“Dante after Wittgenstein: ‘Aspetto’, Language, and Subjectivity from Convivio to Paradiso”,...

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LEGENDA &$*$"0!, founded in 5667 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association.

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EDITORIAL BOARD

ChairmanProfessor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)

Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English)

Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French)

Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)

Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)

Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)

Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German)Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German)Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian)

Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French)Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

Managing EditorDr Graham Nelson

95 Wellington Square, Oxford -:5 ;2<, UK

[email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk


Dante’s PlurilingualismAuthority, Knowledge, Subjectivity

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CONTENTS!

Acknowledgements ix Notes on the Contributors x

Introduction: Dante’s Plurilingualism 5 %!(! <-(#'"!, +!"'$&$ *(!*"-&!#) !"0 2=(*$" #(!1!"#PART I: THEORIES

5. Mother Tongues in the Middle Ages and Dante 5> *)'&)- &$?%3,.;. Millena variatio: Overcoming the Horror of Variation ;9 2=(*$" #(!1!"#@. Man as a Speaking and Political Animal: A Political Reading of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia @9 )(A"$ (-%)$(-3!#!3,9. Volgare e latino nella storia di Dante 7; +)(B- #!4-")7. Le idee linguistiche di Dante e il naturalismo fiorentino-toscano del Cinquecento >6 %#$<!"- *$"%)")>. Aristotele e Dante, filosofi della variabilità linguistica C@ <(!"3- &- ?)?!(-

PART II: AUTHORITY

D. The Roots of Dante’s Plurilingualism: ‘Hybridity’ and Language in the Vita nova 6C E.*+'"# *. 1!(!F%B)C. Language as a Mirror of the Soul: Guilt and Punishment in Dante’s Concept of Language 5;; 1$##)"! &)"0-(<$(6. Plurilingualism sub specie aeternitatis and the Strategies of a Minority Author 5@@ $&$"! &-+1!(0)

PART III: SUBJECTIVITY

58. Dante’s Blind Spot (Inferno XVI-XVII) 578 3!(&- *)"E1'(*55. ‘Trasmutabile per tutte guise’: Dante in the Comedy 5>9 &)"- ?$(#)&$


viii C-"#$"#%

5;. Is Ulysses Queer? The Subject of Greek Love in Inferno XV and XXVI 5D6 *!(. 3$%#!(-5@. Lost for Words: Recuperating Melancholy Subjectivity in Dante’s Eden 56@ <(!"3$%3! %-'#,$(0$"59. (In-)Corporeality, Language, Performance in Dante’s Vita Nuova and Commedia ;55 +!"'$&$ *(!*"-&!#)57. Dante After Wittgenstein: ‘Aspetto’, Language, and Subjectivity from Convivio to Paradiso ;;@ %!(! <-(#'"! !"0 +!"'$&$ *(!*"-&!#)

Epilogue: Riscrivere Dante in un’altra lingua. Conversazione con Giorgio Pressburger su Nel regno oscuro ;96 $++! 1-"0, +!"'$&$ *(!*"-&!#) !"0 &!'(! &$?%3,.

Bibliography ;>D

Index ;CD


CH A P T E R 15

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Dante After Wittgenstein: ‘Aspetto’, Language, and Subjectivity

from Convivio to ParadisoSara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati

Introduction

This paper considers Dante’s poetic and philosophical use of the word ‘aspetto’ and proposes to explore it in connection with Wittgenstein’s original constellation of aspect, aspect-change, seeing-as, and human physiognomy.

Dante’s original use of ‘aspetto’ could be considered as an exemplary case of vulgarization of a somewhat technical term. In his book Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks, the art historian Hans Belting, mentions Dante’s oeuvre as a theoretically relevant synthesis and vulgarization of the Arabic theory of perspective, such as the philosophical meditation of Alhazen’s De Aspectibus and of the species-debate in medieval scholastic philosophy.5 Belting also considers Dante’s poetry as the first manifestation of a proto-humanistic conception of subjectivity, which would manifest itself in the ubiquitous and strongly active presence of the human gaze in the Commedia’s poetic representation.;

These two dimensions — vulgarization of a conceptual field and representation of subjectivity via the gaze dynamics — are deeply intermingled in the complex semantic and conceptual synthesis forged within the term ‘aspetto’. The hypothesis of this article is that Dante’s semantic and poetic use of this term expresses, in a paradigmatic form, a type of relationship between language and intersubjectivity that shows interesting affinities with Wittgenstein’s concept of aspectuality. Moreover, Dante’s use of ‘aspetto’ in Paradiso could help to clarify what Wittgenstein says about the way in which language works in literary and philosophical writing.

The general assumption directing this analysis is that the semantic evolution of ‘aspetto’ in Dante’s works ref lects — and could be considered an expression of — the development of his theory and praxis of language, which moves from the rather negative judgement of linguistic multiplicity in De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio to the Commedia, where Dante embraces multilingualism in all its amplitude and openness, indicating — also through the different ontologies of the three cantiche — diverse modalities of the relationship between language, bodily experience and subjectivity.@

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According to our interpretation Dante’s semantic creation is fully accomplished in Paradiso, which performs a ‘revolution of poetic language’ and activates a different kind of textuality, produced by a set of semantic and morphosyntactic tensions of which the word ‘aspetto’ is an important agent, also bringing to the fore the perspectival and subjective element within the act of perceiving the world.9

Body, Affection, and the Ethics of Language between Dante and Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein, who is notorious for almost never mentioning his philosophical sources and even for completely ignoring the history of philosophy, seems the only contemporary philosopher to recognize the deep theoretical value and, possibly, the historical density of the conceptual frame related to the use of ‘Aspekt/aspect’ and, in his late meditation on the philosophy of psychology, he tracks down the rich and articulated theoretical field of aspectuality in a very original way.7

The idea of connecting Dante and Wittgenstein pushes further an indication by Stanley Cavell, who hints at the similarity between the poetic enterprise attempted by Dante in the Commedia and Wittgenstein’s investigation on language, ethics, and subjectivity in his Philosophical Investigations.> More recently Christian Moevs has also pointed to an analogy between Dante and Wittgenstein’s intellectual development: from the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia, and from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations, respectively. Moevs focuses on the moral character of this transformation, which would shift from an emphasis on doctrine and a set of philosophical creeds to a form of religious conversion: ‘For both, philosophical arguments that lead only to more philosophical arguments are a travesty of philosophy, an illness Dante calls ingegno di sofista, the mind-set of a sophist. The linear discourse of Dante’s Convivio gives way to the Comedy for some of the same reasons, perhaps, that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus gives way to the Investigations’.D

The religious issue is certainly a crucial one in both authors, but the analogy that we would like to draw here concerns, rather, their progression towards under-standing the possibility that language has to express and connect — poetically for Dante and philosophically for Wittgenstein — the complexity and multi-layeredness of reality.

In the case of Dante’s theory and praxis of language, it is possible to trace an evolution from De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio, which are still traversed by several unresolved tensions, to the Commedia, which proposes to exploit and integrate them. In the case of Wittgenstein, recent interpretations of his last meditation on language have focused on the relation between poetic language and intersubjectivity, thereby deconstructing the classical reading of the Philosophical Investigations which considers the multiplicity of the linguistic games presented by Wittgenstein as a neutral descriptive model of how human language functions.C Recent studies argue that Wittgenstein’s image of simple, primitive linguistic games in the first part of the Philosophical Investigations is rather a critical one, and suggests that the primitive character of this linguistic exchange should primarily be considered from an

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‘ethical’ point of view as an isolated, purely mechanic communicative interaction.6 Indeed, according to Cora Diamond, Wittgenstein’s description of Sprachspiele produces in his readers the sense that they lack the core elements of an ethical form of communication: on the one hand, the possibility of the aesthetic dimension which allows us to experience language while making use of it and, on the other hand, the possibility of having language fully rooted in the human form of life (Lebensform), that is, the general background in which every utterance is embedded and from which it acquires sense.58

According to Wittgenstein, the artificial and limited character of linguistic games and ordinary communication can be overcome by a more sophisticated use of language, with respect to which two phenomena play a crucial role: ‘aspect-change’ and ‘perspicuous representation’. Aspect-change (Aspektwechsel) has the specific role of permitting a conversion of the gaze, which also bears a reli gious dimen sion, whereas what Wittgenstein calls a ‘perspicuous representation’ (übersicht-liche Darstellung) is a linguistic form which is able to reveal its own structure and operation. In particular, art and poetry are considered specific manifestations of ‘seeing-as’ (‘Sehen Als’), allowing for aspect-change and the gaze-switch from the foreground (the single linguistic interaction) to the background and giving access to the totality of sense normally hidden in ordinary linguistic usage.

