About “Il brutto eloquente”

Words constantly oscillate in a delicate balance between understanding and strategy. A balance which, as media methods and tools become more sophisticated, tends to tip towards discourse that lures us in whilst circumventing our awareness. Baldi’s book takes us back to the earliest origins of these issues: the ancient world, where the art of speech is born, matures, shapes and is in turn shaped by the political environment, and becomes a subject of reflection.

Agreement and strategy are never truly separable. The art of the word is not peaceful, but it recalibrates the energies already stirred up by violent conflict and heroic hand-to-hand combat. While words can be used to prevail over another without annihilating them, physical elimination may nonetheless be followed by assimilation, the erasure of dissent, or predation. Hence the classic opposition between rhetoric and dialectic: on the one hand, adherence to the ever-changing in order to exploit it; on the other, the confrontation over truth; opinion or knowledge. These are distinctions that are being lost in a world that seeks to be free from metaphysics and in which even modern knowledge—which was meant to replace that truth—is dissolving: all the more urgent, then, is Baldi’s reconstruction, to guard against the clamour that claims to be democratic but is in fact a cacophony of sounds that rewards the voice best equipped to deceive.

Between a word that is the domain of the few and the word that flatters in order to dominate the many, Baldi places Homer’s Thersites, an ambiguous and deceitful Odysseus, right up to Socrates, dishevelled and wise, ironic and deceitful: the charm of the eloquent ugly ones lies not so much in the transgression of an order, but in their withdrawal from any order as such. Their ugliness represents an irreducible otherness. They traverse symbolic codes and relational networks without allowing themselves to be defined, thereby undermining the very claim to completeness and the necessity of conventions and rules. While in ancient Greece beauty and virtue were one and the same, the virtue of eloquence in these shameless, unseemly figures shatters even this fundamental assumption, introducing doubt, duplicity and excess where there ought to have been peace and moderation. Moreover, the ugly yet eloquent, by parodying the world, laughing and making others laugh, elude even those who might wish to turn them into their own standard-bearers. Their unruly gesture does not seek to mobilise; it simply upends what was firmly rooted. On closer inspection, this is already a profoundly political act.

Dino Baldi
"Il brutto eloquente
" Quodlibet, 260 pp., 20 euros