heaven or not. But frankly, it is very, very difficult to imagine a place that could be reasonably called Heaven, or be considered anything even remotely akin to a paradise, without them.

Eco on the disappearance of the book

Umberto Eco considered a failed prophecy of Marshall McLuhan in light of recent developments in e-publishing in an article published on October 30, 2013 in L'Espresso.

Who is afraid of the paper tiger?

At the start of the Seventies, Marshall McLuhan announced some profound changes in our ways of thinking and communication. One of his intuitions was that we were entering into a global village, and in the universe of the Internet we have certainly seen the verification of his vision. However, after analyzing the influence of the printing press on the evolution of the culture and our individual sensibilities in The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan announced, in Understanding Media and other works, the sunset of alphabetic linearity and the newly arisen dominance of images. To hypersimplify this, he anticipated that the masses “will no longer read anymore, they will watch TV, (or the strobing lights of the disco).”

McLuhan died in 1980, just as we were entering the daily world of the personal computer. (There appeared models that were more or less toys and experimental objects at the end of the Seventies, but the mass market began in 1981 with the IBM PC.) If McLuhan had lived a few more years, he would have had to admit that even in a world apparently dominated by images, the personal computer was establishing a new alphabetical civilization. It may be true that the preschoolers of today use iPads, but all the information we receive from the Internet, email, and SMS are based on our knowledge of the alphabet. Computers perfect the situation imagined in Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the archdeacon Frollo, indicating first a book, and then the cathedral seen from the window, rich with images and other visual symbols, says: “this will kill that”. With all its multimedia links, the computer certainly possesses the characteristics of being the instrument of the global village, and it has the capacity to revive again the “that” of the Gothic cathedral, but it still fundamentally rests upon neo-gutenbergian principles.

To return to the alphabet, the invention of the ebook has provided the possibility to read alphabetic texts on screens instead of paper. And on these screens one can expect to read yet another series of auguries predicting the disappearance of the book and of the newspaper, (in part suggested by some declines in sales.) One of the favorite sports of every unimaginative journalist over the years is to ask the men of letters how they see the coming demise of the world of print. It is not enough to argue that the book remains of fundamental importance to the transmission and conservation of information, or that we have scientific proof that books printed 500 years ago have survived wonderfully while we cannot scientifically demonstrate that the magnetized storage systems presently in use can survive for more than ten years. (Nor can we verify this, since computers today cannot read a floppy disk from the Eighties.)

Now, however, there are some disconcerting occurrences that have caught the attention of journalists, although we have not yet grasped their significance and their eventual consequences. In August, Jeff Bezos of Amazon bought the Washington Post, and while announcing the decline of the daily newspaper, Warren Buffet recently acquired some 63 local newpapers. As Federico Rampini observed in Repubblica the other day, Buffet is a giant of the Old Economy and he is not an innovator, but he has a rare acuity for discerning investment opportunities. And I suspect that other sharks of Silicon Valley are also moving against the newspapers.

Rampini asked if the final blow will not be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg purchasing the New York Times. Even if this doesn't happen, it is clear that the digital world is overtaking print. What about commercial calculations, political speculations, and the desire to preserve the press as a democratic watchdog? I don't feel that I have a sufficient grasp on the situation to interpret these various facts correctly. However, I think it is interesting to consider the possibility of the reversal of another famous prophecy. Perhaps Mao had it wrong and one must take the paper tiger seriously.

Umberto Eco on the death of William Weaver

Umberto Eco eulogized his translator and friend, William Weaver, in an article that was published on 3 December, 2013 in L'Espresso.

Ciao, Bill

After ninety years, the last ten of them reduced to a quasi-vegetable state, William Weaver is no more. He was a great translator, and one could say that it was primarily through his merits that our contemporary literature is known and loved in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Born in Virginia, a conscientious objector but unable to ignore the grand conflict that was underway, he enlisted in the Second World War as an ambulance driver. He served with the English forces throughout the entire Italian campaign, facing danger without ever holding a rifle in his hands. From Naples to Rome, he made friends with many Italian writers of the era, and from then on, he never left our country.

Thus it was that he came to translate Pirandello (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and The Late Mattia Pascal), Zeno's Conscience by Svevo, That Awful Mess and Acquainted with Grief by Gadda, two-thirds of Calvino's works, The Monkey's Wrench and If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi, The Sunday Woman by Fruttero and Lucentini, History and Aracoeli by Elsa Morante, Incubus by Berto, A Violent Life by Pasolini, as well as Cassola, Calasso, De Carlo, Malerba, La Capria, Parise, Soldati, Alba de Cespedes, Festa Campanile. He also translated A Man and Inshallah by Oriana Fallaci.

In addition, from 1981 to 2003 he translated four of my novels and many of my essays. For twenty intense years, it was a splendid collaboration, in which we could spend afternoons, or exchange two or three letters, on a single word. If the culture has lost a great writer, I have lost a friend. Weaver was a great translator, not only because he sought to accurately render the fluidity, the rhythm, the lexical richness, and the sound of the text. (From my perspective, he sometimes improved upon my original.) He was a great translator because he also knew that to translate the meaning, one must dare to reject the literal translation in order to conserve the effect or the deeper sense of the text. For reasons of space, I am limited to relating one amusing memory, of a time in which we tore the text apart in order to render a simple play on words, a wordplay that was already difficult for Italian readers.

Bill was translating my Foucault's Pendulum. He arrived at a point in which two protagonists, obsessed with the world of the occult, found a mysterious symbol tied to the transmission system in automobiles. To demonstrate, in an ironic manner, their propensity to think that every aspect of the world, every word written or spoken, does not have the sense it appears, an allusion to the axle of the Sephirot of the Kabbalah was made.

