The Translator’s Invisibility

{293} In his letters to me, as well as in his essays, translations and interviews, De Angelis has made clear that his poetry assimilates various literary materials (European and Eastern, classical and twentieth-century), but also that it has a distinct philosophical genealogy: he has read widely in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, yet revises them according to the new conceptions of language and subjectivity that underlie the varieties of poststructuralist thinking in contemporary French and Italian culture. An early interest in Maurice Blanchot’s critical speculations about the creative process and the nature of textuality led De Angelis to the study of Heidegger and Ludwig Binswanger, and finally to a belief in the importance of Nietzsche and Lacan for any contemporary project in poetry. This aspect of De Angelis’s writing was partly noted by Franco Fortini in a review of that first anthology selection: De Angelis, Fortini found, is “fascinated with the Heideggerian vortices of origin, absence, recurrence, and the danger of death” (Fortini 1975:1309). My interpretation of “L’idea centrale” argues that it reflects Heidegger’s concept of “being-towards-death,” but that De Angelis submits this concept to a Nietzschean revision.

In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger argues that human existence is perpetually “falling,” always already determined by concernful relations with people and things, its identity dispersed into the “they”—until the possibility of death appears (Heidegger 1962:219–224). The anticipation of death, the possibility of being nothing, constitutes a “limit-situation,” in which the subject is forced to recognize the inauthenticity of its determinate nature and gains “a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘they,’ and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious” (ibid.:311). De Angelis’s “L’idea centrale” exploits the potential for drama in this climactic moment of truth by sketching a hospital scene. His poem depicts being-towards-death as a state of physical and psychological extremity where the apparent unity of lived experience is split by competing representations, and consciousness loses its self-possession and selfconsistency. “Actions” are decentered from intentionality: “their meaning” is never uniquely appropriate to the subject, but an appropriation of the subject by the “they,” figured here as the “bosses” who are so “threatening” to identity because they speak “in a dream,” having even colonized the unconscious. The “central idea” is that subjectivity is ultimately “nothing,” mere action on which meaning is imposed, an ensemble of biological processes whose meaninglessness “despotic beings” inadvertently reveal when they attempt to master it {294} and impose meaning through a scientific representation like X-rays. The formal peculiarities of this text—the shifts from realistic detail to abstract reflection to quoted statement, the scanty amount of information, the fragmented syntax—mimic the identity-shattering experience of being-towards-death by destabilizing the signifying process, abandoning any linearity of meaning, and unbalancing the reader’s search for intelligibility.

What does become clear, however, is that De Angelis’s disturbingly engimatic poem carries no suggestion that beingtowards-death is the prelude to authentic existence. De Angelis resists Heidegger’s idea of authenticity as being which is unified and free, which is “something of its own” and can “‘choose’ itself and win itself” (Heidegger 1962:68). In form and theme, “L’idea centrale” rather suggests Nietzsche’s corrosive notes in The Will to Power, where human agency is described as “no subject but an action, a positing, creative, no ‘causes and effects’” (Nietzsche 1967:331).[3] For Nietzsche, subjectivity can never be authentic, because it can never possess an essential identity: it is always a site of multiple determinations, whether produced by the grammaticality of language, the need for a subject in a sentence, or constructed by some more elaborate conceptual system or social institution, like a psychology, morality, religion, family, or job—the “bosses.” De Angelis’s poem calls attention to the contradictory conditions of subjectivity, which often remain unacknowledged in the “careful busying” of everyday life and need a limit-situation in order to reemerge in consciousness.