Representing the Species

Focusing on Alberto Moravia and, in particular, his ‘conversion to politics’, this article explores how Italian intellectuals dealt with the post-war nuclear threat. The ‘conversion’ was provoked by a 1982 visit to Hiroshima, which pushed Moravia – who for a lifetime had openly rejected any active political commitment – to present his candidacy to the European Parliament in order to promote the question of disarmament. I investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Moravia in the journalistic production of his years in Parliament, especially that of ‘oversimplification’. Critics tend to dismiss Moravia’s consistent stylistic and conceptual simplification as a product of naiveté and lack of sophistication. I contend instead that this was a precise rhetorical choice through which Moravia tried to tame the nuclear problem and make it a familiar reality, thereby preventing it from being distanced to the phantasmal sphere of the ‘unthinkable’

Art · Disarmament · Literature · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Social science · Sociology · Sophistication · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European Cultural and National Identity · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law