As for Dante’s meditation on language, De vulgari eloguentia and Convivio share a similar theoretical context related to the tension between unity and multiplicity. The volgare is for Dante very peculiarly associated with a human dimension in which biological, physical, and cultural components are deeply intermingled. Or, rather, one could say that the volgare as a natural language is presented as a sort of bio-cultural link between human beings. In this sense Dante motivates his love for the volgare by explaining that it brought his parents together and therefore represents the origin of his own generation: ‘Questo mio volgare fu congiungitore delli miei generanti, che con esso parlavano, sì come ’l fuoco è disponitore del ferro al fabro che fa lo coltello: per che manifesto è lui essere concorso alla mia generazione, e così essere alcuna cagione del mio essere’ [This vernacular of mine was what brought my parents together, for they conversed in it, just as it is fire that prepares the iron for the smith who makes the knife; and so it is evident that it has contributed to my generation, and so was one cause of my being] (Convivio I, xiii, 9).55 Another crucial passage of the same work associates the volgare with physical needs and drives — as the language which the newborn learns by suckling at the mother’s breast — and opposes it to Latin, which is gramatica, an artificial language: ‘Onde sì, come nato, tosto lo figlio a la tetta della madre s’apprende, così, tosto come alcuno lume d’animo in esso appare, si dee volgere alla correzione del padre, e lo padre lui ammaestrare’ [So as a child clings to the mother’s breast as soon as it is born, likewise as soon as some light appears in his mind he ought to turn to the correction of his father, and his father should give him instruction] (IV, xxiv, 59).5;

Thus the volgare seems to be a synthesis of nature and nurture, need and desire, bodily experience and human social dimension; its intrinsic limits lay for Dante in its fragmentation and constant mutability.

In De vulgari eloquentia the scenario of Babel offers a third manifestation of this

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linguistic phenomenon. The fragmentation of languages during the construction of the tower — God’s punishment for the human hubris and will of competing with him — shifts away from the mythical narrative about the origin of linguistic multiplicity and rather refers to the fragmentation of technical languages in contemporary Florence. What we find in the Babelic building yards is a volgare anchored to a very physical situation and to a specific aim (the construction of the tower) connected to the strong and impious desire of a group of human beings. The volgare appears here as subordinate to the non-linguistic sphere of gestures inasmuch as the training of the workers uses language as a subsidiary form which always remains a component of a broader gestural and ostensive communication.5@

Referring to the distinction between the vernacular as maternal language learned by spontaneous imitation in an affective context, and Latin as a paternal language of discipline and rules,59 one could say that in a certain way these technical jargons of Florentine professional groups (‘corporazioni delle arti e mestieri’; De vulgari eloquentia, I, vii, >–D) at Dante’s time are also ‘paternal’ languages, mostly transmitted within the family from father to son and strongly dependent on the physical context and on an ostensive, practical modality of learning rather than, as in the case of Latin, on the conceptual abstraction and systematic categorization.

While learning the other paternal language, Latin-gramatica, means to move away from the bodily-linked and spontaneous linguistic apprenticeship of early childhood and submit oneself to a hard pedagogical path which makes it possible to learn the abstract grammatical rules of an artificial language, training in volgare (in the intrinsically double sense of learning the volgare as a language and developing one’s knowledge of the world guided by it) is different inasmuch as the volgare is the language of oral, ordinary communication and — as shown in the example of the Babelic yards — seems to have a mainly instrumental use.

In the three scenarios presented by Dante, the volgare embodies the diverse forms of interaction within the human community: in the first one, that of the volgare being responsible for Dante’s birth, the volgare refers to a private, domestic sphere and allows the union of a man and a woman and their transformation into ‘generanti’ (‘fu congiungitore delli miei generanti’)57 and thereby into a family; in the second case, that of spontaneous learning by imitation, the relation established by language is also domestic but this time hierarchical, as it includes an adult and a child and stages a first, affective, and mostly maternal pedagogic relation; in the third case, that of the technical jargons, training in the volgare concerns the public sphere of professional life, that is, a male domain where the ‘paternal’ relation of a ‘master’ with his apprentice is the paradigmatic model.

While from the point of view of De vulgari eloquentia the ‘correction’ of the natural volgare through the vivac (as Jürgen Trabant proposes to call, with an effective acronym, the vulgare illustre, cardinale, aulicum and curiale prefigured in this work) has to correspond to the poetic desiderata of Dante as a universal author and intellectual ‘cui patria est mundus’ (I, vi, @), Convivio seems to acknowledge Latin’s superiority over the volgare but also defends the linguistic choice of the volgare over Latin as the natural form of expression of human thoughts and desires, trying at the same time to challenge the superiority of Latin as the universal language of science

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and philosophy and introducing new technical terms and definitions (the polysemic forms of ‘aspetto’ being one of them, as we shall see). The Commedia introduces a further and original ‘ethical’ dimension into Dante’s concept of the volgare as well as a different poetic solution connected to the overcoming of a specific and limited use of it: using some categories by Wittgenstein, one could say that as long as the volgare manifests itself in a multiplicity of linguistic games — fragmented linguistic practices in which the actors fully invest their will, desires, and whole subjectivity — it suffers from a specific ‘ethical’ lack and is blind to the totality which connects the multiple perspectives underlying the different linguistic games. The plurilingualist choice in the Commedia permits language to overcome this lack: taking a word out of a single, specific linguistic domain means to light up the expressive, formal value deriving from its original context, and adopting polysemic words permits Dante to connect and poetically illuminate different point of views, thereby creating new links between them.

The progression from Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia to the Commedia seems therefore to depend on the possibility for poetic language to refer to the totality of human and supernatural experience and to rely on preconditions directly linked to the plurilinguistic project of the ‘poema sacro’: here the recovery of all aspects (both maternal and paternal) of the vernacular takes place and, as we shall see, the bodily and affective dimension of these symbolic forms is recognized as a necessary condition for a fully and self-ref lective experience of totality and intersubjective relations.

‘Seeing-as’: Physiognomy and Textuality in Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s last meditation on aspect-perception, aspect-change and seeing-as aims at giving a ‘perspicuous representation’ of the relationship between language and subjectivity, between physiognomy and poetic textuality, between ethics and aesthetic experience, examining the condition for a conversion of the gaze and for the possibility of seeing things in the right way.5>

A short overview of Wittgenstein’s ref lection on this topic will provide us with a conceptual diagram of what we could call ‘aspectuality’, which will then offer a perspective from which to consider the conceptual and poetic dimension of Dante’s use of ‘aspetto’ in Paradiso as well as its philosophic and aesthetic implications.

In the Philosophical Investigations (567;), the remarks on Sehen-als (seeing-as) and perception of aspects are systematically presented only in the eleventh chapter of the second part of the book. Indeed, the issue of aspect seems to ‘explode’ in the meditation of Wittgenstein’s last years and Wittgenstein discusses them extensively in the Remarks on Philosophy of Psychology and in the Last Writings on Philosophy of Psychology.

While it is true that what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing-as’ or ‘perception of aspects’ covers an enormous range of different and even apparently non-related phenomena and examples — from the perceptual to the aesthetic field, to the geometric and linguistic one — a common goal of his broad inquiry is to originally rethink classical philosophical matters, questioning the classical separation of subject and

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object and trying to overcome the rigid conceptual borders between the objective and the subjective point of view. In order to understand this theoretical move, it may be useful to turn to the case of ambiguous or rather ‘multi-stable images’, such as that of the Duck-Rabbit:

Presenting this kind of example, Wittgenstein invites us to ref lect on the original tension between identity and difference that seems to mark every human experience. When the aspect-switch occurs, the Duck-Rabbit image remains identical but, at the same time, the inner perspectival difference emerges: I saw a duck and now I see a rabbit, and through an act of attention I am able to produce the change voluntarily, again and again, whenever I want, although at the beginning it might have been difficult to find a second or third hidden aspect.

The enantiosemic5D structure of ‘aspect’, which can refer both to the active act of seeing and to the passive condition of what is seen, links together the gaze and the seen object. One could say that the semantics of the word perfectly corresponds to Wittgenstein’s twofold description of the phenomenon of ‘seeing-as’: the aspect-switch shows the double character of the image composed by two aspects (or more in case of more articulated images), and, at the same time, seems to stress the role of the subjective perspective connected to the active meaning of ‘aspect’ as well as the voluntary act of attention involved in the image-switch.

In the Philosophical Investigations the part devoted to ‘seeing-as’ begins with the distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing-as’, that is, between an objective and an analogical way of seeing. As an example of the latter Wittgenstein mentions the capacity to find physiognomic similarities in human faces. He also indicates that aspect-perception in physiognomy reveals the complex structure of aspectuality beyond the classical horizontal change of aspects such as that from duck to rabbit and vice versa. If we go back to the picture of the Duck-Rabbit, we can see — with only a slight effort of imagination — that even an extremely simplified double silhouette like this has also a definite expressive feature (coquetterie in the duck and puzzlement in the rabbit). Wittgenstein presents this form of perception of aspects as an affective attitude towards a physiognomy, with the implication that while we perceive physiognomies we also express one.

