Interview: Ivan Pozzoni

Ivan Pozzoni

You introduced the concept of “Law and Literature” to the Italian intellectual scene. What drew you to this intersection, and what do you believe it reveals about the human condition?

The introduction, in Italian universities, of a serious study of the subject of Law and Literature, studied, very badly, by a handful of italian scholars (the scenographic Eva Cantarella, professor of greek law in a nearby department), is due to the mere chance of a feud that occurred in the State University of Milan during my assistantship: in the department of philosophy of law there was a fight, chair after chair, between the trend of the theory of law of analytical origin introduced by Uberto Scarpelli and the trend of philosophy of law of historiographic origin held by my teacher Mario A. Cattaneo. First in Italy, the ius-analytic professors flooded the department, chasing away to Padua the professors of historiographic origin. To maintain my role in Milan, fascinated by analytical philosophy and pragmatism, i proposed to my reference professor a historiographic approach to analytical philosophy. First a sort of "Law and Philosophy" was born, and over time a real "Law and Literature", that is, a study of jus-philosophical conceptions in literary texts. This helped me to realize that there is no art without politics and law.

You've been described as a literary guerrilla, founding avant-garde movements and anti-manifestos. What does “NéoN-Avant-gardisme” rebel against—and what does it hope to build?

NéoN-Avant-gardisme, closed in 2018, attacked the italian Mondadori regime, with its Papal State, formed by a manipulative Pope-king, many cardinals co-opted among friends, and many curials interested in obtaining benefits and occupying space. Artists of the calibre of Luciano Troisio, Ignazio Apolloni, Leopoldo Attolico, Marzio Pieri, Francesco Piselli and Francesco Marotta collaborated in the movement, which was based on a destructive irony towards all forms of nomadic neo-capitalism and the fluid structure of society. As a mediocre businessman poet, Panetta, put it in the only meaningful sentence of his existence, at the end of the krisis born with the bankruptcy of Lehman, neon was replaced by LED, becoming anachronistic.

After six years of silence in academic circles, you’ve re-emerged. What led to this hiatus—and what stirred your return?

The pause was caused by a reason of art politology and art sociology: with the end of the krisis, the time of avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes, the NéoN-Avant-gardisme movement became anachronistic. According to Zygmunt Bauman, a change of epoch was taking place: the transition from the modern to the late-modern. Modern aesthetic ontology - as the italian literary critic Giorgio Linguaglossa argued - had to be replaced with a new aesthetic ontology.I focused on the in-depth study of the aesthetic paradigm shift, concluding that a new aesthetic ontology would bring back in through the window the ontology that had been thrown out the door: american pragmatics, new sociology, new epistemology and neuroaesthetics convinced me to found a new  socio/ethno/anthropologyaesthetic, freed from every forms of ontology and metaphysics. The internationalist experience of Kolektivne NSEAE was born.

You’ve written over 150 volumes and a thousand essays. Is there a central idea or obsession that binds them all?

The central, obsessive idea is their collectivity. Unlike my contemporaries, sick of aesthetic narcissism and ego-pathy or ego-mania, who competed in churning out dozens of mono-graphs, aimed at sanctifying and promoting them, i have dedicated 90% of my literary production to the collective or anthology of different voices, in order to create a sort of assembly of artists and scholars, on the Peirce model. The roots of the neo-N-Avant-garde and NSEAE can be traced back, with the Liminamentis publishing house encounter, to the exasperated and continued anarchic and socialist use of the collective volume, understood etymologically as a colligĕre, to collect, «voices», «aesthetic/philosophical experience» far from the egopathy of the mono-graph, the monadic ‘form’-writing of modern aesthetic ontology. The neon-avant-garde experience alternates an extreme anthologising recidivism with less mono-graphic activity.

Your work has been acknowledged by figures like Zygmunt Bauman and featured in major literary manuals. Does literary recognition change your relationship with writing—or does it reinforce your outsider ethos?

