Mari has not withdrawn from the Strega Prize
- Laura Rifiuti
- 6 hours ago
- 14 min read
A reflection on power
It is clear: there is only one elegant way to withdraw from the Strega Prize, and that would be to do so "in the name of culture." In protest, then. "Against the interference of the industrial publisher in a field that I still, archaically, consider non-industrial." Why, then, write an article like this one, on the worldly froth of culture, its pure "industry"—in short, on the "Strega Prize as it is: that is, a field of operations for the most brutal consumerism"? Thus spoke Pasolini, nearly sixty years ago.
I have reflected on this deeply, and it only became clear to me as the days went by. There is only one way to write an article on the "Strega Prize as it is," and that would be to start from Pasolini (or rather: to do it "for Pasolini. With Pasolini"). However, that article is not exactly the one you are reading now. I will take the background events as given.
Why? Because I believe that a vapid, mundane controversy like the one that has staged itself at the Strega in recent days can unwittingly transcend itself, opening up a field of forces that is perhaps unforeseen, yet politically relevant. I immediately felt there was much to discuss, and indeed, people are already talking about it quite a bit. That is precisely why I believe it is worth revisiting.
To be sure, if I were in Rui’s or Ciabatti’s shoes, in the running for the Strega, having faith in what I had written, and then saw the victory handed to someone else, instead of immediately retreating into a self-deprecating indulgence (and flashing a strained, polite smile), it is quite possible that I would think, somewhere between rancorous and consolatory: look at this asshole, a total misogynist too... Etc., etc., without too many snobbish inhibitions regarding the choice of insults.
It is equally certain, however, that if I were in Mari’s shoes—in that rare and fortunate position of being one of the leading edges of research literature while also enjoying a fair amount of publishing success—I would feel rather discouraged by the prospect that a phrase uttered in private could be enough to cut you out of the game: if not forever, at least this once.
This, it goes without saying, if I really believed in my idea of a strong literature; the idea, that is, that within this trashy market that is the natural terrain of literature, one can still carve out a narrow audience, more cultured and perceptive than average (without, of course, disdaining a multi-layered reading); that one can wage a personal battle to invest in style and language in a way that is rarely seen (or sold) today. And if I truly believed, moreover, that a literature of high tone and a style of writing that experiences stylistic research in an existential manner could still say something in and of itself. It is very difficult for me to empathize, but I must do it; I need to, in order to understand. It is no joke, precisely because Mari is naturally as far and as different from me as could be: first and foremost by gender and age (and gender would already imply an ideological positioning), but also because he is a professional intellectual, a prestigious writer, a former university professor. In this respect, neither Rui nor Ciabatti are much closer to me: they are closer, however, because I too am a woman, and I can imagine that their instinctive reaction upon hearing their colleague mention them in what were perhaps offensive terms was to feel targeted primarily as women.
I would like to spare you my autobiography, which is non-existent, of interest to no one, and useless, even to myself. But one thing I can say: there ought to be something vaguely reassuring—even in the midst of discouragement, and especially for someone like me, always fearful of uttering clichés or harboring petty thoughts—in realizing that a refined intellectual can say trite things, pass hasty judgments, and exhibit superficial prejudices. In short, that he is a poor devil like anyone else: a good writer, yes, but a mediocre man, like so many. This does not surprise us. Eichmann, who said and did far more reprehensible things—and to whom, if forced to choose, I would gladly hand over the share of media pillory that Mari received—uttered certain words about Germany and Austria before dying that were of a disheartening banality. You would expect a grand tragic figure, a monologue à la Macbeth, and instead you are left with the common man, the grey bureaucrat of the Rhineland, perhaps less internally torn, but decidedly more tragicomic. And yet, he was a diabolical man and a war criminal. But in the end, isn't that only fair? Isn't that already a balanced poetic justice? Even without dragging the afterlife into it, if we don't believe in it: the humiliation of being stripped bare, and the punishment of discovering oneself to be stupid. It happens to everyone; it will happen to them too.