In the case of a physiognomical interaction, what primarily attracts in the face’s aspect is the gaze of the other person:

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We don’t see the human eye as a receiver; it seems, not to let something in, but to send out. The ear receives; the eye looks. (It casts glances, it f lashes, beams, coruscates.) With the eye one may terrify, not with the ear or the nose. When you see the eye, you see something go out from it. You see the glance of the eye. (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, I, 5588)5C

In this sense, aspectual perception reveals a character of primary intersubjectivity as an interactive exchange of gazes in which the observer perceives the act of seeing of another person. This means not only that physiognomy and expression are deeply intermingled with each other, but also that the inner life of the soul directly manifests itself in the face, both in the case of a real image and of a pictorial one:

The expression of soul in a face. One really needs to remember that a face with a soulful expression can be painted, in order to believe that it is merely shapes and colours that make this impression. It isn’t to be believed, that is merely the eyes — eyeball, lids, eyelashes etc, — of a human being, that one can be lost in the gaze of, into which one can look with astonishment and delight. And yet human eyes just do affect one like this. (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, I, ;>D, p. 79)

This sensorial and physiognomic evidence of the life of the soul within the face and particularly the eyes will also be very important for the analysis of the use of ‘aspetto’ in Dante’s Paradiso. Here one is also reminded of the ancient and medieval debate about sensoriality and of the theoretical tensions which informed, and still inform, ref lection on this topic:

Activity and passivity on the part of the observer and on the part of the universe remained the ontological and epistemological Scylla and Charybdis between which accounts of vision have been and must be navigated. The greater the activity of the world upon the observer, the more reason we have to worry that the universe is a deterministic one; the greater the activity of the observer’s eye and brain in representing the world to the mind, the more reason we have to worry that these representations are sufficiently arbitrary and unique to misrepresent the world or to represent it incompletely.56

Wittgenstein’s image of the activity of the eye as something perceived by another eye stresses the intersubjective character of the active role of the vision and gives a ‘perspicuous representation’ of what seems to correspond to the medieval extra-missionist theory, according to which the eyes emit rays of light accomplishing visual perception.;8

Wittgenstein is also concerned to show that due to its highly dynamic feature, the gaze is the pole of attraction for human perception. In this context the physio-gnomic appearance — and gaze in primis — become the bridge between objective and subjective in the sense that, at a phenomenological level, in the mutual gaze exchange there could be a continuous switch from activity to passivity.

The aspectual frame has a fundamental holistic take in that an aspect never identifies with a single object but always with a context which can be extended or narrowed by the voluntary movement of the gaze. Although the sense of sight in Wittgenstein’s remarks may seem to keep the priority that it always had in the philosophical tradition, aspects-seeing metonymically refers to other senses and also

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and especially to language and to the artistic experience where the conceptual tools linked to aspectuality appear as particularly productive.

In this holistic sense Wittgenstein suggests that textuality could also be seen under a physiognomic aspect:

While any word — one would like to say — may have a different character in different contexts, all the same there is one character — a face — that it always has. It looks at us. — For one might actually think that each word was a little face; the written sign might be a face. And one might also imagine that the whole proposition was a kind of group-picture, so that the gaze of the faces all together produced a relationship among them and so the whole made a significant group. But what constitutes the experience of a group’s being significant? And would it be necessary, if one is to use the proposition, that one feel it as significant in this way? (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, I, @;;, pp. >9–>7)

Although completely invisible in the ordinary use and comprehension of sentences, for Wittgenstein a physiognomic pattern appears virtually to underlay every form of textuality: in particular physiognomic aspectuality appears strongly related to textuality and to both conceptual investigation and poetic representation. Directing the attention to the link between conceptual movement and textuality is an essential goal of philosophy, and the attempt to acquire a perspicuous, evident representation depends on this aspectual character of textuality, which deeply engages the writer’s subjectivity.

However, this polysemic component of perception is hidden in the ordinary way of perceiving and it is not surprising, in this sense, that in the very beginning of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Wittgenstein presents multi-aspectuality as an essential notion for understanding works of art. In the case of art, the observer does not merely switch from one aspect to the other (as in the case of the Duck-Rabbit image), but tries to perceive a totality whereby the shifting aspects are inter-connected and simultaneously present; and in poetry this kind of aspect-change exploits the polysemic potential present in every language. Having the experience of aspect-change in art and in poetry seems to be a necessary condition for having access to them, also because this experience can draw creative links between different aspectual fields:

‘This coffee has no taste at all.’ ‘This face has no expression at all’ — the opposite of this is ‘It has a quite particular expression’ (though I could not say what). A strong expression I could easily connect with a story for example. Or with looking for a story. When we speak of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, that may well mean that we ask ourselves: In what situation, in what story, might one smile like that? And so it would be conceivable for someone to find a solution; he tells a story and we say to ourselves ‘Yes, that is the expression which this character would have assumed here’. (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, I, @C5, p. D7)

Here Wittgenstein refers to a specifically physiognomic dimension of understanding which could create a narrative connection between the perception of a particular physiognomic aspect and a story which is generated by it. Then, according to him, a main feature of the aspectual perception is the possibility of translating it into

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another form of symbolic praxis.;5 In other words, what really matters in ‘seeing-as’ is not only the subjective experience in itself, but also its creative effects and its communicability, both in the field of aesthetics and in those of science, such as mathematics and geometry.

Wittgenstein’s original proposal for solving the riddle of Mona Lisa’s smile could be linked to the rhetorical exercises of ecphrasis or those spiritual exercises of imagining a fictive object and describing it.;; Indeed Mona Lisa’s smile and its enigmatic trait invite us to imagine a broader context, an entire world as a precondition to understanding the sense of her expression. Dante’s poetic work in confronting Beatrice’s mundane and divine appearance seems to engage with an analogous enterprise.

‘Aspetto’ in Convivio: a First Polysemic Frame

Amedeo Quondam’s entry on ‘Aspetto’ for the Enciclopedia dantesca refers to the polysemic character of the word in Dante’s Convivio and Commedia and first of all to its enantiosemic structure connecting the active/subjective with the passive/objective element: ‘Il termine “aspetto” ricorre spesso nel lessico dantesco con una notevole ampiezza di valori semantici, che a volte presentano una difficoltà di precisazione nel loro oscillare tra il significato attivo di “vista”, “sguardo”, cioè “azione del guardare”, e quello passivo, più vicino all’uso moderno, di “ciò che appare a chi guarda”.’;@

Quondam’s subsequent analysis makes clear that his introductory claim is based on the following assumptions: 5) ‘aspetto’’s semantic oscillation corresponds to the differentiation of the use of ‘aspetto’ in Dante’s work — a use that in spite of its ample variability in the texts always corresponds to a single meaning (in no occurrence is the term deemed to bear more than one sense); therefore the polysemic character of ‘aspetto’ is presented as the mere result of the totality of all the monosemic uses of the word; ;) the semantic variability is completely casual — which would mean that there is no particular context-dependent reason for Dante using ‘aspetto’ differently — let’s say in Inferno and Paradiso. Quondam never refers to the diversity in the use of ‘aspetto’ in the three canticles or stresses the difference in approaching the concept in Convivio and in the Commedia.

Quondam’s study seems not to consider an essential trait of ‘aspetto’’s polysemy: the fact that the diversity of contexts and types of subjectivity in Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso determines precise differences in the term’s use both from a quantitative and from a specific semantic point of view.;9 Moreover, not only semantic differences are at stake — the shift from the objective/passive to the subjective/active etc. — but also and especially the movement in the polysemic and enantiosemic uses of the term in the journey from Inferno to Paradiso, where one is constantly confronted with the aspect-change in most uses of ‘aspetto’. This means that in the last part of the Commedia Dante succeeds in creating a sphere of semantic undecidability, where the reader cannot choose one single meaning of ‘aspetto’ but has to keep in mind all of them, letting them shift in her/his mind (as in the case of an extremely complex pluristable image). Therefore the task of the critical interpretation should not be to

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solve the hermeneutic riddle of the ‘aspetto’’s chaotic semantics by opting for only a single meaning in each occurrence.;7 On the contrary, the proliferation and the general interpretations’ discordance through the centuries on the use of this term is rather a relevant symptom that Dante’s poetics of ‘aspetto’ deliberately produces a sophisticated articulation of diverse semantic layers in which multiple meanings mingle with each other and represent a paradoxical poetic performance.

We will see that in Paradiso the word ‘aspetto’ often works in a similar way to Wittgenstein’s ambivalent pluristable images, and that understanding the semantics of ‘aspetto’ implies that the reader and the interpreter confront the aspect-change experience of connecting different meanings and grasp in this way the complex semantic physiognomy of the word.

Dante’s multiple definition of ‘aspetto’ in Convivio, albeit different from the polysemic strategy of Paradiso, seems to represent the precondition for the poetic praxis of the third canticle. In Convivio Dante comments on the two uses of ‘aspetto’ present in the canzone Amor che nella mente mi ragiona:

E puossi dir che ’l suo aspetto giova a consentir ciò che par maraviglia; onde la nosta fede è aiutata: però fu tal da etterno ordinata. Cose appariscon nello suo aspetto che mostra de’ piacer del Paradiso, dico nelli occhi e nel suo dolce riso, che le vi reca Amor com’ a suo loco’. (75–7C)

[And we may say her countenance helps us | Regard as true what seems a miracle, | By which our faith is fortified: | For this she was ordained by eternity. || In her countenance appear such things | As manifest a part of the joy of Paradise. | I mean in her eyes and in her sweet smile, | For here Love draws them, as to himself.]