My artistic activity is bipolar: total outsider in the Italy of the Papal States, due to my constant denunciation of the trust, illicit and mafia-like behaviour of the regime's lyrical/elegiac artistic groups; recognised by Life magazine as one of the major international artists, spread and translated in the slavic world, Africa, the arab world, aouth-East Asia and South America, with the exception of the EU and the USA, dominated by the artistic power groups with the most absolute and categorical ignorance in the history of literature (USA and Germany), where my desecrating and subversive texts are too complex compared to their medium/low level culture. My goal, with the KNSEAE, is to turn this situation around: to annihilate the bigoted and mediocre US and EU art world with the support of marginalised artistic areas; and, and, having remodeled the international artistic areas of strength, to break through the walls of the Papal States in Italy, new Cadorna. Probably, in the future, an “alien” messiah, more gifted and stronger than me, will succeed: i, Ivan the Baptist, prepare the way, as a sapper, for the arrival of this new artistic Yoshua.

Many of your titles—La malattia invettiva, Galata Morente, Scarti di magazzino—suggest rupture, decay, irony. How do you see the role of “invective” in modern literature?

Invective is at the heart of my artistic writing: Martial, Villon, Brassens and De Andrè are the greatest artists in the history of world literature. Writing, by becoming experimental poetry, frees itself definitively from the “elegiac self”. The riot-text, as “anti-poetry”, continues to be based, with due Rortyian corrections, on Derridean and Deleuzian irony, on Dossian humour, on the irony of Lucini's Revolverate, on the invective weapon of the neo-avant-gardes, on Paul De Man's “dédoublement and vertigo that flows into madness”, on Bachtinian carnivalisation, on the use of aesthetic putpourri - all considered as voluntary attempts to anticipate the substitution of a modern aesthetic ontology - directed against “elegiac poetry” and “amateurish self-language”, and innovates with “aesthetic experiments”, with participatory observation and with the utmost clarity. Everything else is boredom, as the maestro Franco Califano sang.

Your poems have been translated into French, English, and Spanish. How do you see the limits—or liberties—of translation when it comes to your deeply Italian-rooted texts?

My texts have currently been translated into 30 different languages and dialects, including kurdish, persian, bosnian, macedonian, polish, hindi, urdu, bengali, nepali, meeteilol, dzongkha, chinese, russian, yoruba... and italian! The artist, gathered in bunds, kolektivne, aeriform, nomadic and resilient assemblies, metabolised the error of modern philosophical historiography on the aristotelian distinction between ποίησις and πρᾶξις, rejects the very notion of “poetry” or anti-“poetry” as a fantastic creation of an object-language and, in the name of a pragmatics conception of the object-language itself, revives the authentic interpretation of the artist against any subjective interpretation of the literary critic. Criticism is not dead: it has become weak interpretation subject to the artist's argumentative meta-criticism (Habermas). The artist becomes agens (engaged poetry), from faber, organises the object-language according to his ends, replaces hermeneutics with praxeology, appropriates art-making (discourse), art-telling (meta-discourse) and art-contra-discourse (mega-meta-discourse), acquiring the role of artist, critic and meta-critic (thermonuclear counter-reviews), against every attempt at metaphysical veramusement of art and against every ontology of lyrical/elegiac modernism. Translation is the confrontation of authentic/subjective interpretations of artists, far from the business translation trade.

You’ve been editor and director of literary and philosophical journals like Il Guastatore and Información Filosófica. What makes a journal relevant in the digital, rapid-fire era of ideas?

The tyranny of magazines must be destroyed by latemodernism. The significant artist - unlike the majority of mediocre artists in every area of the world, who, like Petropoulou or Dooley, exploit the fake role of artistic mediator - must categorically refuse to follow the cage of idiotic editorial criteria constructed by an editorial board of useless mediocrities, interested in hoarding money and funding from the third-rate artist. The latemodernist artist dialogues with a strong editor, who is able to differentiate chocolate from shit, to dismantle space-occupying editorial boards on the european/USA model: otherwise - as is currently the case in certain areas of the world - the artist writes, is a graphic designer, edits, prints, sells and buys magazines by himself. Who cares about your editorial criteria and and artistic mediators with a middle school education: latemodernism will wipe you all out: you are all under attack!

What does it mean today to found a literary or philosophical movement in an age of social media and cultural noise?

Fighting, in a situation of continuous tinnitus, the culture of followers or likes. Please, mediocre people, don't follow me and don't like me. I don't follow you and i don't care. I am creating a very secret and nomadic handful of militants, fit for sabotage/boycott and judicial/legal attack, to be launched in kamikaze attacks against multinationals, publishing groups and magazines. The illicit act to report to the antitrust department of the Strasbourg Court can always be found: we are artists/lawyers!