For the English translator this allusion presented difficulties from the start, because in English there is a difference between a “tree” (vegetable and cabalistic), and the axle (automobile), but after foraging through the dictionary, Weaver discovered that the expression “axle-tree” was legitimate. Nevertheless, he found himself in a predicament when the two characters then engaged in a certain word play that involved the gnostic pneumatics, (the spirits opposite the somatics, that are immaterial), and the pneumatics of a car. It was a joke, but the protagonists were simply making jokes.

However, in English, the rubber upon which an automobile's wheels roll are not “pneumatics”, but rather, “tires”. What to do? Weaver, as he recounts in his translation diary, Pendulum Diary, was struck by a brilliant notion when he remembered the name of a celebrated brand of tires: Firestone. It occurred to him that one might draw an association between that name and the English expression “philosopher's stone” of alchemic lore. The solution was found and the English text therefore describes how the sightless occultists did not succeed in finding the true connection between the philosopher's stone and Firestone.

As one can see, he turned the gag into something different than the original. The translator must render the deeper sense of the text, one that is not “the protagonists speak of tires”, but rather, “the protagonists are students who play foolishly with the universal knowledge”.

As the Prince of Laughter once said, translators are born. And Bill was a born translator.

This is not only an affectionate tribute to a great translator, but wonderful advice that I hope everyone who is translating one of my books into another language will keep in mind. It is always il senso profondo del testo that comes first, not il testo literale.

Speaking of translations, I've translated eleven or twelve of Eco's online articles that aren't otherwise available in English. If you are a fan of his, you can find them here.

Umberto Eco on the death of the dream of Europe

I like and admire Umberto Eco for many reasons, but I firmly believe that the great humanist is absolutely on the wrong side of history with regards to the great post-WWII neo-fascist enterprise of the European Union.  And so, it is very satisfying indeed to read of the increasing despair of the bien-pensant intellectuals, and to hear the cri-de-coeur of an elite that is increasingly conscious of its failure concerning an endeavor where, for one brief shining moment around the turn of the millenium, it believed it had succeeded.

A European Asterix

These are hard times for those who believe in the European Union: from Cameron, who calls his compatriots to decide if they still want it (or if they never had the will), from Berlusconi who one day declares himself a Europeist but the next, if he doesn't make a visceral connection to the old Fascists, says returning to the lira would be better, to the Lega Nord and its hyperprovincialism. In summary, one can say that – at a distance of more than fifty years – the bones of the founding fathers of Europe United are turning in their graves.

Nevertheless everyone should know that in the course of the Second World War 41 million Europeans died, (I say only Europeans, not including the Americans and the Asians), massacred one after the other, and afterwards, saving the tragic Balkan episode, Europe has known 68 years of peace.  If one recounts to the young, (who maybe would appreciate it more if they spent a year working in another country on the continent with the Erasmus program, and perhaps at the end of this experience would find a twin spirit with those who speak another language than their own), that the French might today defend the Maginot line to resist the Germans, that the Italians would want to expand their borders to incorporate Greece, that Belgium could be invaded, that English airplanes could bombard Milan, these youth would believe we were inventing a science fiction novel. It is only the adults who understand that instead of crossing borders without passports, their fathers and their grandfathers vacationed with rifles in hand.

But is it really true that the idea of Europe is unsuccessful in attracting the Europeans? Bernard-Henri Lévy recently released a passionate manifesto in defense of a European identity. “Europe or Chaos” begins with a disturbing threat. “Europe is not in crisis, it is dying. Not Europe as in the territory, naturally. But Europe, the Idea. The Europe that is a dream and a project.” The manifesto was signed by António Lobo Antunes, Vassilis Alexakis, Juan Luis Cebrián, Fernando Savater, Peter Schneider, Hans Christoph Buch, Julia Kristeva, Claudio Magris, Gÿorgy Konrád and Salman Rushdie (who is not European but has found in Europe his primary refuge from the start of his persecution. I also signed it with some other co-signers, a few days ago, when I was at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris for a little debate. One of the themes that quickly emerged, one that I found amply consequential, is that there exists a consciousness of a European identity. It occurred to me to cite the pages of Remembrance of Things Past by Proust when, in Paris during the time of the bombardment by the German Zeppelins, the intellectuals continue to speak and to write of Goethe or of Schiller as an integrated part of their culture.

But this sense of a European identity, certainly very strong among the elite intellectuals, is it also among the common people? It occurred to me to reflect on the fact that even today, in every European country, they celebrate (in school and in their public festivals), real heroes, who are all men who have valorously slain other Europeans, from the part of that Arminius who exterminated the legions of Varo, to Joan of Arc, the Cid, (because the Muslims against whom he fought were of the European centuries), to various Italian and Hungarian heroes of the Risogimento, who fell against the Austrian enemy. Is there no European hero of whom we can speak? Did none ever exist? What about Byron and Santorre di Santarosa, who advanced and fought for the cause of Greek liberty, to say nothing of the not-insignificant numbers of little Schindlers, who saved the lives of thousands of Jews without concern for what nation they belonged to. What about the non-martial heroes, such as De Gasperi, Monnet, Schuman, Adenuauer, Spinelli? And could not searching into the recesses of history expose others, of whom we could speak to the children, (and to the adults)? Is it truly possible that we cannot find a European Asterix of whom we can speak about the Europe of tomorrow?

The fall of the fraud-imposed European Union will be difficult and painful for many, just as the collapse of its force-imposed American counterpart will cause considerable chaos and suffering.  But in both cases, the pain will be a relatively small price to pay, because the alternative is the material imposition of Orwell's metaphorical boot-on-the-human-face forever. 

The answer to his question is no.  There can never be a European Asterix.  Asterix is a hero to millions of Europeans because he represents the independent human spirit resisting the force of Empire.  And as such, the new Asterixes of the future will be those who courageously resisted the bureaucratic stormtroopers of the failing Union, not those who marched in their ranks.  The EU is in the imperial tradition of Augustus, Napoleon, and Hitler, and as such, it can never command the loyalty of an Asterix.

The intellectual elite always loves Empire.  They are its parasites, its remoras.  And how they hate that it is so often those men who stand against them and their will to rule that are loved and lionized by generation after generation of the common people.

