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Mater of transformation. Poiesis and autopoiesis in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Benvenuto Cellini's Vita and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio

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Mater of transformation. Poiesis and autopoiesis in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Benvenuto Cellini's Vita and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio

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MATER OF TRANSFORMATION.
POIESIS AND AUTOPOIESIS IN OVID’S METAMORPHOSES, BENVENUTO
CELLINI’S VITA AND PIER PAOLO PASOLINI’S PETROLIO

by

Paolo Matteucci

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Paolo Matteucci

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………. iv

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………... 1
The Metamorphoses ………………………………….………………………… 8
The Vita .………………………………………………..……………………… 17
Petrolio …………………………………………………………………………. 29

Part 1 – Earth, Gold and Oil

Chapter One : Gold and the Vita …………….………………………..…………….….. 41
Representations of Gold in the Vita ……………………………………………. 52
Benvenuto’s Aurification and Cellini’s Sexuality ...……………….…………... 63
The Vita and Its Living Matters ……………………………………..…………. 76
The Vita’s Alma ...………………………………………………….…………... 87

Intermezzo : Gold in the Metamorphoses and Petrolio ………………………………... 96

Chapter Two : Oil in Petrolio …………………………………………..…..…….…. 121

Chapter Three : Earth in the Metamorphoses ….…….…..……………….…………... 145

Intermezzo : Earth in the Vita ……………………………………..………………….. 165

Part 2 – Autopoiesis

Chapter Four : Autopoiesis …………….………...……………………………….….. 185
Autopoiesis in the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio ……………………. 197
The Production of Components ………………………………..……………... 200
The Problem of Time …..………………………………………………………204
The Capture of Observation ………………………………………...………… 212

Intermezzo : Petrolio, Autonomy and Autopoiesis ………………………………….... 222

Part 3 – Viscous Matters

Chapter Five : Chaos, Poiesis, Autopoiesis ……....…………………………………... 229
Viscous Matters ………………………………………………………………. 234
Prometheus’ Poiesis: Bifurcation, Multiplicity, Transformation (The
Metamorphoses) ………………………………………………………………. 245

iii
The Salinon and the Saltcellar (The Vita) …………………………………….. 254
Origins, Multiple Incipits, Poiesis (Petrolio)………………………………….. 266
Poets’ Poiesis and Textual Auto-Poiesis ……………………………………… 274

Chapter Six : Prometheus and Technics ……………………………………………... 276
Prometheus in the Metamorphoses …………………………………………… 279
Prometheus and the Forgetting of Epimetheus ……………………………..… 285
Prometheus and Epimetheus in the Metamorphoses …………………………. 294
Conclusions …………………………………………………………………… 299

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………….. 302

iv
ABSTRACT
In this project, I develop a comparative reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c.8
CE), Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (c.1558) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio (1975). These
literary works belong to three eras in which Western culture faced crucial processes of
geopolitical expansion, and they are all deeply concerned with the problem of
transformation. On a thematic level, these narratives depict the transmutation of three
precious substances (respectively: earth, gold and oil) into living products. On a structural
level, these texts appear to embody continuous transformation because they defer their
points of beginning, they present themselves as never-ending achievements, and they
draw their readers into recursive signification loops that constantly renegotiate the
boundaries between the textual ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Adopting a number of theoretical
frameworks that range from Goux’s analysis of economic value to Agamben’s
philosophical thought, and from Serres’s reconsideration of physics to Irigaray’s
philosophy of fluids, I argue that these three literary works do more than challenge the
conventional binary opposition between materiality and transcendence. In my view, in
fact, these narratives subvert the structural isomorphism that links the functioning of truth,
financial value, and the phallus as Western culture’s main master signifiers.
Scrutinizing the transformative dynamics that the Metamorphoses, the Vita and
Petrolio engage, I also argue that these texts function as autopoietic organisms. In
Maturana and Varela’s frame, autopoiesis is the fundamental feature that distinguishes all
living systems, and it corresponds to the capacity a system has to produce its new
components while retaining its topological unity. In my views, the three literary works

v
perform autopoiesis because, while they maintain an invariant structural unity through
their written bodies, they capture in their narratives the mechanisms of signification that
are produced by their readers. This suggests that, once it is considered to function as an
autopoietic producer of signification, any literary text can be conceived of as a living
organism.

1
INTRODUCTION
In this project, I develop a comparative reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8
CE), Benvenuto Cellini’s unconventional autobiography titled Vita (c. 1558), and Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s last, unfinished literary work Petrolio (1975). Although these three
books have never been read together in a scholarly context, their juxtaposition allows one
to address a variety of issues. In the first place, it opens a ground from which to
investigate the limits of the canonical distinction between an inside and an outside of a
literary text, because all three these literary works can be read as open-ended narratives
that lack definite points of beginning and end. In addition, my comparative reading
interrogates the traditional separation between a text’s form and its content, because each
narrative is not only thematically concerned with the trope of metamorphosis, but it also
seems to embody transformation in its own structure. Finally, a confrontation of the three
texts helps destabilize the assumption that literature is dead matter. Each narrative in fact
rhetorically captures, within its own recursive loops of signification, the very processes of
interpretation it engages with its readers. It therefore presents itself as a dynamic site of
transformation where new textual components are constantly produced and then
assimilated within the text’s own structure.
I address the three texts’ apparent thematic and structural concern with
transformation by engaging in a dialogue with the theories of autopoiesis elaborated by
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In these two thinkers’ framework, autopoiesis
is the capacity a given organism has to constantly produce its own components while it
maintains a structural unity. In my view, the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio can

2
all be conceived of as autopoietic organisms because, while retaining a topological
stability assured by their written bodies, they also capture in their rhetorical functioning
the signification processes produced by the interaction with their readers. In addition, as
for Maturana and Varela autopoiesis is the distinctive feature that characterizes the
functioning of all living organisms, these texts not only present themselves as systems of
signification in perennial transformation, but they can be even conceived of as organisms
permeated with life. A consideration of these works as living organisms excites wide
philosophical concerns, such as the problems of what constitutes life and how life can be
transmitted. Once they are conceived of as three products of a poetic act of suffusing life
into literary matter, the three texts also provide a ground on which to discuss the
relationship between the human and the technical and, on a broader level, between
literature and science.
Bringing forward the possibility that poiesis can transform a written text into a
living product, my juxtaposed consideration of the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio
employs the three heavily-loaded conceptual metaphors of life, matter, and transmission
of life into matter. While for the problem of definition of life I intensively rely on the
theoretical framework elaborated by Maturana and Varela, I leave open the problem of
how to conceive “matter” outside the subordination of materiality to transcendence that
has retained an undisputed primacy in Western metaphysics. In alternative to the
conventional assumption that subordinates the corporeal to pure and abstracts ideas, all
three literary texts depict—and appear to be made of—matter as a problematic
transformative compound that, while being intrinsically concerned with movement,

3
fluidity and flow, embodies continuous change. They therefore make being and becoming
undistinguishable the one from the other.
The three texts’ interrogation of what constitutes matter directly invests the very
way one understands, and uses, the trope of transformation. Transformation is
conventionally defined as the process of changing of form, shape, or appearance. Still,
when one establishes the primacy of the metaphysical over corporeal, transformation is
ultimately conceived of as a teleological trajectory at first occurring in the abstract and
then finding its manifestations in the spheres of the physical, the tangible, and the
concrete. This is the case, for example, of the theoretical frameworks where “form” is
used (as in the Platonic nous) to connote primary or principal transcendental principles
governing all other phenomena. However, none of the three literary texts scrutinized
appears to reduce either matter, transformation, or their interconnection to the dichotomy
opposing materiality to transcendence. None of these narratives speaks in favor of a clear
distinction between the corporeal and the metaphysical, nor do they inscribe their own
mutability within teleological trajectories. The Metamorphoses, the Vita, and Petrolio can
be rather considered to be all be “made of” the same matter they depict—a substance that
is in the last instance irreducible to the metaphysical divide, and that retains the potential
to transform at any moment into a “mother of life.”
Among other consequences, the three texts’ embodiment of the inseparability
between being and becoming is particularly productive for reconsidering the “power”
that one can ascribe to language. Centered upon the problematic depiction of matter as a
lively, and transformative embodiment of the inextricable relationship between corporeal

4
and incorporeal, physical and transcendental, finitude and infinity, my juxtaposition of
the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio actually shows that these works all deploy
language’s power to, as Giorgio Agamben has suggested, perform the “impossible task of
appropriating what must in every case remain unappropriable.”
1
In my view, all three of
these texts capture, by means of the spectacles of language they construct, the “phantasm
of life” that resides in a “grey zone” of indeterminacy where the distinction between
materiality and transcendence collide. In addition, as literary organism permeated with
life, these texts call for a radical reconsideration of the conceptual metaphors of poet,
poiesis and poetic making.
In my first section, I start from a scrutiny of the deep concern that all three the
narratives share with the trope of transformation. Ovid’s poem, for example, depicts
some 250 episodes of metamorphoses of bodies, humans, animals and “inert” matter.
Cellini’s Vita, besides describing the manipulation of metals as a practice finalized in the
realization of a series of sculptural artifacts, gives remarkable emphasis to the
transmutation of its main character, namely Benvenuto, into symbolic gold. Petrolio,
which on the level of its narrative accounts for various metamorphoses such as, for
example, a number of trans-sexual transformations of its main character Carlo, is in its
entirety presented to the reader as a work in progress whose structure constantly changes,
transforming itself from a “flow of magma” to a “legomenon” and eventually to a
“book.” I then examine how the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio’s concern with the
theme of transformation is related to these texts’ respective representation of earth, gold

1
Agamben, Stanzas, xviii.

5
and oil as “precious matters” that generate and sustain life. In the Metamorphoses, for
example, earth is conceived not only as the “mother” of living organisms and humans,
but also as a viscous humus in which processes of chthonic generation take place. In turn,
the Vita presents gold as both a material that Benvenuto manipulates in his “artistic”
making and the symbolic matter into which his body, at the moment he acquires the
secrets of creation, is transformed. Petrolio, finally, presents the black gold as both a
commodity whose circulation generates a series of “economic empires” that govern
Italian social and political life, and symbolic matter that captures, in its flow, both time
and life. Since earth, gold and oil are three commodities that have retained (and still do
retain) a crucial importance in Western culture and economy, these substances’
representation in the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio challenges the “economic
imperatives” according to which matter should be primarily understood for its financial
value. On this basis, I use the three narratives as points of departure to discuss the
potential language has to challenge the “fundamental isomorphism” that, according to
Jean-Joseph Goux, characterizes the functioning of economic value, fatherhood and the
phallus as Western culture’s master signifiers.
In my second section I argue that the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio
constitute three living products of poetic creation because all three of these texts function
as autopoietic systems. These literary works not only show the impossibility to enclose
signification within a series of clear-cut boundaries, but they also work as autopoietic
organisms for they retain their structural unities while capturing the reader’s positionality
within their own functioning. In other words, these texts perform autopoiesis as far as

6
they tend toward the inclusion, in their mechanisms of signification, of the components
made up by the processes of interpretation that they generate. On the one hand, my
consideration of the three texts as autopoietic machines helps me to reconsider part of
what has been said in the secondary bibliography on the Metamorphoses, the Vita and
Petrolio, and to develop an extensive re-reading of each text centered upon the resonance
between their thematic emphasis on transmission of life and their structural embodiment
of life itself. On the other hand, as they give us three spectacular exemplifications of how
literary texts may function as autopoetic machines, these narratives also suggest that any
text, as far as it is considered to be made “alive” by readership, can be seen retaining a
“lively” autopoietic potential. This implies that autopoietic theories are available as one
ultimate theoretical framework to experiment with; that they can be productively
translated to the field of literary studies; and that they can even help reframe the very
notions of text, readership, and interpretation. In this light, my choice to focus on these
three literary works proves to be, in the last instance, arbitrary. It is mainly justified by
the apparent convergence that each text brings forward between the potential a written
narrative has to represent transformation and the capacity it has to constantly transform
itself into a lively producer of signification. Still, as far as we take as a point of departure
the impossibility to establish a neat line of demarcation separating a system of
signification from the (infinite) processes of production of meaning that it engages, any
text might reveal an autopoietic potential, and possibly contribute to the demystification
of the conventional notion that literature is dead matter.

7
In my third section, I confront my understanding of textual autopoiesis to
problems of origination and transmission of life. I begin by distinguishing between the
notions of self-generation and autopoiesis, and I then discuss the status of the poet who,
by means of a poetic act of making, brings into existence an autopoietic literary text.
Relying on Michel Serres’ understanding of the eternal fluxes of chaos, I suggest that
poetic making might be neither a practice of creation ex nihilo nor a “mode” of begetting
life that would require the intervention of the masculine as a fecundating agent over the
feminine. I also argue, drawing upon Luce Irigaray’s examination of the mechanics of
fluids, that all three narratives seem to spectacularly challenge Western philosophy’s
supposition that the masculine should be associated to rational ideas and pure forms
while the feminine, with its malleability and mutability, ought to be considered an
inadequate physical ‘reproduction’ of men’s intellect. Once “poetic matter” is no longer
seen as a passive recipient of pure forms, and “poetic making” is reconsidered outside
andromorphic, masculine, or phallocentric “inseminational” metaphors, poiesis no longer
corresponds to a practice that imposes (supposedly) pure forms, shapes or ideas into inert
substances. Poiesis is rather reconfigured as a composite process of transformation in
which the manipulation of matter leads to the begetting of life, and in which life is
contained from the start, as an intrinsic potentiality, within matter.
In my final chapter, I confront the depiction of Prometheus in the Metamorphoses
to the theoretical framework elaborated by Bernard Stiegler in his Technics and Time 1,
the Fault of Epimetheus. I demonstrate that Ovid’s poem does not properly belong to the
tradition of forgetting of Prometheus’ brother, namely Epimetheus, that for Stiegler has

8
informed much of Western culture and that has supported one of its fundamental tenets,
namely the assumption that the technological is “inferior” to thought because it mainly
serves utilitaristic purposes. Against this background, Stiegler formulates the hypothesis
that the human and the technical are not two opposite entities, nor is the one (the human)
“father” of the other. Rather, Stiegler envisions the possibility to understand the technical
as a form of “prosthetization” of the human through which the human pursues life by
means other than life, and on this basis he recasts the human and the technical as two
mutually constitutive entities. Intensively relying on Stiegler’s examination of the
relationship between human and technical, I suggest that even written texts, such as in
this case the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio, can be considered to be as
epiphylogenetic “prosthetizations” of the human, that is to say they can be conceived of
as living byproducts of a mutual transmission of life between human and technological
matter. I believe that such a consideration of the three texts can constitute a point of
departure for the reading of further literary works, and I expect at some point in the future
to better frame the status of autopoiesis within the interconnection between human and
technical considering alongside Maturana and Varela not only Stiegler but also other
thinkers such as Heidegger.

THE METAMORPHOSES
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is made up of 15 books. The poem is written in dactylic
hexameter, and it presents a collection of stories that range temporally (so to speak, since
many of the episodes exist of course outside of any history) from the primordial chaos

9
that precedes the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar and the reign of
Augustus. The different episodes recounted by the poem are seldom related the one to the
other by means of causality or consequentiality, and they are not always arranged in
“chronological” order. In telling the stories of over 250 metamorphoses of bodies,
humans, animals and “inert” matter, the poem rather shows a constant concern with
transformation.
The thematic centrality of transformation, critics have argued, is in the
Metamorphoses both “a narrative leitmotiv” that “allows the poem to travel freely among
the varied stories of Greek myth”

and a process investing, as the incipit of the poem
suggests, both the text’s structure and its own generation.
2
In the opening lines from
Book I, in analogy to the bodies and forms that constitute its subject matter, the poem is
presented to the reader as a product of constant and possibly perennial transformation:
My spirit impels me to speak of shapes changed into new
Bodies; oh gods (for you changed even those)
Inspire my beginnings and from the origin of the world
To my own times, draw my song without breaks. (Met, I, 1-4)
3

Analyzing the first lines of Book I, various scholars have posited the text’s
emphasis on an existing continuity between the origins of the words and the present as a
rhetorical device that would insert the poem itself in the continuum of the universe’s

2
Feldherr, 164. Moving from an examination of the text’s incipit, Sara Myers has also suggested that the
text not only stages, but also depicts, the perpetual processes of the entire cosmos’ transformation: “Ovid
destabilizes the physical world of the poem after the flood of Book 1. This instability of matter establishes a
context for the processes of metamorphosis in the mythological stories.” Thus, Meyers continues, “the
fluidity of the Ovidian cosmos” shares crucial features with M.M. Bakhtin’s description of the grotesque
body, or “open body,” which “is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended
with the world, with animals, with objects.” (Myers, 49)

3
“In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas / corpora. Di, coeptis – nam vos mutastis et illas – / adspirate
meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.” (Met. I, 1-4)

10
transformation. Robert Coleman, for example, has spoken of the formal organization of
the poem as a narrative “concatenation” of events, or a number of “structural devices”
that serve the purpose of welding “the individual tales into a perpetuum Carmen” that
extends from the time of the origins to (Ovid’s) present time.
4
Focusing on the adjective
perpetuum (referring to carmen) and the verb deducite in line 4, in turn, E.J. Kenney has
argued that the gods “are bidden not to ‘thin out’ his [Ovid’s] song but to bring it down as
a continuous thread from the beginning of the world to his own day.”
5
According to
David Kovaks, too, since the text’s incipit establishes “a sort of conceptual zeugma in
which the poem and the things it is about are put on the same level,” the poem is a
perpetuum in the sense it extends “from creation to our own day.”
6
To give one more
example, Leonard Barkan has suggested that the Metamorphoses’s “cosmology of layers
is the precondition for a metamorphic universe because it establishes the orders among
which the flow of transformation will take place” and that the stories of transformation
told in the poem take place in a universe in which new anthropomorphic, animal, or plant
life is still being created.
7

Besides representing the poem as a product of transformation, the incipit of the
Metamorphoses refers directly to the problem of the origins of both the literary text and
the world. The generation of the literary text, in fact, derives from a solicitation

4
Coleman, 471. Coleman also suggests that the poem’s epilogue, making the poet “live on in his work”
(476), seems to look “forward confidently to the fulfillment of the prayer at the start” (476).

5
Kenney, in Herescu, 205-6.

6
Kovacs, 459 and 465. For his argumentation, Kovaks relies on Frécaut’s definition of the zeugma as
« l’emploi d’un terme dans une double acception ou d’un terme remplaçant deux synonymes dont un seul
convient exactement » (Frécaut 31).