You once wrote, “Patroclo non deve morire.” Must certain figures in literature and myth be rescued again and again?

I firmly believe that the foundations of modern culture are in the Greek and Latin world. These cultural foundations, mixed with liberal enlightenment, characterize true western democracy, millennia away from the fake western states that dispense fake democracy with carpet bombings of their military air forces (USA/EU). We must, through permanent assemblies of art, support true democracies in extreme difficulty against multinationals and raise the world against false democracies that destroy, rage, export fake democracy. Achilles and Hector, the thumos, the anger, must die: Patroclus, the sweetness willing to do anything, must survive.

Your return coincides with joining NSEAE Kolektivne. How does this collective reflect or extend your past intellectual battles?

I am the conducator maximus of the Kolektivne NSEAE, of Serbian model. The Kolektivne has a Prezidium of 15 members and divides the 3,000 militants and 30,000 contacts into 50 geopolitical groups, with constant voting rights. What distinguishes the Neon-vanguardist movement from the KNSEAE? The KNSEAE is militant and organizational; it’s devoted to internationalism and considers the influence of italian nationalist culture equal to the culture of Oman and Lesotho; having emerged from the krisis, that is, from the avanguardist’s destruens phase, it’s now able to dedicate all its subversive/subversive energies to its construens function.

Having written on ancient juridical ethics and modern social philosophies, where do you personally locate hope in contemporary discourse?

The contemporary does not exist. After the end of the modern era and of every modernist aesthetic ontology, decreed by Zygmunt Bauman and contemporary new sociology, every post-modernist meta-philosopher - like Jencks with architecture, Danto with art or Fukuyama with history - is tempted to impose the definitive sanction of death sentence on the object of his philosophy, without taking into theoretical consideration the lesson contained in La condition postmoderne and in the beautiful and unknown Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants by Jean-François Lyotard: the core of post-modernism consists in the admission of the fall of every «métarécits», that is, the delegitimization of the metanarratives of modernity and of the conception and of «univers(o)ality». Hyper-modernism, aware of Lyotard's distinction between the death of discourse and the death of meta-discourse, resuscitates art and buries Danto's everything goes: against post-modernism rises the hyper-modernism of Virilio, Baudrillard and Lipovetsky; against post-modern rises the hyper-modern of Bauman (liquid society) and Beck (risk society) [post-modernity has always maintained a certain confusing vagueness between theory (post-modernism) or historical space (post-modern)]. Hyper-modernism, like every neo-avant-garde millennials (an italian example is my neon-avant-garde), abandons - as consolidated - the debate on anti-«univers(o)alism» and inserts itself in antagonistic continuity with modernism, unlike post-modernism, unleashing its Katjuša missiles in the direction of delegitimizing every form of «canon» and «tradition». However, hyper-modernism is a movement of the krisis. Once the krisis is over, every avant-garde/neo-avant-garde, self-criticizing, commits artistic suicide, and, finally, latemodernism enters the field. What is latemodernism? First of all, it is, at the same time, theory and historical space: it surpasses post-modernism and hyper-modernism on the left by declaring the definitive end of ontology and the total detachment from modernism, natural or caricatural; it goes beyond post-modernity and hyper-modernity on the right, making official the transition from the modern era to the latemodern era (as a historical repetition of the transition between the ancient era and the lateancient era).

If you could only preserve one of your books in a future archive, which would it be—and why?

Il pragmatismo analitico di Giovanni Vailati. Because the nineteenth-century lombard philosopher anticipates by a hundred years the conclusions of the US pragmatism of Rorty and Putnam and US analytics. Lombardy, culturally, fucks the US a hundred times. Ah-ah.

How do you balance your relentless productivity with the conceptual depth and aesthetic disruption your works are known for?

With an IQ of 164 i sleep three hours a night. And like a latemodern tribunus plebis, from the height of the concilia, i ask for the provocatio, untouchable (i’m not blackmailable and, in exchange, i hold an archive of materials useful for making my enemies blackmailable), and i murder artistic senators with an IQ of 80, similar to homines erecti. As you see, Ana, i held a rally, as Massimino l'Abruzzese says. But he keeps his in Abruzzo, i towards the world. My riots will conquer all the world.