In the commentary in the third book, Dante sketches the multiplicity of theoretical contexts (psychology, optics, metaphysics) to which the meaning of the word seems to be related (III, vii–viii). In this way he provides a paradigmatic form of vulgarization of interrelated fields of knowledge and accomplishes one of the goals illustrated in the first treatise, where Dante defends his original decision to adopt the volgare instead of Latin.

Convivio’s dictionary or rather encyclopaedic contribution on ‘aspetto’ expresses the following points:

5) ‘Aspetto’ is the act of seeing: Dante’s literal explanation of the verse ‘E puossi dir che ’l suo aspetto giova’ is ‘guardando costei’, which is explicitly connected to ‘li occhi de’ riguardatori’ (III, viii, 7). In this case we have a form that is not only semantically different from the passive/objective form of ‘appearance’, but also contains (in a somewhat hidden form) the verbal construction of ‘looking at’.

;) ‘Aspetto’ is also the face, but considered as a physiognomic expression of the soul, whose manifestation ‘massimamente in due luoghi opera [...] cioè nelli occhi e nella bocca’ (III, viii, C).;> Here we have an aspect-switch in the meaning of ‘aspetto’ from the active dimension of ‘li riguardatori’ to the physical appearance of the

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donna gentile’s face, the object of their vision. This switch is then somehow reversed again as Dante indicates that the parts of the face that attract the observers’ gaze is another gaze — one that manifests the internal life of the lady, her intellectual, mental gaze. Interestingly, this sense also implies an element of individuality, and one could therefore say that ‘aspetto’ links together with great intensity the act of perception with the lady’s individuality, expressed in primis in her face (‘nella faccia di costei’), eyes and mouth as a manifestation of her individual inner life. It is this individuality and specific subjectivity expressed by her physiognomy seems to be related to the lady’s power to bestow the supernatural pleasures of Paradiso.

@) By taking the text’s connection between the lady’s ‘aspetto’ and Heaven as an indication that ‘li occhi della Sapienza sono le sue dimostrazioni, colle quali si vede la veritade certissimamente; e lo suo riso sono le sue persuasioni, nelle quali si dimostra la luce interiore della Sapienza sotto alcuno velamento’ [the eyes of wisdom are her demonstrations, by which truth is seen with the greatest certainty, and her smiles are her persuasions, in which the inner light of wisdom is revealed behind a kind of veil] (III, xv, ;), Convivio’s allegorical explanation of the canzone also associates ‘aspetto’ with a philosophical and theological context.;D

In its literal explanation, Convivio starts from the complex semantics and ambiguous use of ‘aspetto’ to develop an analytical interpretation that separates the term’s different meanings. As a last step, the allegorical level shifts from the corporeal, relational traits within ‘aspetto’ that inform the actual canzone, and moves towards a disembodied concept related to abstract knowledge.

Semantic Metamorphoses in the Commedia’s Use of ‘aspetto’

One can consider Convivio’s conceptual elaboration of the term ‘aspetto’ as a rele-vant step towards the term’s use in the Commedia. Convivio’s technical inquiry acknowledges both the intersubjective character of the gazes’ exchange and a possible link between the lady’s gaze and heavenly bliss.;C

While recognizing the importance of the Convivio’s elaboration of ‘aspetto’ for its poetic use in Paradiso, our interpretation wants to stress, at the same time, the gap dividing the analytic conceptual definitions of ‘aspetto’ in Convivio from the ‘aspetto’-poetics of the Paradiso, where Dante performs a sort of semantic explosion of the meanings of the word. Moreover one should also take into account that the semantics of ‘aspetto’ in Inferno and Purgatorio is different from that of Paradiso. In the first two canticles ‘aspetto’ is used in an objective, physiognomic sense pushing further Convivio’s association between one’s aspect and character: the use of ‘aspetto’ refers to the physiognomy, to the face or to the whole figure, and often has a qualitative and affective connotation expressed through an adjective: ‘lo cotto aspetto’ (Inf. XV, ;>), ‘tinto aspetto e brollo’ (Inf. XVI, @8), ‘aspetto fero’ (Inf. XXI, @5), ‘gentile aspetto’ (Purg. III, 58D).;6

Considering the differences in the use of ‘aspetto’ in Inferno and Purgatorio, one could notice that in Inferno the — mostly singular — quality of the damned’s ‘aspetto’ also expresses the fixed and unchangeable character of their infernal condition.@8 This element emblematically appears in Canto X in the description

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of Farinata who, during the intense dialogue between Dante and Cavalcante, ‘non mutò aspetto’ (Inf. X, D9).@5 In Purgatorio it is the affective component with its intersubjective, relational trait that prevails in the use of ‘aspetto’, as one can see from the reaction of the person perceiving the aspect. The description of the encounter between Dante and Casella on the shores of Purgatory is paradigmatic of the relational urge that the term expresses: ‘Io vidi una di lor trarresi avente | per abbracciarmi, con sì grande affetto | che mosse me a far lo somigliante. | Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!’ [I saw one of them come forward | with such affection to embrace me | that I was moved to do the same. | Oh empty shades, except in seeming!] (Purg. II, D>–D6).@;

The use of ‘aspetto’ is different in Paradiso, which performs a ‘revolution of poetic language’ and activates a different kind of textuality, one that tries to express the subject’s experience of heavenly simultaneity — what medieval theologians called totum simul. Indeed, as Teodolinda Barolini has shown, rather than a narrative textuality that is discursive, logical, linear, ‘chronologized’ and intellective — which is the common mode of textuality — the poem, in some parts of the last cantos of Paradiso, deploys a ‘lyric’ textuality that is that is ‘nondiscursive, nonlinear or circular, “dechronologized”, and affective’.@@

By referring to Wittgenstein’s meditation on perception and aspectuality, we should like to argue that in Paradiso the semantics of ‘aspetto’ is strictly related to Dante’s desire to push the poetic language beyond its normal limits and thus enable it to express — through ‘lo trapassar del segno’ (Par. XXVI, 55D) — the ‘oltraggio’ of heaven, its dimension of being beyond, ‘oltre’.@9 Our interpretation of Dante’s text brings together several components of Wittgenstein’s thought: the concept of the gaze as something active that is perceived by other gazes, the pluristability of perception and in particular the aspect-switch, the physiognomy’s power to express the soul and thereby affect the gazers, as well as the linguistic correlative of aspectuality which Wittgenstein represents both as the physiognomic character of textuality and, in the case of art and poetry, the possibility of bringing together different aspects and expressing them simultaneously. In particular, we shall focus on cantos I, XXIII, XXX and XXXIII as the most interesting cases to explore the connection between the semantics of ‘aspetto’ and the ‘ jumping textuality’ which is, as Dante explicitly claims, a necessity for the poetry of Paradiso: ‘e così, figurando il paradiso | convien saltar lo sacrato poema, | come chi trova suo cammin riciso’ [And so, in representing Paradise, | the sacred poem must make its leap across, | as does a man who finds his path cut off ] (Par. XXIII, >5–>@).@7 We shall describe how this textuality can work by activating the following elements and connecting them with one another: the ubiquitous and intense presence of self-ref lexivity, particularly in the form of the ineffability topos; the corporeal, affective, maternal dimension conveyed by the images of the infant drinking the mother’s milk; the intersubjective quality of the pilgrim’s experience, and the transformation of both his self and vision.

Paradiso I effectively introduces that exchange of gazes between Dante and Beatrice as a recurrent motif of the whole cantica, where it is often difficult if not impossible to tell who is the subject, and who is the object of the act of vision. By

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referring to the new and radical idea in the Middle Ages that Beatrice, a woman, is ‘loquax’, we could say that she is also ‘spectans’: both Beatrice and Dante are in fact ‘active gazers’.@> A crucial point characteristic of the heavenly action of seeing is the possibility of transforming the contents of the vision and intensifying it. Here in the first canto, the constant exchange of gazes between Dante and Beatrice produces an enhancement of Dante’s vision which is not yet connected to the aspect-change in vision occurring in the last part of the heavenly journey, but which nonetheless introduces to the totum simul of heaven, the whole that can also be understood — as we shall see analysing the final visions in cantos XXX and XXXIII — as the simultaneous presence of multiple aspects.@D

Still in the Garden of Eden and pushed by Beatrice’s gaze into the Sun, Dante himself tries to stare at the planet directly, but cannot sustain it for long. It is only by looking at Beatrice’s gaze that he can intensify his power and have access to the first transformation of Paradiso:

Beatrice tutta ne l’etterne rote fissa con li occhi stava; e io in lei le luci fissi, di là sù rimote. Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei, qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba che ’l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi. Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria; però l’essemplo basti a cui esperienza grazia serba. (Par. I, >9–D;)

[Beatrice had fixed her eyes | upon the eternal wheels and I now fixed | my sight on her, withdrawing it from above. | As I gazed on her, I was changed within, | as Glaucus was on tasting of the grass | that made him consort of the gods in the sea. | To soar beyond the human cannot be described | in words. Let the example be enough to one | for whom grace holds this experience in store.]