Umberto Eco on the ever-ending world

Where will we go in the end?

First little thought. We will not speak of the curse of the Mayans, but of certain newspapers, that are always citing Cassandra and day after day announce an ever-darker tomorrow, where the oceans overflow, the seasons end, and, of more immediate concern, the Default. For example, after listening to his parents inform him about the destiny of the world, a ten year-old son of my friends began to cry and asked: “But is there really nothing good in my future?”

To console him, I could cite many extremely dolorous predictions concerning the years to come, as were customarily made throughout the past centuries. Here is an excerpt from Vincenzo di Beauvais in the 13th century: “After the death of the Antichrist... the final judgment will be preceded by many signs that were indicated by the Evangelist.... In the first day the sea will rise forty cubits over the mountains and its surface will rise like a wall. On the second day, it will submerge many who will go unseen. On the third day, the marine monsters appearing on the surface of the sea will roar at the heavens. On the fourth day, the sea and all the waters will catch fire. On the fifth day the grass and the trees will emit a dew of blood. On the sxith day, buildings will collapse. On the seventh day, the stones will crash against each other. On the eighth day, the entire earth will shake. On the ninth day, the earth will be levelled. On the tenth day, the men will come out of their caves and will wander like madmen unable to speak. On the eleventh day, the bones of the dead will rise. On the twelfth day, the stars will fall. On the thirteenth day, the survivors still living will die to rise again with the dead. On the fourteenth day, the heavens and the earth will burn. On the fifteenth day, there will be a new heaven and a new earth and all will rise again.” As you can see, we already have no lack of climactic alterations and tsunamis to threaten us.

Leaping over six centuries of more fatal prophesies, here is Balzac in 1836: “The modern industry, that produces for the masses, is destroying the creations of the antique arts, those works that possessed an individual hallmark for the consumer and the artisan alike. Today we have “products”, we no longer have “works””. Among these “products” that Balzac warned would be deprived of every artistic value, Leopardi was writing The Flower of the Desert in that same year, Manzoni had in hand the second draft of The Betrothed, three years later Chopin composed Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, twenty years later Flaubert published Madame Bovary, and there was still about thirty years before the appearance of the Impressionists and more than forty prior to the publication of The Brothers Karamazov. As you see, in the past they were also overly afraid of the future.

A second thought. Perhaps, if we reconsider, “evil times today” really are here, for as tradition has it, one of the typical signs the end of times is at hand is the fact that the world has gone to ruin. Consider that at one time the rich lived in the center of Rome in luxurious palaces and the poor on the desolate peripheries; today it seems the palaces that face the Colosseum are like prostitutes, with toilets on the balcony that you can enter for four bucks. I imagine the corrupt politicians go to live outside the imperial walls.

Yesterday the poor travelled in trains and only the rich were permitted airplanes; today the airlines cost forty cash, (those with the best price resemble cattle carriers in a time of war), while the trains become ever more expensive and luxurious, with bars reserved only for the hegemonic classes. At one time, the rich went to Riccione, and in the worst case, to Rimini, while in the islands of the Indian Ocean there lived a miserable population as well as those deported there for life imprisonment. Today, it is only politicians of rank who go to the Maldives, and in Rimini, on the other hand, you will find mostly lower-class Russians barely removed from the slavery of the soil.

Where will we go in the end?

I'm more than a bit dubious about the bit concerning the modern palaces, but otherwise it was an unusually easy column to translate. I'm also not sure about the reference to the slavery at the end, as the most literal translation would be "the slavery of the the fleshy spore-bearing inner mass of fungi."

Umberto Eco on Italy's new dictator

I was extremely curious to know how Umberto Eco would react to Italy's peaceful departure from democracy, given his left-wing ideology as well as his childhood experience with Fascism and the post-WWII ideological battles. He did not disappoint as his take on it is fascinating, not only in his characteristic use of an apt literary analogy, but in the way that he appears to almost completely ignore the salient point. The key word there being "almost", as if one considers the specifics of the analogy, one can see that his view of the matter may not be quite as favorable as it seems on the surface.

But we asked it of him

There is no relationship between the tall and elegant professor Monti and a ball of tallow, and yet I see one between his vicissitudes and the short story of the same name by Maupassant. Everyone, I hope, is familiar with the story: during the Franco-Prussian war traveled a carriage that, among its various passengers, carried a prostitute, provocative and curvacious. Accepted ungraciously by her travel companions only because she offered to everyone the provisions she had with her in a basket, she became responsible for the halting of the carriage on the part of a Prussian official, who threatened to refuse to permit anyone to depart if the girl did not concede her favors to him.

Although she had already granted them to many, the patriotic "escort" refused to let her offer her services to the hated enemy. The carriage therefore remained halted, until little by little, the travelers began to remonstrate with Ball of Tallow for harming everyone over one foolish little point. Through various arguments and moral blackmail, they pushed her to concede. Reluctantly, and for the good of the community, she accepted. The illicit goods consumed, the carriage departed, but at that point the travelers began to regard the wretched girl with contempt because she was a prostitute, even though she had pulled their chestnuts from the fire.

It seems to me that the same thing is happening to Monti. Everyone has asked him to remove the chestnuts from the fire, to take those severe measures that otherwise they have not known or wanted to take even at the risk of unpopularity. Now that he has done it, everyone has begun to look at him negatively. Maupassant understood these things.

Now, I would first argue that it is far, far too soon to argue that the unelected, IMF-installed Professor Monti has pulled anyone's chestnuts from the fire, except perhaps the balance sheets of a few international banks. And while some degree of fiscal responsibility is in order, it wasn't the Italian people who asked for him because they have never voted for him. For anything. But the analogy is a brilliant one regardless, because Monti most certainly is a prostitute and the nation of Italy is being occupied, in a very real, albeit non-military, sense, by the Franco-Prussians.