7
Barkan, 28.

11
performed by a spirit, the animus, which impels the poet “to speak.” The poet’s
“perpetual song,” in turn, is referred to as a “beginning” that extends from the origins of
the world to present times. The text does not specify, at this point in the narration,
whether or not we should conceive either the moment of “the beginning of the world” or
the poet’s “present” as fixed points in time. Rather, in juxtaposing the origin of the poetic
act of making and the beginning of the world, the Metamorphoses’s first lines disclose
the possibility to see the existing continuity between the creation of literary text, which in
being a “beginning” also accesses the problem of the origins, and the moment of the
creation of the world. If considered this way, Ovid’s poem does more than “reconstruct”
the history of the world from its beginning to the present: it posits poiesis as a practice
that, besides being transformative in nature, at any point in time gains access to the
moment of the origins.
It is important to recognize the fact that the first active subject that is introduced
by the narrative is neither the poet nor a god, but rather the “spirit” (or animus) that
impels the poet to engage in producing the text. This is a common trope in ancient
literature. Still, in the context of the Metamorphoses, the presence of such a living spirit
encompasses important theoretical implications because it posits the issue of the
transmission of life as one of the center of the text’s narrative. I will develop the question
of how we should understand both the poet’s animus and the text’s problematic depiction
of chronological time later on in this work, where I will confront the Vita’s representation
of the universal breath that animates the cosmos to the pneumophantasmological
doctrines that, as Agamben has shown, started developing in Western thought during the

12
Middle Ages. For now, it is important to point out that in the context of Cellini’s Vita ,
like in the Metamorposes, the notions of alma and anima play crucial roles within the
processes of transformation of matter. As it is represented in the Vita’s incipit, in fact, the
alma is in the first place what gives a “life” to the poet and then makes it possible, for
him, to “live” a number of extraordinary undertakings:
This troubled life of mine I write
To thank the God of nature,
Who conveyed my soul to me and then took care of it,
That various noble undertakings I have done and live. (Vita, 1-4)
8

Scrutinizing what it is stated in their two textual incipits, then, we can observe
that the Metamorphoses and the Vita converge in representing themselves as the products
of two analogous poetic processes of creation, as the “making” of both texts is not only
“put into motion,” but it is rather “animated,” by two similar living principles. In Ovid’s
poem, this living principle makes the universe alive and it impels the poet to produce a
perpetuum literary work that develops from the origins of the world to the present. In
Cellini’s text, an alma is given by the God of Nature to the poet and subsequently makes
the poet both alive and capable of “living” his undertakings.
After the initial quatrain, Book I of the Metamorphoses gives a description of the
primordial chaos defined as a “rough unordered mass” in which “the discordant seeds of
unassembled things” are heaped together. In primordial chaos, the poem says,
… No part maintained its form,
And one impeded the others, because in the body
The cold were fighting with the hot, the wet with the dry,

8
“Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo / per ringraziar lo Dio della natura, / che mi diè l’alma e poi ne ha
‘uto cura, / alte diverse ‘mprese ho fatte e vivo.” (Vita, 1-4, p.79)

13
The soft with the hard, and with the weightless those with weight. (Met., I, 17-
20)
9

A “God, or more kindly nature” then intervenes to settle the “dispute” inscribed in
primordial chaos. The harmonization of chaos occurs through a process of separation:
God distinguishes the elements and divides the sky from the lands, “the land from the
waves,” and “the clear sky from the misty air.”
10
Remarkably, while distinguishing the
elements, the God of creation also “creates” space. The process of separation of land,
water, sky and air, in facts, occurs through the ascription to each element of its “separated
place.” God’s pacification of primordial chaos therefore appears not only to be a practice
of distinction of matter, but also a process of production of space:
God, or more kindly Nature, settled this dispute;
Far from the sky he split the lands and from the lands the waves,
And divided the clear sky from the misty air.
And after unfolding these and drawing them from their dark heap,
He bound them in their separate places with harmonious peace. (Met, I, 21-25;
emphasis mine)
11

Book I from the Metamorphoses describes, a few lines after the account of the
cosmogony, the accomplishment of the creation of man. It is not clear, the text states,
whether man was made by the creator god from divine seed, or whether earth still kept
some residual seeds of the sky that Prometheus mixed with rainwater to mold into the
likeness of the gods. The narration only tells us that after the moment the stars, the fish,

9
“ Nulli sua forma manebat, / obstabatque aliis aliud, quia corpore in uno / frigida pugnabant calidis,
umentia siccis, / mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus.” (Met., I, 17-20)

10
Met., I, 21-22.

11
“Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit; / nam caelo terras et terries abscidit undas / et liquidum spisso
secrevit ab aëre caelum. / Quae postquam evolvit caecoque exemit acervo, / dissociata locis concordi pace
ligavit.” (Met. I, 21-25)

14
the wild beasts and the birds appeared in the sky, water, earth and air, “a holier living
thing than these was still required.”
12
With an abrupt caesura, at this point the poem states
that “man was born”:
Man was born; perhaps he was made from divine seed
By the universal Craftsman, the source of a better world;
Perhaps the new earth freshly separated from the high
Ether retained the seeds of the kindred sky,
Which the son of Iapetus mixed with rain water
And shaped into the likeness of the all-controlling gods. (I, 78-83)
13

As we can read in this passage, the Metamorphoses does not ascribe with
certainty the paternity of mankind to either the “universal Craftsman” or Prometheus. In
either case, though, for the text the origination of man never corresponds to a practice of
creation of life ex nihilo, but it rather appears to be a mode of “cultivating” a pre-existing
living principle, or “seed,” that resides within matter and that animates the universe.
Either man was created by the “universal Craftsman” or by Prometheus, poiesis
corresponds, in both texts, to a process of begetting of life.
The relationship between poiesis and life outlined in Book I is echoed in the
poem’s conclusion. The last lines of the Metamorphoses state that, now that the book is
finished, the poet can overcome his bodily lifetime and in this way aspire to immortality.
As the last word (vivam) of the text indicates, the poet “shall be born” forever because his

12
Met., I, 77.

13
“Natus homo est / siue diuino semine fecit / ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo, / siue recens tellus
seductaque nuper ab alto / Aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli; / Quam satus Iapeto mixtam pluuialibus
undis / Finxit in effigiem modernatum cuncta deorum; / Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / Os
homini sublime dedit caelumque tueri / Iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere uultus. / Sic, modo quae fuerat
rudis et sine imagine, tellus / Induit ignotas hominum conuersa figuras.” (Met., I, 78-88)

15
poem (said to be a work that neither Jupiter’s anger nor fire, steel or time can erode) will
make his name spoken wherever Rome’s domination will be extended:
And now I have completed a work which neither Jove’s anger, nor fire,
Nor sword, nor devouring age will be able to destroy.
When it wishes, let the day, which has no power except
Over this body, finish the span of my uncertain lifetime;
But, with the better part of me, I shall be borne forever
Above the stars on high, and my name will be indelible;
And, where Roman power extends over subdued lands,
I shall be read by the peoples, and, through the ages, in fame,
(if there is any truth in the predictions of bards) I shall live. (Met, XV, 871-
879)
14

As several critics have noticed, the conclusion of the Metamorphoses is rich in
implications regarding notions of politics, territorial domination, and imperialism.
15
As
Thomas Habinek has argued, for example, the conclusive lines of the Metamorphoses can
be productively read as a crucial site for the investigation of Ovid’s understanding of “the
transfer of empire to Rome,” and to open up a consideration of the Roman Empire as a
permeable spatial entity.
16
For my purposes, it is relevant to highlight the fact that,

14
“Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. / Cum
volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat haevi: / parte tamen
meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. / Quaque patet domitis
Romana potentia terris, / ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum presagia,
vivam.” (Met. XV, 871-9)

15
Confronting the final lines of the poem and “the issue of the poem’s ‘Augustianism’,” Carroll Moulton
has observed how “the poet may lay claim to a more solidly enduring achievement than the emperor.” In
other words, “Ovid prays that Augustus may survive him here on earth ; yet five lines later he can declare
himself ready to die at any moment, since his poetry will survive him forever” (Moulton, 7).

16
Habinek, 54. For Habinek, much of the criticism dedicated to the final sentences from the text has been
grounded on a questionable rendering of the verb pateo (XV,877) as “to extend.” For Habinek, that moves
from the contradictory assumptions that it is important to understand literature as “an important component
of the cultural hegemony that, for better or for worse, sustained Roman power for centuries” (61) but it is
not really relevant to ask whether or not the Metamorphoses “undermines the ambition of Augustus and
other Romans to achieve permanent control,”(52) reading patet as “extending” has foreclosed the
possibility to conceive the Roman Empire as a permeable, accessible and open spatial entity: “the Latin

16
positing the earth as a “product” that can be “mastered, pacified, domesticated,” the
conclusive passage of the Metamorphoses resonates with the book’s beginning.
17
More
specifically, as the account of the creation of man in Book I does, so the poem’s end
draws a distinction between two separate processes of “cultivation” of earth. On the one
hand, there is the colonization of the land performed by Roman expansionism, which
corresponds to the act of taking possession of the lands and which results, as Habinek has
argued, in the pacification and domestication of the land. On the other hand, there is the
“promethean” process of cultivation of earthly matter, which, besides making the product
of the poet’s work alive, also allows the poet to remain alive forever.
The conclusion of the poem really seems to invite the reader, as Habinek has
suggested, “to evaluate the Roman state as an explicit cultural, as opposed to military or
economic, arrangement.”
18
But it does so while also opening the possibility to understand
poiesis as a form of cultivation of matter that does not exactly correspond to the practices
of conquest of land of the Roman Empire. More specifically, the manipulation of literary
matter appears to be a practice of transmission of life rather than a process of
colonization. As my next chapters reveal, the Metamorphoses’s representation of earth as

word patet (‘lie open’) should give pause. While commentators and translators have usually taken the word
to mean something like ‘extend’, the implied reference being to Rome’s continuing expansion, in fact the
word more generally describes something that is unprotected, or easy of access: doors, nostrils, escape
routes, unguarded fields, an unwalled city, open minds are all used as the subject of the verb pateo, to lie
open, to be accessible, to permit entrance. To say that Roman power lies open, or is accessible, indicates
that it brooks no rival, it has no reason to surround itself with guards, it is open to all; and the expression
domitis terries would seem to explain why – because the lands have been not just conquered but mastered,
pacified, domesticated.” (55) Habinek concludes, then, arguing that “the movement of Ovid’s great poem,
temporally from chaos to Cleopatra and geographically from East to West” suggests “an ideology of
cosmic convergence on the Roman empire as constituted by Augustus.”

(53-54).

17
Habinek, 55.

18
Habinek, 57.

17
a poetic matter (and not, for example, as a commodity) is rich in political implications
because it challenges the notion of earth as a physical matter whose value should be
mainly understood in financial terms. A similar “subversion” of the “universal
imperative” of understanding matter primarily for its financial value is unfolded by
Cellini’s Vita and this text’s representation of gold.

THE VITA
Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita is mainly written in prose, but it also includes an initial
sonnet, a capitolo in terza rima, and a number of other passages in verses of different
length.
19
The text is divided into two books, respectively comprising 127 and 113
chapters. Between these two sections, the Vita presents a long poem in terza rima
centered upon the transformation of the main character of the narration, namely
Benvenuto, into “gold”.
Book I and Book II narrate a number of different episodes which vary
considerably in terms of length, setting, tone and subject. The Vita’s characters include
artisans, scoundrels, noblemen, merchants, cardinals, kings, the Pope as well as Christ
and an invisible spirit that appears to Benvenuto in prison and leads him to see the
“spheres of the Sun.” Indulging in anachronisms, digressions, and ekphrastic descriptions,
the Vita’s multifarious text is not at all scrupulous about narrative sequencing.
Furthermore, the text continuously displaces the action in a number of socio-geographical

19
Portions in verses—of variable length—range from a motto in Latin to a quatrain and a sonnet. They are
enclosed in the following chapters: I, V, 90; I, VI, 94; I, X, 101; I, XXX, 150; I, LXXXIV, 293-4; I, CXIX,
381; I, CXXII, 391; II, LXXXIX, 598.

18
locations that range from the sixteenth century Florentine artisans’ community to the
secludedness of the metallurgist’s workshop, the countryside of France, the Vatican
palaces and the Papal prisons in Rome. Characterized by several discrepancies between
the narrative and the formal organization of the text, the Vita also merges material of
different kind ranging from technical accounts of the casting of metal to the invocation of
Christ, historic digressions concerning metallurgy in Ancient Rome and the description of
current political intrigues in the courts of Florence, Rome, Ferrara and Paris.
The text begins with an introductory sonnet. Here the poet, while positing the
theme of “life” as the main subject of the narration, introduces himself as Benvenuto and
explains to the reader why he is engaged into the process of writing. Benvenuto writes in
order to thank the God of Nature for having provided him with an alma and for having
taken care of it so that he has become capable of accomplishing a number of imprese in
the course of his life.
20
One of these undertakings, Benvenuto specifies, is the act of
producing the literary text we are reading:
This troubled life of mine I write
To thank the God of nature,
Who conveyed my soul to me and then took care of it,

20
As Karen Pinkus recalls in Picturing Silence, “in contemporary Italian the term impresa refers to an
undertaking, specifically a business venture, entrepreneurship. An impresa, in short, associates itself with
an accumulation of capital: and even where the purely materialistic aims of an impresa are masked by a
language of group interaction, in any case the impresa implies a specific goal, a struggle against obstacles,
an ‘overcoming’ as much as an ‘undertaking’.” (Pinkus 139-40)
In sixteenth century Italian, the term impresa also referred to a composite text that, like the emblem, was
made by a combination of words (such as, typically, a motto or a sentence) and a piece of non-verbal
language (such as, typically, an image). At this point in my work, I use the term impresa in its broad
meaning to designate the accomplishment of an undertaking. Still, as my discussion of Benvenuto’s bodily
aureification in the next chapters suggests, the use of the term impresa in the opening sonnet from the Vita
also discloses the possibility to read the entire narrative as a process of production of (non financial) value.

19
That various noble undertakings I have done and live. (Vita, opening sonnet,
lines 1-4)
21

The use of the present tense to refer to the impresa of writing is rich of
implications. First, as the juxtaposition of the verbs scrivo and vivo suggests, the process
of producing the literary text is as an ever-present achievement that like the
Metamorphoses uninterruptedly develops ad perpetuum. Second, the use of the present
tense implies that, consistently with its title, Cellini’s Vita is deeply concerned with
problems of life and life-giving. Third, in analogy to the Metamorphoses, the act of
writing is posited as a practice that, at least on the rhetorical level, is capable of making
the poet forever “alive.” If we read the poem’s first line as meaning “I write about my
troubled life” or if we translate them, as John Addington Symonds has done, as “this tale
of my sore-troubled life I write,” it seems that the main subject of the Vita consists in the
sequence of events that have happened in the course of Cellini’s life.
22
This way of
reading the textual incipit is not neutral in methodological and theoretical terms, because
it leads to an understanding of the whole literary text as a more or less fictionalized
reconstruction of Cellini’s “biographical” life. Within this frame, the Vita has been often
received as an “early modern autobiography,” and in this line of thought a number of
critics have interrogated the text to find documentary information concerning Cellini’s
biography, his work, his society and his times.
23
A more literal rendering of the Vita’s

21
“Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo / per ringraziar lo Dio della natura, / che mi diè l’alma e poi ne ha
‘uto cura, / alte diverse ‘mprese ho fatte e vivo.” (Vita, opening sonnet, lines 1-4)

22
See the 1909–14 edition of Cellini’s “autobiography,” translated by John Addington Symonds for
Harvard Classics.

23
Goldberg, 71-83.

20
first line seems to open up the text to a set of much more problematic theoretical
perspectives. If we take the sentence “Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo” in its literal
sense as “I write this troubled life of mine,” it appears that the very product of the poet’s
act of writing is not (only) the literary text but also, and mainly, the “realization” of life
itself. If considered this way, we can start envisioning the possibility that the literary text
can be approached as a “living organism,” while the poetic act of writing becomes a form
of “repetition” of the God of Nature’s giving of the soul to the poet. A literal reading of
the text’s incipit can also help reconsider the ways we understand the very title of the
literary work. While several translators and commentators have rendered the title of the
Vita as “Cellini’s autobiography,” the text reads, simply, “life.” This “life” can refer not
only to the author’s own “biography” but also, and more consistently to what it is said in
the opening sonnet about the poet’s “living” of his high undertakings, to the entire
literary text we read. This would be consistent with an understanding of Cellini’s Vita as
a living product of poetic making.
As a way to draw out a first set of preliminary conclusions, we can now consider
a series of further similarities between the Vita’s incipit and the first lines from the
Metamorphoses. The first four lines of the sonnet that opens Cellini’s narrative state:
This troubled life of mine I write
to thank the god of nature
who conveyed my soul to me and then took care of it,
that various noble undertakings I have done and live. (Vita)
24

The first four lines of Ovid’s poem, in turn, read:

24
“Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo / per ringraziar lo Dio della natura, / che mi diè l’alma e poi ne ha
‘uto cura, / alte diverse ‘mprese ho fatte e vivo.” (Vita, 1-4, p.79)

21
My spirit impels me to speak of shapes changed into new
Bodies; oh gods (for you changed even those)
Inspire my beginnings and from the origin of the world
To my own times, draw my song without breaks. (Met.)
25

In the first place, like first line of Ovid’s poem, the initial verse of Cellini’s Vita
establishes a connection between life and the poetic act of “generating” a literary text.
While the Metamorphoses mentions the poet’s animus as force impelling the poet “to
speak of shapes changed into new bodies” (Met., I,1), the Vita says that Benvenuto writes
to thank the god who has provided him with an alma (capitolo, line 3). In the second
place, the two incipits contain, immediately after having mentioned the poet’s act of
writing, a similar invocation to the deity. In line 2, the poet from the Metamorphoses asks
the gods to inspire “his beginnings,” because gods have transformed both the poem and
the bodies whose transformation the poem accounts for. In line 2 from the Vita, the act of
writing is finalized to thank the God of Nature for having provided Benvenuto with his
alma and assisted him in accomplishing his imprese. In the third place, both incipits show
a similar concern with to the problem of time, and both understand the making of literary
poiesis as a process whose time is present. In the Metamorphoses, this “present” is
alluded to by the expression “to my own times” (capitolo, line 4). As we have seen,
though, this moment is problematically linked to both the “origins” of the world and the
perpetuitas that characterizes the transformative processes that the text both represents
and embodies.

25
“In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas / corpora. Di, coeptis – nam vos mutastis et illas – / adspirate
meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.” (Met. I, 1-4)

22
In the Vita, the poet lives “present” achievements that are distinct from the
undertakings he has done in the past. In dissimilarity to the differenti ‘mprese that
Benvenuto has accomplished in the past, in fact, the act of producing the literary text is a
work in-progress that takes place into an ongoing present (questa mia vita … io scrivo)
and that could possibly continue ad perpetuum. The process of literary creation is also
what makes, in the narration’s present tense, the poet alive (vivo).
26

After its incipit the Vita recounts, in a quasi-chronological order, a number of
events that happened to Benvenuto from his birth to the present. Book I, for example,
after having explained that Benvenuto’s ancestors were linked to Julius Caesar, accounts
for the protagonist’s birth, his infancy, and then his professional apprenticeship as a
sculptor and goldsmith. The narration then gives great emphasis to Benvenuto’s
professional achievements, and it portrays him as a skillful craftsman who travels from
Florence to Siena, Pisa, Rome, Bologna, Paris, and then back to Florence.
27
In the course
of Benvenuto’s journeys, a wide number of incidents occur. These range from violent
duels, trials and periods spent in prison to a number of love affairs and a series of
encounters with different political and religious personalities.

26
As we can read in its incipit, the Vita’s opening sonnet not only puts a strong emphasis on the theme of
“life” (a word reiterated twice in the first quatrain), but it also presents the alma as the living principle that,
besides making the poet alive, assists him in the creation of his literary accomplishment.

27
The theme of travel is recurrent throughout the entire narration, and some scholars have put it as the
book’s main leitmotiv. It should be noticed, on the topic, that the Vita quite abruptly ends with Benvenuto
“leaving for Pisa” after a controversy regarding a payment he did not receive. Interrogating the conclusive
sentence of the book, Goldberg has argued that “when Cellini closes his Autobiography with the seemingly
casual mention of an intended trip to Pisa, he invokes the continuous design of his work, the unending
journey that leads him to make ever-widening circles from his native Florence, circles that move to include
Rome and France as external measures of his success” (Goldberg 78). Luigi Monga, too, has seen the text’s
end as an interruption, rather than a conclusion, of its main character’s journey: Benvenuto “se ne va a Pisa,
ed è con questa ennesima preparazione di un viaggio di cui non ci dirà l’esito che si conclude, o piuttosto
s’interrompe, l’odeporico celliniano della Vita.” (Monga, 78).

23
Among other episodes, Book I contains the account of two “prodigious”
encounters Benvenuto experiences in the course of his childhood. In the first of these
episodes, which have captured the attention of a wide number of readers and critics,
Benvenuto is shown at the age of three holding in his hand a poisonous scorpion that,
surprisingly, does not harm him.
28
In the second of these episodes, recounted shortly after
the first, Benvenuto is depicted seeing, at the age of five, a living salamander in the fire.
29

Critics have argued that both these episodes are invested by a great symbolic meaning in
the context of Cellini’s “self-fashioning of his own identity,” and that Benvenuto’s
encounters with the scorpion and the salamander constitute two paradigmatic cases of the
representation of the protagonist’s “prodigious destiny.”
30

The theme of Benvenuto’s “extraordinariness” is reiterated later on in the
narration. In describing this character’s works of sculpture, for example, Pope Paul III
considers Benvenuto a man who, for his exceptional craftsmanship, needs “not to be
subject to the law.”
31
When we find him actively participating to the armed defense of the
Vatican during the Sack of Rome, too, Benvenuto appears to be an extraordinary figure,
because with his courage he physically eliminates a number of enemies and eventually
manages to save himself in front of extreme adversities.

28
Vita, I, IV.

29
Vita, I, IV.

30
On Cellini’s “self-fashioning” of his own identity and his prodigious destiny see, respectively, Margaret
Gallucci (2003) and Margherita Orsino.

31
As Pope Paul III puts it, “men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, need not be subject to the law:
especially not Benvenuto.”