In this passage it is the syntactic construction of the sentence that enhances the polysemic dimension of ‘aspetto’: the verse ‘nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei’ remains ambiguous and almost all the commentators consider ‘aspetto’ to have an active meaning similar to that of the passage from Convivio quoted before (III. viii, 57): that is, that Dante is looking at Beatrice and not — as a lectio facilior for contemporary readers would suggest — that ‘aspetto’ refers to Beatrice’s gaze and whole physiognomy. It seems that here it is practically impossible to settle for either interpretation. What is clear is that the gazes of Dante and Beatrice are joining together and that one cannot distinguish an active from a passive subject. At the same time Beatrice’s physiognomic appearance centred on the eyes comes to the foreground, as it is also confirmed by the two preceding lines, which describe Beatrice’s gaze fixed into the heavenly spheres: ‘Beatrice tutta nell’eterne rote | fissa con li occhi stava: e io in lei | le luci fissi, di la su remote’ (Par. I, >9–>>). The joining of Dante’s gaze with Beatrice’s produces a form of divine transformation that, as the text itself indicates, cannot be fully rendered with words and can only be expressed by a simile: ‘qual si fe Glauco nel gustar de l’erbe | che ‘l fe consorte in mar de li altri dei’. The reason given will become a leitmotif of the whole Paradiso:

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‘trasumanar significar per verba | non si poria’: that is, human language (verba) is considered unable to express the heavenly experience — here specifically that of deification, of joining with God. Indeed the poem tells us that what is required is a different use of language, a ‘poetic’ use we could say, that is, a use that is able to push language beyond its human boundaries.@C

This self-ref lexivity is intensified by a use of ‘aspetto’ where a poetic form of aspect-change takes place. The text is not only able to ‘trasumanar’ and go beyond its usual boundaries, but, by staging the sort of structure that we find in Wittgenstein’s example of the Duck-Rabbit, it even indicates that the poetic and ‘ethical’ power of language consists in overcoming the limitedness of the ordinary linguistic reference and thereby giving access to the formal complexity of both the linguistic and heavenly totality.

In the same direction, Gabriel Josipovici observes:

of the seven words Dante uses, only four are clearly Italian: ‘Trasumanar significar per verba | non si poria.’ Dante first of all invents a word ‘trasumanar’, ‘to transhumanise oneself ’, for precisely that which cannot be set forth in words, the going beyond the human; then he presents us with a Latin phrase — per verba — instead of the expected ‘con le parole’, partly because ‘con’ means ‘with’ while ‘per’ means ‘through’, which answers his needs better, but also as though to balance his daring invention of a new word by reminding us and himself that language is always grammatica, that once you are in the world of words you are in the world of the stones of the low.@6

Rather than taking Dante’s bold plurilinguistic phrase as a sign that language is always also gramatica (as Josipovici does), we would say that lines D8–D5 of Paradiso I deploy a precise plurilinguistic strategy and have a specific purpose: while ‘aspetto’ hosts in itself a semantic multiplicity connected to an intersubjective situation, Dante’s association of terms with very diverse origins seems to suggest that his poetic praxis does not submit to any absolute authority or rule.98 It seems to us that the reference to the ‘essemplo’ in the following line could also be read in this perspective as a self-ref lection about the very essence of the poetic creation: the authority of poetic language is not that of rules and models to be given and mechanically followed, but that of its exemplary power to transcend the scattered, limited character of ordinary language and have access to totality.95

In order to succeed in doing so, poetic language deploys a multiplicity which keeps together single and separated linguistic worlds. While the different elements which the Commedia recollects from normal linguistic usage have an intrinsic ‘ethical’ lack inasmuch as they are not able to refer to a totality, their poetic use integrates many different fragments, and one could say that this integration is also made possible by manifesting awareness of both the limitedness of single fragments and the impossibility of expressing the totality without them. The exemplarity of poetry corresponds to an unavoidable tension between particular and universal, obtained through a plurilinguistic (and polysemic) strategy which ideally opens up an infinite range of possibilities; Dante can only present examples, single scenarios, visions, images to which a paradigmatic value is given.

If the opening canto of Paradiso introduces the concept that ‘trasumanar’ requires

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a different kind of language, Paradiso XXIII activates this new poetic dimension at a further level: on the one hand, we find a similar constellation of self-ref lexivity and going beyond human limits, both as Dante’s experience and the text’s performance; on the other hand, a progression is expressed by the appearance of maternal, corporeal and relational figurations.9; The term ‘aspetto’ already appears in the opening simile of the canto, where Beatrice is compared to a mother bird waiting for the dawn in order to be able to see her children’s ‘aspetti disïati’ (l. 9). While the term ‘aspetti’ has the objective meaning referring to the appearance of the baby birds, the rest of the simile uncovers the subjective dimension of the phrase:

Come l’augello, intra l’amate fronde, posato al nido de’ suoi dolci nati la notte che le cose ci nasconde, che, per veder li aspetti disïati e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca, in che gravi labor li sono aggrati, previene il tempo in su aperta frasca, e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta, fiso guardando pur che l’alba nasca; così la donna mïa stava eretta e attenta, rivolta inver’ la plaga sotto la quale il sol mostra men fretta: sì che, veggendola io sospesa e vaga, fecimi qual è quei che disïando altro vorria, e sperando s’appaga. (Par. XXIII, 5–57)

[As the bird among the leafy branches that she loves, | perched on the nest with her sweet brood | all through the night, which keeps things veiled from us, | who in her longing to look upon their eyes and beaks | and to find the food to nourish them — | a task, though difficult, that gives her joy — | now, on an open bough, anticipates that time | and, in her ardent expectation of the sun, | watches intently for the dawn to break, | so was my lady, erect and vigilant, | seeking out the region of the sky | in which the sun reveals less haste. | I, therefore, seeing her suspended, wistful, | became as one who, filled with longing, | finds satisfaction in his hope.]

The second part of the simile unexpectedly reveals that albeit objective, ‘aspetti disïati’ must also be considered from the subjective point of view of Beatrice’s desire to look at Dante. Moreover, the text shifts to indicate that Dante is staring at Beatrice who is looking upwards and waiting for a new vision to occur. Through this connection, ‘aspetti’ acquires the subjective meaning of ‘glances’, and it does not seem an accident that the previous canto ended with Dante’s act of joining his eyes to Beatrice’s (‘poscia rivolsi li occhi a li occhi belli’; Par. XXII, 579), and that the gerund ‘disïando’ in the conclusive simile of lines 59–57 recalls the ‘aspetti disïati’ of the first simile.

Dante’s impossibility of sustaining the vision of Christ’s triumph turns into a veritable excessus mentis, that is, into a mystical state transcending the normal limits of the human mind, followed by the impossibility to remember that experience (lines 98–97). Dante is made capable again of looking into Beatrice’s smile and sustaining its intensity, but the problem is now that he is not able to express in language the

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beauty of that smile. Yet, the topos of ineffability becomes here the starting point for a new, more positive declaration of poetics, that is, of that ‘ jumping textuality’ aiming expressing the simultaneity of Heaven’s totality:

Se mo sonasser tutte quelle lingue che Polïmnia con le suore fero del latte lor dolcissimo più pingue, per aiutarmi, al millesmo del vero non si verria, cantando il santo riso e quanto il santo aspetto facea mero; e così, figurando il paradiso, convien saltar lo sacrato poema, come chi trova suo cammin riciso. (Par. XXIII, 77–>@)

[If at this moment all the tongues | that Polyhymnia and her sisters nurtured | with their sweetest, richest milk | should sound to aid me now, their song could not attain | one thousandth of the truth in singing of that holy smile | and how it made her holy visage radiant. | And so, in representing Paradise, | the sacred poem must make its leap across, | as does a man who finds his path cut off.]

As Barolini has shown, this passage expresses the necessity to create a ‘lyrical or antinarrative mode’, which is ‘characterized by apostrophes, exclamations, heavily metaphoric language, and intensely affective similes’, and represents Dante’s attempt to ‘forge an oxymoron, an adynaton, a paradox: namely linguistic/diegetic uguaglianza, “equalized” language’.9@ It seems to us that while Barolini shows Dante’s textual strategies at a macro level, his poetic use of the word ‘aspetto’ could be taken as a micro textual strategy to create an ‘equalized’ language. Rather than an exclusively philosophical approach interested in analytical, scholastic distinctions, which corresponds to Barolini’s mode of disagguaglianza (and is best embodied by Convivio), Paradiso is also interested in pushing a more mystical textual mode aiming at coexistence.