If for some reason you're reading the original article at La Repubblica, please note that this particular Bustina comes in two parts. I skipped the first one, which concerned poetry and a Spaziani novel, and was of no interest to me.

Umberto Eco on canine intelligence

But do dogs speak or not?

A lady, who went mushroom-gathering with a friend, was stung by a wasp and went into anaphylactic shock. She stopped breathing and her friend telephoned the paramedics, but the arrival of the paramedics was delayed because the two women were in a very thick forest and it was hard to find them. However, Queen, the friend's dog, (but I imagine it must have been a female dog)1, instead of staying there licking the hand of the stricken as instinct would have commanded, ran through the forest, found the paramedics, and guided them to the right place.

As Danilo Mainardi commented in the Corriere Della Sera last August 21st, we are not seeing a simple instinctive behavior here, we are seeing an “intelligent” behavior in which the dog does not respond to the command of the instinct, (to stay near the injured), but elaborates “a complex plan which also comprehends the involvement of other individuals”.

The case, and the comments by Mainardi, recall to mind the vast literature of antiquity on the capacity for reason on the part of dogs. One of the texts that had great influence in the past is the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, who is occupied with the voices of fishes and birds, but also delved amply into canine intelligence; he cites a dog that recognized in the crowd the killer of his master, and by snapping and snarling at him, forced him to confess his crime. He also relates the story of the dog of a man condemned to death that howled mournfully over him, and when a spectator gave the dog some food, tried to put it in the mouth of the dead man. When the body was finally thrown in the Tiber, the dog jumped in and swam in an attempt to rescue its master.

But the more interesting philosophical discussion was already developed in three centuries of debate between Stoics, Academics, and Epicureans. Within the circuit of the Stoic discussions appears an argument attributed to Chrysippus of Soli, that was actually reprised and popularized about five centuries later by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus judged that the dog had the capacity for logical reason, showing how a dog that arrived at an intersection of three paths, and recognized by the odor that the prey had not taken two of the paths, immediately ran down the third without needing to sniff it. In effect, the dog had shown this mode of reason: “The prey has taken this way or that, or the other, now it is not this way or that, and therefore it is the other.” That would be an example of a reasoning called the Fifth Indemonstrable.

Sextus further recorded that a dog possessed a “logos” because it knew to remove the slivers and clean the paws, hold the injured limb immobile, and distinguish the herbs that possessed the ability to ease its suffering. As to an animal language, it is true that we don't comprehend the voices of the animals, but we also don't comprehend the voices of the barbarians even though we know they speak. And dogs certainly emit diverse vocalizations in diverse situations.

We can continue by citing the De Sollertia Animalium of Plutarch, where he said that while it is certain the rationality of animals is imperfect with respect to that of Man, this difference also applies between human beings. In another dialogue, Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti, to one who forcefully objected to attributing reason to beings that possessed no innate notion of the divine, Plutarch responded by recalling that there are also atheists among human beings.

In the On the Nature of the Animals of Claudio Eliano, other arguments are already seen; he cites dogs that are in love with human beings. In the De Abstinentia of Porfirio, the arguments in favor of the intelligence of animals serve to sustain a vegetarian thesis. All of these themes have been variously reprised in the modern era and until our days.

But let us stop here: if we cannot succeed in successfully defining the canine intelligence, we must be more sensible about this mystery. If it isn't enough to cause us to become vegetarians, at least the less intelligent dog owners among us will not abandon their dogs on the highway.

As always with these translations, please recall that I am sub-fluent in Italian, particularly Eco's notoriously complex brand of it. As an aside, I find it interesting to contemplate how reason has been turned on its head since Plutarch's day. From assuming that an innate sense of the divine is required for a being to possess reason, there are now individuals such as Sam Harris who assume that an innate sense of the divine somehow equates to evidence of a lack of reason. I trust that by the time it ends, the ongoing Memorial Debate will suffice to demonstrate the false nature of the Harrisian assumption.

As for the matter of canine intelligence, having owned a Viszla for 15 years, I can testify that while dogs do possess the capacity for reason, they don't have a lot of it. The larger part of it appears to go towards rationalizing why they should be able to steal food from places they know perfectly well is not permitted. But despite these limitations, it goes without saying that anyone who intentionally abandons a dog should be excommunicated, flayed, rolled in salt, and burned.

If human affections were only half as reliable as the canine, the world would be a much better place.

(1) this clarification stems from the use of grammatical gender in Italian. "Il cane" is the generic term and suggests "the male dog", but Eco imagines that the name Queen tends to indicate "la cagna", or "the bitch".

Umberto Eco on literal readers

Credulity and identification

In the preceding “Bustina di Minerva” I wrote that many readers find it difficult to ascertain, in a novel, the reality of the fiction, and they tend to attribute to the author the passions and the thoughts of his characters. To confirm this, I found a site on the internet that records the thoughts of various authors, and under "the quotes of Umberto Eco” I discovered this: “The Italian is unfaithful, a liar, vile, treacherous, he is is more comfortable with the dagger than with the sword, better with poison than with medicine, slippery in negotiation, and coherent only in that he changes his flag with every wind." It's not that there isn't something of the truth in all this, but it appears as if it is written by a foreign author. In my novel, The Cemetery of Prague, this sentence is written by a gentleman who in the preceding pages has manifested a racist compulsion making use of all the most hoary old cliches. From now on, I must be sure to never place banal characters in fictional scenes, otherwise one day they will attribute to me philosophies such as “one has but one mother”.

Now I read the last “Blown Glass” of Eugenio Scalfari, which reprises my previous “Bustina” and raises a new problem. Scalfari agrees with the fact that there are people who confuse the fictional narrative for reality, but retains, (and rightly retains that I retained), that the fictional narrative can be truer than the truth in order to inspire identifications and perceptions of historical phenomenons, to create new modes of thought, etc. And we must consider if one cannot be in accord with this opinion.