24
At end of Book I, we find Benvenuto imprisoned in the Papal prisons of Castel
Sant’Angelo, with the charge of having stolen gold and jewels from the Church. At a
crucial moment of this captivity, the text says, Benvenuto envisions a spirit that “like a
whirlwind” leads him to ascend from the underground to spheres of the sun. The sun
appears to be made of pure gold, and its vision corresponds, to use Benvenuto’s own
words, to the most remarkable accident that ever occurred to a human being.
32

Book II begins telling that Benvenuto, while leaving Rome after his imprisonment,
discovers that his body reverberates with a “golden halo.” This halo is particularly
important, the text reveals later in the narration, because it makes Benvenuto not only a
skillful craftsman but also a metallurgist capable of giving life to material. Ample
sections of Book II are dedicated to the description of processes of bronze casting, and
the account of the making of the Perseus, Benvenuto’s masterpiece, constitutes the
subject of several chapters. The realization of the Perseus, the text also says, is
comparable to no other work done by man on earth. It literally corresponds, as Benvenuto
tells the reader, to a process of “resuscitation” of matter.
The representation of metallurgy as a promethean inflation of life into matter is
reiterated at several points in Book II. In accounting for a number of episodes of casting,
for example, the text uses the words anima to indicate the earthly crust from which the
metal, once solidified after its melting, is extracted. In addition, in the course of Book II
Benvenuto understands metallurgy as a “promethean” process of inflating life into matter
because he repeatedly refers to the product of his work as his own “sons.” While the

32
As the text puts it, this event is “a circumstance which is perhaps the most remarkable which has ever
happened to anyone” (I,CXXVIII, 238)

25
positing of the products of poetic making as their maker’s offspring results in being, from
Plato’s Symposium onwards, a common trope in Western culture, Benvenuto’s
understanding of his works as his living offspring seems to constitute an exceptional case
because it shows how, once he has achieved the promethean capability to inflate life into
matter, Benvenuto is also capable of inflating life into the literary text we are reading.
33

Despite the large number of critical studies dedicated to the Vita, the partition of
the text into two separate books has received only marginal and unscrupulous attention.
Literary critics have argued, in the best cases, that the overall structure of the text could
reflect Benvenuto’s process of “becoming” a skillful craftsman, that the narrative from
Book I “prefigures later events,” and that the two Books reflect the two phases of the
protagonist’s spiritual trajectory from condemnation to redemption.
34
In two influential
articles, for example, Paolo Rossi has argued that at the end of Book I Benvenuto
experiences a dramatic religious conversion taking him to the redeeming process
exemplified in Book II.
35
More recently, George Bull has written that “the second book,
which he started to write in 1561, in contrast to the astrologically determined structure of

33
In the Symposium, poetic creation is described by means of biological metaphors such as ejaculation and
pregnancy: “people” may be pregnant, Diotima says, “with the offspring” of virtue and wisdom (209a). For
Socrates, intellectual creations like poetry are higher forms of physical reproduction. Against this
background, in Generation of Animals (1:1111-1218, 716a 5-16, 723b 20-32, 724a 14-34, 727b 14-7, 729b
1-8) Aristotle “collapses Plato's distinction between poetic and physical creation when he describes
physical procreation as the imposition of the male's idea onto and into the female body. By arguing that the
male contributes the rational part of procreation, Aristotle's model ensures that the male is always involved
in what Plato called the "procreancy of the spirit," even while procreating in the flesh.” (Spiller 65). As my
next chapters disclose, the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio all recast the generative potential of
matter outside the metaphors of ejaculation and pregnancy, as well as the subordination of the feminine to
the masculine “realms” of pure ideas.

34
See respectively Orsino and Goldberg.

35
Rossi, 1994 and 1998.

26
the first, presents Cellini in the simpler guise of an artist at court, successfully striving
against great odds to create magnificent works.”
36
In my perspective, the transition
between Book I and Book II is a crucial moment in the narrative because it marks the
initiation of Benvenuto to poiesis. As the text explicitly states, at this point Benvenuto
gains access to the “secrets of creation” while his body transforms, to use the
protagonist’s own words, “into gold.” More specifically, as we can infer from a close
reading of the initial chapters from Book II, it is specifically in the course of this
transformation that Benvenuto acquires the aura that “allows” him to be capable of
inflating life into matter.
The relationship between Benvenuto’s bodily aurification and his acquisition of
the promethean capacity to suffuse life into matter can be better examined by juxtaposing
the two versions the text gives of the account of Benvenuto’s transformation. The first
version, in prose, occupies the conclusive chapters of Book I. The second version, in
verses, is contained in the 190 line capitolo in terza rima that precedes the beginning of
Book II.
At the end of Book I, we read in chapter CXIX, Benvenuto is secluded in a cell
located under the level of the ground. Here he perceives the arrival of an “invisible spirit”
that, “like a whirlwind,” carries him out of the earth and brings him to see the sphere of
the sun. The sun appears to Benvenuto, after an initial moment of bewilderment, as “a
bath of the purest molten gold, neither more nor less.”
37
The liquid gold of the sun, the

36
Bull, xiv.

37
Vita, I, CXXII, 229.

27
narration also says, is matter that undergoes transformation, because it takes the form of
three different anthropomorphic figures, identified by Benvenuto as Christ, Saint Peter,
and the Madonna.
The capitolo in terza rima that is separates Books I and II contains a reiteration of
the same sequence of episodes, beginning with the telling of Benvenuto’s imprisonment
and continuing with his vision of the spheres of the sun and his initiation to the secrets of
nature. In its very fist lines, the capitolo posits the poet’s imprisonment as its central
subject, and it contextually relates what happens in the course of this captivity to the
poet’s acquisition of the secrets of the god of creation. Playing on the possibility that the
term “Ben” can be ambiguously read as either designating one of the attributes of god
(namely his Benevolence) or the name of the poet (whose name is Benvenuto), the poem
superimposes the figure of the deity with the one of the maker. In doing so, the poem’s
incipit also implies that there might be a resemblance between the likenesses of the man
and the god, and that in the case of Benvenuto this resemblance is based on the
possibility the poet has to acquire, specifically because of his imprisonment, the hidden
powers that belong to the God of creation:
Whoso would know the value of God,
And how a man resembles that high [Ben] good,
Must lie in prison, is my opinion. (capitolo, lines 1-3)
38

As we can read in this passage, the capitolo puts man’s resemblance to god as one
of its central issues. A clarification concerning of this resemblance comes from the
central section of the poem. Here, the text recasts the story of Benvenuto’s imprisonment

38
“Chi vuol sapere quant’è il valor de Dio, / e quant’un uomo a quel Ben si assomiglia, / convien che stie
‘n prigione, al parer mio.” (capitolo, lines 1-3)

28
in Castel Sant’Angelo and, in particular, the prodigious events of his envisioning the
melting gold of the sun. In the seclusion of the cell, and deprived of “paper, pen, ink, iron
and fire,” (line 29) Benvenuto is impelled to action by his spirit, but he encounters the
problem of not having any matter to manipulate. Benvenuto, whose inactivity makes him
“constantly prompt to do something new,” (line 24) resolves to crumble a brick of earth
into powder, and mixing the sand with some “dead water” (line 57) he obtains a
malleable material that, like Prometheus in Book I from the Metamorphoses, he can
manipulate. Immediately after having mixed the earth and the water, Benvenuto
perceives the “fire of poiesis” entering his body:
Next find a piece of brick upon the floor,
Crumble a part thereof to powder small,
And form a paste by sprinkling water o’er.
Then came the fire of Poesy [poesia]
Into my carcase, by the way methought
Whence bread goes forth: there was none else at all. (capitolo, lines 55-59)
39

In manipulating the primordial elements of water and earth, Benvenuto “repeats”
Prometheus primordial act of suffusing life into matter. We know, reading the capitolo,
that at this point of the narration Benvenuto’s body is inflated with the “fire” of poiesis.
But we also know, considering what it is said at the end of Book I, that this moment
corresponds to Benvenuto’s vision of the spheres of the sun, and that in this way he has
access the “secrets of creation.” Benvenuto’s act of mixing water and earth, then, results
in his initiation to the secrets of nature. It results in the inflation of poiesis into
Benvenuto’s body, and it makes him capable of inflating life into matter.

39
“E presi un pezzo di matton per sorta, / e rotto in polver ne ridussi un poco; / poi ne feci un savor
coll’acqua morta. / Allora allor della poesia il fuoco / M’entrò nel corpo, e credo che la via / Ond’esce il
pan: ché non v’era altro loco.” (lines 55-59)

29
At the precisely calculated center of the capitolo, the text summarizes in one
single assertion the composite process of Benvenuto’s vision of the sphere of the sun and
his initiation to poiesis. Benvenuto, the text reads, has become gold:
I’ll add no more. Now I’m become fine gold,
Such gold as none can be so easily spent
Nor can be used to make best work. (capitolo, lines 94-96)
40

On the basis of the passages considered so far, it seems not only that the Vita
shows, from its beginning a concern with alma, anima, and life, but it also posits
transformations of both the matter the poet manipulates and the persona of this matter’s
manipulator as central themes of the narrative. The protagonist, Benvenuto, transforms
into gold and in this way he becomes capable of inflating life into matter. He is, at
present, alive, and the products of his work, including the literary text, are to be
considered his own living offspring.

PETROLIO
Petrolio is a complex and multilayered literary work that engages a variety of
different materials. Besides making reference to other works of literature, cryptic
quotations, mythological names and themes, the book seems to present a problematic
account of the processes of the text’s own creation. The text is made of about 230
Appunti (literally “notes”), a letter, and other written material. Sections are of variable
length, and they can consist of passages in prose, lists of notes “to be developed”,
schematic summaries of other Appunti, or even empty pages. Some sections of the text

40
“Non vo’ dir di più: son diventato d’oro, / qual non si spende così facilmente, / né se ne faria troppo buon
lavoro.” (lines 94-6)

30
have a title and subtitle; others do not. Several fragments have the same title, while
numerous numbered Appunti are not presented in progressive order.
The book appears to be divided, in similarity to the Vita, into two main sections.
Still, the exact “extension” of each section is difficult to determine. While a considerable
group of Appunti follows a note marking the beginning of “part II,” the preceding section
of the book is not designated as “part I.” To further complicate the problem of the textual
continuity, we find several “prefatory interventions” which posit different Appunti as the
incipit of the literary work. The point where Petrolio begins seems to be problematically
deferred into a number of prefaces, introductions and empty pages, and several textual
fragments present themselves as “beginnings” of either the entire narrative or a series of
digressions. Emphasizing the facts that Petrolio’s plots are not linear and that each
Appunto can be read as an autonomous narrative, one might also argue that the starting
lines of each fragment constitute a possible incipit of the whole literary text. All these
features, taken together, make Petrolio a text characterized by the lack of a definite or
ultimate point of beginning.
If we look at the first fragment of Petrolio, for example, we learn that the book we
are reading is a primary version of a work that will be accomplished in the future. From
its second “draft,” as Ann Goldstein’s translation into English reads, Petrolio will be
made by an assemblage of different written, oral, and cinematographic documents:
All of Petrolio (from the second draft) should be presented in the form of a
critical edition of an unpublished text (considered a monumental work, a
modern Satyricon). […] this reconstruction makes use […] of the contribution
of other materials: letters from the author (concerning whose identity there is
an unresolved philological problem, etc.), letters of friends of the author who
know about the manuscript (and disagree among themselves), oral testimony

31
reported in newspapers or elsewhere, songs, etc. […] An enormous quantity of
historical documents that have some bearing on the events of the book will be
used, especially regarding politics and, in particular, the history of ENI. Such
documents are: journalistic (features from magazines/supplements,
L’Espresso, etc.) […]; “recorded” oral testimony, in interviews, etc. of high-
ranking characters or in any case of witnesses; rare cinematographic
documentaries […]. The author of the critical edition will therefore
summarize, on the basis of these documents-in a flat, objective, colorless, etc.
style-long passages of general history to link the “fragments” of the
reconstructed work. (ix)
41

In its future version, we can infer from this passage, Petrolio will consist in a
work that cannot be held in a reader’s hands, because it will be the site for the
amalgamation of a wide series of oral, written, and filmic “testimonies.” The “vast
lacunae of the book,” we are also told, are integral parts of the text, because the second
draft will include a number of documents of different kinds. Petrolio therefore presents
itself to its readers, then, not only as a product, but also a motor, of transformation. On
the one hand, the text is a “work in progress” that both represents and undergoes
transformation. On the other hand, since its second draft is conceived of as a “critical

41
“Tutto PETROLIO (dalla seconda stesura) dovrà presentarsi sotto forma di edizione critica di un testo
inedito (considerato opera monumentale, un Satyricon moderno). Di tale testo sopravvivono quattro o
cinque manoscritti, concordanti e discordanti, di cui alcuni contengono dei fatti e altri no ecc. La
ricostruzione si vale dunque del confronto dei vari manoscritti conservati (di cui, per es., due apocrifi, con
varianti curiose, caricaturali, ingenue o ‘rifatte alla maniera’): non solo ma anche dell’apporto di altri
materiali: lettere dell’autore (sulla cui identità c’è un problema filologico irrisolto ecc.), lettere di amici
dell’autore a conoscenza del manoscritto (discordanti tra loro), testimonianze orali riportate su giornali o
miscellanee, canzonette ecc. Esistono anche delle illustrazioni (probabilmente ad opera dell’autore stesso)
del libro. Tali illustrazioni sono di grande aiuto nella ricostruzione di scene o passi mancanti: la loro
descrizone sarà accurata, e, poiché si tratta di opere grafiche di alto livello benché assolutamente
manieristiche, accanto alla ricostruzione letteraria ci sarà una ricostruzione critica figurativa. Per riempire
poi le vaste lacune del libro, e per informazione del lettore, verrà adoperato un enorme quantitativo di
documenti storici che hanno attinenza coi fatti del libro: specialmente per quel che riguarda la politica, e,
ancor piú, la storia dell’Eni. Tali documenti sono: giornalistici (reportage di rotocalchi, l’Espresso ecc.) e in
tal caso sono riportati per intero; testimonianze orali ‘registrate’, per interviste ecc., di alti personaggi o
comunque di testimoni; documentari cinematografici rari (e qui ci sarà una ricostruzione critica analoga a
quella figurativa e letteraria – non solo filologica ma anche stilistica e attribuzionistica – per es. “Chi è il
regista di tale documentario?” ecc.). L’autore dell’edizione critica ‘riassumerà’ quindi, sulla base di tali
documenti – in uno stile piano, oggettivo, grigio ecc. – lunghi brani di storia generale, per legare tra loro i
‘frammenti’ dell’opera ricostruita.” (3)

32
edition of an unpublished text,” the book we read is also said to be capable of including
in its body what it does not say. Among other consequences, these features make any act
of writing about Petrolio also a process of writing within the literary text. The critics’
commentaries about Petrolio, for example, are rhetorically already-included in the literary
text because writing about the text, as the first written fragment suggests, also inevitably
results in a process of the text’s transformation.
The possibility to read Petrolio as a text that has no incipit is reinforced by the
content of Appunto 1, problematically titled “Antefatti.” Appunto 1 is presented to the
reader after three other initial fragments (the paragraph in prose that is mentioned above,
a fragment referring to the “future” content of Appunti 8-9, 9-20, 20-40, 40 and ff., 50
and 25, and a quotation of Osip Mandel’Štam). The note reads:
………………………………….
…………………………………..
……………….¹”

The three-line sequence of dots contained in Appunto 1 is followed by a footnote stating:
¹ This novel does not begin. (Petrolio, 3)
42

Understandings of Petrolio as a narrative lacking a definite point of beginning are
also brought forward by what the text says about its own transformation. Different
passages from the narration, for example, refer to the text as a transitional “form,” a
“project” to be developed, and even an “effect of the pure and simple accumulation of
matter” (Appunto 6b). The definition of Petrolio as “a novel” offered in Appunto 1, too,
undergoes transformation. After having been presented as a “novel” in Note 1, in fact,

42
“Questo romanzo non comincia.” (9)

33
Petrolio becomes an “allegory,” a “poem,” a “legomenon,” a “block of signs” and finally
a “book.”
43

Allusions to Petrolio’s functioning as a literary body that, besides undergoing
continuous transformation, is also capable of capturing what it does not include in its
texts are also present in a number of meta-narratorial interventions. In directly addressing
the reader, for example, at one point Petrolio’s narrator states that his act of writing
corresponds to the attempt to elaborate a self-sufficient form:
These printed but illegible pages are intended to announce my decision; […]
that is, that not of writing a story, but to construct a form […]: a form
consisting simply of “something written.” […] That’s why I have chosen, for
my self-sufficient and pointless construction, materials that are apparently
meaningful. (Appunto 37, 129)
44

In a later fragment, after having specified that his intention is not to write “a true story”
but rather to construct “a form,” the narrator of Petrolio states that:
What is said is rule by what is not said; testimony by reserve; civic sentiment
by a conspiracy of silence. The form is based on what is not the form. And the
exclusion of form is always planned, calculated. (Appunto 65, 274).
45

43
Petrolio is said to be a “novel” in Appunti 1, 37, 72d, 72g, 74a, 82, 97, 103b, 125, and a “poem” in
Appunti 22c, 32, 42, xxx (p.184), 51, 55, 62, 58, 97, 128, 129. In Appunti 43 and 103a, the text is said to be
an “opera” (work). In Appunto 97, it is an “allegory” (403). In Appunto 103a, Petrolio is a “book.” In Part
II, Petrolio also becomes a “legomenon” (Appunto 131) and a “block of signs” (Appunto 103a).

44
“Queste pagine stampate ma illeggibili vogliono proclamare in modo estremo – ma che si pone come
simbolico anche per tutto il resto del libro – la mia decisione: che è quella non di scrivere una storia, ma di
costruire una forma (come risulterà meglio piú avanti): forma consistente semplicemente in ‘qualcosa di
scritto’. Non nego che certamente la cosa migliore sarebbe stata di inventare addirittura un alfabeto, magari
di carattere ideografico o geroglifico, e stampare l’intero libro cosí. [Ma la mia formazione culturale e il
mio carattere mi hanno impedito di costruire la mia ‘forma’ attraverso simili metodi, estremistici, sí, ma
anche estremamente noiosi. Ecco perché ho scelto di adoperare, per la mia costruzione autosufficiente e
inutile, dei materiali apparentemente significativi.” (155)

45
“Tutto ciò che posso fare é ricorrere a un cambiamento di registro […] io, onniscente gestore di questa
storia. [...] Il detto è regolato dal non detto; la testimonianza dalla reticenza; il sentimento civico
dall’omertà. Solo fondandosi su ciò che non è forma, la forma è tale. E l’esclusione della forma è sempre
un progetto, un calcolo.” (315)

34

Critics have sometimes used these statements as a basis to understand Petrolio as
a testamentary document intentionally left unfinished by Pasolini at the moment of his
death. In my perspective, these passages reinforce the hypothesis that we can read
Petrolio, in similarity to both the Metamorphoses and the Vita, as a literary organism that
is capable of embodying, and not merely of representing, processes of constant
transformation.
46
Such a perspective, I also argue, seems to have been implied—but not
fully explored—by much of what literary criticism has said concerning the problems of
Petrolio’s “impossible structure,” its “structural un-finishedness,” and its textual “open-
endedness.” Petrolio, it might be useful to recall here, has been read as an “interminable
work” (Ferroni),
47
an “autogenetic work” displaying its foundational rules in their
progress (Lunetta),
48
a “flexible form capable of registering movement” (Garand),
49
a
“work in fieri” (Majorino),
50
an “intrinsically unending work” (Fusillo),
51
as well as an
“indefinable organism” and a “total work” (Tusini).
52
In my perspective, Petrolio is not
simply an “unfinished” literary work, but more properly a system of signification that
embodies, and at the same time produces, transformation. More pointedly, in postulating

46
As Robert Gordon has put it, Agosti locates “the principal fascination of the text in its self-searching
interrogation of form (‘la forma’) throughout the meta-text that surrounds the passages of narrative.”

47
Ferroni, 41.

48
Lunetta, 224.

49
Garand, 73.

50
Majorino, 107.

51
Fusillo, 2003, 414.

52
Tusini, 65.

35
its own unfinishedness, the text captures in its own functioning the readers’ processes of
reading and writing. All these features become particularly relevant, as I will make
clearer later on in this dissertation, for my understanding of Petrolio as a living textual
machine that performs autopoiesis.
53

Despite the textual complexity, fragmentariness and heterogeneity, critics have
attempted to establish an “order” among Petrolio’s narratives fragments. David Ward and
Aurelio Roncaglia, for example, have traced a distinction between Petrolio’s “macro-
narrative,” namely the series of fragments containing meta-narratorial interventions (for
example, the Appunti 1 and 6b mentioned above), and the rest of the book, in which the
text develops a number of “micro-narratives.”
54
Other critics, instead of considering
Petrolio in its entirety, have focused on specific sections of the text and have established
correspondences between them and a number of literary works that range from Petronius’
Satyricon to Dante’s Commedia.
55

In order to briefly sketch out just a few of the several plots which develop across
the 230 appunti, I think it useful to recall here those referring to a number of allegorical
journeys made by different characters (a vision of a Medieval garden, a descent in the
inferi staged by a character named Merda that covers more than 20 Appunti, and others),

53
As I argue in the next chapters, the first page of Petrolio suggest that the text as a system capable of
“renewing” and “transforming” itself while maintaining the integrity of its own structure, therefore
depicting the literary work as an active system of signification that while generating meaning also tends to
the inclusion, in its own body, of what it does not say. This resonates with the definition of autopoetic
organism provided by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. In biology, an
autopoetic organism can be either organic or inorganic, and autopoesis designates “the capability a living
system has to self-produce its units which (self-) maintain their essential form.”