We would therefore suggest taking ‘aspetto’ in the meta-poetical passage quoted above as an example of this strategy, which lets all the meanings found along the poem’s journey resonate with one another. One could say that when Dante claims that no poetic language could ever express Beatrice’s beatific smile and luminous ‘aspetto’ except in the realm of jumping textuality, he also irresistibly invites us to refer this textuality to the semantics of ‘aspetto’ in this very context. Within this occurrence of the term, aspect-change focuses on the fact that we have to try to put together all the different senses of ‘aspetto’ and transform their chronological succession into a simultaneous coexistence: in this case, we can shift from the general physical appearance of Beatrice to her face, from this more objective dimension to the more subjective one of her gaze, and from her gaze to the affective dimension displayed by it, which also includes Dante’s gaze and its mingling with Beatrice’s.99

We would also like to mention that the reference to milk within a plurilinguistic frame (‘tutte le lingue’) not only points to the necessity of ‘regressing’ to a primary phase of linguistic apprenticeship, of which recent studies have highlighted the phonic richness,97 but also indicates the connection between this proto-linguistic phase and the symbiotic relationship between mother and child symbolized by

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the act of suckling at the mother’s breast.9> This image, which returns in a more complete way in the second part of the canto (‘[...] come fantolin che ’nver’ la mamma | tende le braccia, poi che ’l latte prese’ [And, like a baby reaching out its arms | to mamma after it has drunk her milk]; Par. XXIII, 5;5–;;) and, as we shall see, in the self-ref lexive passages of cantos XXX and XXXIII, is also part of the strategy of jumping textuality which exemplifies rather than explains. What it exemplifies through this image is the necessity of integrating a logical mode of narrative with a more affective, unified and circular one. As Gary Cestaro has argued, by engaging with Julia Kristeva’s psycho-analytical approach to language, the image of suckling in this passage is a symptom that the latter mode also recovers the corporeal, rhythmic, synaesthetic dimension of language which appears in the initial developments but is subsequently lost with the access into the symbolic order.9D

Canto XXX pushes further the poetic strategies towards a more corporeal dimension. It opens with the poet’s last declaration of the failure in representing the beauty of Beatrice’s eyes, followed by the claim about the necessity to stretch language beyond its limits. ‘Aspetto’, here in the plural form ‘aspetti’, surprisingly acquires one more semantic layer, in opposition to its use in Purgatorio II: while, as we have mentioned, the term ‘aspetto’ in the line ‘Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!’ (Purg. II, D6) referred to a defective appearance inasmuch deprived of substantiality, ‘aspetti’ in this canto expresses the fully corporeal way in which the blessed are going to appear to Dante in the Empyrean: ‘Qui vederai l’una e l’altra milizia | di paradiso, e l’una in quegli aspetti che tu vedrai a l’ultima giustizia’ [Here you shall see both soldieries of Paradise, | one of them in just such form | as you shall see it at the final judgment] (Par. XXX, 9@–97).

Here the transformation of Dante’s vision is expressed through an increasingly synaesthetic and bodily textuality, where the senses of taste and smell mingle with an extremely dynamic and affective vision. For instance, since the entrance into the Empyrean and Dante’s growth of sight, Beatrice indicates an emotional and more physical way to experience the heavenly metamorphic figurations (‘[...] di quest’acqua convien che tu bei | prima che tanta sete in te si sazi’; XXX, D@–D9), and explains that Dante’s visual capability will increase further and the subsequent vision will also change. Dante sees a river of light, which progressively becomes a circle and finally appears as a candida rosa formed by the blessed:

Non è fantin che sì subito rua col volto verso il latte, se si svegli molto tardato da l’usanza sua, come fec’ io, per far migliori spegli ancora de li occhi, chinandomi a l’onda che si deriva perché vi s’immegli; e sì come di lei bevve la gronda da le palpebre mie, così mi parve di sua lunghezza divenuta tonda. (Par. XXX, C;–68)

[No infant, waking up too late | for his accustomed feeding, will thrust his face | up to his milk with greater urgency, | than I, to make still better mirrors of my eyes, | inclined my head down toward the water | that f lows there for our

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betterment, | and no sooner had the eaves of my eyelids | drunk deep of that water than to me it seemed | it had made its length into a circle.]

The image of suckling expresses the desire to unite with God and occurs in the fundamental moment when, entering the Empyrean, Dante abandons the linear realm of temporality and joins the circular, extra-temporal dimension where everything is present at the same time.

With respect to the use of ‘aspetto’, we would like to suggest that like Paradiso XXIII, Paradiso XXX also deploys a polysemic strategy in which all the word’s meanings are recalled in a sort of linguistic resurrection, so that the word ‘aspetti’ referring to the blessed’s resurrected body also carries a subjective, relational trait conveyed by the gaze.

Paradiso XXXI and XXXII combine the jumping textuality with a more traditional, logical, linear mode informed disagguaglianza, which corresponds to a more classificatory and scholastic interest. It is not an accident that we find here a more doctrinal use of ‘aspetto’ similar to that of the allegorical interpretation of Convivio in the phrase ‘gli aspetti della fede’ (Paradiso XXXII, @C). By contrast, Paradiso XXXIII fully reactivates and brings to completion the antinarrative textuality introduced by I and performed by XXIII and XXX. After Bernard’s prayer to Mary — itself a masterpiece in paradox — the poem indicates that Dante’s visual power is so perfect (‘sincera’; 7;) that it cannot detach itself from the heavenly vision. At this point, the poem declares again that it is approaching its maximal degree of un-expressibility, and that, as in the case of a dream, memory fails in front of ‘tanto oltraggio’ (7D) and does not have access to the content of the beatific vision but for its affective dimension (lines 77–>@). After a tercet expressing two fragmented similes in the form of analogic f lashes (>9–>7), one finds an invocation to God where the reference to his otherness with respect to mortal concepts expresses, once more from a self-ref lexive perspective, the necessity to go beyond logical and analytical linearity and to poetically perform a fragmented and polysemic textuality (>D–D7).9C

The subsequent description of Dante’s gaze represents an inversion with respect to that of canto I; whereas there Dante was unable to tolerate looking at the divine light for a long time and needed the mediation of Beatrice’s gaze, at the end of his journey Dante cannot remove his look away from the divinity:

Io credo, per l’acume ch’io soffersi del vivo raggio, ch’i’sarei smarrito, se li occhi miei da lui fossero aversi. E’ mi ricorda ch’io fui più ardito per questo a sostener, tanto ch’i’ giunsi l’aspetto mio col valore infinito. Oh abbondante grazia ond’io presunsi ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna, tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!’. (Par. XXXIII, D>–C9)

[I believe, from the keenness of the living ray | that I endured, I would have been undone | had I withdrawn my eyes from it. | And I remember that, on this account, | I grew more bold and thus sustained my gaze | until I reached the Goodness that is infinite. | O plenitude of grace, by which I could presume | to fix my eyes upon eternal Light | until my sight was spent on it!]

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The paradoxical character of this act of joining the individual gaze with an infinite dimension of goodness (‘valore infinito’) corresponds to the metamorphosis of Dante’s vision, which is now able to put together unity and multiplicity, identity and difference. Moreover, the presence of the term ‘aspetto’ in the phrase ‘i’ giunsi | l’aspetto mio col valore infinito’ could also be taken as a sign of the poem’s claim that, as we saw in Canto XXIII, poetic language must overcome distinctions and stretch language towards expressing the infinity of Heaven. Indeed, in the following mystical vision, a sort of semantic background emerges which powerfully echoes the various meanings of ‘aspetto’, making it refer not only to the gaze but to a corporeal, intellectual, and affective experience:

Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l’universo si squaderna: sustanze e accidenti e lor costume quasi conf lati insieme, per tal modo che ciò ch’i’dico è un semplice lume. La forma universal di questo nodo credo ch’i’ vidi, perché più di largo, dicendo questo, mi sento ch’i godo. (Par. XXXIII, C7–6@)

[In its depth I saw contained, | by love into a single volume bound, | the pages scattered through the universe: | substances, accidents, and the interplay between them, | as though they were conf lated in such way | that what I tell is but a simple light. | I believe I understood the universal form | of this dense knot because I feel my joy expand, | rejoicing as I speak of it.]

Once more Dante stresses the fact that he is just dealing with a faint memory of this vision, and once more he stresses the affective dimension of this paradoxical remembrance where forgetting prevails over remembering (Par. XXXIII, 69–6>). The ever increasing fragmentation of different images accomplishes the necessity for the poem to jump as expressed in canto XXIII: that is, the poem’s textuality literally jumps back and forth from one declaration of insufficiency to an affective simile, from the vision of one mystery to an apostrophe to the divinity, thereby breaking the linearity of language and textuality and engaging with a circular dimension that tries to express heaven’s totum simul.

We find the last occurrence of ‘aspetto’ at the core of the description of the following vision:

Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa, mirava fissa, immobile e attenta, e sempre di mirar faceasi accesa. A quella luce cotal si diventa, che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto è impossibile che mai si consenta; però che ’l ben, ch’è del volere obietto, tutto s’accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella è defettivo ciò ch’è lì perfetto. (Par. XXXIII, 6D–587)

[Thus all my mind, absorbed, | was gazing, fixed, unmoving and intent, | becoming more enraptured in its gazing. | He who beholds that Light is so

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enthralled | that he would never willingly consent | to turn away from it for any other sight, | because the good that is the object of the will | is held and gathered in perfection there | that elsewhere would imperfect show.]