It is not only that the fictional narrative also confirms aesthetic conditions: a reader can very well know that Madame Bovary never existed and yet enjoy the style with which Flaubert constructs his character. But here the aesthetic dimension can be seen to be in opposition to the “aletic” dimension, (that which has to do with the notion of the truth shared with logic, the sciences, or the judges that make courtroom decisions about the veracity of testimony declaring how a certain thing took place.) They are two diverse dimensions; there are problems if a judge makes his decision based on how aesthetically a defendant lies to him. I was occupied with the aletic dimension. It is for the most part true that my reflections were born of an internal discourse on falsehood and the lie. Is it false to say that a Vanna Marchi lotion will regrow hair? It is false. Is it false to say that Don Abbondio met two bravos?(1) From the aletic point of view, yes, but the narrator does not want to tell us how much of the story is true or false, he pretends it is true and asks us to play along. He asks us, as Coleridge recommended, “to suspend the disbelief”.

Scalfari cites Werther(2), and we know how many romantic young men and women identifying with the protagonist committed suicide. Did they perhaps believe that the story was true? Not necessarily, just as we know that Emma Bovary never existed and yet we are moved to tears on her behalf. One recognizes a fiction as fictional, even as we immerse ourselves in the depths of a character.

It is that we intuit that even if Madame Bovary never existed, there exist many women like her, and it is perhaps as if she is also us to some extent and from her a lesson can be derived of life in general and of our own selves. The ancient Greeks believed the things that befell Oedipus were true and reflected his fate. Freud knew very well that Oedipus never existed, but read those events as a profound lesson on how the aspects of the unconscious operated.

What happens instead to the readers of whom I speak, those who don't absolutely distinguish between fiction and reality? Their situation does not have aesthetic validity. To the extent they are inclined to take the story so seriously that they never ask if it is told well or poorly, they are not looking for instruction and they do not identify with the characters. They simply manifest that which I will define as a fictional deficit; they are incapable of suspending their disbelief. Since there are more of these readers than we think, it is worth the trouble to consider them because we know that all the questions of morals and aesthetics will elude them.

(1) The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni
(2) This must mean The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe rather than the opera entitled Werther since the opera premiered 118 years after the book was published and well after the wave of the suicides it inspired.

Umberto Eco on Stephen Hawking

I was thinking about addressing Stephen Hawking's absurd new book, but I couldn't quite bring myself to bother even picking it up, let alone reading it. Fortunately, Umberto Eco was willing to do the dirty work for us:

Philosophy is not Star Trek

In “The Republic” of last April 6th, there appeared a preview of the book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, introduced with a subtitle that more or less reprised a passage from the text: “Philosophy is dead, only physics can explain the cosmos”. The death of philosophy has been announced on various occasions and therefore the announcement made little impression, but it seemed to me it must be balderdash to have claimed that a genius like Hawking would say such a thing. To be sure that “The Republic” had not erroneously summarized the book, I went and bought it, and the reading confirmed my suspicions.

The book appears to have been written by two hands, although in the case of Hawking the expression is sadly metaphorical because, as we know, his limbs do not respond to the commands of his exceptional brain. However, the book is fundamentally a work of the second author, whose qualifications are described on the cover as having written some episodes of “Star Trek”. In the book, one can see the beautiful illustrations that appear to be conceived for a children's encyclopedia from a bygone time; they are colorful and engaging, but do not actually explain anything about the complex physical, mathematical, and cosmological theorems they are supposed to illustrate. Perhaps it is not prudent to trust one's destiny to the philosophy of individuals with rabbit ears.(1)

The work begins with the fixed affirmation that philosophy no longer has anything to say and only physics can explain:

1)How we can comprehend the world in which we find ourselves.
2)The nature of reality.
3)If the universe had need of a creator.
4)Why there is something instead of nothing.
5)Why we exist.
6)Why this particular set of laws exists instead of some other.

As you see these are typical philosophical questions, but it must be admitted that the book demonstrates how physics can, in some ways, serve to answer the last four, which appear to be the most philosophical of all.

The problem is that in order to attempt to answer the last four questions, it is necessary to have answered the first two. It is those questions which, in a large way, are what one requires in order to say that something is real and if we know the real world as it is. Perhaps you will recall from your philosophical studies at school that we understand by attribute what the intellect perceives of a substance,(2) it is something outside of ourselves. (Woody Allen adds: and if so, why are they making all that noise?) Either we are Berkeleyans(3) or, as Putnam said, brains in a vat.

Well then, the fundamental answers that this book puts forward are exquisitely philosophic and without these philosophical answers not even the physicist could say “because he knows” and “what he knows”. In fact, the authors speak of “a realism dependent on the models”, that is, they assume that “other concepts of reality independent of description and theory do not exist”. Therefore “other theories can satisfactorily describe the same phenomenon by means of different conceptual structures” and all that we can perceive, we know, and we say of reality depends on the interaction between our models and that thing which is outside but that we know only due to our perceptive organs and our brain.

The more suspicious among the readers will have already recognized a Kantian phantasm, but it is clear the two authors are proposing that which in philosophy is called “Holisticism” and by others “internal realism”. As you see, it is not a treatise of physical discoveries, but of philosophical assumptions, that stand to sustain and legitimize the research of the physicist – those which, when he is a good physicist, can only address the problem of the philosophical foundations of his own methods. We already knew, we were already familiar with these extraordinary revelations, (evidently due to Mlodinow and to the company of Star Trek), for “in antiquity there was an instinct to attribute the violent actions of nature to an Olympus of displeased or malevolent gods”. By gosh, and then, by golly.(4)

(1) "Orecchie da leprotto". Literally, "the ears of the hare". I'm not familiar with this phrase, which could mean anything from implying that the two men are asses (think Pinocchio) to a leafy green vegetable found in salads. Or it may simply be referring to Mlodinow's background in television. Seeing as it's Eco, one hesitates to guess. But one thing is certain; it's not a compliment.
(2) I think this refers to Spinoza's philosophy of mind. Some school. But do they know how to put condoms on bananas?
(3) Philosopher George Berkeley, who argued against rational materialism and considered the idea of “matter” to be unjustified and self-contradictory.
(4) "Perdinci e poi perbacco". It's an Italian expression that doesn't necessarily translate well, but indicates a lack of surprise. The sense of dismissive sarcasm should be readily apparent.

