Marcello Veneziani will be at the book fair today as part of the “Italy, guest of honor” demonstration. He will present his recent essay on the Italian thinker Vico, in a dialogue with Ahmed Somai, a leading Tunisian academic and translator from Vico in Arabic. Go to the Italian pavilion, Saturday April 27 at 4 p.m.
Life sometimes has enigmatic detours that can weigh on destinies. Thus, it is completely plausible that Marcello Veneziani launched himself in a biography of Vico, an Italian thinker from the seventeenth century, for a coincidence of the latter’s initials with those of his own father, to whom this book is dedicated.
This filigree story that connects Giambattista Vico and Giovanni Veneziani, admiration for genius and affection for the father, the seed they both sown, makes this book all the more moving. Because if undertaking a vico biography is not an easy task, doing so by investing in the image of the sire, makes the business daring and resolutely modern and committed.
In fact, in this work which restores the work and the days of Vico, the diachronic platitude which awaits this literary genre is in no way of bet. The author, Marcello Veneziani, reaches a dozen chapters, not only to rehabilitate Vico, unjustly forgotten, but also to produce a mythical image of this thinker. The just narration, the deep and romantic breath of Veneziani have a lot to do with it, just like his readings in the work of the one who, for posterity, remained at the Pantheon threshold.
It is no coincidence that Marcello Veneziani’s essay is called “Vico Dei Miracoli”, a title that suggests as much a miraculous thinker whose work was born when it was necessary that a reborn vulgate, miraculously reborn, to rehabilitate the one whose life was obscure and tormented, as the subtitle of the work underlines.
For Veneziani, there is no hesitation in having: Vico is the biggest Italian thinker. His plea seems to have hit the bull’s eye since Italian readers literally rushed to this book which, in the space of seven months, between August 2023 and February 2024, knew four successive reissues, to the delight of Rizzoli editions which accompanied the Veneziani project.
For the author of this “Vico des Miracles”, things are clear and are based on two observations: Vico is an essential thinker and also the most translated Italian writer in the world. According to Veneziani, all modern Italian thought, from Benedetto Croce to Antonio Gramsci via Catholic theorists, was nourished by Vico, not only through the reference to historicism but also by other ferments.
Original thinker for his time, straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Vico suffered the misunderstanding of his contemporaries who saw him more in the clothes of a rhetorician or a Latinist than in those of a philosopher. Could it be because of his rather difficult language? The fact is, advance Veneziani, that Vico’s recognition will only come after its French translation by Jules Michelet.
In Vico, historicism is undoubtedly a reading key but it remains insufficient because it does not allow to grasp its intuitions and its capacity to generate a philosophy of thought, an authentic epistemology which will seek its roots in the myth, poetry and language which are posed as matrices of civilization. Vico’s approach then expands myth to theology and philosophy. Mircea Eliade as well as Martin Heidegger also perfectly assimilated these Viquian approaches.
This demonstration allows Veneziani to make a fundamental observation: Vico’s thought tends to integrate all the disciplines of knowledge within a single organic knowledge. In this way, while the time was in the triumph of the Enlightenment, Vico manages not to delegitimize religious thought, faith, myth, and insert them in a humanist path, a wisdom which integrates without rejecting.
This is neither a primitivism nor any obscurantist resurgence. On the contrary, Vico will enrich this inclusive approach – which is developing simultaneously to Cartesianism – by completing it by its own historical vision. For the Italian thinker, it is advisable to free oneself from progressive theorists who build a vulgate according to which the secularization of the Christian idea is a primacy.
These thinkers of modernist gestation also believe in a linearity of history which is always moving forward. Vico also stands out from more classic thinkers that history is repeated as in the light of natural cycles.
Contrary to the dominant ideas, Vico will argue that the path of history responds to the complex figure of the spiral. He thus considers that the process which tends forward is accompanied by circles which reproduce the experiences of the past with new texts and characterize historical development.
Beyond these points of doctrine, Marcello Veneziani highlights many other essential points, in particular the intuitions of Vico in the fields of aesthetics or pedagogy or his conception of childhood as a laboratory of thought, this dazzling which establishes a visionary link between the child and the primitive being. All these components of Viquienne thought remain little studied despite their intersection potential with contemporary psychology.
Reading the Vico de Marcello Veneziani, one can only feel a paradigm change compared to the fundamental studies carried out by Fausto Nicolini. We are with Veneziani in the face of an open reading, a plea often lit by the issues of the new century and not obliterated by the tumult of the previous eras which have mysteriously concealed Vico whose influence will be remembered on constructivism and its derudid.
How not to see in Vico, a philosopher in history? How did he stay in the shadow of Hegel when he was a precursor of complex thinking? How did we miss the vico theorizing the development of the social sciences? How to reread Vico today, both in view of the intuitive historicism of Ibn Khaldoun as in relation to the supporters refuted from the end of history?
So many questions induced by the remarkable work of Marcello Veneziani who questions our Vico conscience and that of the Italians who themselves, do not always give this genius, the status he would undeniably deserve. This son of a bookseller, with disjointed studies and the removing desire for philosophy, whose forgotten work in the meanders of history is reflected, imposes itself on us in all its news.
Of course, we could also evoke Vico’s influence on certain aspects of metaphor semiology in Umberto Eco. Or his surreptitious impact on James Joyce. The fact remains that the most immediate text is that of Marcello Veneziani who introduces us to the singularities of a great man, a “heroic spirit” and a pivot of Mediterranean culture.
Thanks to the meticulous and properly militant work of Veneziani, a miraculous Vico is reborn and also a new flow of readers in search of its most important texts. “New science” whose title is in many premonitory aspects, constitutes the ultimate in the doctrine of Vico. The two editions of this book, that of 1725 and that of 1743, would now deserve a new reading.
This mistress work of the Italian thinker has also just been translated into Arabic by Ahmed Somai, emeritus professor of the Tunisian University. This translation, which has just obtained the highly sought after Cheikh Zayed Book Award, also establishes a double convergence with Ibn Khaldoun and also with the need for the Arab-Muslim area of feeding on Vico approaches.
As for Marcello Veneziani who will be among the guests of the International Book Fair of Tunis, he will be able to amplify his plea for Vico, recall that if Dante is the father of Italian literature, Vico is the most translated thinker.
In addition Veneziani which is as much a pamphleteer as a biographer, will have the most leisure to present the most recent of his tests published in January 2024 and entitled “L’Amore Necessario”, a new plea for reigns love, this force which makes the world advance, this deeply Christian concept which invites to a polyphonic reading.
