Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean

Notes

n o t e s translators’ introduction: on franco cassano’s southern thought 1. This statement is translated from private correspondence with the author. 2. See above, note 1. 3. See, for example, the essay ‘‘Il gioco della Scienza,’’ Rassegna italiana di sociologia. 30, no. 1 (1989): 3–30. 4. Francesco Giacomantonio, ‘‘All’origine del pensiero meridiano di Franco Cassano,’’ accessible at http://tiny.cc/0yzzl 5. Michel de Montaigne, ‘‘The Profit of One Man Is the Loss of Another,’’ in Essays of Montaigne, vol. 1, trans. Charles Cotton (New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1910). 6. Jonathan Morris, ‘‘Challenging Meridionalismo: Constructing a New History for Southern Italy,’’ in The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited, ed. Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris (Exeter, UK.: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 5. 7. The latifundia estates were the vast grain-producing land-holdings of Calabria, Apulia, and Western Sicily. 8. See, for example, Salvatore Lupo, ‘‘I proprietari terrieri del Mezzogiorno ,’’ in Storia dell’agricoltura italiana, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, vol. 2 (Venice: Marsilio, 1991); and Marta Petrusewicz, Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery, trans. Judith C. Green (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 9. We are referring to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famed Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1986). 10. The reference is to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 11. The reference is to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (London: Verso, 2007). 12. Cassano does so in the footsteps of the German philosopher Carl Schmitt, the author of Land und Meer, but his understanding of geophilosophical categories is also shaped by the work of Massimo Cacciari, Geo- filosofia dell’Europa (Milan: Adelphi, 1994). An English translation of Land und 155 156 Notes to pages xiv–xxii Meer is available under the title of Land and Sea (Washington, D.C.: Plutarch Press, 1997). While Cacciari’s work has not been published in its entirety, an English translation of a chapter from Geo-filosofia is included in The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason, ed. Alessandro Carrera (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 197–205. 13. Cassano is very aware of the criticism of territorializing-identity politics leveled at his work. Indeed, after the 1996 publication of the first edition of Southern Thought, Cassano’s call to return to the Mediterranean generated ambivalent responses. While some critics understood the deeper meaning of this work and the context in which it was produced, others merely dismissed it as an imaginary fiction or interpreted it as a reactionary manifesto of ‘‘meridionalismo.’’ In 2005, on the occasion of the second edition of the volume, Cassano added ‘‘Prologue: Parallels and Meridians’’ where he clarifies his intent: ‘‘Herein lies the main aim of this prologue: to reconstruct the intersection of arguments formulated in Southern Thought so as to allow the discussion to continue on more precise foundations. The one who writes has not arrived to the South and to Southern thought from a ‘we’ or a sudden passion for identity, but from the category of the ‘Other,’ from a meditation on the shadowy side of every identity. . . . [C]hoosing the South was an attempt to take the side of the other even before taking the side of the self, a theoretical reaction to a characterization presented in such a negative and caricatured manner that it could not be true.’’ The prologue is included in this translation. 14. Enrique Dussel, ‘‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,’’ in The Culture of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 18–19. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See, for example, aphorism 124, ‘‘In the horizon of the infinite’’: ‘‘We have forsaken the land and gone to sea. We have destroyed the bridge behind us—more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite. . . . Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of the cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there...