We have grown accustomed to looking at culture and intellectuals in a childish manner: either we ignore them, because the market finds them unprofitable and besides, we are tired at night and need a distraction, or we idolize them, mummifying them and treating them as if they were already dead—and if they really are dead, all the better, because we can feel like knights on a holy quest by redeeming ourselves for having ignored them while alive. That is when things go well. But when they go badly—and lately they go badly often—we want them to be unimpeachable pedagogues, teachers of moral virtues (whether these are hypocritical or petty-bourgeois is not the place to discuss) before being teachers of notions and wisdom. Yet it is forgotten too quickly that, in our cultural roots, the step from pedagogy to pederasty was, at least once upon a time, a short one. I must believe that either an education conceiving sex with minors as a good initiatory practice is considered moral—which I highly doubt these days—or there is a massive amount of sexual content you are sweeping under the rug along with the dust.
All joking aside, it seems to me that this whole story allows us to take the pulse of how the perception of culture has changed, namely, how our demands of it have mutated. The demands we most imperiously advance can essentially be summarized as: edifying stories, good messages, ethically marketable; and therefore: rock-solid personal consistency, moral clarity, cheap kalokagathia. Far, so very far from the "scandal of contradicting myself," for two reasons: because we are increasingly removed from the capacity to distinguish and integrate (I am speaking of a broad swath of the public) complex and stratified meanings, in literature and outside it; and because, truth be told, the terms of the debate surrounding Mari do not exactly carry the same seriousness as a reflection on the role of the intellectual in the anthropological mutation (and besides, Pasolini scowled even when he went on television).
Upon closer inspection, however, even from this controversy something (semi-)serious could be drawn. I say it would be beautiful if the Strega, or any other cultural institution, could afford to blissfully ignore media pillories. And yet it cannot, and it is inevitable that it cannot, not only because it (understandably) wishes to avoid stepping into deep shit. It cannot because, in fact, it has a duty not to ignore what is happening on a broad scale among the reading public, who today—in writing as well as in the ethos of behavior—seek satisfaction for a moral and civil need for reality that did not exist, or no longer existed, thirty years ago. This is an important sign of an unalterable shift. Whether the market then scrambles to compensate by feeding us far too many mediocre and brutally written books is another matter. But the fact that today a writer’s public persona also matters—that they are called upon to express themselves and account not only for their work, but also for their level of commitment—is by no means a separate issue.
Lately, however, there is a principle that seems to have taken hold and immediately degenerated: the publicization of the private. Some may refuse to surrender to the idea of living in a panoptic regime, in an inescapable and unceasing, fundamentally unjust scrutiny; but I want to, or must, accept it, with all due respect to the "reactionary" part of my soul that cannot bring itself to share the principle. But precisely because we derogate from our principles—yes, even our moral ones—we must, I believe, rise to the level of these derogations. If we accept that what a public figure does and says in private matters even more than the demeanor they maintain in public—even more so because it betrays, from a sideways glance, the Truth, the true Reality of the Person (another ghost we wear ourselves out trying to catch, somewhat in vain); if we accept Truth as the supreme value, a (mythical) spontaneous and immediate Truth rather than the painstakingly crafted and refined one—by nature artificial, and therefore false, and therefore Evil—of the writer-archaeologist digging into the depths of language; if we accept all this, and accept that privacy is a derogable right, it is also dutiful that we grow up in the meantime and assume a good dose of responsibility for what comes out of it. Let us not be scandalized, then, if Mari has an unfortunate slip of the tongue, since writers are not under oath, they are not in the army, and we cannot punish them with a delay in promotion; just as we would then be unable to either laugh or cry—indeed, we would have to recognize it with the utmost honesty and rigor—if it leaked out that Salvini, over a plate of pasta at the Montecitorio bar, had rewritten Simulacra and Simulation, formulating the brilliant (if slightly dated) diagnosis of modernity.
