Michelstaedter

Persuasion and Rhetoric, by Carlo Michelstaedter // From Part I, Chapter I: “Persuasion”

I know that I want and I do not have what I want. A weight hangs from a hook, pending, and in hanging it suffers that it is not descending: it cannot free itself from the hook, for insofar as it has weight, it hangs, it pends, and thus depends.

We wish to satisfy it: we free it from its dependence; we let it go, may it sate its hunger for what lies below, and descend, independent, until it is content with descending. —But at no point attended does it find satisfaction, and still wishes to descend, for the next point below surpasses in lowness that which the weight attained. And no point ahead will make it content, because the point ahead is necessary for its life, insofar as it awaits the weight below; yet every time the future point becomes present, it is hollowed out of all allure, for it is no longer below; thus at every point the weight lacks the points below, and these attract it all the more: it is always pulled by an equal hunger for what is lower, yet endless lingers its desire to descend.—

If at a certain point its will were exhausted and in that point it could possess the infinite descent of the infinite future—then, at that point it would no longer be what it is: a weight.

Its life is this very lack of its life. Were it to lack nothing anymore—were it to be complete, perfect: were it to fully possess itself, it would cease to exist.—Its weight is the impediment to possess its life and no longer depend on anything but itself in its inability to be satisfied. The weight can never be persuaded.

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Gravity and Gravitas

On Monday, October 17, 1910, twenty-three-year-old Carlo Michelstaedter finished writing Persuasion and Rhetoric, his idiosyncratic dissertation now recognized as a philosophical masterpiece of the Italian twentieth century. A few hours earlier, he had argued with his beloved mother Emma about her birthday celebrations, which he had apparently forgotten about. At 2 p.m. that same Monday, sitting at his desk, Michelstaedter shot himself—twice, according to the local newspaper.

Michelstaedter was a writer, a painter, a philosopher, a hiker, and a swimmer. Good-looking and academically talented, he was a student first of mathematics at the University of Vienna and then of Letters at the University of Florence. Persuasion and Rhetoric deals with issues of volition, fulfillment, and self-awareness by repurposing the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of persuasion and rhetoric as two cornerstones of his thinking.

Persuasion, for Michelstaedter, means the full possession of oneself, as in coherence of words, thoughts, and deeds: in his words, “Persuaded is he who has his life within himself.” This condition is, however, unattainable: “The way of persuasion is hyperbolic”—persuasion can never fully be achieved as long as words and acts are conditioned by desires, hopes, or fears that dwell in the future. This projection onto the future, Michelstaedter argues, is part of the human condition, and collides with the presentness of persuasion.

If full persuasion is unattainable, rhetoric permeates everything as the system of beliefs and apparatus of social institutions that pretend persuasion could be achieved or has been achieved already. In so being, rhetoric is what gives false meaning to everything that does not have any meaning in itself, and makes one turn from thing to thing, with everything becoming a means for some other thing. Whereas persuasion signifies meaningful stillness, rhetoric implies meaningless motion.

In the passage from Persuasion and Rhetoric that I translated above, Michelstaedter invites us to reflect on the pull that things have over us. Desires may weigh us down, but they also move us around. I want, therefore I am: unhooked, or perhaps unhinged, we follow sublime objects of desire, only to find them hollowed out upon reach.

But for Michelstaedter, hollowness lies in the desiring person rather than the desired object. His conclusion, paradoxical only in appearance, is that hollowness is what defines the weight: its downward motion mistakes movement for meaning, descent for depth—“The weight can never be persuaded.” A weight can thus be shallow, in addition to hollow.

A shallow person is someone allured by hollow things: they are unable to free themselves from the pull of what lies below, beyond, and beneath. If they did, they would cease to be what they are— – just as Michelstaedter’s weight would cease to be a weight if it stopped descending. But is it possible to preserve a degree of autonomy despite the gravitational fields in which we are embedded?

Our editors invite us to consider gravity as the language of the relational. From a physical point of view, without gravity, large-scale structures of matter would disintegrate into disconnected fragments.Such fragmentation is exactly what characterizes shallow people, but from an existential rather than physical point of view: hollowed out, they lack an internal mass that can stabilize them—they are not centers of gravity but objects adrift, caught in the pull of external forces. They lack their own gravitational core, a center of self-possession, something that would grant coherence and meaning to their persona. They are ruled by gravity; yet, they fundamentally lack gravitas.

Michelstaedter writes: “Persuaded is he who has his life within himself.” Perfect persuasion is unattainable, and perhaps even undesirable—extreme gravitational forces lead to equally extreme collapse and compression. Yet, the individual without any semblance of persuasion—perpetually drifting, always seeking, hollow and shallow—resembles a universe without gravity: unstable, structureless, and ultimately illiterate in the language of the relational. Just like Michelstaedter’s weight, those who move the most may also be those whose motion is the most meaningless.

Andrea Capra is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at NYU.