54
Ward, 109; Roncaglia, 571 ff.

55
See Fusillo, 2003 and also Vazzana.

36
the history of ENI (the Italian State oil company in the post-war economy), and the
lengthy story of the duplication and dissociations of Carlo Valletti.
56
This character is not
only the protagonist of a considerable number of Appunti but he also has, as one of the
initial fragments explicitly says, the same name as the narrator’s father.
57

In Appunto 2, Carlo contemplates Rome from the terrace of a villa in the city’s
residential quarters, and he then envisions his own suicide. Two beings, Tetis and Polis,
argue over Carlo’s body. While Tetis cuts into Carlo’s body with a knife and pulls out a
fetus that immediately grows into an exact replica of Carlo, the dead body also comes to
life. It transforms into two living bodies, both named Carlo. One is named Carlo di Polis,
the other Carlo di Tetis. The former works for ENI, the state petroleum corporation; the
latter is an intellectual. These two Carlo’s are said to be opposites, but also a single
interchangeable person, and even “the same. /And in fact they are identical/” (Note 3,
p.9).
58
From this point of the narration onwards, either separately or together the two
Carlo’s lead the action in a large number of notes.
Carlo is the protagonist of a series of travels towards the Orient (in the section
titled “Gli Argonauti” he goes to the Middle East in search of oil) as well as within the
space of Italy (in the section titled “I Godoari” he moves, after the explosion of a bomb,
from the train station of Torino to a deserted countryside and then back to urban
“civilization.”) Returning from his journeys, Carlo undergoes a series of sexual

56
ENI, the Italian State-run agency for the extraction, purchase, transportation, refinement and
commercialization of oil, was founded in 1953 as “holding economica di diritto pubblico per la ricerca,
produzione e il trasporto degli idrocarburi” (Menduni 13).

57
“Carlo is my father’s name.” (Note 4, 20)

58
“Il Carlo di Tetis e il Carlo di Polis sono identici. ⌐E infatti si identificano.¬” (15)

37
transformations. Remarkably, these trans-sexual metamorphoses do not follow a
consequential pattern, nor they are presented as subsequent “stages” of a linear process of
development. After he is back from his first trip to the Orient, for example, Carlo is a
man that becomes a woman (Appunto 51, p.194). Later in the narration, after a visionary
“digression” titled Giardino medioevale, Carlo’s body transforms from man to woman
again (Appunto 58, p.265). In Appunto 82, a fragment presented after a long series of
Notes dedicated to a “vision” of via Torpignattara in Rome and entitled “Il Merda:
visione,” Carlo becomes man and he “immediately decides” to undergo castration (p.394).
Eventually, in Appunto127, after having wandered in an “immense desert” and then in a
boundary-less “savanna” of uncultivated land, Carlo reaches the city of Turin and here
transforms from woman into a man (p.504-5).
59

Besides the narrative fragments narrating the story of Carlo, Petrolio presents a
series of further narrative accounts. Many sections are introduced by a number of
anonymous narratorial figures who, intervening in cornice-like frames, recount tales of
different length and subject. In Appunti 41, 42 and 43, for example, three narrators
intervene and respectively tell a story of a British journalist who travels to Sudan and
purchases a slave girl, the saga of an Indian family whose member die of hunger one by
one, and the tale of the “resurrection” of the population of Bihar.
60
In the series of notes
titled “L’Epochè,” a further series of un-named narrators intervene and tell a “parable”
concerning the crash of a small Alitalia aircraft on its way to Africa (Appunto 98, p.409);

59
Note 111, 412 and following notes.

60
See the fragment “Collected Stories” at the end of Appunto 40.

38
a story of a narrator that establishes a series of “contradictory” rules he wants to employ
in telling how a “the true story” has “to do with the absolute independence of laws that
establish a form with respect to the laws of all other forms” (Note 98, 355);
61
a
description of one day in the life of a doctor named Tomoo Tushima (98a, 356); a story
of a Roman clergyman who has two daughters (101, 366); a journey of a spaceship that
moves through the space of the cosmos (102A, 380); and finally a “Story of a Failed
Coup d’État” (103, 388).
62

The text does not provide specific information concerning the identity of these
multiple narrators, and it does not clarify whether, in speaking, they address other
characters in the narration, Petrolio’s readers, or both. As Stefano Agosti has argued, the
problem of distinguishing between these figures is not really relevant as we come to
realize that Petrolio’s multiple narrators all intervene, at the level of the symbolic order,
in the construction of Petrolio’s wider meta-textual “structure.” For Agosti, according to
whom (any) literary “work is un-terminable for structural, internally constitutive
reasons,” Petrolio stages the discovery, from the side of the Subject, “of the constitutive
structure of its psychic being, […] or the return to the before-the-origin.” The Subject’s
“discovery” is performed by means of a “direct transition (slittamento), with no noetic
mediation, into the symbolic order.”
63
This “passage” into the symbolic order is staged,

61
“La vera storia che vi sto narrando non è questa. La vera storia riguarda l’assoluta indipendenza delle
leggi che istituiscono una forma rispetto alle leggi di tutte le altre forme.” (410)

62
“Storia di un colpo di Stato fallito.” (444)

63
Husserl distinguishes between the noetic and the noematic. While the former refers to “that which
experiences,” or the “experiencing,” the latter indicates “that which is experienced,” or the “being
experienced.”

39
within Pasolini’s literary text, through the projection of the “meta-discursive ‘I’ of the
narrator (namely the ‘I’ of the Author)” into the “third person” of the different characters
of Petrolio as well as the “second person” of the several “anonymous” narrators we find
in the Epochè or in several other Appunti. Considering Lacan’s definition of the parola
fondatrice, “or a word that is no more a word but a fact, an event, in which are
simultaneously modulated the two pronouns of ‘I’ and ‘you’,” Petrolio constitutes for
Agosti a testamentary writing that, in simultaneously staging “the drive to death and the
drive to the before-the-origin,” takes “the ‘form’ of the event.”
64
Thus, Agosti concludes,
Petrolio “maintains death in life within the symbolic order.”
65

Agosti’s conclusions suggest that the text can be considered as a literary work that,
besides embodying and engaging transformative processes, confronts the issues of death
and life, and tends to access the moment of the “before-the-origin.” Agosti’s
understanding of Petrolio as a literary work that maintains death in life can be also taken
as a starting point to discuss whether or not this text performs, like Cellini’s Vita and
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poetic move that transforms the poet and provides him with
immortality. As I will make clearer in the next chapters, a conception of the poet as a
subject capable of accessing what Agosti names the “moment of the before-the-origin”
can be also relevant in analyzing the implication of a conception of literary writing as a
mode of “repetition” of the promethean process of inflating life into matter.

64
Agosti, 113 and ff.

65
Agosti, 120.

40
Promethean understandings of poetic making are conveyed, in Petrolio, by a
number of statements made, at different points in the narrative, by the multiple “figures
of narrators.” In Appunto 6 sexies, for example, the narrator tells the reader that he “lives”
the genesis of the book: “may the reader forgive me if I annoy him with these matters, but
I am living the genesis of my book.”
66
Later on, and more specifically in Appunto 50, the
text again addresses the relationship between poetic making and life. In this fragment, the
character of Carlo is qualified as “a poet” not because he is engaged into the act of
writing, but rather because he is “living”: “in a certain sense Carlo was a poet, because he
wrote his poetry by means of living” (Appunto 50). In another crucial passage (Appunto
99 from the Epochè,) one of Petrolio’s narrators states that
at the same time I was planning and writing my novel-that is, looking for the
meaning of reality and taking possession of it, immersed in the creative act
that all of that involves-I also wished to free myself from myself, that is, to
die. To die in my creation: to die as, in effect, one dies in birth. (364)
67

In conclusion, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita, and Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s Petrolio appear to be three literary texts that do more than just posit
transformation as one of their main thematic concerns. With their complex organizations,
their structural open-endedness, and their problematic narratives lacking definite points
of beginning and end, these three interrogate the problem of how a literary text can
embody in its functioning, and not merely depict or represent, transformation.

66
Petrolio 37. The original Italian reads: “il lettore mi perdoni se lo annoio con queste cose: ma io vivo la
genesi del mio libro.” (48)

67
“Nello stesso tempo in cui progettavo e scrivevo il mio romanzo, cioè ricercavo il senso della realtà e ne
prendevo possesso, proprio nell’atto creatico che tutto questo implicava, io desideravo anche di liberarmi di
me stesso, cioè di morire. Morire nella mia creazione: morire come se in effetti si muore, di parto: morire,
come in effetti si muore, eiaculando nel ventre materno.” (419)

41
PART 1 – EARTH, GOLD AND OIL

CHAPTER ONE : GOLD AND THE VITA
In his The Coiners of Language, Jean-Joseph Goux discusses gold’s functioning
as universal equivalent of economic exchange. Goux begins by distinguishing three main
functions that precious metals, and not only gold, acquire when they become money.
These functions are “(1) that of the measure of values, (2) that of the means of exchange,
and (3) that of the instrument of payment and of hoarding of reserve.”
68
When a precious
metal indicates a measure of value, Goux explains, it functions as an “archetypal unit”
that measures the value of goods and services independently from the condition of being
concretely present and available at the moment these goods and services are evaluated,
commissioned or paid. In the case, for example, of the determination of a given
commodity’s price in terms of units of gold (or, we could add, of barrels of oil), financial
value is physically embodied by the metal (or the oil) that measures such a value.
69

When a precious metal functions as an instrument of exchange, in turn, it
“participates directly in the market” because it functions not only as a general unit of
measurement, but also as the concrete medium that makes exchange possible.
70
A
paradigmatic case of precious metal that, transforming into money, functions as both an
indicator of value and a concrete means of exchange, is the gold coin. In the systems of

68
Goux, 1984, 33. The original reads: « On peut considérer que le métal précieux devenu monnaie, à l’issu
d’un développement des formes de l’échange, remplit dè lors trois fonctions tout à fait différentes : 1/ celle
de mesure des valeurs ; 2/ celle de moyen d’échange ; 3/ celle de moyen de paiement ou de thésaurisation ».
Goux, Éditions Galilée, 50.

69
Goux, 1984, 34.

70
Goux, 1984, 35.

42
exchange founded on the gold coin, as money is “actually a portion of the gold ingot
placed in circulation,” economic wealth appears purely in its “concrete form” because the
nominal value of the piece is indistinguishable from the “concrete” value of the metal it
contains: “value was not distinguishable from a given, heavy and objective substance in
which it was embodied to the point of perfectly coinciding with the substance itself.”
71

When it functions as an instrument of hoarding a reserve, finally, a precious metal
furnishes a standard for the measurement of values and it also constitutes a medium that
keeps, in time, financial value “present in its metallic body.” When financial value is
stored, for example, in the form of the gold bullion, the metal must appear “necessarily in
person.” Gold’s physical presence, then, guarantees that value “will be considered as real
and not dependent on an ephemeral agreement.”
72

It is important, Goux also explains, to recognize that “each historical mode of
exchange” has been characterized by a different importance retained by one (or more) of
these three modes of functioning of precious metals, and specifically gold, over the others.
The functioning of gold and money as an “archetypal” unit or standard of measurement
of value, for example, has preceded “by far” the usage of “the coin as an instrument of
exchange.” In economies like that of “ancient Egypt,” Goux argues, “the appearance of
barter notwithstanding—there existed an ideal unit of measurement that made it possible

71
Goux and Di Piero, 16. Goux then continues: “In a ‘materialist’ monetary system, money is actually a
portion of the gold ingot placed in circulation, from which we get the term money-merchandise sometimes
applied to it. We see then that the relationship between this circulating general equivalent and the
heterogeneous world of commodity, as much as it oppositional, is itself nonetheless a strict correspondence.
Reflected in the body of the money-merchandise is the price of all other merchandises in their infinite
variety; this re-presentation by the circulating medium poses no problem concerning the nature of
equivalences. Equivalence is not conventional, but real.” (Goux and Di Piero, 19).

72
Goux and Di Piero, 16.

43
to evaluate what was exchanged”.
73
The simultaneous functioning of gold as an ideal
standard of value, as a symbolic instrument of circulation and as a means of hoarding
reserves, in turn, has characterized the various systems of materialized economy that, in
the West, have developed from Antiquity to the nineteenth-century. In these economies,
“the gold piece is at one and the same time an ideal standard of economic value, a
symbolic instrument of circulation, and finally a real value that can be put away in
reserve.”
74

Things become more complicated, though, by the fact that in the course of history
metallic “money,” such as gold coins, has been progressively replaced by a second kind
of money, constituted by a series of immaterial signs or “conventional symbols--tokens
devoid of intrinsic value”.
75
In the West, Goux explains, the transformation of money
from a metallic embodiment of value into an immaterial series of tokens and signs began
in the Middle Ages, and continued developing throughout the different historical eras
finally reaching an irreversible stage in the first decades of the twentieth century.
76
The
definitive replacement of metallic money “by any sign or token whatsoever” occurred, in
Europe, after the First World War—when banknotes lost all convertibility of into gold.
77

73
Goux, 1984, 35.

74
Goux and Di Piero, 19.

75
Goux, 1984, 35.

76
In early twentieth century, Goux explains, “the capitalism of monopolies and huge trusts” completely
substituted the “liberal, (or industrial, or competitive) capitalism” that had previously dominated Western
economy. (Goux and Di Piero, 16)

77
Goux, 1984, 35. With this final step towards the complete “dematerialization of value” (16), Goux
observes, the transition from the economic realm of ‘fortune-possession’ to the one of the ‘fortune sign’ is
completed, and “the symbolic register” of nominal money acquires a nearly exclusive domination over both

44
Moving from the theoretical framework summarized above, Goux recognizes a
“fundamental isomorphism” that in all historical epochs pertains to both “gold” and
“language.” For Goux, the replacement of fortune-goods by fortune-signs, which began
in the first decades of the nineteenth-century, corresponds to the composite process of
transformation in the conception of language developed, in structural linguistics, by
Ferdinand de Saussure. More specifically, the transition from gold-money to nominal
money in the field of economics is for Goux paralleled, in Western culture, by the
transition from a naïve notion of language-as-naming to the more abstract conception of
language-as-system, where the “value” of each “sign,” instead of being directly related to
the “real” thing it is supposed to designate, is rather determined by its relationships with
the wider system made up of all other signs.
In materialized economies, where the circulating gold-money was always a
portion of the gold ingots placed in circulation, language was mainly trusted for its
“referential function,” that it to say it was supposed to directly name the things it
denominates and to therefore provide an “objective representation” of reality:
Just as economic value is always incarnated in a body, first and foremost
circulating money, or diversely the land, house, bundle of grain (which, in turn,
derive their value from the gold-money serving as the universal standard and the
privileged method of exchange), similarly the word can be exchanged for things
in an unproblematic equivalence. (Goux, 1988, 19)

“the ideal register of the archetype and over the real register of the treasury” (Goux, 1984, 37): “This
monetary revolution exposes the transition from industrial capitalism to the capitalism of monopolies, in
which the financial power and regulation of banking operations acquire a hegemonic role in economic life”
(Goux, 1984, 34 ff and Goux, 1988, 24). What circulates now “has only the purely symbolic function of an
instrument of exchange, while the other two functions are, so to speak, virtualized–excluded, in any case,
from the sphere of circulation.” (Goux and Di Piero, 20)

45
The age of dematerialized value, in turn, is characterized by a “new” conception
of language, in which its function of immediate designation (“the house, the land, the
bundle of grain”), is substituted by the notion of language as a system of signs chained, in
terms of both their value and their signification, to each other. As around and after WWI
money started to have value only in relation to other signs in the economic system, and
banknotes lost all convertibility into gold, so from Saussure onwards language has started
to be conceived of “a system of pure values, with no roots in things and in no way
deriving sense from the simple operation of direct designation of an object.”
78
In
conclusion, for Goux, “the transition from language-as-naming (in which the word is
worth a thing) to language-as-system (in which the relationship among words determines
their value) recalls the semantic and economic dematerialization” that occurs in the
sphere of finance and economics.
79

Besides retaining the potential to mirror “the exchanges between the economist’s
money and the writer’s money,” literature constitutes for Goux a site where it is possible
to observe how the fundamental isomorphism between the functioning of gold and the
functioning of language can be also extended to other two general equivalents of value,
namely the father and the phallus:
Gold, the Father, The Phallus and Language seem to occupy perfectly
homologous positions, all functioning as the general equivalents of exchanges
in a universal logic of exchanges and values. (Goux 31)
80

78
Goux and Di Piero, 20.

79
Goux and Di Piero, 22.

80
« L’or, le père, la langue, le phallus servent mutualement and continuement comme metaphores l’un de
l’autre. (2) [...] et nous apparissent ainsi, dans une logique généralisée des échanges et des valeurs, occuper

46

When they directly depict processes of exchange, circulation or accumulation of
gold, for example, “realist” works of literature such as Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet show,
alongside the different modes of functioning of gold-money within a system of
materialized economy, also how “the treasury (in economics) and the referent (in
literature) have a homologous status and position.” Balzac’s novel, then, for Goux not
only provides an exemplary representation of the structural isomorphism between gold,
truth, and the phallus, but it also shows how, in a system of materialized economy where
financial value is taken to be physically present in the circulating gold, language is taken
as a direct and objective representation of reality. With the advent of the era of nominal
money and dematerialized value, in turn, literature not only mirrors the “crisis” of the
convertibility of money into gold, but it also registers the decline of the referential
function of language. A paradigmatic depiction of this transformation is provided by
Gide’s 1925 novel titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters). In this narrative,
that for Goux weaves together “various strands clustered around the core question of the
loss of standards”, language is no longer conceived as being capable of expressing a fixed
reality or distinct objects. Language is rather used as “a means, a relatively autonomous
instrument, by which it is possible to represent reality to varying degrees of exactitude.”
81

Employing the tropes of “counterfeiting” and “demonetization” to reflect how “language,
money and father” all ceased, at a specific point in history, to be the nucleus of a

des places et des fonctions tout à fait homologues, celles d’équivalents généraux des échanges. » (Goux,
1984, 47).

81
Goux, 1984, 39 and 17.

47
guarantee of meaning and values, Gide’s novel for Goux explores the “homology that
exists among all the registers of the general equivalent,” therefore showing that “if the
truth of language is contested along with the truth of gold, the truth of the father is also
challenged.”
82
The Counterfeiters is all the more important, for Goux, because it was
produced in the same years in which money lost its direct convertibility into gold.
Gide’s novel is not, of course, the only existing literary work that critiques “entire
series of archetypes that are isotopic” to gold or that confronts and resists the “universal
imperative” that makes financial gold, alongside language, fatherhood and the phallus a
general equivalent of value.
83
In Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’autre monde, or voyage sur la
lune (1657), for example, the lunar world is depicted as a space where the speech loses all
its referential value, and in which language’s failure to represent a universal standard of
exchange obliterates the connotation of both gold and fatherhood as “master signifiers.”
84

Literature retains the potential to do more, Goux also argues, than merely
depicting the modes of functioning of gold in different economic systems or challenging
the “monocentric” perspective that makes gold, language, fatherhood, and the phallus
general equivalent of exchange. For Goux, in fact, the processes of manipulation of
language that a writer performs in giving birth to a literary text can even be considered,
metaphorically, as a mode of production of symbolic gold. Bringing the example of
Mallarmé’s usage of “monetary metaphors for language” in his Crisis in Poetry, Goux
introduces the expression “gold of the poets” to designate the non-physical, yet

82
Goux, 1984, 43, 32 and 32.

83
Goux, 1988, 117.

84
Goux,1988, 112.

48
incommensurably valuable treasure that a writer brings forth when giving birth,
combining words and manipulating language, to a literary text.
85
This gold is distinct
from the both the gold of finance and the physical gold of monetary exchange. It is not a
physical substance, but a “purely signified” matter that is detached from all convertibility
into money and whose value is not measurable in financial terms. Instead, the gold of the
poets belongs to the realm of “philosophical truth”:
The poet’s gold is not money […]; it is rather the treasury of words uttered,
rich in the eternal Idea evoked by this thesaurus. […] Since minted, countable
gold, caught up in the computations of meaningless quantification, is but an
empty god, lackluster and un-glorious, it is left to the writer (the poet, but also
perhaps the philosopher, in the alchemical sense) to amass a treasure of
another order, of incalculable wealth, referring to a transcendent Measure.
What is suggested by the word gold—the treasures of its symbolic
signification (glitter, light, sun, wealth, purity, immutability)—is of greater
worth than real gold, unprepossessing numéraire with no flair, no pomp, a
hollow deity, a mere instrument of quantification.” (Goux, 1984, 109)

The opposition between the financier’s and the poet’s gold, Goux immediately
adds, is neither self-evident nor easily accessible, because it stems from a “splitting of our
need along two separate paths” that harks back to an “originary” bifurcation between two
opposite epistemological and economic assumptions:
86

the poet, and not the financier bent on accumulating an overly empirical
treasure, in his worship of vulgar gold, reorients the eternal dream of a gold
that is truly the philosopher’s. […] The poet’s gold is a valence of the Idea, an

85
Goux, 1984, 98.

86
Goux, 1984, 110. « Il y a donc deux ors. Celui du financier et celui du poète. L’opposition toutefois n’est
pas si simple. Elle est advenue, peut-être. Cette division des ors naît d’une bifurcation. Celle qui sépare
notre besoin en deux voies ». (Goux, 1984b, 154)

49
originary metaphor that says “aura,” “sun,” “beauty,” “truth,” and that is
betrayed by the monetary cipher. (Goux, 1984, 111)
87

It should be noted that the gold of poets, as Goux underlines, retains a value. This
value is incommensurably “richer” than the one pertaining to the gold of finance. Its
abundance, however, cannot be “coldly” calculated in quantitative terms: “signified gold
is now richer and more dazzling than the monetary cipher manipulated in the arithmetic
of banking.”
88
The gold of the poets or “gold of true beauty,” then, shares with
dematerialized money the characteristic of representing “a sign designating possession of
nothing (concrete) but open to an infinity of possibilities.”
89
Still, unlike nominal money,
it is also characterized by “a shining radiance, distinct from the dull gold of monetary
traffic.”
90

Finally, alongside its distinct radiance which distinguishes it from financial gold,
and its non-arithmetically measurable value, the gold of the poet also presents the
characteristic of retaining a political valence for it subverts the “multiple structural
congruences concerning the situation of all elements which function as general
equivalences (gold, language, the father, the phallus)” and it “refuses to submit to the
‘quite hollow universal deity’ through which the idea of a supreme impersonal power has

87
« Cette bifurcation, à la vérité, appartient au secret destin de l’alchimie. La quête immémoriale de l’or
philosophale dans le laboratoire du grand œuvre, s’est convertie en objectif de l’économie politique ».
(Goux, 1984 b, 155).