Ultimately, if Mari truly spoke not knowing he was being listened to (the proper verb would be sputtanato, exposed/screwed), it is obvious that the responsibility for his public words does not fall on him alone. Because, quite simply, it was not on the public plane that he originally assumed responsibility for them by the act of uttering them. When a (conscious!) shift of truth is operated from the public to the private sphere because we believe that only on the latter plane can it be received authentically, the actors involved in this shift are multiple, and multiple must be the responsibility. People often speak of times of moralism, and I myself have invoked the category: if Truth is the Good, and remains the good even at the cost of emerging from a betrayal (nay, the betrayal loses all negative connotation!), it must be entirely right, according to this system, to reveal it. Never mind that this is a rather police-like and therefore inherently contestable approach; within its own terms, however, it attempts to be consistent. For a system that elects Truth as its highest value must not care about bon-ton hypocrisies and must reveal it even when it is inconvenient, unfair, or discriminatory—in short, when it is close to Evil or takes on its guise. In the hope, I suppose, that some utility will come of it. If the truth is the good, starts from the good, and ends in the good, it neutralizes evil within itself; that is, it manages to contain it. It is a moralistic system, yes, because it elects a value it considers prior to everything else; but it is not Victorian—or it would desperately try not to be—because the demand for Consistency and Transparency, corollaries of Truth, is directed first and foremost at itself, and in fleeing hypocrisy, it ends up entering neurosis. But beware, hypocrisy lurks everywhere, if only because it is impossible to know oneself entirely, and there will always be something of oneself that slips away, or crumbles.
I suspect, precisely, that people struggle to take responsibility because they are terrified that everything will collapse. Indeed, if someone personally claimed credit for having disclosed the truth, how could anyone think of disqualifying Mari? I mean that if we suddenly stopped viewing Truth as a disembodied will, and instead someone wanted to claim its immanence in their own face and body (admitting: it was I who revealed it), there would be no need to find "political" solutions to fix things, to steer them toward the good. Because the Good would have already come down to become flesh—which is the unconscious aspiration of our bigoted secularism—and in place of a scapegoat, we would have its holy executioner. Thus, disqualifying Mari would turn out to be superfluous. For if someone assumed full public responsibility for the action, not only would Mari’s own share of responsibility be relativized, but the satisfaction of the error would be somehow exhausted within the Truth itself: disqualification would be an extra measure, but his strenuous presence in the competition would prolong the pillory and allow the sense of restored justice to be preserved for longer.
Furthermore, I believe it is superfluous to recall that, when wiretapped by the FBI, Martin Luther King did not exactly emerge as the image of the chaste reverend. But perhaps, if despite everything we continue to celebrate him (thank goodness!) as a great leader of a moral movement, it is also because at a certain point the responsibility could be shared, and the burden of disclosure, as well as that of the words, fell upon an identified subject.
Instead, Mari’s affair is beset by imbalance, and an assumption of responsibility in this sense cannot be expected, neither soon nor ever. I doubt Mari fails to recognize that what he said carries weight in perpetuating the patriarchy, as has been written; otherwise, he would not have issued the denial he did. But I also believe that, if he really said what he said, at that moment he didn't care much about the patriarchy, just as he didn't care about common sense (just) or the sense of the appropriate (subjective). And I do not believe at all that if those words had remained in the van, they would have had the effect of gifting the patriarchy more champions than already exist. Quite the contrary. It is not so much that I think it unhelpful to concentrate the multiple fates of the patriarchy in Mari's hands alone—meaning I do not trust the radicalization of the debate, and I do not believe he is a determining agent. In any case, I think whoever leaked the news did so with a precise political and ethical intent that cannot be ignored and indeed must be discussed: beyond any possible personal motive, the existence of which is immeasurable.
Whoever did it must have acted for reasons that are, broadly speaking, political; that is, with the precise intent of public exposure, beyond any "humanitarian" consideration of social risk (the danger of misogynistic and patriarchal models being reinforced). Undoubtedly, those who defend the choice of publication also think that words come before things and have an effect on things themselves. But it is precisely for this reason that, had the reasoning been done solely in terms of social effect, it would perhaps have been more convenient to keep the news private. It is clear, in fact, that if one had believed heavily or solely in the social risk that those words contain in themselves, one could also have chosen not to make them public, precisely to safeguard a beneficial social message of which intellectuals are asked to be examples. On the other side, it is evident that the "efficacy of the message" also feeds on counterexamples and needs, in order to stand, to publicly display their repression. However, we would be speaking in bad faith if we forgot that the person who possesses sensitive news had, first and foremost, the power to make it—precisely—sensitive and relevant: they made a choice by which they exercised power. Whoever chose to leak the news about Mari, in short, had the power and the opportunity to transform his phrase into a grave phrase, or a graver one: simply because it is undeniable that it is also and above all due to the fact that it is public that the offense turns out to be, precisely, graver. That it was made public afterward, strictly speaking, no longer matters; once it ends up on the pages of Repubblica, it wouldn't change much—at the level of public opinion, at least—if that phrase had instead surfaced in a faculty council, for example, or in an interview.
