The work of the Neapolitan philosopher of culture, Giambattista Vico (1661–1744) is still fresh today, if only because his theory of metaphor has only (in my view) been confirmed and expanded by one other thinker, Jacques Lacan. There is no significant body of scholarship to support this claim, so it is very likely that the connection will be lost. Anyone who might take up this line of thinking will have to put up with the isolation that comes with arguing for the significance of two thinkers who are both equally insightful but equally difficult. Just as Vico wondered whether his discovery of the ideal form cultures make in their separate emergences, from their animal nature to mythic thought, from their mythic thought to a heroic mentality, and then from this representational stance to full human conceptualization, had made him a god or a demon (aut deus aut dæmon). Thanks to the Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene, I undertook Vico before I fully appreciated the difficulties, but began with Verene’s emphasis on the imaginative universal as key to Vico’s original thinking. Thanks to Thomas Godard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch’s unusually good translation of Vico’s major work, The New Science, a broad audience has, since the late 1960s, had access to a way of thinking about culture that is primarily linguistic, like that of Ernst Cassirer, Verene’s other specialty. Thanks to good teachers (Verene, also Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Ernesto Grassi) I was able to write about Vico in a variety of venues: for architecture scholars, for geographers, and finally for Lacanians. The result of these attempts, first to connect Vico to Joyce (an easy target) but then to Lacan (an impossible target) will be hard to assess, since there are as few Vichians interested in Lacan as there are Lacanians interested in Vico. This is immaterial. Anyone who wishes to study Giambattista Vico has the difficulty of such a task counter-balanced by the pleasure of finding an originality that remains fresh and resistant to misreadings. And, anyone who has the bad or good luck to see, in Vico, an anticipation of Lacan’s equally original theory of the human subject will enjoy a double benefit (or curse). Where Vico studied the public subject by grounding it in the private subject, Lacan did the reverse. This scholarly chiasmus may not ease the difficulty of reading either of these two geniuses, but it will multiply any benefits immeasurably.
This is not an exhaustive list of lessons or even a complete collection of essays. A sample samples, and not often representatively. It is simply an effort to make public in one list a series that might be of use to the solitary writer who needs company.•
• Study guide to Giambattista Vico’s The New Science
• Vico as a Philosopher of Quantum Dimensionality, in Forty Points
• Giambattista Vico as a Philosopher of Place: Comments on the Recent Article by Mills
• The “Vico Box,” a Theory of How to Read The New Science‘s dipintura
• Save the Tears for Later: The Return of Cyclopean Mind in Pandemic Times