88
Goux, 1984, 110. « L’or signifié est maintenant plus riche et plus éblouissant que le chiffre monétaire
manipulé dans l’arithmétique des banquiers ». (Goux, 1984b, 155)

89
Goux, 1984, 111, and Goux and Di Piero, 17.

90
Goux, 1984, 110-111.

50
been imposed concretely upon one and all.”
91
The gold of true beauty provides the poet,
in other words, with a key to obliterate the isomorphic system of “equivalences” that
gives a privileged position to gold, the father, and language, because it works as a
political instrument that dismantles the structures of power that such a system of
universal equivalences creates. In Cyrano’s text, for example, the invalidation of gold’s
functioning as a standard of financial value engages a crisis in all notions of “universal
equivalences,” strikes against “all conventional law,” takes “apart the mechanism of
patriarchal self-legitimation,” and even undermines “those form of authority—namely of
the clergy and of the nobility—that rely on the signs of power.”
92
The gold of the poets,
then, retains not only the potential to subvert the system that makes this metal, alongside
speech and the phallus, a general equivalent of value, but it also opens the space for a
political struggle against the very idea of “supreme impersonal power.”
Goux’s distinction between the different functions and valences that pertain to
gold seems to be particularly apt to scrutinize the depiction of this metal (as well as of
other “precious” substances) in the Vita, the Metamorphoses and Petrolio. In terms of the
transformation of “physical” gold into money, for example, several passages from Book I
of the Vita portray the usage of gold as a measure to indicate the value of Benvenuto’s
works, to make payments, or to accumulate wealth. Representations of the metal as a
concrete matter in which financial value is stored are also presented in the
Metamorphoses, and remarkably in the story of King Midas who, driven by his thirst of

91
Goux and Di Piero, 24 and Goux, 1984, 111. « Le poète se fait martyr de la cause éternelle de l’or
philosophal, contre le pouvoir établi de l’or vulgaire » (Goux, 1984b, 158).

92
Goux, 1988, 106-108 and 111.

51
possession, remains physically captured by the gold he accumulates. In Petrolio, where
entire economic empires are said to grow, and to sustain themselves, specifically by
trafficking in oil, “black gold” is not only represented as a commodity that circulates
within the circuits of finance and the market, but it is also depicted as matter whose
consumption is related, at different degrees, to universal processes of “cultural
homologation” in Italy after WWII.
In opposition to this series of depictions the three texts also present, at different
points in their narrative, a series of representations of gold (and oil) as a “poetic”
substance. In these passages, gold often emanates a peculiar “radiance,” and its value is
never measured in economic terms. In the transition from Book I and Book II of the Vita,
for example, gold is the matter into which the main character of the narration, Benvenuto,
transforms when he is initiated to the divine secrets of nature and creation. This gold,
which represents Benvenuto’s acquisition of the capability to inflate life into “inert”
matter, is also said to have a “splendor” that reverberates, like a “halo,” from his body.
When Book I of the Metamorphoses describes the ages of mankind, in turn, the image of
gold is associated to processes of spontaneous generation of fruits and life. Here the
image of gold is used as a trope that indicates a moment in time in which the uncultivated
earth spontaneously generated its fruits, the lands were not divided by borders or
enclosures, and humankind did not know any law, punishment or fear. Another
representation of gold as a “shining” matter—that is deeply associated to life and
creation—is proposed at the beginning of Book II. Here, the poem indulges in a lengthy
description of the Sun, the doors of its Palace, and the generative potential that earth,

52
illuminated by the golden radiance of the Sun, retains. In Petrolio, finally, black gold is
depicted as a “modern Golden Fleece” that shines “/in shreds/—with and oily and barely
trembling red light, here and there throughout the desert.”
93
It is a precious, albeit non
financially valuable, substance that makes the main character of the narration, Carlo,
engage in a series of “purely intentional” journeys towards the origins of the world,
during which he experiences a series of processes of “initiation” and re-birth.
94
Oil is also
the symbolic matter that Petrolio’s narrator manipulates to “give life” to the literary text
we are reading.

REPRESENTATIONS OF GOLD IN THE VITA

In many passages from Cellini’s Vita, and exemplarily in those describing the
payment of the works commissioned from Benvenuto, gold is clearly represented as
metal that becomes money. Measured either in weight or in number of coins, gold is
depicted providing an “ideal” standard for the measurement of economic value as well a
physical instrument to make payments. Benvenuto receives gold as reward for his labor,
for example, when he works as a stamp-master in the Papal Mint (I, XLV, 198), when he
makes jewels (I, XCII) and when he works as a metallurgist for the King of France (II,
XCII, 603) and for the Pope (I, LVI, 223). Benvenuto, who expects Cosimo to pay him

93
Note36d, 120.

94
Note 36e, 121.

53
gold in exchange for his making of the Perseus (II, XCVI, 611), also receives gold as a
gift (I, LXXVI, 270) and, at times, he uses the metal to make payments (I, CX, 208).
95

An example of the text’s depiction of gold as a physical medium used to store
wealth is in enclosed in Book I, and more specifically in the passage that depicts the first
act of metallic fusion that Benvenuto performs throughout the narrative. Here, gold
physically is employed to protect the Pope’s financial reserves during the sack of Rome.
At a crucial point in the dramatic events of the sack, Benvenuto is ordered by Pope
Clement to melt secretly a large number of gold artifacts into bullion, so that the Pope’s
treasure can be protected from theft (I, XXXVIII). Pope Clement’s request is related to
the circumstances of exceptional danger the Church’s treasure is exposed to. Taking all
the gems out of the tiaras and jewels of the Apostolic Camera and gathering together the
maximal amount of gold are seen, in this context, as an urgent measure to be immediately
taken to store the Pope’s reserves of wealth in gold’s metallic body:
I shall tell how Pope Clement, wishing to save the tiaras and the whole
collection of the great jewels of the Apostolic Camera, had me called […]
They laid before me the tiaras and jewels of the regalia; and his Holiness
ordered me to take all the gems out of their gold settings. […] Then they gave
me all the gold, which weighed about 200 pounds, and bade me melt it down
as secretly as I was able. I went up to the Angels, where I had my lodging, and
could lock the door so as to be free from interruption (I, XXXVIII, 70-1).
96

95
After his escape from Castel Sant’Angelo, for example, Benvenuto gives to a water-carrier “a crown of
gold” to receive help and leave Rome. Further uses of gold to make payments are presented in: II, XVI, 445;
II, XVII, 448; II, XXIII, 462; II, XXXVIII, 490 and XXIX, 492; II, XLII, 499; II, XLV, 505; II, XLVI, 507;
II, LII, 518: II, LIX, 533; II, LXXX, 577; II, XCII, 603; II, XCVI, 611, II, XCVII, 615; L, C, 623; II, CIX-
X, 642-3. Gold is also used as a means for hoarding reserves in II, XXIX, 471. In II, CII, 629 gold is used
as a measure of value.

96
“Papa Clemente, per salvare i regni con tutta la quantità delle gran gioie della Camera Apostolica, mi
fece chiamare […] Dippoi mi dettono tutto l’oro, il quale era in circa dugento libbre, e mi disseno che io lo
fondessi quanto più segretamente che io poteva. Me ne andai a l’Agniolo, dove era la stanza mia, la quale
io potevo serrare, che persona non mi desse noia.” (I, XXXVIII, 176)

54
As the narration later reveals, after having melting the bulk of the gold of the Pope
into bullion Benvenuto takes a portion of the metal for himself. The gold Benvenuto
subtracts from the Church’s treasure provides him, as the text explicitly says, with a
reward for his work. Gold appears to be used here, then, also as a means of payment for
the work done to other gold:
The case is this. When I melted down the gold and worked at the unsetting of
those jewels, your Holiness ordered the Cavalierino to give me a modest
reward for my labours, of which I received nothing, but on the contrary he
rather paid me with abuse. When then I ascended to the chamber where I had
melted down the gold, and washed the ashes, I found about a pound and a half
of gold in tiny grains like millet-seeds; and insamuch as I had not money
enough to take me home respectably, I thought I would avail myself of this,
and give it back again when opportunity should offer. (I, XLIII, 80)
97

Following Goux’s conceptual frames, these passages from the Vita exemplify
how a precious metal—in this case gold—can become money in fulfilling the three main
functions that govern the universal logic of general equivalents of exchanges, namely that
of the measure of values, the instrument of payment and the hoarding of reserves.
98
Gold
is in fact here represented as both the immaterial “archetypal unit” that functions as
measure of the value of goods and services, and as the physical medium that makes
exchange and storage of financial value possible. It is important to remark also the fact

97
“Il caso è questo, che quando io fonde’ l’oro e feci quelle fatiche a scior quelle gioie, vostra Santità dette
commessione al Cavalierino che donasse un certo poco premio delle mie fatiche, il quale io non ebbi nulla,
anzi mi disse più presto villania. Andatomene su, dove io avevo fonduto il detto oro, levato le ceneri, trovai
in circa una libbra e mezzo d’oro in tante granellette come panico; e perché io non avevo tanti danari da
potermi condurre onorevolmente a casa mia, pensai servirmi di quelli, e rendergli da poi quando mi fusse
venuto la comodità.” (I, XLIII, 190)

98
Goux, 1984, 33. « On peut considérer que le métal précieux devenu monnaie, à l’issu d’un
développement des formes de l’échange, remplit dè lors trois fonctions tout à fait différentes : 1/ celle de
mesure des valeurs ; 2/ celle de moyen d’échange ; 3/ celle de moyen de paiement ou de thésaurisation ».
(Goux, 1984b, 50)

55
that the characters owning the largest quantities of the physical gold, which throughout
the Vita circulates to pay services and works, all belong to the apex of political power,
and they are Pope Clement, King Francis I and Duke Cosimo.
In addition to these representations of gold, the Vita includes many passages
where this metal is, simply, a substance that the goldsmith manipulates. Benvenuto uses
gold to create various objects (I, CXIII, 368), figures (I, XC), medals (I, XLIV), vases (II,
LVIII) and even a cape (a piviale) for the Pope (I, LI). Benvenuto also works the metal to
make “a golden eye out of a French crown” (II, LXXII), a book cover (I, XC) and a
saltcellar for the King of France (II, XXXVI).
99
Finally, Benvenuto uses “trifles of gold”
to finalize the surface of his bronze Perseus immediately before its installation in Piazza
della Signoria (II, XC).
100

In this second group of passages, gold is not mainly considered for its financial
value, but it is rather represented as a base matter that the artisan, with his own expertise,
physically manipulates. The gold that Benvenuto physically works has, of course, an
intrinsic financial value, and this value can be even implemented by its refining. The
additional value that baser gold acquires when it is craftily re-worked, can be also
measured, as we can read in the negotiations between Benvenuto and his mecenati, in

99
“Era ritornato il Re a Parigi, e io l’andai a trovare, portandogli la ditta saliera finita; la quale, sì come io
ho detto di sopra, era in forma ovata ed era di grandezza di dua terzi di braccio in circa, tutta d’oro, lavorata
per virtù di cesello.” (II, XXXVI, 485)

100
The text also makes reference to the use of gold in the finalization of the statue of Perseus: “Io
cominciai a dare ordine di scoprire; e perché e’ mancava certo poco di oro, e certe vernicie e altre cotai
coselline, che si appartengono alla fine dell’opera, sdegniosamente borbottavo e mi dolevo […] e così
malcoltento il giorno seguente io la scopersi” (II, XC, 599). In the course of the 1999 restoration of the
Perseus, traces of gold have been found on the surface of the statue. In the restorators’ words “we found a
large amount of gold-leafing on the drapery, the pillow, the wings, the belt around the waist, the sheath of
the sword, the wings on the head, and the blood drops coming out of Medusa’s neck. We are not able to tell
whether the statue was shown with all the gilding when first unveiled.” (Morigi 14)

56
financial terms. Still, apart from the cases in which he is engaged in negotiations with the
various figures of power that commission work from him, Benvenuto never shows any
interest in the monetary value of the physical metal he is working upon. When a
“gentlemen from Santa Fiore” asks Benvenuto to polish a little gold ring, for example,
Benvenuto does not make any reference to the financial value of the gold that constitutes
the ring, but he rather shows an understanding of the metal as a matter that the
goldsmith’s work can “revitalize”:
This gentleman came to me one day, and showed me a little gold ring which
had been discolored by quicksilver, saying at the same time: ‘Polish up this
ring for me, and be quick about it.’ It was engaged at the moment upon jewel-
work of gold and gems of great importance; besides, I did not care to be
ordered about to haughtily by a man I had never seen or spoken to; so I replied
that I did not happen to have by me the proper tool for cleaning up his ring,
and that he had better go to another goldsmith. ( I, CXIII, 213)
101

The Vita envisions a third main possibility to understand gold. This possibility is
brought forward by the capitolo in terza rima that separates Book I and Book II, where
the text accounts for Benvenuto’s acquisition of the secrets of poiesis. At this crucial
point in the narrative, gold is the matter into which Benvenuto is transformed. This gold
is neither a physical substance in which financial value is stored, nor it is a precious metal
that can be owned and exchanged. Rather, this gold is an immaterial substance that
symbolizes Benvenuto’s acquisition of the secrets of creation and that reverberates, like a
“golden aura,” over his body after he had become capable of suffusing life into matter.

101
“Questo gentiluomo di Santa Fiore venne un giorno a me e mi porse un piccolo anellino d’oro, il quale
era tutto imbrattato d’ariento vivo, dicendo: “Isvivami questo anelluzzo e fa presto”. Io che avevo innanzi
molte opere d’oro con gioie importantissime, e anche sentendomi così sicuramente comandare da uno a il
quale io non avevo mai né perlato né veduto, gli dissi che io non avevo per allora isvivatoio, e che andassi a
un altro.” (I, CXIII, 368)

57
To provide a brief summary, at the end of Book I Benvenuto is imprisoned in
Castel Sant’Angelo. Held in captivity in an underground cell, Benvenuto has no hope “of
beholding the sun even in a dream,” and for this reason he uses “a little piece or charcoal”
he had “found covered up with earth” to draw on the wall of the prison “a God the Father,
surrounded with angles, and a Christ arising victorious from the grave” (I, CXX). He also
begins composing a capitolo in terza rima, which is intended to praise the time spent in
“prison” and the accidents that occurred there.
102
Suddenly, in the course of his
imprisonment Benvenuto is also abruptly taken away by an invisible being that acts “like
a whirlwind.”
103
This “Being” leads him to an ascension that culminates with the vision
of the spheres of the sun. The sun, which reverberates with a blinding light, appears to
Benvenuto to be made of pure melted gold. The gold that makes the sun, then, transforms
its shape into the figures of Christ, Madonna, and Saint Peter.
104
From this point onwards,
we know reading the last paragraphs of Book I, that Benvenuto’s body acquires a sort of
splendor halo that, like a halo, reverberates with golden light. Benvenuto’s golden halo is
connected, the text explains, to the fact that Benvenuto has been initiated into the secrets
of creation. More specifically, Benvenuto’s golden aura is defined as a “justification” of
the benevolent act of God who has revealed his secrets to Benvenuto:

102
The capitolo is said to be a praise of the “prison, relating in it all the accidents that have befallen” (I,
CXIX, 224).

103
I, CXXII.

104
As M. Cole has suggested, certain details of Cellini’s visions might depend on his reading of Dante: “in
the first cant of the Paradiso, for instance, Dante describes watching the sun turn into liquid metal (in
Dante’s case, boiling iron –Paradiso, I, 60). And in the fourteenth canto, the narrator of the Paradiso, like
Cellini, has a vision of Christ” (Cole, 2002, 106). Dante’s text reads: “Qui vince la memoria mia lo
‘ngegno; / ché quella croce lampeggiava Cristo, / sì ch’io non so trovare essempro degno; / ma chi prende
sua croce e segue Cristo, / ancor mi scuserà di quel ch’io lasso, / vedendo in quell’albor balenar Cristo.”
(Paradiso, XIV, 103-8).

58
I will not omit to relate another circumstance also, which is the most
remarkable which has ever happened to any other man. I do so in order to
justify the divinity of God and of His secrets, who deigned me to make me
deign of: for ever since the time of my vision until now a splendor, marvelous
thing, has rested on my head: this is apparent to every sort of man to whom I
have chosen to point it out; but those have been very few. This halo can be
observed above my shadow in the morning from the rising of the sun for about
two hours, and far better when the grass is drenched with dew; and it is also
visible at evening about sunset.” (I, CXXVIII, 298)
105

Benvenuto’s vision of the sphere of the sun, and his subsequent acquisition of a
bodily golden halo, is retold in verse in the capitolo in terza rima that follows the
conclusion of Book I. This section, which specifies that what happened to Benvenuto
when was imprisoned in the underground cell is the “most remarkable circumstance
which has ever happened” (I, CXXVIII) to him in his lifetime, summarizes the complex
events of Benvenuto’s initiation into the secrets of creation in one single sentence,
according to which Benvenuto “has become gold.” In the capitolo, like in the final
chapters of Book I, Benvenuto’s corporeal aurification is the culmination of a composite
process of initiation to the secrets of poiesis.
106

In both accounts of the exceptional events that occurred during Benvenuto’s
imprisonment, then, gold plays a central role. In Book I, it is the liquid matter that makes
the sun, and that in the course of the vision transformed into anthropomorphic figures. In

105
“Non voglio lasciare indietro una cosa, la maggiore che sia intevenuto a un altro uomo; qual è per
iustificazione della divinità de Dio e dei segreti sua, quale si degniò farmene degno: d’allora in qua, che io
tal cosa vidi, mi restò uno isplendore, cosa maravigliosa, sopra il capo mio: il quale si è evidente a ogni
sorta di uomo a chi io l’ho voluto mostrare, qual sono stati pochissimi. Questo si vede sopra l’ombra mia la
mattina innel levar del sole insino a dua ora di sole, e molto meglio si vede quando l’erbetta ha addosso
quella molle rugiada; ancora si vede la sera al tramontar del sole.” (I, CXXVIII, 400)

106
The poem also explains that Benvenuto is a human that resembles God, and is provided with “a smart
brain” that allows him to engage in poetic “exercises” with or without the help of “paper, pens, ink, fire, or
tools of steel” (lines 28-29, p.239). Or quest’è dove un bel cervel trastulla; / né carta, penna, inchiostro,
ferro o fuoco, / e pein di bei pensier fin dalla culla. (lines 28-30, 401)

59
the capitolo, gold is the matter into which Benvenuto transforms. It might be useful also
to recall that, while in the prose of Book I the vision of the sun is caused by the
intervention of an “invisible spirit,” in the capitolo Benvenuto’s transformation follows
the inflation of his own body with the “fire of poiesis” that occurs when he starts working
over a mixture of water and earth. The capitolo therefore posits Benvenuto’s accession to
the secrets of poesis as the direct result of his repetition of a Promethean act of
manipulation of malleable matter. This whole process of Benvenuto’s initiation, which
begins with his manipulation of a mixture of water and earth, is summarized, Benvenuto
asserts at the exactly calculated central verse of the poem by one sentence: “I have
become gold.”
107
The gold into which Benvenuto transforms, the text immediately adds,
can hardly be measured for its financial value. Also, the text hermetically continues, this
gold cannot be used to make better work. “Such gold,” the text says, “none could easily
spend, / Nor [it could] fit for excessively good work.”
108

If confronted with Goux’s distinction between financial and poetic gold, the metal
in which Benvenuto transforms appears in the first place to be distinct and opposed to the
“financial” gold he receives as payment for his work. The text clearly states, in fact, that
this gold cannot “be easily spent,” and this specification raises the problem of how the
metal’s value should be measured. In the second place, the gold Benvenuto transforms
into shares, with the metal that Benvenuto skillfully manipulates in other passages from
the Vita, the characteristic of being a malleable matter that can be worked. In the third

107
“Non vo’ dir di più: son diventato d’oro.” (line 94)

108
“Qual non si spende così facilmente, / né se ne faria troppo buon lavoro.” (lines 95-6)

60
place, the gold into which Benvenuto transforms resonates with the substance that Goux
names the “gold of the poets” because, being used as a metaphor for his own accession to
the inner secrets of creation, it incarnates what Goux calls “the eternal dream of a gold
that is truly the philosopher’s” and it embodies “a valence of the Idea, an originary
metaphor that says ‘aura,’ ‘sun,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘truth’.”
109

