Pierluigi Battista he wrote a beautiful book. It’s called “My Heroes.” Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and George Orwell. It is a text full of passion and history. These are not three flat biographies. In fact, the stories of his heroes are actually just a pretext: the subtext is Battista’s unconventional approach to the things of the world. There is little that is self-evident in what he writes, and above all, he handles his pen extremely well.
“My three cultural heroes immediately understood that the distance between the bloody construction of a redeemed humanity and the barbed wire of a concentration camp was minimal. They were not gentle, harmless individuals. They simply hoped for a society that would be gentler and harmless, fairer, more civil, pluralistic, full of contradictions and, above all, freer. Camus argued that it was better to be wrong without murdering anyone and letting others speak than to be right amid the silence of corpses.
Camus has itand especially Battista, with the famous intellectuals of the time, with the Sartres, with the Brecht, with all those who “placed the idea of man above that of humanity”. Battista’s three heroes are not John Galt, Ayn Rand’s Never-There Man, but they are flesh and blood. Like Arendt’s fatal attraction to her master Heidegger, a Nazi and unscrupulous.
But it is Arendh herself who shrugs off the very harsh and unfair criticism she receives for her work Banality of Evil; and that she is even considered a collaborator precisely because of her old (and dusty) friendship with the intellectual who got caught up in the vortex of Nazi idealism.
In the book there is also the opportunity to talk about the heroic performances of our three actors. The notes about what has been forgotten are wonderfulunfortunately, Nicola Chiaromonte, who died alone in a Rai elevator, hoping for collaboration. The liberal intellectual, anti-fascist and also anti-communist (for which he was not forgiven) and friend of Battista’s friends. Who among the readers of this column still remembers the polite argument between Chiaromonte and the great Italo Calvino (and yet you can still see it on YouTube). Calvino “showed contempt from his podium for the inappropriate and provocative decision to award the Nobel Prize to the author of Doctor Zhivago: the risk, he argued, was to intensify the reaction of the Soviet power.”
But it is “absurd, absurd,” Chiaromonte continued to object awkwardly. Pick up Battista’s book and devour it like this liberal column did.
Nicola Porro, Il Giornale October 15, 2023