A Prophetic Reading of the "Opera senza nome”
For many years Roberto Calasso served as director—and later as proprietor—of Adelphi, the publishing house founded by Luciano Foà, Roberto Olivetti, and Roberto Bazlen with two stated purposes: to publish the critical edition of Nietzsche’s Works and to bring out “unique books.” Without question, he was one of the most distinguished figures in the Italian and European cultural landscape. A devoted student of Nietzsche—whom, in the essay accompanying the 1969 translation of Ecce Homo, he sought to defend against Heidegger’s criticisms—Calasso was an omnivorous literary aesthete, and above all a coryphaeus of Central European literature: from Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, by way of Schnitzler and Walser. To fully enumerate his merits as an editor would be a daunting task.
Yet Roberto Calasso—R.C., as he liked to sign himself—sought also to channel the vast learning he had drawn from the most rarefied and aristocratic corners of knowledge into a literary undertaking of his own: the Opera senza nome ("Nameless Work"). It consists of a sequence of books, each centered on a distinct theme yet open to reflections and constellations of unexpected and often unheard-of connections. Like a magic wand, this Opera touches upon fields immensely different from one another, each nonetheless bearing deep significance within the mare magnum of human understanding.
L’impuro folle (The Impure Madman) was the first book published by Calasso with Adelphi. It was a novel centered on the figure of Daniel Paul Schreber, President of the Court of Appeal in Dresden, who, having succumbed to a hallucinatory paranoia, had recounted his experience in Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenarztes ("Memoirs of my Nervous Illness")—the very book that would later inspire Freud’s speculations on the subject. Calasso’s book is an aside: a playful yet penetrating exploration of the complex relationship between Schreber and his psychiatrist and neurologist, Flechsig, which he takes as an opportunity to examine the creaking structure of the totem of the I. By Calasso’s own choice, this text does not formally belong to the Opera, though it may well be seen as its prelude. Its absurd, enigmatic nature—already implicit in the title, since the pure fool (der reine Tor) is the most familiar of the etymologies proposed for the name Parsifal—contains the very seed that alone, as will later be seen, illuminates the Opera senza nome, whose first annunciation is already discernible here.
The first book of Calasso’s Opera is La rovina di Kasch ("The Ruin of Kasch"), that mythical African city where the order founded upon sacrifice and the observation of the stars was once ignored—and from which, inevitably, came ruin. Yet the true protagonist of the book, or rather the pivot around which its narratives revolve, is Talleyrand: his intrigues, his recollections, his web of subtle manipulations. Then comes the plunge into classical antiquity with Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia ("The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony"), a meditation on Greek myth and its enduring resonance in both ancient and modern times. After that, Ka—on India, from the Veda to Kṛṣṇa—though for the most part it lingers upon the surface of its immense subject; and likewise L’ardore ("Ardor"), the seventh volume of the Opera, remains literal in its approach, devoted again to India and, in particular, to the theme of sacrifice as codified in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. However, one critique cannot be overlooked: Calasso approaches the sacred texts of ancient India through the lens—and with the mindset—typical of Western scholarship, wherein every phenomenon that does not submit to calculative reason is dismissed as apotropaic naïveté. Yet the sacrifice to Agni, which lies at the very heart of the post-Rigvedic world, is anything but the childish act of melting butter into the fire, as once performed by the Brāhmins and as Calasso seems to believe. It is, rather, the sacrifice of the I itself—as the esoteric Tantra have consistently declared—indeed, the very equivalent of the nigredo, the blackness of alchemy.
Between these two works stand K. (on Kafka), Il rosa Tiepolo ("Tiepolo Pink"), and La Folie Baudelaire. After L’ardore comes Il Cacciatore Celeste ("The Celestial Hunter")—exploring the constellation of Orion, known as Sha’u for the Egyptians—which tells how our ancestors may have become predators in their turn, and how the echoes of that event still resound in myth and in the collective unconscious. L’innominabile attuale ("The Unnameable Present") shifts toward the modern age, exposing its existential void. Then Il libro di tutti i libri ("The Book of All Books"), the tenth work of the Opera, returns to the past—to that common source of the Western world, the Bible, and in particular the Old Testament. The next book, La tavoletta dei destini ("The Tablet of Destinies"), reaches further still, to the very origins of Genesis itself: the wisdom crystallized in the Sumerian myths. The final volume—posthumous, and likely unfinished—is Sotto gli occhi dell’Agnello ("Under the Eyes of the Lamb"), where Calasso turns to the book that closes the Christian Bible, the Apocalypse of John, and once again, with renewed intensity, to the theme of sacrifice.
What, then, is the meaning of Calasso’s Opera? The author himself never says. Many have explored this path in search of an answer, yet always in vain. Most often, one contents oneself with saying that it is an immense, silken, and translucent web of connections—daring yet irrefutable—whose aim is to open a new and indeterminate perspective (that prospect, which is Nietzsche’s legacy) upon reality itself. But such an interpretation is merely a description a posteriori of Calasso’s Opera: it pays it due homage, yet remains at the level of the text, never venturing beyond its surface. The Aleph that gives sense and order to the apparent congeries of his reflections is not perceived—nor even sought.
