Timothy Murphy

translator of "Flower of the Desert: Giacomo Leopardi's Poetic Ontology"

November 4, 2015

Murphy is the author of "Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs" (1997) and "Antonio Negri: Modernity and the Multitude" (2012), as well as many essays on modern and contemporary literature, philosophy and culture; editor of "The Philosophy of Antonio Negri" (2 vols, 2005-2007); and translator of 'Negri's Subversive Spinoza" (2004), "Books for Burning" (2005), "Trilogy of Resistance" (2011) and "Flower of the Desert" (2015). He served as general editor of the scholarly journal Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture from 2000 to 2013.

One of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, Antonio Negri, offers a radical new interpretation of one of Italy's most renowned and beloved poets, Giacomo Leopardi. "Flower of the Desert" constitutes a profound meditation on Leopardi's art and thought as well as a reframing and reassertion of Negri's own philosophical and political project of liberation. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic but isolated individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its 'true illusions.' Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi offers an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition 'a uniquely Italian one' that is as relevant now as it was in the 19th century.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2016-honorees/timothy-murphy

Last Updated: 12 January 2022