(Engl.)

Gabriele Pulli

Infinità e vaghezza

Liguori editore, Napoli, 2023

The relationship between the infinite and the indefinite and the turning points of thought.

In the preface, the author states that human psychic experience can also be understood within the ‘polarity’ between the world and the tension beyond the world, between things in the world and ‘something in the world that is not there’; however, the text closes with the words ‘the indefinite evokes the infinite and the infinite evokes the indefinite (...) insofar as each has value in itself’ (67). The ‘vagueness’ or "indeterminacy", the being vague of something or in general, which was in the title, has been transformed into the indefinite of the conclusion, while the other pole of tension remains the infinite. But how are these terms understood and modified in the reasoning?

The world-beyond-world polarity is immediately redefined as the relationship between the definite and the indefinite, revisiting Freud's description of the process of constituting desire: desire is not in effect at the beginning of life but afterwards, so that beyond a desiring condition one can suppose a pre-desiring condition, and this second one continues to ‘subsist’ under that, even after the first satisfaction of a ‘need’ has given rise to ‘desire’. Desire must be understood as ‘something that has an object towards which to strive and at the same time (because of the survival, along with the constituted desire, of a condition prior to desire, ed. ) is devoid of it' (7). Thus desire is a tension towards the object, towards the definite, but, at the same time, towards the indefinite ‘dimension devoid of object that underlies it’ (ibid.). Freud mentions need and desire but does not dwell on their difference, which is argued by the author as follows: whereas need is satisfied by the object - e.g. thirst is satisfied by drinking - desire is supposed to contain within itself, alongside the present object, also ‘a lost object, and that it does so precisely in order to contest its loss’ (11) - posing the question ‘how is it possible for something to have ended in nothingness?

   In this way, the theatre of universal and personal experience - that of existence, as of the great literary and poetic works - opens up to everyone. ‘In the deep layers of the human psyche, the idea of annihilation is missing’ (12), and loss, the passing into nothingness of something, is a fact to which one rebels. But, along with loss, there coexists in desire the longing to desire and the longing for the absolutely new that only in the future can really take place. Desire appears as two-faced, as ‘the one movement, towards the past and towards the future, towards the already lived and towards the not yet lived’ (13), two tendencies not only opposite but ‘enclosed within each other’ (14). The author brings the strong and opposite examples of mourning and falling in love to illustrate the uniqueness of the lost and/or acquired object.

   According to what has been said so far, the fact that the object of desire can emerge as unique and ‘with all the excitement of the unexpected’ is only possible by presupposing the notion of the indeterminate, proper to ‘a psyche that is in a pre-desiring condition’ (15): ‘the object of desire is constituted on the borderline between the pre-desiring condition and the establishment of desire itself’ (ibid.). Suspended zone - the object of desire hovers ‘on that boundary’ between the determinate object of desiring and the indeterminate of the pre-desiring; being indeterminate also applies to the future, because if the future cannot be foreseen (except as a projection: that is, the future is understood by Pulli not insofar as it contains the definite purpose, but as momentum, as vital protention) one can desire it to repeat the condition of the absolutely new, of the proximity ‘to the very origin of desire’, to a pre-desiring condition (16).

But how can the indefinite be understood as being indefinite? This is the subject of the second part, the indefinite and nothingness, where, considering that the indefinite (being) in the history of thought ‘appears equal to nothingness’ (20), despite the diversity of meanings, a Platonic place on love is discussed, to show how, in addition to being love of something, love can also be love of nothing. Here: what is loved, is loved by not possessing it, if it is true that ‘One desires something that is missing... as long as it is missing’ (24). Well, ‘the two processes are closely connected’ (25), one loves that which one possesses and yet does not possess it, and connected they remain, and the second is also necessary for Plato, however problematic it appears.

If the determined quid that is missing, once achieved, is no longer desired, then ‘it means that it is something imaginary’ destined ‘never to become real’. In such a case, ‘the question about the relationship between desire and nothingness becomes (...) the question about the relationship between the imaginary and nothingness’, that nothingness which is always given ‘in’ or ‘with’ something and never by itself. If the imaginary is made of nothingness, nothingness is the matter ‘of which the imaginary is made’ (28) and the matter of images, but in this case it will not be the indefinite ‘that escapes into nothingness but - simply - (it will be, ed.) nothingness’ (ibid.).

In the third part, the indefinite and the origin of the imaginary, we move on to a reflection ‘on the very existence of verbal language’ (33): not only on language, i.e. semantics, but on its verbal component, on sound (34 ff.) and on the voice, the sound of the voice and the capacity to ‘translate a sound into an image’ (37). This moment of thought also seems to have strong implications in the field of poetry.

The author asks ‘what does the sound of the voice evoke (...) in its pure sonority? ' (ibid.) and argues by mentioning a condition of early childhood, which is that of “hearing (which) precedes seeing” (35): the point is that in such a situation it can be assumed prevails ‘to imagine the appearance of the world having heard its sound’ (ibid.) or rather, not that one can pre-see, certainly not ‘what a face or any appearance might be’ but rather ‘visibility itself’ as ‘something (... ) indefinite’ with the ‘extreme intensity of the coming into being’ (ibid.) ‘in the mother's body’.

Here, hypothetically, might lie the ultimate reason for the unbridgeable difference between the imaginary and the real, and the truth of the imaginary would dwell in the ‘memory of its origin below its surface’ (36). The subject in life will always seek ‘that object (...) of his first imagination’ (40) and will find it in a certain way in ‘something that is in the world’ (41) as invested with requirements of ‘unrepeatability’ and ‘uniqueness’ such as to bring it ‘close to not being there at all’ (41); in another way, he can find it in ‘any determinate thing’ that, however, enveloped by that special charisma that is ‘in the air’ around the thing or person, is ‘completely desirable’ (ibid.).

The object of love appears at once ‘as something infinite and at the same time indefinite’ (48).

The relationship between the indefinite and the infinite is the title of the concluding section, where Giacomo Leopardi's figures of thought and poetry in the Canti and the Zibaldone take over.

The reader can explore the punctuality of the reasoning by reading on. Here I choose only to say that what, in hypothesis, was given as the remotest root of the imagination, perhaps the maternal womb, returns in a good circle. There is ‘a direct thread between the sound and the imagination of the indefinite: the reference of the imagination to the indefinite appears as its positive property (...) as a virtue’ (61).

The indefinite, then, is not only a vital psychic situation, but is separated from the infinite; must it be deduced then that the infinite, as the object considered from the point of view of the infinite, is debased? Certainly not, as we anticipated. It is up to the reader to discover this last twist of thought, again argued from certain passages in the Canti.