We know, from the text, that after his vision of the sun Benvenuto’s body has
acquired a special golden halo that reverberates on his head and that justifies “the divinity
of God and of His secrets, who deigned to grant me that great favour.”
110
In addition,
from this point in the narration onwards Benvenuto has acquired the capability of
inflating life into matter, like Prometheus. At the beginning of Book II, for example, the
text clearly points out that after having become gold Benvenuto starts considering the
products of his work as his own living offspring. More specifically, while describing a
model for a golden saltcellar for the Cardinal of Ferrara Benvenuto claims that he feels
great affection for the products of his work as a metallurgist and goldsmith, and he
specifies that he considers these works to be the sons he brings forth by means of his art:
It is apparent, my Lords, of what vast consequence are the sons of kings and
emperors, and what a marvelous brightness of divinity appears in them;
nevertheless, if you ask some poor humble shepherd which he loves best,
those royal children or his sons, he will certainly tell you that he loves his own
sons best. Now I too have a great affection for the children which I bring forth
[partorisco] from my art; consequently the first which I will show you, most
reverend Monsignor, my good master, shall be of my own making and
invention. (II, II, 245-6)
111

109
Goux, 1984, 111.

110
I, CXXVIII.

111
“Vedete, Signiori, di quanta importanza sono i figliuoli de’ re e degli inperatori, e quel maraviglioso
splendore e divinità che in loro apparisce. Niente di manco se voi dimandate un povero umile pastorello, a

61
The actual processes of making this saltcellar, as well as ekphrastic descriptions
of its shaping (featuring Earth as a female deity generating and sustaining all living
creatures), occupy several chapters of Book II. In this context Gabriello Cesano, the first
viewer of the saltcellar’s model, reinforces the notion that the products of Benvenuto’s
work are his offspring by saying that, in his golden saltcellar, Benvenuto “wanted to
show his children” (II, II, 247).
112

Later in the narration, the text describes in great detail Benvenuto’s making of his
bronze Perseus, and it directly portrays the realization of this statue as a “prodigious”
process of inflation of life into matter. The Perseus is never directly designated as
Benvenuto’s “son.” However, the making of the statue is explicitly described in terms of
a poetic practice of infusion of life into matter. The entire process of the statue’s
realization—beginning with the testing of the earth in which liquefied metal can be
poured and ending with the installation of the finished artifact in Piazza della Signoria—
extends throughout the entire second book of the Vita, and it is presented as an
exceptional achievement that no man on earth, other than Benvenuto, could accomplish.
At a climatic moment of the infusion of liquid metal into the earthly stamp, which the
text denominates as anima, Benvenuto is said, literally, to perform a “resuscitation of the
dead.”
113
Casting, then, is for Benvenuto a process that gives life to matter. It is

chi gli ha più amore e più affezione, o a quei detti figliuoli o ai sua, per cosa certa dirà d’avere più amore ai
sua figliuoli. Però ancora io ho grande amore ai miei figliuoli, che di questa mia professione partorisco: sì
che ‘l primo che io vi mostrerrò, Monsignior reverendissimo mio patrone, sarà mia opera e mia
invenzione.” (II, II, 411)

112
On this passage, see also: Cole, 2002, 40.

62
specifically for this reason that it constitutes a poetic mode of “making” that has no
equivalents in any other craft or art:
I suspected of having caked my metal for me said I was no man, but of
certainty some powerful devil, since I had accomplished what no craft of the
art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary fiend could work
such miracles as I in other ways had shown. (II, LXXVII, 365)
114

To Benvenuto’s golden saltcellar, which the text states is his living son, and the
Perseus, which is made bringing life into matter, we could add a third “living” product
that Benvenuto generates, in the course of his Vita, after his initiation to poiesis. This
third “son” of Benvenuto’s is the literary text we are reading. As the sonnet that opens the
Vita suggests, the main subject of the narration is the theme of “life,” and Benvenuto’s
act of writing (in analogy to the capitolo composed in prison, which is dedicated to the
resemblance between Benvenuto and god) is finalized to thank the god of nature that had
provided Benvenuto with an alma. In addition, the sonnet points out that the Vita, as one
of Benvenuto’s most remarkable “undertakings,” is animated by the same living principle,
or alma, that assists the poet in his poetic making. As the poetic act of writing stages a
“repetition” of the god of nature’s giving of the soul to the poet, the prefatory sonnet also
suggests, the literary “product” that we are reading is generated by Benvenuto after his
accession to the secrets of creation and it can be therefore conceived of, in similarity to
the other “sons” that Benvenuto gives birth to, as his “living” offspring.

113
“Or veduto di avere resuscitato un morto, contro al credere di tutti quegli ignioranti, e’ mi tornò tanto
vigore.” (II, LXXVII, 571)

114
“Non ero un uomo, anzi ero uno spresso gran diavolo, perché io aveva fatto quello che l’arte nollo
poteva fare; con alter gran cose, le quali sarieno state troppe a un diavolo.” (II, LXXVII, 573)

63
The text of the Vita presents, in conclusion, a variety of different representations
of gold. In a first acceptance, gold is a physical substance that, with its financial value,
functions as an indicator of value, as instrument of payment, and as medium to store
reserves. In a second series of passages, gold is the base matter that Benvenuto, as a
skillful sculptor and goldsmith, manipulates. Finally, in the crucial events of the
protagonist’s initiation to the secrets of creation, which render him capable of inflating
life into matter, gold is the immaterial substance into which Benvenuto is transformed.
This gold is not purely symbolic, because its radiance reverberates, like a golden halo,
around Benvenuto’s body. In addition, it has an incommensurable, yet non financial,
value, because it functions as a “justification”of Benvenuto’s resemblance with the god
of Nature and it indicates, with its reverberating halo, Benvenuto’s acquisition of
knowledge of the divine powers of creation. This gold makes the Vita’s protagonist
capable of inflating life into matter and in this way to procreate, like no other man on
earth. It has, for these reasons, an intrinsic value. Still, this value resembles more what
Goux calls “the true gold of the poets” than the financial one made present, when this is
used as a means of exchange, measure or storage of wealth, by “physical” gold.

BENVENUTO’S AURIFICATION AND CELLINI’S SEXUALITY

The manuscript of the Vita was received with a certain interest immediately after
Cellini’s death, and was read and commented on well before its first printed edition in

64
1728.
115
After that moment, the book was widely reprinted and translated into several
languages. The text has constituted a point of departure for the work of an enormous
number of scholars and it has inspired the literary production of a conspicuous number of
writers which include among others, Foscolo, Balzac, Hoffman, Stendhal, Goethe,
Melville and Anatole France. The bibliography dealing with Cellini’s Vita is immense,
and still growing. The corpus of bibliographical works on the Vita range from Vasari’s

115
The problem of the attribution of the Vita’s manuscript to “Cellini’s hand” is not central in my reading.
This problem, however, has constituted a debated issue. Paleographers agree that the autographed
manuscript of the Vita (Codice Mediceo-Palatino 234) preserved at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in
Florence might be a revised version of a previously existing one, and they concord in considering Cellini’s
signature in the frontispiece authentic. It is composed of 520 leaves or 1,019 pages, numbered only on the
recto. 114 pages are autographed and they include: the opening sonnet, a brief section of prose following
the poem, and pp. 464b-520a. Several pages are blank (69-80), one is repeated (112), and one is missing
(113). Most pages of the manuscript appear to have been written by the hand of a copyist (possibly Michele
di Goro Vestri), except for pp.461a-464b, composed by an unidentified second copyist. The manuscript
presents a number of corrections, additions and erasures. Paolo Rossi argued that Mediceo-Palatino 234 is a
clean copy prepared for the printer while previous versions have been lost or destroyed: “the text is the
result of a great deal pf preparatory work;” “I belive the manuscript now in the Laurenziana … is nothing
short of a bella copia” (Rossi, 1998, 59 and 57). The Biblioteca Laurenziana also holds the manuscripts
Laurenziano Antinori 229 (in a Eighteenth century hand). A third manuscript, the Magliabechiano
XVII,v,29 (probably used as the source of the 1728 first printed edition of the Vita) is preserved at the
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. A further variant (Codice 101) is owned by the Accademia di
Belle Arti di Firenze.
It is not clear whether or not (and if so, how) Cellini circulated the manuscript during his lifetime. It seems
certain that Benedetto Varchi knew at least some sections of it. Cellini’s biography was excluded from
Vasari’s first version of the Vite (1550), but it was present in the second version of the book (1568). Here,
Vasari explains that Cellini was a goldsmith who had become a sculptor (“oggi scultore, quando attese
all’orefice in sua giovinezza” 215). Vasari adds that biographical information can be found in Cellini’s own
corpus of writings: “Ora sebbene potrei molto più allungarmi nell’opere di Benvenuto, il quale è stato in
tutte le sue cose animoso, fiero, vivace, prontissimo e terribilissimo, e persona che ha saputo pur troppo
dire il fatto suo con i Principi, non meno che le mani l’ingegno adoperare nelle cose dell’arti, non ne dirò
qui altro, atteso ch’egli stesso ha scritto la vita e l’opere sue e un Trattato dell’Oreficeria e del fondere e
gettar di metallo con alter cose attenenti a tali arti, e della scultura con molto più eloquenza e ordine, che io
qui peravventura non saprei fare: e però, quanto a lui, basti questo breve sommario delle sue più rare opere
principali.” (Vasari, XV, 218).
Evidence shows that before being edited (by Antonio Cocchi “docente di medicina”) and printed in Naples
(with a dedication to Lord Burlington) for the first time in 1728, Cellini’s manuscript was jealously kept by
the Cavalcanti family, as detailed by Filippo Baldinucci in a 1675 letter (“se lo tengon caro”). In his
Zibaldone, a collection of miscellanueous accounts compiled between 1632 and 1636, Scipione Ammirato
il Giovane reports (under the title of “Memorie estratte dalla Vita di Benvenuto Cellini”) several episodes
taken from the Laurenziana manuscript. Cellini’s Vita is also cited in the fourth edition of the Vocabolario
degli Accademici della Crusca (1729). In the eighteenth century, the manuscript was hold by a monastery
library in Florence. In 1805 it was acquired by the director of the Biblioteca Laurenziana from a Florentine
bookseller.

65
mention of the text in the second edition of his Vite (1568) to the scholarly works
recently dedicated to the figure of Cellini by Michael Cole (2002), Margaret Gallucci
(2003), Paolo Rossi (2004), and others. At present, the text continues to be studied by
readers from a variety of disciplines, especially literary criticism and art history. Not
surprisingly, given the great number of scholars that have worked on the text, the Vita
has been framed according to numerous, and often discordant, theoretical perspectives.
The considerable extension of the corpus of interpretative works that the Vita has
inspired suggests that this literary work contains a remarkable heuristic value, and that its
“content” cannot be contained in a single book. Recalling again Goux’s theoretical
frames, for example, the Vita lends itself to “documentary” readings that posit the text as
a mirror of the structures of economic and financial exchange proper to the society
Cellini lived in.
For a long time the Vita has been marginalized by mainstream literary criticism,
often because the text was considered to be too obscure, inconsistent, or grammatically
incorrect to constitute a “literary masterpiece.”
116
If in 1764 Baretti had praised Cellini’s
love for the arts while considering his “ingenuity” as a writer,
117
as late as 1941 Italian

116
Cellini’s prose has been considered as permeated by naiveté and colloquialism by Francesco De Sanctis:
“In Toscana gli uomini colti (…) si contentavano di dire le cose alla semplice ed alla buona, come faceva il
Lasca e Benvenuto Cellini.” (De Sanctis 402). Maier has focused on the difficulties and disharmonies
belonging to Cellini’s style and has referred to Cellini’s writing as “spoken prose” (“prosa parlata”, Maier
13-14). Grote has observed that many of the terms presented by the text “have never been accepted by the
Vocabolario della Crusca (“molti dei suoi termini non sono mai stati accettati dal Vocabolario della
Crusca” Grotes 75). In his Introduction to 1927 edition of his translation of The Life of Benvenuto Cellini,
John Addington Symonds defines the Vita a “monument of vernacular Tuscan prose.” (Symonds, xxxvi).

117
In his La Frusta Letteraria (n. VIII, 15/1/1764) Baretti praised Cellini’s prose for its spontaneity and
wrote: “noi non abbiamo alcuno libro nella nostra lingua tanto dilettevole a leggersi quanto la Vita di quel
Benvenuto Cellini scritta da lui medesimo nel puro e pretto parlare della plebe fiorentina. Quel Cellini
dipinse quivi sé stesso con sommissima ingenuità e tal quale si sentiva di essere: vale a dire bravissimo

66
critic Natalino Sapegno was still criticizing Cellini for subordinating his prose to the
“instincts” of his own personality:
Cellini’s vehement affirmation of his own personality as a man and artist is
instinctive (and not programmatic at all). It is at the basis of the passionately
subjective tone of the autobiography, as well as the almost exclusive relevance
given to the protagonist. (Sapegno 108)
118

A process of re-consideration began in 1952, when in a short essay dedicated to
the Vita Benedetto Croce praised Cellini’s prose for its “naiveté and simplicity.”
119
From

nell’arti del disegno e adoratore di esse non meno che de’ letterati, e spezialmente de’ poeti, abbenché
senza alcuna tinta di letteratura egli stesso, e senza saper piú di poesia, che quel poco saputo per natura
generalmente da tutti i vivaci nativi di terra toscana. Si dipinse, dico, come sentiva d’essere, cioè animoso
come un granatiere francese, vendicativo come una vipera, superstizioso in sommo grado, e pieno di
bizzarria e di capricci; galante come in un crocchio di amici, ma poco suscettibile di tenera amicizia;
lascivo anzi che casto; un poco traditore senza credersi tale; un poco invidioso e maligno; millantatore e
vano, senza sospettarsi tale; senza cirimonie e senza affettazione; con una dose di matto non mediocre,
accompagnata da ferma fiducia d’essere molto savio, circospetto e prudente. Di questo bel carattere
l’impetuoso Benvenuto si dipinge nella sua Vita senza pensarvi su piú che tanto, persuasissimo sempre di
dipingere un eroe. Eppure quella strana pittura di sé stesso riesce piacevolissima a’ leggitori, perché si vede
chiaro che non è fatta a studio, ma che è dettata da una fantasia infuocata e rapida, e ch’egli ha prima scritto
che pensato” (Baretti, vol.I, 203-204). Baretti praises Cellini’s Vita “simplicity” also in La Frusta
Letteraria n.IV, 15/11/1763: “lo stile del [...] Benvenuto Cellini, che era un uomo ignorantissimo, [...] è
semplice, chiaro, veloce e animatissimo [...] perché il Cellini pensava unicamente a dire le cose che aveva
in mente. [...] la natura sa al primo cenno correre in aiuto di chi la chiama, senza farsi chiamare due volte;
come corse ad aiutare quel Cellini, che sempre la invocò divotamente, e che, quantunque ignorante e
plebeo, pure fu da lei reso il meglio maestro di stile che s’abbia l’Italia. La natura fu che al Cellini insegnò
a mettere il nominativo innanzi al verbo, e dietro al verbo l’accusativo, o qualunque altro caso gli occorreva
per rendere il suo discorso grammaticale e secondo l’indole del parlar fiorentino; la qual indole gli metteva
poi nello stile tutte le altre parti del discorso ne’ luoghi loro, o prima o dopo alcuna di quelle tre principali,
senza fargli fare la minima fatica.” (I, 85-6). Baretti continues: “Benvenuto Cellini ha scritto un meglio stile
che non alcun altro italiano; uno stile piú schietto e piú chiaro, perché piú secondo l’ordine naturale delle
idee.” (Baretti, I, 88)

118
“Istintiva è in lui (e niente affatto programmatica) la fortissima affermazione della propria personalità di
uomo e di artista, alla quale si deve l’accento appassionatamente soggettivo dell’autobiografia; il rilievo
quasi unico dato al protagonista.” (Sapegno, 108).

119
Croce claimed that Cellini’s seemingly simple prose betrays a self-conscious literary style: “è notissimo
che la prosa semplice e ingenua suol essere la più a lungo travagliata” (Croce, 129). Croce registers the
presence of anacoluthon, antitheses or paradoxes, assonance and alliteration, the tension between the ideal
and reality, coincidentia oppositorum, the combination of “high” and low registers, the use of superlatives,
anaphoric repetitions.

67
then on, literary criticism has massively elaborated on Cellini’s literary work, providing a
wide number of keys to enter the text and putting a variety of theoretical issues in play.
The Vita has been then studied in relation to problems that range from issues in sixteenth-
century poetry to the assemblage of different genres (such as verses and prose) into a
single literary work.
120
Some scholars have discussed the complexity and obscurity that
characterizes the Vita’s syntax and vocabulary, and others have used the text to address
issues such as the definition of the tropes, canons and conventions of the autobiographical
genre.
121
Many have seen in the Vita a revealing historical document.
122
Others have
emphasized the importance of the Vita in the context of the history of literature and have

For problems related to the syntax and language of the Vita see also Frank Bowman (1976) and James
Mirollo (1987), who has discussed Cellini’s “colloquial, informal style, not scrupulous about narrative
sequence, correct or clear grammar, or syntax” (Mirollo, 67).

120
For a reading of the sonnet which opens the Vita as a lyric that echoes Petrarca, see Faggi (1924).

121
For a confrontation of the Vita to the canon, conventions, tropes and definitions of early (modern)
autobiography, see Goldberg’s “Cellini’s Vita and the Conventions of Early Autobiography” (1974).
Goldberg detects in the “Renaissance” a “new attitude towards philosophy, theology and the self, based on
the primacy of the will, which gave man a new sense as the initiator, generating the impulse toward
autobiography.” He then uses Northrop Frye’s examination of the relation between confession and anatomy
in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) to point out that “whereas modern autobiography unveils a unique,
personal and private self, early autobiography presents a universal, depersonalized and public version of the
self” (Goldberg, 71). Reading the text as an autobiography, Victoria Gardner has detected the presence of a
kind of “traditional” Pauline conversion in the narrative and she has concluded that Cellini’s life echoes the
prodigal Son, St. Paul, and Augustine.

122
According to George Bull, “The Life, after all, is itself a revealing historical document, shedding light
on matters as diverse as prison conditions in Rome, the behaviour of Florentine exiles, or the relationship
between Francis I and his mistress” (Bull vii). For Nino Borsellino, Cellini’s ability as a writer allows him
to “become the main protagonist of a novel that continuously flows from his personal story to the history of
his century” (“farsi protagonista di un romanzo che deborda continuamente dalla storia personale in quella
del suo secolo.” Borsellino, 13). For Charles Klopp, Cellini’s Vita is a “continuous” narrative that provides
a representative example of autobiographical writing in “a moment in Italian history when the country’s
inhabitants were fashioning their lives into artifacts as aesthetically pleasing and widely admired as the
Italian art and architecture that were the wonder of the western world.” Thus, “it seems appropriate to begin
a consideration of prison writing in modern Italy with Benvenuto Cellini” (Klopp, 13).

68
assessed the text’s influence over later literary works produced by a number of writers.
123

Apart for having assessed the difficulty (and perhaps the impossibility) to discern
whether or not Cellini lied in his “prose,” recent literary criticism seems not to have
really questioned the notion that the Vita is an autobiography. The text has been therefore
received, for instance, as a narrative showing its main character’s passage from
“transgression to redemption” or exemplifying a “progressive path to the realization of a
personal and private self.”
124

While most critics, in reading the Vita as an autobiography, have conflated the
biographical figure of Cellini with the text’s first person narrator, a few have
demonstrated the importance of establishing a clear difference, as Paolo Rossi has done,
between the “figures” of Cellini as a man, a writer and a literary character.
125
Specifically
scrutinizing the differences between the “biographical” Cellini and the fictionalized
account of his life presented in the Vita, Paolo Rossi and other scholars, such as Margaret
Gallucci, have also brought forward the argument that, in writing his autobiography,
Cellini aimed to shape his own personal and artistic identity. Among other consequences,
the discussion over Cellini’s literary “self-fashioning of his own identity” has opened up
the possibility to read the Vita as a revealing document in the context of the early modern

123
For a reading of the influence of the Vita on the work by Foscolo, Balzac, Hoffman, Stendhal, Berlioz,
K. Blixen and others, see: Gianmarco Gaspari, “La Vita del Cellini e le origini dell’autobiografia” (1992).
For Goethe’s reception of the Vita, see: Koenigsberger’s “Leben des Benvenuto Cellini: Goethe, Cellini and
Transformation.” (1992). For Melville, see Morsberger (1972); for Anatole France, Tracy (1924).

124
Guglielminetti (1977) and Goldberg (1974).

125
Rossi demonstrates that there is a considerable difference between the account provided by Cellini and
his criminal records. For this reason, he suggests, it is crucial to neatly distinguish between Cellini “the
man”, the writer, and the main character of the Vita Benvenuto” (Rossi, 1994). On the topic see also:
Arnaldi, 1986.