As my Italian is better described as "conversational" rather than "fluent", don't put too much confidence in my translation. The four italicized notes are mine and therefore may be incorrect. Regardless, it should be clear that Eco is describing a material example of how, once more, science has climbed to the summit of another intellectual mountain, only to find the philosophers already there.

Umberto Eco on migrations

This essay, entitled "Migrazioni", was published in La Bustina Di Minerva in 1990

Last Tuesday, while all the newspapers were dedicating numerous articles to the tense events in Florence, there appeared in La Repubblica a cartoon by Bucchi: it showed two silhouettes, an enormous Africa looming over a miniscule Italy; next to it was a Florence that was represented only by a small dot. The caption was: “Where do we want more police?” Meanwhile, the Corriere della Sera summed up the story of the climactic changes on our planet over the last six thousand years. From this review it emerged that the fertility or the aridity of a continent inspired vast migrations that changed the face of the planet and created the civilizations that today we know, experience directly or study through history.

Today, with regards to the so-called problems of the “foreigners” (a gracious euphemism that, as has already been noted, must also include the Swiss and the tourists from Texas), an issue that is of interest to all of the nations of Europe, we continue to reason as if we find ourself facing a phenomenon of immigration. One has immigration when some hundreds of thousands of citizens of one overpopulated country want to go to live in another country, (for example, the Italians in Australia). And it is natural that the hosting country must regulate the flow of immigration according to its ability to incorporate them, which is why it has the right to arrest or expel those immigrants that prove criminal, just as it has to arrest its own criminal citizens who rob the rich tourists carrying their precious valuables.

But today, in Europe, we do not find ourselves facing a phenomenon of immigration. We find ourselves facing a phenomenon of migration. To be sure, it does not have the violent and sweeping aspect of the Germanic invasions in Italy, France and Spain, it does not have the virulence of the Arab expansions following the Hegira, nor the slowness of the imprecise flows that carried the dark peoples from Asia to Polynesia and perhaps to America. But it is another chapter in the story of the planet that has seen civilizations form and dissolve on the waves of the great migratory flows, first from the West to the East (but we know very little about that), after from the East to the West beginning with the millennial movement of the surge from the Indus to the Pillars of Hercules, (the straights of Gibraltar), and afterwards in the fourth century from the Pillars of Hercules to California and Tierra del Fuego, (Argentina and Patagonia).

Now the migration, unnoticed because it comes in the guise of an airplane trip and a stop at the immigration office at the police headquarters, or perhaps by a clandestine boat, comes to the North from an arid and hungry South. It feels like an immigration, but it is a migration, a historic event of incalcuable scope. They do not travel in such a horde that the grass will no longer grow where their horses have trampled, but in discrete clusters that attract little notice, nevertheless, the process will not take centuries or millenia but decades. And like all the great migrations, it will finally result in a rearrangement of the ethnicity of the land of their destination, an inexorable change of costumes, an unarrestable hybridization that noticeably mutates the color of the skin, the hair and the eyes of the population, as even a small number of Normans left behind their blond hair and blue eyes in Sicily.

The great migrations, at least in historic periods, were feared: at first they tried to avoid them, the Roman emperors erected one rampart here and another one there, they sent the legions ahead to defeat the advancing intruders, after they came to bargain and discipline the first settlements, therefore offering Roman citizenship to all the subjects of the Empire, but in the end, the ruin of the Romans formed the so-called romano-barbarian kingdoms that were the origins of our European countries, of the languages that we jealously speak today, of our political and social institutions. When on the Lombardian highway, we find places that we call, in Italian fashion names like Usmate or Biandrate, we have forgotten that they were descendants of the Longobards. On the other hand, from where do we get those Etruscan Smiles we find so often in central Italy?

The great migrations cannot be stopped. We simply must prepare ourselves to live in a new season of Afro-European culture.

Umberto Eco comes to Chesterton

Umberto Eco shows himself to be a moralist in spite of himself:

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest....

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Eco, a non-Christian but a great humanist in the best sense of the term, herein expresses the essence of Voltaire's point regarding the fundamental necessity of religion. Human beings are not capable of maintaining a spiritual vaccuum and they will fill that void with faith in something. In some cases, they will fill it with something harmless, in others, something silly, in still others, something actively evil.

I see Eco's article as tangentially related to yesterday's discussion, which demonstrated again how decent atheists and agnostics raised in a Christian culture parasitically and irrationally latch onto the greater part of the morality they reject as a whole, causing them to react in horror as their fellow disbelievers not privy or more resistant to such moral indoctrination behave rationally in the manner exhorted by Nietzsche and accepted with sardonic resignation by the existentialists.

The essential point that continues to evade most of these decent disbelievers is that regardless of the ethical structure he erects to rationalize his subscription to traditional morals imposed on his consciousness by society, he has no logic beyond simple utilitarianism to offer anyone else. His definition of good and evil - assuming he even accepts such things - is his alone. He can say to the rapist "what you do is evil", but he has no effective response when the certainly rapist says to him "what I do is good, because I define good as that which pleases me" or " A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength" nor does he have a legitimate grounds for preventing or punishing the rapist.

Even the ethical arguments based on utilitarianism can fail here. In a demographically declining West, the rapist can quite reasonably argue that he is committing an act for the good of society, even for the good of humanity, in forcing himself on a woman who intends to remain childless. Indeed, an honest devotee of "the greater good" would have to at least consider supporting a policy of forcibly impregnating the most intelligent women, accompanied, of course, with a revivial of the historical eugenicism aimed at sterilizing the least intelligent.

