Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: parlar male di Umberto Eco

Daniel Johnson ci riesce
 
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4330/full
 
 
Overrated: Umberto Eco
DANIEL JOHNSON
March 2012
 
 
Illustration by David Smith
 
Who said: "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in
nothing: they believe in anything"? The Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations attributes it to G.K. Chesterton, but it cannot be found in
any of his works and appears to have begun life as a paraphrase by his
biographer Emile Cammaerts. One does not need to be a scholar to trace
this cliché to its origin. Yet on the home page of the extensive
website of Umberto Eco, one is greeted with the following quotation by
the great man: "When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they
then believe in nothing: they believe in everything." Undergraduates
who tried to palm off such a hackneyed misquotation as their own might
expect to be laughed at or even reprimanded by their teachers. But Eco
is Europe's most celebrated living writer, with countless academic
honours to his name. Why does a man so feted, who boasts that he owns
50,000 books (including 1,200 rare titles) "in my various homes", seek
to appropriate Chesterton's gnomic wisdom? Is it possible that Umberto
Eco is, as Henry IV of France said of James I of England, "the wisest
fool in Christendom"?
 
In his own eyes, at least, Eco is the opposite: the most disillusioned
of men, "fascinated by error, bad faith and idiocy", and thus
perfectly equipped to expose everyone else as a fraud. In his recent
published conversation with Jean-Claude Carrière, This is Not the End
of the Book, he reveals that his vast library consists entirely of
"books whose contents I don't believe";  these "lies" include a first
edition of Joyce's Ulysses. Eco makes no distinction between fiction
and forgery. He also assumes that most of his readers are hopelessly
ignorant: "The current generation is probably tempted to think, as the
Americans do, that what happened 300 years ago no longer matters..."
 
This pose of the learned sceptic, even the arch-cynic, has stood Eco
in good stead. Without it he could never have written The Name of the
Rose, the medieval whodunnit that became a film vehicle for Sean
Connery and has gone on to sell more than 50 million copies. The novel
is an exercise in debunking the monks to whom he owed his education
and who immunised him from fascism. Eco's first book, based on his
doctoral thesis, is his best: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. He
still recalls the joy of being surrounded by old books and manuscripts
at the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris. Then he lost his faith and
has spent the rest of his life in search of a substitute.
 
Eco found his pseudo-religion in the pseudo-science of semiotics,
which he has taught for many years. His novels are case studies in
postmodernism, which elides all categories of truth, beauty, morality
and politics into an esoteric game. The Plan, which forms the theme of
Foucault's Pendulum, his second bestseller, shows Eco was already
obsessed with conspiracy theories, involving everything from the
Knights Templar to Kabbalah. But the subversive message of the novel
is that conspiracy theories may after all be true, and secret
societies may actually exist. The dissolution of reality into mere
"narratives" lends the conspiracy theory new life.
 
In Eco's latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, his idée fixe mutates into
a gothic fantasy embracing Jesuits, Freemasons and above all Jews,
culminating in the most pernicious conspiracy theory of them all: the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Eco claims that he has invented only
one character, the protagonist Simone Simonini, whose fictitious
diaries record how he forges the Protocols, frames Dreyfus and infects
Europe with anti-Semitism. "But on reflection," he adds, "even Simone
Simonini ... did in some sense exist. Indeed, to be frank, he is still
with us." In other words, Eco deliberately confuses fact and fiction.
Having immersed his readers in conspiracy theories against the Jews,
he then leaves them wondering whether some of these vile slanders
might, after all, be true.
 
The trouble with what his publisher calls "an inspired twisting of
history and fiction" is that Eco is playing with fire. This time it is
not a game. There is nothing esoteric about the Protocols, millions of
copies of which circulate in the Muslim world. Anti-Semitism is on the
march, not only in the Middle East but across the globe, including the
West, fuelled by that multiplier of conspiracy theories, the internet.
The leaders of Iran have made Holocaust denial state policy and
signalled that they plan a second Holocaust, using nuclear technology
supplied by, among others, Germany and Russia — the two worst
persecutors of Jews in the recent past. Eco's frivolous treatment of
Jew-hatred as a cloak-and-dagger mystery, to fund his collection of
incunabula, while real Jews are targeted by terrorists from New York
to Mumbai and from London to Buenos Aires has left many readers
feeling queasy.
 
The doubts sown by the book fall on fertile soil, for ours is a
culture that long ago lost its bearings, thanks to the prestige of
postmodernists such as Umberto Eco. He stands for the intellectuals of
the 21st century who, like those of the last century, commit trahison
des clercs by flirting with anti-Semitism when their duty is to take a
clear stand against it.

 Overrated: Umberto Eco
 
e Van Gaagh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fX4QLLHUxKw#t=210s
 
 
da cui:
http://it-it.facebook.com/pages/The-academy-of-the-overrated/77535041853