“The perfidious beast, of course, is conscience with its brigade” Tommaso Landolfi in the regions of the unspeakable

Abstract

The present essay aims at examining Landolfi’s poetics at the intersection of the anthropology of Lévy-Bruhl, whose concepts of “primitive mentality”, mystical participation of essences and “pre-logic” he embraced, and of the organisation of unconscious psychic processes described by Freud. Through the idea of “primitive mentality”, Landolfi, who was generally reticent toward the ‘talking cure’, seemed to approach a psychoanalysis understood as the practice of regression, which implies leaving aside the position of a conscious subject in order to return to the primitive elements that give structure to the psyche. It is specifically through his choice to materialize the unspeakable that Landolfi placed himself at the intersection of the animistic-anthropological and the psychoanalytic approach: in view of the interdependence between physical and spiritual reality and of the separation of man from the animality in which it is rooted, any determination that is ‘different’, alien to those who discover it (the unspeakable, the impulses, the phobias, the obsessions, the anxieties, etc.) transforms, in Landolfi’s works, into a tangible reality that takes the name and shape of a “beast”.