The divine luminosity is identified as the maximal perfection and the only object of attraction for Dante’s gaze; and ‘per altro aspetto’ could be (and has actually been) interpreted both in a subjective/active way (as looking at something else) and in an objective/passive way (as the aspect of other things that could be seen).96

Here the impossibility of turning away from the heavenly vision can be taken as a further ref lection on poetic language: as heavenly perfection is produced by the combination of discrete parts which are defective if isolated in themselves but transcend their limitations in their totality, so could this model be applied to language, with respect not only to plurilingualism (as in the ‘trasumanar’ passage in Paradiso I), but also to the inclusive semantic strategy of which the polysemy of ‘aspetto’ and the baby-talk are exemplary cases. It is not surprising that this passage is followed by the image of the baby suckling at the mother’s breast, which points once more to the necessity of recovering a form of synthetic, holistic expression in opposition to an analytical, linear, sequential mode: ‘Omai sarà più corta mia favella, pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante | che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella’ [Now my words will come far short | of what I still remember, like a babe’s | who at his mother’s breast still wets his tongue] (Par. XXXIII, 58>–8C).

By recovering the maternal dimension of language, the poet is indeed able to describe again the transformation of his vision in the deepening of his gaze into the divinity, reminding us that the actual change must be understood as a metamorphosis within oneness:

Non perchè più che un semplice sembiante fosse nel vivo lume ch’io mirava, che tal è sempre qual s’era davante; ma per la vista che s’avvalorava in me guardando, una sola parvenza, mutandom’io, a me si travagliava. (Par. XXXIII, 586–59)

[Not that the living Light at which I gazed | took on other than a single aspect — | for It is always what It was before — | but that my sight was gaining strength, even as I gazed | at that sole semblance and, as I changed, | it too was being, in my eyes, transformed.]

The image changes because Dante’s subjectivity is changing. On the one hand we can describe his relation to the transforming vision in terms similar to the Duck-Rabbit structure, in the sense that the actual figure doesn’t change but one experiences it in different ways. On the other hand, Dante’s three subsequent visions preceding and preparing for the final union with God (unity and multiplicity of the universe, Trinity and Incarnation) seem to require a certain degree of capacity to simultaneously perceive all the different components of the vision and thereby go beyond the temporal dimension still present in the Duck-Rabbit.

In particular the way in which Dante describes the Trinity and the Incarnation does not compromise their doctrinal complexity and expresses them not only with the analytical language of scholasticism, but also through an affective and circular

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textuality, as is exemplified by the final tercet devoted to the description, in the form of an invocation, of the Trinitarian mystery: ‘O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, | sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta | e intendente te ami e arridi’ [O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone, | knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself | and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!] (Paradiso XXXIII, 5;9–;>). And yet there is still something to be left behind: the rational attempt to ‘crack the figure’ as a ‘geomètra’ trying to square the circle. Ultimate union is only possible when Dante’s mind is hit by a fulgor that frees it from his intellectual attitude and allows it to join God beyond a rational way of understanding. Tension is finally released and the mystical union with the divinity is fully asemantic and beyond the power of poetry. The paradoxical experience of a multi-aspectual and simultaneous vision dissolves, and with it the complementary poetic language which however — Wittgenstein would have said — has made the accomplishment of this journey possible.78

Notes to Chapter !"

5. See Hans Belting Florenz und Bagdad: Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks (Munich: Beck, ;88C), pp. 556–;5.

;. Belting, Florenz und Bagdad, pp. 596–78. On the way in which medieval theories of optics have been appropriated by Dante and inform his works, see Simon Gilson, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, ;888); Patrick Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 566@); Dana Stewart, The Arrow of Love: Optics, Ethics and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Press, ;88@).

@. This hypothesis is connected to some research we have already done on the way in which the image of the baby suckling at the mother’s breast informs the meditation on desire, language, and subjectivity in Dante’s work and in Elsa Morante’s last novel Aracoeli; see Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati ‘Between Affection and Discipline: Exploring Linguistic Tensions from Dante and Aracoeli’, in The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante’s ‘Aracoeli’, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Sara Fortuna (Oxford: Legenda, ;886), pp. C–56. Our reading of Dante was indebted to Gary Cestaro’s inspiring book Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, ;88@), which draws on Julia Kristeva’s 56D9 work, La Révolution du language poétique and its meditation on the relationship between language-learning and development of subjectivity, and proposes to read the evolution of Dante’s poetic and theoretical discourse of language from the perspective of the motif of the infant suckling.

9. We take the idea of a ‘revolution of poetic language’ from Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du language poétique: L’Avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Flammarion, 56D9), who argues that a form of poetic praxis can subvert the symbolic order of adult verbal language at all its level (morpho-syntactic, semantic, and phonologic) and let the original corporeal, pre- or proto-linguistic mode of signification — which Kristeva calls the ‘semiotic’ chora — re-emerge. In this article, we focus on poetry’s power to overcome the boundaries of temporal division and logics and thereby express a fullness of which the re-activation of the ‘semiotic’ is but one aspect.

7. A good example of the way in which the philosophical tradition ignored the concepts of aspect is the article devoted to ‘Aspect’ in Vocabulaire européen de philosophies edited by Barbara Cassin, which only deals with the linguistic concept of aspect created in the nineteenth century to describe specific features of the Slav language verbal system of tempus, although — oddly enough — the contribution deplores the lack of philosophical ref lection within the linguistic category of aspect: see Sarah de Vogue and others, ‘Aspect’, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, ed. by Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil/Le Robert: ;889), p. 5@8.

>. Stanley Cavell, ‘Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture’, in This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch

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Press, 56C6), pp. ;6–D7; p. @D. The title of this paper echoes that of an essay by Hilary Putnam, ‘Aristotle after Wittgenstein’, in Modern Thinkers and Ancient Thinkers, ed. by Robert W. Shaples (Boulder, CO: Westview; London: UCL Press, 566@), pp. 55D–@D (also in Hilary Putnam, Words and Life, ed. by James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 5669), pp. >;–C5), which in a somewhat Wittgensteinian way rethinks his previous positions within analytical philosophy and offers an original reconsideration of classical philosophical matters in a dialogue with Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

D. See Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ;887), p. C and p. C>.

C. A collective work which is very representative of this hermeneutic view is Wittgenstein: Dérnières pensées, ed. by Jacques Bouveresse, Sandra Laugier, and Jean-Jacques Rosat (Marseilles: Agone, ;88;).

6. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein associates ethics and aesthetics and connects them to exhibition of the logical form which is the condition for the correspondence between language and world. Ten years later, in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, he pushes further this point, relating ethics to the dimension of ‘absolute values’ and the striving of language to overcome its ordinary use. Albeit not explicitly, the Philosophical Investigations also originally develop this ethical concern, introducing the intersubjective, affective and bodily dimension and connecting them to language. See Sara Fortuna, Il giallo di Wittgenstein (Milan: Mimesis, ;858), pp. 5C@–;CD.

58. See Cora Diamond, ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy is’, in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, ;889), pp. 5@@–97, and Piergiorgio Donatelli, ‘Concetti, sentimenti e immaginazione: Un’introduzione al pensiero morale di Cora Diamond’, in Cora Diamond, L’immaginazione e la vita morale, ed. by Piergiorgio Donatelli (Rome: Carocci, ;88>), pp. 6–7; (p. 5>).

55. Quotations from Convivio are taken from Dante Alighieri, Convivio, ed. by Franca Brambilla Ageno (Firenze: Le Lettere, 5667). Translations are from Dante Alighieri, Il Convivio/The Banquet, trans. by Richard Lansing (New York: Garland, 5668). On Dante’s negative approach to linguistic variety in De vulgari eloquentia, see for example Jürgen Trabant, Mithridates in Paradies (Munich: Beck, ;88@), p. D8 and Elena Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ;88D), pp. 5@9–98.

5;. See also De vulgari eloquentia, I, i, ;–@: ‘Vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam qua infantes assuefiunt ab assistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt; vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus’. Quotations are taken from Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, in Opere minori, ; vols (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 56D6–CC), )) (56D6), @–;@D.

5@. See Giorgio Stabile, ‘Confusione dei linguaggi e impotenza tecnica’, in Dante e la filosofia della natura: Percezioni, linguaggi, cosmologie (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, ;88D), pp. ;56–7;, and Stefano Gensini, ‘Sulla confusio linguarum di Dante’, Studi filosofici, @8 (;88D), >5–DC.

59. See Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body. 57. ‘Non è secondo [...] a una cosa essere più cagioni efficienti, avegna che una sia massima dell’altre:

onde lo fuoco e lo martello sono cagioni efficienti dello coltello, avegna che massimamente è il fabro. Questo mio volgare fu congiungitore delli miei generanti, che con esso parlavano, sì come ’l fuoco è disponitore del ferro al fabro che fa lo coltello: per che manifesto è lui essere concorso alla mia generazione, e così essere alcuna cagione del mio essere’ (Convivio I, xiii, 9).

