Toward a Minor Michelstaedter

Abstract

Carlo Michelstaedter (1987–1910) is mostly known for his tragic suicide and for his undefended tesi di laurea, titled La persuasione e la rettorica. He has thus been commonly regarded as a marginal, peripheral thinker, and his work has been often placed on the outskirts of the Italian philosophical and literary canon. In this article I focus precisely on Michelstaedter as a minor author, and on his work as an example of minor writing, but in light of what Deleuze and Guattari have called “minor literature,” a concept they first enunciate in their work on Kafka. A comparison between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories and Michelstaedter’s oeuvre does not in fact confirm Michelstaedter’s purportedly marginal position vis à vis canonical Italian culture. Rather, it allows, first, a reassessment of the potential of the attribute minor that overturns the negative connotations attached to Michelstaedter’s peripherality, and, second, a literary and pragmatic interpretation of his work capable of both preserving its uncanny intensity and underlining its socio-political implications.