The
proclaim of the death of ideologies
had the same paradoxical effect of
the proclaim of God’s death.
However this is nothing but a clever
idea defended by those who have been
trapped within a disturbing ideology.
Ideologies are immortal. And they
will be so until science informs all
the domains of knowledge and human
behaviour. They will always be immortal
and indispensable, like a magic wand
when we are left with no other instrument
to orient ourselves amidst the misery
and the anguish of the century, unable
to give our paths a sense that cannot
be find elsewhere.
Any
ideology, whether moderate or libertarian,
besides attaining a collective immortality,
is pernicious, for it tends to deny
any concurrent ideology the right
to live. For this reason, any underestimation
of the ideological nature of human
actions, from the less noble to the
nobler, is nothing but a catastrophic
hypostasis of the ideological. In
this sense, Marx’s and Freud’s
lessons shall not be forgotten. RiLUnE
is determined to address this question
and thus devotes an issue to the presence
and the role of ideologies within
the European literatures of the 20th
Century. We would like to open a theoretical
and critical debate in which all the
ideologies which have contributed
to the developing of literature in
the last century are taken into account.
Neither splendour nor misery of the
Right or the Left shall be neglected
a priori. Moreover, with the help
of our contributors, we hope to provide
a satisfactory definition of the specific
Left and Right ideologies and their
role within the mechanisms of literary
culture. Needless to say, those who
believe that Left and Right do not
exist, are very welcome to participate
to the discussion: we would be delighted
to receive an irrefutable demonstration.
The
different issues launched by RiLUnE,
of which this is the first one, will
therefore be unbiased under this respect,
in order to achieve new opinions.
Finally, it shall be noted that we
are not interested in the anecdotic
side of biographies when this is not
finalised to considering the ideology
of texts which can sometimes contradict
the political colour of each author.
Ruggero
Campagnoli
tr. Ana Pano