5>. As observed, among others, by Michael Kremer, already in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein is aiming at this shift in the way of looking at the world via a form of religious conversion; see Michael Kremer ‘The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense’, Nous, @7 (;885), @6–D@. Despite the undeniable continuity within Wittgenstein’s ref lection, one can however affirm that only the later works introduce the dimensions of intersubjectivity, affectivity, bodily expression and perception within this frame.

5D. Enantiosemy is a case of polysemy in which one sense is in some respect the opposite of another.

5C. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 56C8), p. 56;. 56. Katherine H. Tachau, ‘Seeing as Action and Passion in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth

Centuries’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F.

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Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ;88>), pp. @@>–76 (p. @@D). Through seeing-as, Wittgenstein defends a form of direct realism which is surprisingly close to the anti-Thomistic theory of Peter John Olivi. Olivi opposes his concept of aspectus to the proto-representationalist view which considers the species intellegibiles as necessary mediators between the object and the subject; see Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 566D), especially pp. 5@8–@9 and pp. 5>C–C8, which presents Olivi’s concepts of aspectus as the intellectual, mind’s gaze as a theoretical alternative position in the medieval debate mostly informed by Thomas Aquinas’s account on human perception based on the species-mediation. See also Dominik Perler, Theorien der Intentionalität im Mittelalter (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, ;889). For an interpretation of Olivi as the first medieval author expressing a concept of subjectivity, see Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, and Alain de Libera, ‘ “Sujet” (“L’Invention de la certitude subjective”)’, in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, ed. by Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil/Le Robert, ;889), pp. 5;@C–9@.

;8. Intromissionists instead thought that in perception the eyes do not emit rays but are entered by them. See Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages.

;5. See Sara Fortuna, A un secondo sguardo: Il mobile confine tra percezione e linguaggio (Rome: manifestolibri, ;88;).

;;. See Mary Carruthers, ‘Moving Images in the Mind’s Eye’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ;88>), pp. ;CD–@87 (pp. ;68–65). For a connection between Wittgenstein’s late philosophy and ancient and medieval spiritual exercises, see Pierre Hadot, Wittgenstein et les limites du language (Paris: Vrin, ;889).

;@. Amedeo Quondam, ‘Aspetto’, in Enciclopedia dantesca, > vols (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 56D8–DC), ) (56D8), 959–5>.

;9. We find only six occurrences of aspetto in Inferno, fourteen in Purgatorio, while in Paradiso there are twenty-two.

;7. Only once, a propos Paradiso, II, 555, Quondam observes that ‘ “che ti tremolerà nel tuo aspetto” può valere sia in senso oggettivo (‘nel guardar lei’), che soggettivo (‘nella sua apparenza’)’ (‘Aspetto’, p. 957).

;>. Here Dante seems to refer to physiognomics as the classical doctrine which deals with the connection of the inner powers of the soul to the external appearance and which is already represented in the Greek tradition with the idea of kaloskagathos.

;D. The enantiosemic use of ‘aspetto’ has a quite long duration, we find it in the opening pages of Vico’s Scienza Nuova (5D99), where Vico comments the complex image, ‘la dipintura’ put at the beginning of the book because its structure has to synthesize the fundamental discoveries of his ‘new science’. Here ‘aspetto’ is f irst of all God’s gaze but also the metaphysical principles of metaphysics inspired by God; for an analysis of all the different meaning of ‘aspetto’ in this work see Sara Fortuna ‘Osservazioni sulla nozione di aspetto nella Scienza Nuova di G. B. Vico’, Bollettino del centro di studi vichiani, @> (;88>–8D), 6C–557.

;C. It is interesting to note that Dante’s enantiosemic use of ‘aspetto’ only refers to the heavenly dimension, whereas the enantiosemic use of ‘viso’ for both sight and face can be found — almost equally represented from a quantitative point of view — in the three canticles.

;6. Quotations from the Divine Comedy are taken from Dante Alighieri, ‘La Commedia’ secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, ;nd rev. edn, 9 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 5669). Translations are from Dante Alighieri, Comedy, trans. by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander, @ vols (New York: Doubleday, ;888–8D).

@8. For an interpretation of Hell as fixity as opposed to the transformative character of Purgatory, see Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Gluttony and the Anthropology of Pain’, in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. by Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, ;88D), pp. ;@C–78.

@5. See Niccolò Tommaseo, ‘Aspetto’, in Dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: Edizione tipografica torinese, 56;6), pp. >>5–>;.

@;. On the emotional charge of these lines and their anthropological implications, see Manuele Gragnolati’s essay in this volume, ‘(In-)Corporeality, Language, Performance in Dante’s Vita

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Nuova and Commedia’, as well as his ‘Nostalgia in Heaven: Embraces, Affection and Identity in Dante’s Comedy’, in Dante and the Human Body, ed. by John Barnes and Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts Press, ;88D), pp. 65–555; see also Purg. XV, D6: ‘con quello aspetto che pietà disserra’. Francesca Southerden’s article in this volume, ‘Lost for Words: Recuperating Melancholy Subjectivity in Dante’s Eden’, provides an effective analysis of the poetic caesura represented by the encounter between Dante and Beatrice in the garden of Eden in Purgatorio XXX, giving an indirect account for the fact that the enantiosemic meaning of ‘aspetto’ appears for the first time in this context.

@@. Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine ‘Comedy’: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 566;), pp. ;;8–;5

@9. See Barolini, The Undivine ‘Comedy’, pp. 7@–77. @7. See Barolini’s splendid chapters ‘Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition’

and ‘The Sacred Poem is Forced to Jump: Closure and the Poetics of Enjambment’, in The Undivine ‘Comedy’, pp. 9C–7@ and pp. ;5C–7>.

@>. See Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Notes toward a Gendered History of Italian Literature, with a Discussion of Dante’s Beatrice Loquax’, in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham, ;88>), pp. @>8–DC.

@D. An emphasis on the blurring of boundaries operated by poetic language rooted in corporeality can also be found in Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella letteratura occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 56DD): ‘L’oggetto dell’amore è [...] un fantasma, ma questo fantasma è uno “spirito”, inserito, come tale, in un circolo pneumatico in cui si aboliscono e si confondono i confini tra l’esterno e l’interno, il corporeo e l’incorporeo, il desiderio e il suo oggetto (p. 5@6; see also pp. 585–8;).

@C. For this interpretation see Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, pp. 5>8–D9. @6. Gabriel Josipovici, ‘Dante: Trusting the Mother Tongue’, in his On Trust: Art and the Temptations

of Suspicion (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 5666), p. D6. 98. For the transformation of the concept of authority at the end of the Commedia, see Albert R.

Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ;88C), p. 989, where Dante’s invocations and praises of God are compared to Adam’s first act of naming God.

95. See Elena Lombardi’s article in this book, ‘Plurilingualism sub specie aeternitatis and the Strategies of a Minority Author’.

9;. Note that already in Canto I, Beatrice’s attitude towards Dante is described as the affective and caring relation of a mother looking at her son (lines 588–8;).

9@. See Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. ;;5. 99. Commentators usually interpret ‘aspetto’ as Beatrice’s face or appearance, while Daniele

Mattalia reads it as gaze, ‘sguardo’. The text of line >8 is controversial and some commentators, (including Natalino Sapegno and Giuseppe Giacalone) follow the variant ‘quanto il santo aspetto il facea mero’, where ‘il santo aspetto’ refers to Christ and ‘il’ to ‘il santo riso’, interpreting ‘il santo aspetto’ as Christ’s appearance. Giovanni Fallani interpretes it as ‘la fulgidissima luce di Cristo’. We cite all commentaries to the Divine Comedy from the Dartmouth Dante Project: <http://dante.dartmouth.edu>.

97. See Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, ;887), chapter 5.

9>. See Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, and Sara Fortuna and Manuele Gragnolati, ‘ “Attaccando al suo capezzolo le mie labbra ingorde”: Corpo, linguaggio e soggettività da Dante ad Aracoeli di Elsa Morante’, Nuova corrente, 77 (;88C), C7–5;9.

9D. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body. 9C. ‘O somma luce che tanto ti levi | da’ concetti mortali, a la mia mente | ripresta un poco di quel

parevi, | e fa la lingua mia tanto possente, | ch’una favilla sol de la tua gloria | possa lasciare a la futura gente; | ché, per tornare alquanto a mia memori | e per sonare un poco in questi versi, | più si concepirà di tua vittoria’.

96. See for example the interpretation by Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, who explain the meaning of ‘per altro aspetto’ as ‘per guardare in un’altra direzione’ and ‘per un diverso guardare’, whereas Chiavacci Leonardi gives it a strictly objective meaning as ‘oggetto del vedere’.

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78. We are here referring to the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, where the image of throwing the ladder away indicates that this work’s process of comprehension culminates with getting rid of it: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) | He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright’ (>.79; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, ;885), p. C6). As for Dante, silence is the final destination of the inquiry: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (Tractatus, D; p. C6).

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