It is a pity that, if one wants to reflect on all the elements honestly, evaluating the context is mandatory: objectively, Mari expressed himself in an unmonitored context; it is equally objective that if he had instead spoken in a public capacity, let's say again a faculty council, the behavior would have merited disciplinary sanction and the failure to punish would be an ignoble injustice. Moreover, however, we do not have the elements to be sure that Mari would have expressed himself that way in a faculty council, perhaps against a colleague. I cannot guess whether Mari does or does not have a sense of context, because I do not know him; I can, however, hypothesize that, at least in hindsight, he had some idea and respect for it. And not only because he himself emphasized that it was a private conversation (which was interpreted as a green light to disbelieve his denial), but also because he built his defense by disowning the misogynistic content of the comment, and thus understood that assuming full responsibility for it would have implied admitting to being indifferent to any distinction between public and private, or between good and evil, right and wrong: which is a far worse immorality. Therefore, I do not believe that focusing solely on sexism is necessarily a productive viewpoint, because I hold that the line of condemnation, though clothed in excellent reasons, can be played out on partial elements or, by the way it has been conducted, turn out to be out of focus. As often happens, we are forced to read a discourse moving at two speeds, obtuse and non-communicating: one would want to bang one's head against the wall, but instead, we are trying to untangle them.
The fact remains that we are now truly in a double bind. If Mari wins the Strega, all hell will break loose and, rightly or wrongly, people will twist themselves into knots wondering whether he shouldn't have been disqualified instead; if Mari loses, however, a counter-uproar will induce a paranoia of a feminist conspiracy—namely, that they made Mari lose on purpose because, as people love to repeat, you can't say anything anymore. If in this case a woman were to win in his place, people would speak of a political victory and, whether one thinks it deserved or not, the not-too-implicit but inevitable result would be the devaluation of the intellectual merit of the female candidates. There must be a reason, which I would venture to say was calculated with reasonable judgment, if, according to Mari (and we cannot infer that he is lying), Ciabatti’s wish was not to follow up on the episode. Not only, perhaps—but also for that reason—because she too believed it should be confined to what it is: a banal, mediocre, stupid, treacherous conversation in a van.
The publication of a truth is itself a moral and political act, certainly more political than Mari’s position. Mari is as little a victim as he is a victimizer: victim of a news leak, author of a misogynistic phrase, with the aggravating circumstance, if anything, of having uttered it mockingly, for the intellectual pleasure of going against common sense. But it is clear that, zooming in on the pattern of forces, Mari exercises a rather weak power. After the leak, far more power belongs, instead, to whoever caused the leak: the more power, the more Mari’s phrase is fundamentally harmless; the less power, the graver Mari’s phrase is instead—but undeniably a power nonetheless. At any rate, it is understandable why Mari disowned it (grave or harmless, the bad taste remains); but there is a broader discourse on power that emerges disquietingly from this little story, a discourse that deserves to be had and that still, I fear, has not been had. Let us attempt, for once at least, to step out of this suffocating binarism: we are adults, and we must not ossify around the usual ritual bonfire.
If it is not completely unwarranted, I would like to conclude on an ironic note. Perhaps the only way to truly understand this little fable about power, that is, to empathize with it, would be to recover a bit of good old sense of the tragic. What do I mean? Not exactly that we need to titanically inflate the stature of these characters and gloat over a deception: quite the contrary! Rather, I suspect we are mistaken, and people are staging melodramatic reactions when we are facing a tragic recital. Throughout the whole affair, in fact, the concept of responsibility I have invoked has something of what Kierkegaard called the "aesthetic ambiguity" of ancient tragedy: the co-responsibility of (individual) guilt and fatality (the inexorable design imposed by others, hence innocence). It is true that fatality is indeterminate, but since the dawn of time, indeterminacy frightens, and so we invented the gods to act as figureheads for the ineffable. Convenient! Now replace the gods with the name (which must exist) of whoever sent the message to the editorial staff of Repubblica, and you are all set. Someone might comment that Mari, a true tragikòs, played his part too.
Mari has not withdrawn from the Strega Prize
by Laura Rifiuti
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