‘Cyberia, Syberia …’: Clones, Virtual Spaces, and Cyber-Selves in Claudio Magris’s Alla cieca

This article analyzes the moments in Claudio Magris’ Alla cieca (2005) in which the author mobilizes the expressive potential of technology by means of three specific European cultural references: the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, twentieth-century class-struggle and its path toward the catastrophe of totalitarianism, and the legacy of the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts. I argue that these moments, in which Magris conjugates technology and specifically European cultural references, are essential to extracting his philosophy of (European) history, and its current and future representations. Despite his modest knowledge of contemporary digital and technological culture, Magris sees in it a metaphor for how history plays itself out in the lives of individuals and collectives.