This is, of course, abhorrent to the Christian morality, which Nietzsche rightly viewed as a defender of the weak. But on what grounds does a utilitarian object?

There is no dearth of philosophical systems of ethics, and they are all useless because they make no logical claim on those who do not voluntarily accept it. This is why the atheist, the agnostic and the pagan so readily resort to force as a substitute for ethics, because their arguments are toothless. To be fair, one must admit there is no shortage of Christians who do the same in their confusion of government-mandated legality with Biblically-mandated morality.

Eco quotes another lapsed Catholic, Joyce: ""What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" I would add: what profits it an individual to forsake a morality which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical, incoherent and inapplicable to others?

(In case it is not readily apparent, I did not translate this for The Telegraph.)

Umberto Eco on Jules Verne

Umberto Eco writes of the great science-fiction author on the centenary of his death in an article that was published on 11 April, 2005, in L'Espresso:

VOYAGE TO THE CENTER OF JULES VERNE

When we were boys, we were divided into two groups: those that held to Salgari [Italian author Emilio Salgari] and those that held to Verne. I quickly confess that at that time I held for Salgari, and now History compels me to revisit my opinions of that time. Salgari, retold, cited from memory, loved for all the colors it gave one’s infancy, no longer seduces new generations or – to tell the truth – the elders either. When they reread him in search of a little ironic nostalgia, the reading simply makes them tired, and too many of those mangroves and wild pigs come to be an annoyance.

Instead, in 2005 we are celebrating the centenary of the death of Jules Verne, and not only in France are there daily and weekly conventions dedicated to him, searching to demonstrate the many ways that his fantasies anticipated reality. A look at the editorial catalogs in our country suggest to me that Verne was republished far more often than Salgari, to say nothing of France, where there exists an absolute industry of Vernian antiquities. The old hardbound Hetzel editions are certainly very beautiful. (In Paris, on the Left Bank alone, there are at least two stores possessing these splended volumes laid out in red and gold, offered at a prohibitive price.)

For all the merits that our Salgari must be remembered, the father of Sandokan did not have a great sense of humor, (not unlike the rest of his characters, with the exception of Yanez), while the romances of Verne were full of humor. It is enough to remember those splendid pages of “Michele Strogoff” where, after the battle of Kolyvan, the reporter from the Daily Telegraph, Harry Blount, goes to the telegraph office and spends thousands of rubles transmitting verses of the Bible* to his corrispondent in Paris in order to impede his rival, Alcide Jolivet. But Jolivet succeeds in robbing Blount of his position at the telegraph and blocks him in turn by transmitting the little songs of [François] Béranger.

"Hallo!" said Harry Blount.
"Just so," answered Jolivet."

And tell me if this is not style!

Another reason for this fascination is that many futuristic stories, read at a temporal distance when that future is already known, leaves the reader a little disappointed, because the things that truly happened, the inventions that were actually realized, are more marvelous than those imagined by the books of the previous era. With Verne this is not so, no atomic submarine will be more technologically wonderful than the Nautilus and no dirigible or jumbo jet will ever be as fascinating as the majestic helix ship of Robur the Conquistador....

And if we do not have the money to buy the old Hetzel editions from antique bookstores and we are not satisfied with the contemporary re-editions? You can go on the Internet, to the address http://jv.gilead.org.il/. There a gentleman by the name of Zvi Har’El, a collector of all the news of Verne, has a list of the worldwide celebrations, a complete bibliography, an anthology of sayings, 304 incredible stamps dedicated to Verne from various countries, translations in Hebrew, and most of all, a virtual library where you can find integral texts of Verne in various languages and see the original French editions as well all of the engravings to save and afterwards enlarge as you like because, sometimes, we are even more captivated the second time.

One of the most decent things about writers, a famously indecent lot, is that they are one of the few disciplines who trouble to remember those who went before.

*Eco makes an uncharacteristic mistake here, as "the verses learned in his childhood" do not refer to the Bible, but rather "the well-known verses of Cowper", which is to say, William Cowper, the English poet.

Umberto Eco on the end of democracy

Big Chilly once told me that he greatly respected how I often use my public platform for mysterious and seemingly nonsensical purposes. In that light, it gives me great pleasure to present more of that for which no one is asking, a translation of an article by Umberto Eco which appeared on June 25th in L'espresso: Apparire piu come essere.  

To appear more than to be

Sixty-four years before Christ, Marcus Tullius Cicero, already a celebrated orator but the epitome of a New Man, estranged from the nobility, decided to declare himself a candidate for Consul. His brother, Quintus Tullius, wrote for him a manual in which he was instructed how to make an impression. In the front of the current Italian edition, (Manuele del candidato – Istruzioni per vincere le elezioni, editore Manni, 8 euros), are comments by Luca Canali, in which he lucidly describes the histoical circumstances and the personalities of that campaign. Furio Colombo writes the introduction, with a reflective essay on the First Republic.

In fact, there are many similarities between our Second Republic and this Roman Republic, in the virtues, (very small), as well as the defects. The example of Rome, over the course of more than two millenia, has continued to hold much influence on many successive visions of the State. As Colombo records, the antique model of the Roman Republic inspired the authors of the Federalist Papers, which delineated the fundamental lines of the American Constitution. They saw in Rome, more than in Athens, the example of what was truly a democracy of the people. In their pragmatic realism, the neocons around Bush were inspired by the image of imperial Rome and many of their actual political discussions gave recourse to the idea of an empire, that of a “Pax Americana” which makes explicit reference to the ideology of the “Pax Romana”.

I must note that the image of electoral competition that emerges in the 20 pages of Quintus is of extremely small virtue compared to that which had inspired the federalists of the 18th century. Quintus does not seem to even consider the possibility of a political man who boldly confronts the electorate in the face of dissent with a courageous project, with the hope of conquering the voters on the powerful strength of a utopian idea. As Canali also notes, totally absent from these pages is any notion of debating ideas; instead, there is recommendation to never expose oneself on any political issue, so as to avoid making enemies. The candidate envisioned by Quintus must only be sure to appear fascinating, doing favors and other self-promotion, never saying no to anyone but leaving everyone with the impression he will do what they want. The memory of the electorate is short, and before long they will forget old promises....

