Differentia: Review of Italian Thought Number 1 Autumn Article 24 1986 Logos and Transience in Franco Rella John Paul Russo Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia Recommended Citation Russo, John Paul (1986) "Logos and Transience in Franco Rella," Differentia: Review of Italian Thought: Vol. 1 , Article 24. Available at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/vol1/iss1/24 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Academic Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Differentia: Review of Italian Thought by an authorized editor of Academic Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected],
[email protected]. Logos and Transience 1n• Franco Rella John Paul Russo Travel along every path, you will not find the boundaries of the soul, so deep is its logos. -Heraclitus, Fr. 71 After World War II the cultural ambience of the Italian Left was defined variously by dogmatic Marxism, by the later Lukacs, by socialist realism, and by followers of Croce and Gramsci. In the 1960s the Frankfurt School, French Marxism, and other "critics of ideology" began to exert a potent influence on Italian criticism. It was demonstrated (once again) that there could be no ultimate explanatory language or fact in isolation from its "resistance" or "opposition," that even the "means of production, in themselves isolated, do not explain or determine," but are "anticipated, re tarded, or crossed by ideological currents." 1 For their own purposes the Italian critics wished to recover and utilize the avant-garde, experimental, bourgeois art and literature of modern ism: Conrad, Mann, Kafka, Schoenberg, Musil, Rilke, Eliot, Joyce, DIFFERENT/A 1 (Autumn 1986) DIFFERENT/A 188 etc.