69
production of discursive practices concerning sex. Scholars have juxtaposed, for instance,
the Vita to sixteenth-century Florentine legislation about sodomy, or they have
scrutinized the text to reconstruct Cellini’s representation of his contemporaries’
“standards of proper masculine behavior.”
126
Others have elaborated on the textual
representation of women and fortune by juxtaposing a series of passages from the Vita
and Cellini’s sculptural works in gold and bronze.
127

Besides sharing the assumption that the Vita is instrumental to Cellini’s self-
fashioning of his own identity, various recent scholarly works have elaborated on the
problems of Cellini’s sexuality and Cellini’s “discursive” constitution, in the literary text,
as a modern subject. Margaret Gallucci, for example, has used what Michel Foucault says
in La volonté de savoir as the basis for a more extended reading of both the Vita and the
legal documentation used to raise charges and accusations against Cellini. Great emphasis
has been given to the fact that Cellini supposedly started writing his Vita while under
house arrest for sodomy, and enormous importance has been ascribed to the legal
documentation used to make accusations against him. When we read it as an apology or a
literary confession, scholars have also demonstrated, the Vita becomes a representative
example “of resistance to the dominant cultural discourse of heterosexuality.”
128
Among

126
Gallucci, 145.

127
According to Gwendolyn Trottein, Cellini’s Medal for Francis I provides “one of the most violent
representations” of Fortune (213). The medal’s violence more clearly appear, Trottein argues, when its
iconography is considered alongside the text of the Vita, where “the goldsmith-sculptor recognizes no
authority outside his own, even that of princes and popes, are legion” (Trottein 224). On Cellini’s
misogynist depiction of Fortune as a female subject, see also Vickers, 1994.

128
Gallucci, 36.

70
other consequences, as Gallucci has shown, in this frame the text can be productively
used to trace “the contours of homoerotic desire through history.”
129

Gallucci’s arguments present, in my perspective, a number of problems that call
for further elaboration. In the first place, the emphasis given to sixteenth-century legal
documentation seems to have put the literary text, and what it actually says, in the
background. In second place, the assumption that Cellini wrote the Vita to defend himself
from accusations is not neutral in methodological and epistemological terms. Taking the
Vita as a confession implies, in fact, considering the text as part of the proliferation of
discourses concerning sex that for Foucault characterize modernity. But at the same time,
to consider the text a source of documentary evidence to discuss Cellini’s
contemporaries’ reception of homosexuality, also means to reproduce the discursive
practices that for Foucault make the confession “one of the West’s most highly valued
techniques for producing truth.”
130
Understanding the Vita as either an apology or a
confession is, in short, a paradoxical move. On the one hand, it intensively relies on the
assumption that text is a conveyor of “historical truth.” On the other hand, it seems not to
fully explore Foucault’s assumption that the “truth is not by nature free […] but its
production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.”
131

129
The literary text has in this way been inscribed in a “dialogue” between legal and literary documents of
sixteenth century, and it subsumed a specific value, in the context of Cellini’s life and works, because it
demonstrated the possibility of being read as an autobiographical self-defense. As Galucci has put it, an
“apologetic” reading of Cellini’s Vita shows that “the trial metaphor is fundamental to its structure”
(Gallucci 24). See also: Halperin, Barkan, Saslow, Goldberg on homoeroticism, homosexuality, and
receptions of Cellini as “sodomite.”

130
Foucault, 59.

131
Foucault, 60.

71
In addition to the problems raised above, it seems that the corpus of scholarly
work that has posited the Vita as a self-apologetic text has not really solved the problem
of how we should understand Cellini’s sexuality. Even if one might argue that the text
can help to distinguish “early modern homosexuality from its modern counterpart,” it
remains unclear, using Gallucci’s words, whether Cellini “should be categorized as a
sodomite, a homosexual, bisexual, gay or more recently, queer.”
132
The impasse in which
the debate concerning Cellini’s sexuality has fallen seems to constitute a dangerous field
of investigation because, as Gallucci’s usage of the notions of “early modern
homosexuality” and “its modern counterpart” show, it might lead to “chronocentric”
understandings of homosexuality as a single or essential entity whose contours can be
unproblematically projected, from the present, over the past.
Given the structural isomorphism that, for Goux, characterizes the functioning of
gold, the father, and the phallus as general equivalents and “master signifiers,” a key to
enter the debate concerning Cellini’s sexuality might be provided, instead, by a
consideration of the textual representations of gold, and more pointedly by a discussion
of the characteristics that belong to the gold into which Benvenuto transforms. This gold,
adopting Goux’s terminology, can be understood as a sign designating nothing concrete
and yet open to an infinity of possibilities, because it cannot circulate in the mercantile
realm and it can not be converted into money. With it sumptuous radiance and its
inconvertibility into money, though, this gold is incommensurably “richer” than the gold-
money that Benvenuto receives from his authoritative mecenati give as a payment. The

132
Gallucci, 18.

72
gold into which the main character of the Vita transforms also embodies, like the gold of
the poets, “philosophical beauty” because it is “produced” at the moment Benvenuto has
access to the inner secrets of creation. Because of its inconvertibility into a general and
financial equivalent, the gold into which Benvenuto is transformed also contests, at least
in a certain measure, the “monocentric perspective” that for Goux characterize the
mechanisms of general equivalences which are proper to the systems of materialized
economy. The gold into which Benvenuto transforms cannot be exchanged nor can it
circulate, and its existence is “unknown” to the various authoritative mecenati that, in the
course of the narrative, commission his services and works. This gold makes its
appearance, in the text, when Benvenuto is secluded in an underground cell of the Papal
prisons in Castel Sant’Angelo and its reverberating “aureole” is “visible” to only a very
few men, those to whom Benvenuto has “chosen to point it out.”
133
In analogy to the
gold of the poets, then, Benvenuto’s gold might even be seen as refusing “to submit to the
‘quite hollow universal deity’ through which the idea of a supreme impersonal power has
been imposed concretely upon one and all”: it “justifies” Benvenuto’s exceptional
accession to the inner secrets of creation.
134
Therefore it is a matter of personal initiation
or, as Benvenuto calls, “the most remarkable circumstance that has ever happened to any
other man.”
135

133
I,CXXVII,238.

134
Goux, 1984, 111. « Le poète se fait martyr de la cause éternelle de l’or philosophal, contre le pouvoir
établi de l’or vulgaire ». (Goux, 1984b, 158)

135
I,CXXVII, 238.

73
It is crucial to recall, at this point, the fact that Benvenuto’s aurification is strictly
related to his acquisition of the capability to “bring forth,” by means of his work, his
“sons.” It is specifically after turning into gold, in fact, that Benvenuto becomes in the
narration a figure of procreation sharing, with the god of nature that in the opening sonnet
is said to have provided the poet writing the Vita, the ability to instill life into matter.
Both Benvenuto and the god of nature are, in a sense, fathers of living creatures, because
they are both capable of transmitting, as the opening sonnet suggests, the lively spirit of
life. We can therefore conclude that Benvenuto acquires, after having become gold, the
capability to procreate. This capacity, however, constitutes a quite specific kind of
“mode” of procreation for it “conceals” sex and it erases any reference to the phallus.
This makes Benvenuto appear, like the god of nature mentioned in the Vita’s opening
sonnet, to be a mere “genitor” that brings forth life–he is not a not a “father.” As Goux
has shown, the difference between pater and genitor is full of theoretical implications,
because it disavows the foundation of the equation that makes financial value, gold, and
the phallus central equivalents of exchange: “when the “sacrality” of fatherhood is
deprived of the presence of the phallus, reproduction is “entirely subordinated to the
domain if nature.”
136

Paraphrasing Goux’s statements, then, the connection between the gold
Benvenuto transforms into and his acquisition of the capability to generate life “contest”
the coherences of the “symbolic mode […] centered on money, logos, father and

136
Goux, 1988, 112.

74
phallus.”
137
The gold of knowledge makes fatherhood a matter of “natural” procreation; it
cannot circulate in the market; its value cannot be measured in financial terms; and it is
only visible to the very few men chosen by Benvenuto. At least on the rhetorical level, it
disavows the tyrannies of both the phallus functioning as a transcendent symbol of power
and the gold that functions as a standard equivalent of exchange. Finally, because it is
“accessible” to us, the readers, only through the spectacle of language that the Vita stages,
this gold illustrates how literature can contest the “monocentric principle of universal
equivalents” that constructs fatherhood, phallus and financial values as Western culture’s
master signifiers.
138

The characterization of Benvenuto as a genitor deprived of all the “sanctity” of
fatherhood makes, we read in the opening sonnet, Benvenuto a man that resembles to the
god of nature like no one else on earth. What this deity and Benvenuto have in common
is, in fact, specifically their capability to instill life into the creatures they generate:
Benvenuto inflates life into matter; the god of nature gives an alma to Benvenuto so that
he becomes a man capable of extraordinary achievements. Like Benvenuto, then, also the
god of nature transmits life without recurring to the phallus. Furthermore, as its very
name indicates, Benvenuto’s deity reinstates procreation within the realm of nature. This
reference to “nature” is crucial because it opens the possibility that procreation is not a
matter of phallocentric symbolic economy. As the long description of the golden
saltcellar demonstrates, Benvenuto does understand nature as a female deity. Still, he also

137
Goux, 1988, 112.

138
Goux, 1988, 113.

75
understands procreation as a mode of inflation of life that might happen without the
intervention of fathers. Borrowing one more time Goux’s terminology, we can conclude
that in Benvenuto’s understanding of the procreative forces of the Nature is promoted an
“antipatriarchal revindication” of the feminine:
the other of the father is the mother. [But in the Vita,] She is not represented
as such. She is not a character of the human family, opposed to the father. The
maternal appears in a significant way, but only figuratively, or rather only
through the irreducible symbolism associated with the … concepts of Nature
and of Matter. It is necessary to admit an uncreated “eternal matter”—
uncorrupted atoms of every form that congeal to form those beings which we
see in the great Universe.” (Goux, 1998, 116).

If we consider Benvenuto’s capability to repeat promethean processes of
instillation of life into matter, and if we consider Benvenuto’s poetic makings, consistent
with Book II, as a generative practice that leads to the generation of living offspring
without recurring to the father and the phallus, one can come to a radical reconsideration
of the utility and the magnitude of the scholarly discussions centered on Cellini’s
sexuality. More specifically, it might be argued that what really matters, in the economy
of the Vita, is not exactly the problem of the classification of the book’s author within our
contemporary notions of homosexuality, but rather whether or not, reducing procreation
from “fatherhood” to “generation,” the text stages a rejection of phallocentrism which
dismantles, at one time, the founding principles of the nomos, the laws of value and
exchange, and even the reduction of motherhood to the “opposite” of fatherhood.

76
THE VITA AND ITS LIVING MATTERS
An impressive number of readings of the Vita have been elaborated in the field of
art history. Scholars from this discipline, seldom informed by the conclusions reached by
literary criticism, have frequently subordinated the Vita to the rest of Cellini’s artistic
production. For example, the Vita has sometimes been used to solve problems of
attribution and dis-attribution of a number of artifacts to “Cellini’s hand.”
139
It should be
noted that, when scholars have used the text to find evidence that Cellini did (or did not)
produce certain specific sculptural artifacts—as did Giovanni Baldini, who scrutinizing
the narrative has argued that it is legitimate to attribute to Cellini a silver seal designed
for the Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga in Mantova around 1528—art historians have shown the

139
The attribution of the marble Ganymede to Cellini, for long time taken for granted on the basis of the
“artist’s statements” contained in the Vita, has been recently questioned. Cole suggests that the statue was
made by Willem de Tetrode: “Cellini oversaw a large workshop through which numerous talented
founders, sculptors, and goldsmiths passed. As a result, works associated with Cellini from this period
continue to raise attribution problems: Willem de Tetrode, for example, has good claim to be the maker of
the marble Ganymede that often goes under Cellini’s name” (Cole, 2004, 271). Discrepancies between the
Vita and other coeval documentation can be also observed about the dates of the realization of the famous
medal for Pietro Bembo (the one realized after Pope Celement’s death; see: See Radcliffe, 929).
Specifically because the Vita does not mention them explicitly, a number of further artifacts conventionally
related to the name of Cellini are of uncertain attribution. These include: a bronze statuette of Jupiter (now
in the Niarchos Collection, Detroit), a bronze satyr possibly related to the Nymph for the Porte Dorée (at
the Getty), a bronze Ganymede (preserved at the Bargello); a bronze statuette model of Neptune (at the
North Carolina Museum of Art); another bronze statuette model of Neptune (formerly credited to
Alessandro Vittoria, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum); a bronze figure of Cleopatra auctioned at
Sotheby’s in 1995; two metal keys known as the Strozzi and the Potocki key.
For problems of attribution of the Getty satyr, see Pope-Hennessy and Jospeh Bliss. Arguing that,
“contrarily to popular belief, Cellini’s Vita is a careful and accurate book” (409), Pope-Hennessy considers
the satyr to be a preparatory model that Cellini regarded as “the memory of his French commissions” (412).
In a recent essay, Jospeh Bliss suggests “that the Getty Satyr was cast in France prior to Cellini’s
departure” (Bliss 84) and that it therefore is “a Cellini’s”. For problems in attribution of the bronze statuette
of Cleopatra, see the article “It’s a Cellini” in Artnews, vol.94, No.3, March 1995, page 35.
For problems of attribution of the Strozzi and Potocki keys see: Vallone and Kaczmarzyk. Vallone
questions the attribution of these keys to Cellini on the basis of what it is said in his writings: “Benvenuto
non ebbe affatto predilezione per il ferro come materia elettiva dell’arte sua. Inoltre, negli scritti, non dice
d’aver mai realizzato chiavi, né se ne conoscono di sue, altrimenti certe.” (Vallone 66). Kaczmarzyk uses
the Vita to declare the impossibility of attributing the Potocki key to Cellini (Kaczmarzyk 497-499).

77
tendency to establish a primacy of the “real” material object over the literary text.
140
In
other words, they have considered language, as with the gold-coin in systems of
materialized economies, as an indicator of value that can be unproblematically
“exchanged” for the things it designates.
Besides having assumed, albeit often implicitly, that a written text has a
transparent meaning, and that this meaning is immediately accessible, art historians have
seldom questioned problems such as the distinction between the figures of the author and
the literary character of the Vita. In this context, the text has frequently been used to
describe traits of Cellini’s personality, while specific passages from the Vita have served
to illustrate the “background” of Cellini’s making of his works. Often, a number of
excerpts from the Vita have been crudely detached from the rest of the text in order to be
made functional to the “reconstruction” of Cellini’s life.
For the purpose of my work, it is important to underline how, in regarding the text
as a compendium to the rest of Cellini’s “artistic” production, art historians have often
posited the products of Cellini’s work—including the Vita—as “inert” artifacts, “dead”
matter, therefore neglecting what the text states concerning Benvenuto’s initiation to
secrets of creation and, remarkably, his simultaneous becoming gold. Let us consider, for
example, the following excerpt taken from the journal Apollo, March 2004. In this
passage, art critic Yasmine Helfer reviews an exhibition dedicated to Bindo Altoviti’s
patronage, titled Boston and Florence, Raphael, Cellini and a Renaissance Banker: The

140
Baldini, 554-6.

78
Patronage of Bindo Altoviti. The exposition featured Cellini’s busts of Cosimo I and
Bindo Altoviti:
[in 2004] Cellini’s Bust of Cosimo made its first trip over the Atlantic
especially to meet that of Bindo: a convincing example of how art can bring
peace between fierce enemies and a resounding coup showing the organisers’
diplomatic finesse in obtaining spectacular loans. In the cramped room,
however, Cosimo remained hostile to Bindo, his bust contrasting by its
colossal size and heroic spirit with the sober and thoughtful Bust of Bindo, an
indisputable masterpiece of private portraiture. (Helfer, 50)

A first problematic issue is constituted by Halfer’s use of several “fictions.” These
range from the personification of the two statues to the construction of the figures of
Cosimo and Bindo as fixed characters that have been hypostatized, by history, as eternal
enemies. A second main problem arises from the fact that Helfer’s prose sets the viewer’s
gaze in an aporia. On the one had, the viewer’s gaze makes Cellini’s bronzes “alive”,
because it renders the statues significant in terms of economic and “historical” value. On
the other hand, the viewer’s gaze posits Cellini’s bronzes as “dead” matter, because it
erases the possibility that these bronzes may also be read outside the “imperative”
narratives of economics and history.
In the light of Goux’s analysis of the usage of gold in systems of materialized
economies, we might also add that for Helfer the Bust of Cosimo represents not only a
commodity that can circulate, but also as an instrument in which financial value is stored
and accumulated. As it is exemplified not only by the emphasis given to Bindi’s
patronage in the title of the exposition, but also by the reasons for which Helfer considers
Cellini’s statue to be an “indisputable masterpiece,” the intrinsic value of the Bust can be
even augmented when it is used as an instrument to generate monetary income. Helfer’s

79
understanding of the Bust of Cosimo, in conclusion, completely erases any reference to
poiesis. Helfer is blind, like the Pope, Duke Cosimo and Francis I in the Vita, to the
possibility that there might exist a different understanding of metals, according to which
craftsmanship is not merely a process of generating financial income and poetic creation
aims to higher “philosophical truths” than the monetary cipher.
Another representative example of how sculptural artifacts can be conceived as
“dead” matter is provided by what Charles Avery says describing Cellini’s works in gold:
independently from their artistic quality, the intrinsic value of the materials in
which [Cellini’s] artifacts were made determined a remarkable level of
appreciation, a sense of admiration that we can perfectly understand and that
still appears, today, when the common man admires the windows of Asprey’s
or Tiffany’s, or when for a moment he looks at the jewels of the Crown.
(Avery, 9)
141

For Avery, as for Helfer, Cellini’s works in metal mainly function as a site for the
projection of the viewer’s gaze. Bronzes and jewels not only constitute “inert” matter on
which the critic, like the “common man,” can impose meanings, but they also function, as
in Avery’s emphasis on the “intrinsic value of the material” of which they are made, as
sites for the hoarding of financial reserve. Remarkably, to underline the economic value
of Benvenuto’s jewelry, Avery turns to the images of the windows of Asprey’s or
Tiffany’s and of the Queen’s Crown. Avery’s juxtaposition is a powerful example of
what Goux means by the correspondence between the functioning of gold, the general
equivalences between gold, the nomos and the law in the systems of materialized

141
“A prescindere dalla loro qualita’ artistica, il valore intrinseco dei materiali di cui [i gioielli e gli oggetti
decorativi di Cellini] erano fatti giustificava un significativo grado di apprezzamento, un senso di
ammirazione perfettamente comprensibile, ancora oggi diffuso quando l’uomo della strada ammira le
vetrine di Asprey o di Tiffany, o guarda di sfuggita i gioielli della corona.” (Avery, 9)

80
economies, and it reinforcing the contiguity between gold and money when they function
as “master signifiers.” Avery is far, of course, from envisioning the possibility that gold
might be understood in any way other than as a precious metal that becomes money. His
prose allows no room for the gold of the poets, nor does it give any space to the
possibility that goldsmithing might constitute, besides a means to generate value, also a
poetically significant practice of making. In other words Avery, like Helfer, considers
gold exclusively as “the monetary cipher manipulated in the arithmetic of banking.”
142

Scholars have recently begun to discuss the possibility to understand Cellini’s
metallurgic activity as a process aiming not only at shaping bodies, but also, like
Prometheus, animating them. Moving from different theoretical perspectives, literary
critic Margherita Orsino and art historian Michael Cole have respectively argued that in
Cellini’s understanding matter is considered to be “a living substance” and that, for
Cellini, liquefied metals can be “understood as living.”
143
Considering in detail the
lengthy and detailed description of the casting of the Perseus enclosed in Book II the Vita,
these scholars have also pointed out how, in Cellini’s own understanding, metallurgy
corresponds to a practice of re-enactment of the archetypal act of life-giving.
144
Still, as
we are going to see in the following paragraphs, both have not fully explored the deep
consequences of what Goux names the “divorce” between gold’s “literary existence” and
the imperatives of commercial exchange.

142
Goux, 1984, 110.

143
Orsino, 104; Cole, 1999, 224; see also Cole, 2002, 2003 and 2004.

144
Orsino states that Cellini considered matter to be a living thing (“Cellini considera la materia come cosa
viva”) while Cole, drawing on Aristotelian pneumatology, sees Cellini’s work as a process giving “the
spirits a medium in metal.” (Cole, 1999, 225)

81
Michael Cole begins pointing out that, in Cellini’s times, sculpture was conceived
of as composite practice in which the material work of the “artist” enables him to
accomplish a “spiritual” journey towards self-realization: “The sculptor’s work amounts
to a series of procedures (composing, casting, carving, modeling, drawing), and that these
procedures realize not only the material, but also the artist.”
145
Recalling Agricola’s
reading of Aristotle, Cole then explains that in Cellini’s time there was a widespread
notion that “the primary ingredient in metals was watery, and that metals formed when
waters (or waters-to-be) became trapped in the earth and congealed. One implication […]
was that the ‘natural’ state of metals was not quite solid, but rather ‘unctuous’.”
146
As in
“Cellini’s culture” there was common acceptance of the Aristotelian notion that “the hard
metals of the world were found at the edge of a spirited, liquid state” and therefore metals,
“originating with water, were animated,” Cole concludes,
the idea that bronze could be brought to life is not something that Cellini made
up. It draws on conceptions about metals that he would have understood as both
ancient and contemporary, scientific assumptions about their nature, their
origins, and their potential. (Cole, 1999, 222)

For Cole, not only was Cellini “familiar with the basics of Aristotelian theories of
generation well before he begun work as a bronze caster,” but he also wrote the Vita to
show how his “process of making statues […] was something more than the mere act of
giving materials a shape:”
147

145
Cole, 2002, 13.

146
Cole, 1999, 222.

147
Cole, 1999, 222. Elsewhere (Cole, 2002, 638), Cole quotes the Duorum librorum Mercurii Trismegisti
Pimandriscilicet et Asclepii (“Just as the master and father –or god, to use his greatest name- is maker of
the gods in heaven, so is man the maker of the gods that are in the temple, content to be near the humans.