At the end of the letter we ask: but is democracy truly only this, a form of conquering the public favor that is founded on nothing but appearances and a strategy of deceit? It is certainly so, and it cannot be differently if this system, (which, as Churchill said, is imperfect, but is less imperfect than all the others), allows one to arrive at power only through consensus and not through force and violence. But we must not forget that these instructions for a political campaign were written at moment when Roman democracy was already in crisis.

It was not long after when Caesar definitively took power with the assistance of his legions, and with his life Marcus Tullius paid the passage from a regime founded on consensus to a regime founded on the fist of the State. But one cannot avoid the thought that Roman democracy had begun to die when its politicians understood that they no longer had to be serious about their policies but had only to engineer the obtaining of the sympathies of those we might well call television viewers.

This demonstrates that there is truly nothing new under the sun. In our modern arrogance, we believe that we are different, that our pseudo-democracy, (as false in every way to the democratic ideal as was its Roman predecessor), is a light illuminating all mankind. Quintus Tullius might easily have been Dick Morris or Karl Rove, advising hollow-suited frauds such as Bill Clinton and George Bush.

The laws of history are not as easily discerned as the laws of physics, but they are every bit as inexorable. Eco gives us one more reason to believe that we are living in the last days of the American Republic.

Umberto Eco on political correctness

This article, entitled La pistola dell'Ostrega, appeared on 11 June 2004 in L'Espresso:

Political Correctness is a true and proper movement born in the American universities of liberal and radical inspiration, therefore of the Left, with an eye towards acknowledging multiculturalism and reducing some of the ingrained linguistic vices that established lines of discrimination confronting various minorities. And therefore they began to say “blacks” and later “Afro Americans” instead of “negroes”, and “gay” instead of the thousands of other notorious appellations reserved for disparaging homosexuals.

Naturally, this campaign for the purification of the language has produced a true fundamentalism, which has led to the notable case in which some feminists proposed to no longer say “history” since it begins with the pronoun “his”, as they thought this meant that the story was “his”, but instead to say “herstory” - her story – obviously ignoring the Greco-Latin etymology which has no gender implications.

However, the tendency has assumed also neoconservative, or frankly, reactionary aspects. If you decide to no longer call people in wheelchairs handicapped or even disabled, but “differently abled” and after do not construct access ramps in public places, it is evident that you have hypocritically removed the word but not the problem. And the same is true if you substitute saying “indefinitely unoccupied” for fired or “in a program of transition to change careers” for dismissed. Who knows why a banker isn't ashamed of his title and doesn't insist on being called an operator in the field of savings. If it's not working, changing the name won't fix it.

On these and an infinity of other problems, Edoardo Crisafulli amuses in his book “The Politically Correct and Linguistic Liberty”, which strips naked all these contradictions. He takes on both sides, pro and con, and is always very entertaining. Reading it, however, I came to reflect on the curious case of our country. While Political Correctness exploded elsewhere, in our case it was diffused and instead we are always developing more and more Political Incorrectness. If, at one time, one would read a newspaper and a politician would say: “As a politics of convergence is emerging, one would prefer an asymptotic choice that eliminated single points of intersection"; today he prefers to say: “Dialogue? To Hell with that dirty son of a bitch!”

It is true that at one time in old Communist circles they used to label the adversary as “horseflies” and in speaking during a fracas, they might have chosen to use a lexicon more incontinent than that of a longshoreman, but that was in a time when there were no limits to what one could say – it was accepted as an affectation – as was once the case in the gentlemen's clubs of venerated memory - where the gentlemen were not verbally inhibited. Today, instead, the technique of an insult is televised, a sign of unconcious faith in the valor of democracy.

It probably began with Bossi(2), in which his manly hardness obviously alludes to the softness of other people, and the appellation of “Berluskaz(3)” was unmistakable but the thing spread widely. Stefano Bartezzaghi, writing under the name Venerdi di Repubblica, cites the play of insults today in circulation, but in good fun, all things considered

Therefore, I too must contribute to the sweetness of Politically Incorrect Italian, and as I have consulted a series of dictionaries and dialects, permit me to suggest some polite and good-natured expressions with which to insult your enemy, graceful words: pistola dell'ostrega, papaciugo, imbolsito, crapapelata, piffero, marocchino, pivellone, ciulandario, morlacco, badalucco, pischimpirola...[long, long list of like insults removed for the sake of brevity].

(1) Ostrega can't be found in most dictionaries. I thought he was playing off the term "strega" witch or "ostrica" oyster. This led me to wonder if there wasn't some deeper profundity there, but Vittorio emails to explain: "ostrega" is an old exclamation in Venetian dialect. It may be a euphimism for "ostia!"

(2) Vittorio also adds: in the 1980's the Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi, had a celebrated slogan "The League is the one that is hard" used against PC. That's where "celodurismo" comes from. I don't know about "celoflocismo". My undestanding is that Eco is implying overtones of hardness and softness as they relate to male tumescence. Alessandro also writes to explain: Celodurismo is a neologism in Italian politics derived from the (in)famous phrase by Umberto Bossi: "ce l'ho duro" meaning "I got an hard-on and I can keep it up for hours!", so that celodurismo means a rough and boasting attitude which is typical of Umberto Bossi and his mates of the Lega Nord political party. Actually, I never heard of celoflocismo, but it surely derives from "ce l'ho floscio" which is quite the contrary of "ce l'ho duro" so that celoflocismo means the contrary of celodurismo.

(3) "Berluskaz" is likely a combination of "Berlusconi" and "catzo", saying that Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister and owner of AC Milan, is a motherf-----. Well, they won the Scudetto this year, so deal.