No less superficial and reductive is the reading of the Opera senza nome as a mere description of modernity. It is true that the seemingly irreducible complexity of the modern world is examined—from its origins to its degraded contemporary manifestations—but even such an interpretation ultimately says nothing. For if the Opera were to be understood in this way, it would mean that Calasso had simply exhibited modernity; whereas Calasso himself—who called his books 'absolute literature'—thereby affirmed that his Opera does indeed possess meaning: it is not a mere catalogue of ships in the Homeric sense. Calasso often repeated that he was writing a work still in the making. Is it possible, then, that he left us no key to it? And where could that key lie—how might it be found amid such a sea of perspectives, each luminous, decisive, and essential? Which of them is the Aleph of Calasso? In other words, what is the concrete and real message that one of the most profound intellects of the past century sought to leave to his readers? In brief, the fulcrum of Calasso’s Opera, in my view, is the messianic figure.
He reveals it in his posthumous book Sotto gli occhi dell’Agnello, invoking one of the most authoritative figures in the entire tradition of Western thought—none other than Jesus himself. Calasso recalls the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus says: “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Paraclete, who will remain with you forever”. Commenting on this, Calasso writes: “According to the Gospel of John, Jesus even asks the Father to grant him another Paraclete. Does he wish to relinquish his own function? Is this the announcement of a new kingdom—the kingdom of the Paraclete? Perhaps an eon without limits. The successor is far from being merely the assistant, the continuer. His coming presupposes that the world itself has changed, and that the ways of responding to it have changed. At the end of time Christ disappears and is replaced by another celestial being—the Paraclete. But why does Christ require this duplication? A new kingdom approaches, one that demands new forces, new forms”. And Calasso continues in this section with a series of insistent, almost hoarse questions—uttered as if in a breath of anguish: “The uncertainty is enormous—and remains”. It is as though he were asking, in a tone both incredulous and trembling: “And what if it were all true?”.
This overall and synoptic interpretation of Calasso’s Opera also accords with its two most recurring leitmotifs: the sacred and the sacrifice—the latter explored in many forms, although perhaps never in its properly esoteric sense. It also reconnects to the prelude of the Opera itself, L’impuro folle for if Parsifal was not a messiah, he was certainly a redeemer. And since the figure of Parsifal is necessarily linked to Wagner’s Parsifal—that ultimate representation of the sacred—it is well known that the opera closes with the chorus Erlösung dem Erlöser! (“Redemption to the Redeemer!”), a verse that is nothing other than the renewed invocation, the reawakening, of messianic expectation.
So Calasso’s Opera is without a name because the modern world—from the eighteenth century of “rights” to the periodic resurgences of populism—has no form: it is nothing but the triumph of the Kali Yuga, the age of ignorance, in which one can witness only the vain attempts to straighten the course of humankind and the cries of protest against fate uttered by the more sensitive souls. In his culminating book, Calasso states this quite plainly: every rational or reasonable attempt to comprehend the world halts before the mystery. There is, then, a vast sea of what remains unsaid—and beyond it, the solution: the figure of the Messiah.
This teleological interpretation of Calasso’s Opera is, however, refuted by Calasso himself. In his final posthumous book, Opera senza nome—a commentary detached from his main œuvre—he states that the Opera is to be understood as a vast fresco of the contemporary world and of its irreducible fragmentariness Indeed, Calasso’s apparent lack of knowledge regarding the foundations of the Sanātana Dharma—as is evident both from what he writes and from what he shows himself to ignore in his two works on Indian civilization—supports the argument that his so-called 'absolute literature' often reduces to a mere transcription of the present age in its formlessness. Yet perhaps not even Calasso’s own interpretation is the definitive one, for understanding often transcends conscious articulation. Many people share, to some degree, the gift of an unordinary kind of understanding—and yet are so unaware of it that they reduce what they intuit to the limits and confines of the reigning rationalist mode of knowledge. “The yawns of Kundalinī occur to many; the difficulty lies in realizing them,” says a Hindu adage. It is likely that all great thinkers, scientists, and artists have at some point risen beyond the ordinary plane of representational mentality through some tear in the veil of knowledge—only to end by suffocating their own gift within the dim and ashen categories of the calculative mind. Thus Hegel, who from the sublime vision of the Objective Spirit descended into a science of hyper-logicism pursued for its own sake; and thus Spinoza, who, from conceiving nature as the glove upon the hand of God, fell into a geometric hierarchization of philosophy and ethics; and the same may be said of many other geniuses across the various domains of Western thought.
The very nature of such profound insights attests to Kṛṣṇa's teaching in the Bhagavad Gītā: that yoga is bestowed as it is—always in accord with the circumstances in which it arises."