Time and Festivity

One of the foremost thinkers of his generation, Furio Jesi began to publish scholarly essays in academic journals at the age of fifteen. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had accumulated a body of work that astonishes with its abundance and diversity, its depth and scope, and, above all, for its unfailing rigor and brilliance.

In Time and Festivity, Andrea Cavalletti collects Jesi’s finest essays, ranging from his groundbreaking work on myth and politics to his reflections on time, festivity, and revolt. He explores the significance of texts by Rimbaud, Rilke, Lukács, and Pavese and the mythological language of the biblical story of Susanna. Carefully annotated and referenced, and enriched by a first-person account of Jesi’s intellectual biography, Time and Festivity provides a precious guide to the methodology and approach at the core of Jesi’s thought, displaying how his personal, vitally intense via negativa might in fact originate from his early statement: “All I have ever written is poetry.”

Furio Jesi (1941–80) was an Italian writer, translator, mythologist, and Germanist. A correspondent of Thomas Mann and Károly Kerényi, he worked on a number of studies of Egyptian and classical mythology, culminating in his book Secret Germany. Andrea Cavalletti is professor of aesthetics and contemporary literature at the IUAV University of Venice. He is the author of Suggestion and The Biopolitical City. Cristina Viti is a poet and translator.