Alfonso Nitti’s Inertia or Impotentiality: Reconsidering Ineptitude in Italo Svevo’s Una vita

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Abstract The term ‘inetto’, on which Italo Svevo’s entire critical and literary tradition has been based, is mostly absent from Svevo’s texts with a few exceptions. Despite this low frequency, ‘inetto’ has become the adjective most used to define his characters. Surprisingly, Svevo scholarship has not yet focused, intensively and extensively, on those terms that the author did use to describe his protagonists: ‘inertia’ and ‘inert’. The goal of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to reconsider the veil of negativity that still saddles the category of ineptitude. At the same time, in order to achieve this aim, it rethinks this category by means of the neglected concept of inertia. By so doing, it not only rectifies the idea that the term ‘inetto’ is the primary correlative to describe Svevo’s characters, but also allows us to reimagine forms of impotentiality in a positive light.