82
the classical term for the melting of ores during the casting of a statue is
profilare (literally, to breathe forth”). Cellini’s imaginative descriptions of the
caster’s operations suggest that the metal infused into the mouth of a mold
constitutes a different sort of figurative breath: the caster, infusing life into an
earthen form, pouring spirits into the mouth of his mold, repeats God’s act of
breathing life into the world’s first sculpture, His earthen Adam. (Cole, 2003,
140)
148

Cellini’s capability to repeat God’s act of inflating life into matter, Cole argues,
makes him a “demonic” figure invested with supernatural powers and who finally
“arrives at the beginning of immortality.”
149
In the course of the sixteenth century, Cole
recalls, works such as the Asclepius of Hermes Trismegistus propagated the idea “of the
divine nature of the human artifice,” and “Renaissance artists, in conducting their
operations,” were quite used to “call on supernatural help, asking muses, genii, planetary
governors, and even angels to enable their work.”
150
Thus, Cellini’s notion of metallurgy
as a mode of breath-giving would resonate with “the idea of the demonic,” that “cuts
across not only […] early modern literature of magic and witchcraft but also that of
art.”
151

Not only are humans illuminated’ they illuminate as well”) to argue that for Cellini “the process of making
statues […] was something more than the mere act of giving materials a shape. What God did with them
with his own works was to ‘illuminate’ them, and humans, if they were to follow his lead, had to do the
same.” (Cole, 2002b, 630).

148
Elsewhere, Cole adds that: “presenting himself as a pourer of metals, Cellini discovered, he could do
something no stonecutter could: he could explain just how he spirited his figures” (Cole, 1999, 221).

149
Cole, 1999, 225. For Cellini, Cole also states, what God did with men with his own work was to
‘illuminate’ them, and therefore “humans, if they were to follow his lead, had to do the same.” Cole also
recalls that according to the Vita, Cellini entered into a ‘diabolico furore’ and that “sounds like both an
exorcism and an act of metempsychosis” when casting his Perseus (Cole, 2002b, 631).

150
Cole, 2002b, 631 and 622.

151
Cole, 2002b, 621.

83
According to Cole, the main example of Cellini’s “daemonic” work is constituted
by his casting of the Perseus, described in the Vita as a process of inflation of life into
metal where the infusion of liquefied metal into the mold corresponds to the inflation of
life into an earthen form. According to Cole, the textual references to Benvenuto’s
“resuscitation” of the metal shows that Cellini considered himself capable of repeating
the primordial act of bringing the first man to life. The making of Perseus
took place, so to speak, within the breast of earth. Making man will have to go
beyond giving him a form in clay; it must also involve ignition. If the making
of the first man is to be emulated, one cannot just shape bodies, one must also,
Prometheus-like, animate them. Cellini’s stories of casting are consistent with
his poetry insofar as the marvel of Cellini’s fusione (casting) is its capacity for
infusione (infusion). Once liquified metals are understood as living, the
pouring of them into the armed mold could reproduce the archetypal act of
life-giving. (Cole, 1999, 224-225)
152

The possibility to understand Cellini’s metallurgy as a “supernatural” activity that
gives life to the metal has been also discussed by literary critic Margherita Orsino. She
begins arguing that, throughout the Vita, the element of “fire” dominates Cellini’s
temperament and personality, and that Cellini’s “privileged” relationship with the
element of fire is at the basis of his remarkable dexterity as a metallurgist.
153
Cellini’s
casting, for Orsino, is a “challenge to the laws of physics” or a “diabolic art” that, using
the “mythical power of the blacksmith” allows the caster to blend two or more metals,
that are usually separated in nature, forcing the liquid matter to descend into the mould

152
The same passage is verbatim presented also in Cole, 2002, 58.

153
Orsino speaks of Cellini’s “relazione privilegiata con l’aspetto igneo” (95), and argue that Cellini
constructed his own myth “in relazione al fuoco, all’arte della forgia e alla tradizione filosofica ermetica
fiorentina” (95). Cellini “costruisce […] il proprio mito su […] questa destrezza con il fuoco ch’egli
manifesta non solo al momento della fusione dei una scultura, ma anche in diverse altre circostanze di tutto
il racconto” (95).Il fuoco è l’elemento nel quale e col quale si compie la creazione.” (Orsino, 106)

84
rather than evaporate.”
154
At this point, Orsino links Cellini’s understanding of casting to
the notion, initially elaborated by Italian critic Guglielminetti, that the Vita is a narrative
centered upon its main character’s progression from damnation to redemption. More
specifically, Orsino shows how the text can be read as an “initiatory journey” in which
one can observe “Benvenuto’s progressive transformation from artillerist to magician,
and eventually to blacksmith.”
155
Throughout the Vita, in summary, for Orsino Cellini
elaborates “a symbolic plot that recuperates the mythical topoi of the metallurgist and the
alchemist” and that shows how Benvenuto’s transformation into blacksmith is the
“ultimate center of the artist’s self-mythization”:
156

Like the alchemists do, Cellini considers matter a living thing. [...] The
process in different stages that the alchemist performs on the metals to extract
the philosopher’s stone corresponds [in the Vita] to a dramatic scenario of
suffering, death and resurrection of matter. The alchemist himself lives the
phases from suffering to rebirth as a process of purification. Here the artist,
like his work, has been exposed to the risk of dying in the process of
transformation, but having been capable to resuscitate the matter he managed

154
Cellini uses his “arte diabolica in virtù dei poteri mitici del fabbro.” His work is “una sfida alle regole
fisiche” (102), that is performed “contro natura: prima perché la fusione lega due metalli separati in natura,
poi perché obbliga l’elemento incandescente a scendere nello stampo invece che a salire” (103). … “una
sfida alle regole fisiche” (Orsino, 102).

155
Cellini is for Orsino an “artigliere” (as in the episodes of the Sack of Rome), then “mago” (in occasion
of the two necromantic sessions at the Colosseo), and he eventually becomes a “fabbro” (in Book II).

156
For Orsino, the Vita can be read as a “percorso iniziatico” (106) that posits Cellini’s transformation as
“il vero fulcro dell’auto-mitizzazione dell’artista” (99). Cellini’s Vita elaborates, in Orsino’s words, “un
ordito simbolico che riprende i topoi dei miti del fabbro e dell’alchimista” (Orsino, 110). Orsino’s
examination of the Vita is deeply informed by Marziano Guglielminetti’s reading of the text, according to
which “il palese sdoppiamento fra autore ed attore conferma, ancora una volta, che la Vita non è mai il
riepilogo più o meno impegnato d’un’esistenza in corso, ma sempre ed esclusivamente la ricostruzione e
l’interpretazione a priori di un destino ricostruibile nella sua dialettica di opposti” (Guglielminetti, 333). On
this basis, Guglielminetti argues that “Se il primo libro della Vita è cadenzato e bilanciato secondo il ritmo
della discesa nel peccato e dell’ascesa a Dio, il libro secondo conosce una parabola sostanzialmente
rettilinea e statica.” (Guglielminetti, 354)

85
to escape himself from death. […] The myth of the metallurgist is, like the
myth of the alchemist, a promethean myth. (Orsino, 104-107
157

The climactic moment of Cellini’s “resuscitation of matter”, in which the “artist”
“attracts and concentrates on himself the fury of the elements and the dis-order of the
matter”, occurs in the casting of Perseus.
158
At this point in the narrative, for Orsino,
Cellini realizes his Grand Oeuvre, reaching “a point of arrival” that turns his “great
misfortune” into “high felicity and glorious well-being” (Vita, II, LXXV).
159

Finally, Orsino concludes arguing that the Vita not only displays Cellini’s
privileged relationship with the element of fire, but it also posits fire as the element
whose manipulation allows him (the “biographical” Cellini) to self-fashion “his own
myth” and to realize, through casting, his promethean “act of creation”. Orsino does not
mention, though, the fact that in the capitolo that separates Book I and II Benvenuto is

157
“Al pari degli alchimisti, Cellini considera la materia cosa viva […] L’operazione in diverse tappe che
l’alchimista compie sui metalli per estrarne la pietra filosofale, corrisponde a uno scenario drammatico di
sofferenza, morte e resurrezione della materia. L’alchimista vive lui stesso queste fasi della sofferenza alla
rinascita come purificazione. Qui l’artista, come l’opera, ha rischiato di morire nell’operazione di
trasformazione, ma essendo riuscito a resuscitare la materia è sfuggito lui stesso alla morte.” (104) […]
Quello dell’artista fabbro è, come quello dell’alchimista, un mito prometeico.” (107).
For Orsino, then, Cellini’ personality is characterized by an ambivalent “exceptional power” (99) which is
neither positive or negative per se. (“[In Cellini] il temperamento dominato dal fuoco non è positivo o
negativo in sé” 98). Also, Cellini believed in Ficino’s theory of the influence of stars and planets over the
character of men: “secondo la teoria ficininana dell’influenza astrale e planetaria, non solo le stelle
determinano la tendenza dell’uomo alla nascita, ma continuano a influenzarlo e a determinare così i suoi
diversi stati d’animo alternado la sua natura” (97). Benvenuto “riesce a volte a vincere sulla cattiva fortuna
tramite l’atto creatore”, that is to say through “una lotta, quella contro le forze naturali e soprannaturali, in
cui egli mette in pericolo la sua vita fisica e spirituale” (108) … “l’autobiografia permette a Cellini, proprio
in quello spazio che si crea fra verità storica e racconto, di costruire un vero e proprio mito di sé come
artista scultore.” (Orsino, 109)

158
When he casts his Perseus, Cellini “attira e concentra su di sé e la sua opera la furia degli elementi e il
disordine della materia.” (Orsino, 104)

159
As Orsino has put it, in making the Perseus Cellini realized the work “attraverso la quale egli spera di
cambiare il suo destino, di mutare il male e la sfortuna in ‘sommo piacere e glorioso bene’ (II, LXXV).”
(Orsino, 102)

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initiated to the secrets of poiesis specifically at the moment he physically mixes, in prison,
water and earth. Even more relevantly, she also neglects the fact that, when his body is
inflated by the fire of poiesis, Benvenuto “becomes gold.” According to Orsino, then,
Benvenuto’s trajectory from his “great misfortune” into “high felicity and glorious well-
being” represents a mere “evolution” from artisanship to blacksmithery, and it is not clear
whether or not such a “progression” is related in any way to the structures of power of the
society Cellini lived in.
If taken together, Cole’s and Orsino’s readings of the Vita offer a variety of
problematic points of departure for the investigation of the literary text. In the first place,
both Cole and Orsino conflate the figure of the “biographical” Cellini with the literary
protagonist of the Vita’s narrative, Benvenuto. In the second place, both scholars read the
text in order to reconstruct features of Cellini’s “personality” rather than elaborating on
the problem of how we conceive a literary work when we inscribe it into the genre of the
autobiography. In the third place, both Cole and Orsino find support for their arguments
moving from a variety of sources that are external to the Vita, and in this way they both
put what the text actually says in the background. For example, while Cole reaches the
conclusion that Cellini had a “living” notion of the metal, looking at a number of
philosophical works that were read in Italian neo-platonic circles (but that are never
mentioned in the context of the Vita), Orsino detects the promethean valences of Cellini’s

87
activity, considering Michelangelo’s sonnets and Marsilio Ficino’s 1464 translation of
the Pymander (Corpus Hermeticum).
160

In my perspective, the work done by Cole and Orsino constitutes an analytic
background that needs to be implemented by a consideration of the “political”
consequences of the conception of gold (of the poets) that the Vita brings forth. The gold
into which Benvenuto transforms, in fact, not only displays Cellini’s understanding of
metals as “lively matters,” but is also recasts “value” as a matter of knowledge and not
mathematical banking; it dismantles the convertibility of all gold into money; it envisions
procreation as a practice that may occur outside the mechanisms of patriarchal self-
legitimation. Finally, if we see gold, language, the father and the phallus as isomorphic
equivalents that are all related to the nomos and the law, Benvenuto’s poetic gold even
undermines the fundamental sign of power (namely, financial gold) on which the
authority of his various patrons—namely the Pope, Cosimo, Francis I, and others—rely.

THE VITA’S ALMA
In his Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Giorgio Agamben
scrutinizes a series of main dichotomies that have informed the epistemological
foundation of Western culture—such as those opposing literature and philosophy, eros

160
Cole focuses on Pymander’s following passage : “Inde fumus quidam magnus in sonitum erumpebat. Ex
sonitu vox egrediebatur, quam ego luminis vocem existimabam: ex hac luminis voce, verbum factum
prodiit. Verbum hoc naturæ humidæ adstans, eam fuebat. Ex humidæ autem naturae visceribus, syncerus ac
levis ignis protinus evolans, alta petit. Aer quoque levis spiritui parens, mediam ragionem inter ignem et
aquam sortiebatur. Terra vero et aqua sic invicem comixtae iacebant, ut terrem facies aquis obruta nusquam
pateret. Haec duo deinde commota sunt a spiritali verbo, quod eis superferebatur, aures eorum
circumsonans.” Marsilio Ficino, Mercurii Trismegisti Pymander, De potestate et sapientia Dei (Basilea,
1532). Orsino, instead, elaborates on Michelangelo’s verses: “Sol pur col foco il fabbro il ferro stende / al
concetto suo caro e bel lavoro / né senza foco alcuno artista l’oro / al sommo grado suo raffina e rende; / né
l’unica fenice sé riprende / se non prim’arsa” (Orsino, 107).

88
and language, and joy and knowledge—in order to elaborate on the psychoanalytical
notion of the “fetish object.” The fetish object can be defined as “the presence of an
absence,” or “something” that is located beyond the canonical distinction between
materiality and transcendence, because it is, at one time, simultaneously “concrete and
tangible” and “immaterial and intangible.” One of the fundamental characteristics of the
fetish object is that it “alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never
really be possessed.”
161

The poetic sign is capable, for Agamben, of performing the “impossible task of
appropriating what must in every case remain unappropriable.”
162
It does so when it
function as a “knowing representation” that mediates between materiality and desire, that
is to say when it allows the human spirit to “capture” its fetish. The poetic’s capture of
the fetish object takes place outside the distinction that opposes matter and spirit, and for
this reason it is capable of eluding the dichotomy that opposes materiality and
immateriality. A main example of poetic sign working as “knowing representation” can
be found in some Stilnovistic lyrics. Here,
the object of love is in fact a phantasm, but this phantasm is a “spirit,” inserted,
as such, in a pneumatic circle in which the limits separating internal and
external, corporeal and incorporeal, desire and its object, are abolished.
(Agamben, 1993, 108)

In Stilnovistic poetry, then, the “poetic sign” succeeds in appropriating the un-
appropriable. In a series of poems by Cavalcanti and Dante, for example, the circulation
of a “ ‘subtle’, ‘animal,’ and ‘noble’ […] spirit that enters and exits through the eyes”

161
Agamben, 1993, 34.

162
Agamben, 1993, xviii.

89
allows the poetic sign to mediates between material and immaterial, and in this way to
capture its fetish, namely the “stilnovistic” object of love.
163

At this point Agamben traces the “genealogy” of a theory, developed by
“European culture” from the eleventh century onwards, in which a number of
dichotomies, and in the first place the opposition between material and immaterial,
dissolve.
164
This theory is named “pneumo-phantasmology.” Despite having been
neglected by past and present scholars, pneumo-phantasmology can be considered “the
most imposing intellectual cathedral constructed by late medieval thought” because it is a
synthesis between the medieval “theory of the phantasm, of Aristotelian origin” and the
“Stoic-medical-Neoplatonic pneumatology.”
165
The theory of the phantasm, Agamben
explains, harks back to Antiquity. It understands “phantasy” as a speculation which
“imagines” the phantasms in the absence of the object and, as it is exemplarily shown by
Plato’s Philebus and Aristotle’s De Anima, it posits the cognitive process “as a
speculation in the strict sense, a reflection of the phantasms from mirror to mirror.”
166

Elements of phantasmology, Agamben continues, are quite recurrent in the works of
Averroës and Avicenna, and they are widely disseminated, with some variants, in a
number of medieval texts. Specifically focusing on the works of Averroës and Avicenna,
one can also start tracing the “genealogy” of a second theoretical frame, that was initially
distinct from phantasmology and that can be named the doctrine of the pneuma.

163
Agamben, 1993, 85 and ff.

164
Agamben, 1993, 72.

165
Agamben, 1993, 90 and 108.

166
Agamben, 1993, 81.

90
According to this doctrine, “the limits separating internal and external, corporeal and
incorporeal, desire and its object, are abolished.”
167
Like phantasmology, the origins of
pneumatology “must be very ancient.”
168

Agamben’s survey of pneumatology begins with a reading of Averroës and
Avicenna and it underlines that, in respectively speaking of a bodily “spirit that is
perfected in the brain” and an “internal heat that originates in the heart,” these two
authors underline the “spiritual nature” of the imaginative phantasm and both inscribe
into the theory of the phantasm the characteristic presence of a “power” that, while
having “its place and root in one part of the (living) body […] exercises its proper
functions elsewhere.”
169
A comprehensive outline of pneumatology is presented by
Aristotle’s De Generatione Animalium. Here, the pneuma is conceived of as “a hot breath
that originates from the exhalations of the blood.” The pneuma is “continuously inhaled”
“from the external air,” and it has two main “characteristic elements.” The first is its
“astral nature”. The second is its capability to “vivify the sperm”:
170

in all cases the semen contains within itself that which causes it to be fertile-
what is known as ‘hot’ substance, which is not fire nor any similar substance,
but the pneuma which is enclosed within the semen of foam-like stuff, and the
natural substance which is the pneuma; and this substance is analogous to the
element which belongs to the stars. (De Generatione Animalium 736b)
171

167
Agamben, 1993, 108.

168
Agamben, 1993, 91.

169
Agamben, 1993, 85.

170
Agamben, 1993, 91.

171
The origin of the doctrine of the pneuma, Agamben also explains, “must be very ancient.” Medieval
writers frequently referred to the following passage taken from Aristotle’s De Generatione Animalium
736b: “in all cases the semen contains within itself that which causes it to be fertile-what is known as ‘hot’
substance, which is not fire nor any similar substance, but the pneuma which is enclosed within the semen

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After Aristotle, Agamben continues, stoic philosophers elaborated on the pneuma
conceiving it as a “corporeal principle a subtle and luminous body, identical to the fire,
which pervades the universe and penetrates every living thing.” The understanding of the
pneuma as the world’s “living spirit,” for Agamben, underwent further elaboration in
Neoplatonic circles, where it started being mainly conceived of as a “subtle body that
accompanies the soul during the course of its soteriological romance from the stars to the
earth.”
172
Starting from the eleventh century, Agamben continues, “European culture”
developed a complex doctrine that superimposed “the interior image of Aristotelian
phantasmology with the warm breath (the vehicle of the soul and the life) of Stoic-
Neoplatonic pneumatology.”
173
This doctrine, that Agamben names “pneumo-
phantasmology” because it develops a synthesis between pneumology and
phantasmology, posits the pneuma as a sort of universal “breath that animates the
universe.” The pneumatic living principle is

of foam-like stuff, and the natural substance which is the pneuma; and this substance is analogous to the
element which belongs to the stars” (Agamben, 1993, 91). In Medieval sources, the pneuma is “a quid
medium between corporeal and the incorporeal” (99), a concrete and real mediator of the “ineffable union”
between soul and body” (99). It is represented as a “spirit” inserted in “a pneumatic circle in which the
limits separating internal and external, corporeal and incorporeal, desire and its object, are abolished.”
(108). “In a pneumatic culture, that is, in a culture founded on the notion of spirit as quid medium between
corporeal and incorporeal, the distinction between magic and science […] is of no use. Only the
obsolescence of pneumatology and the consequent semantic mutation that has brought the word "spirit" to
identify with the vague notion now familiar to us (and which acquired such a meaning only in opposition to
the term “matter”) will make possible the dichotomy between corporeal and incorporeal that is the
necessary condition of a distinction between science and magic. The so-called magical texts of the Middle
Ages (such as the astrological and alchemical ones) deal simply with certain aspects of pneumatology (in
particular, certain influences between spirit and spirit, or between spirit and body) and, in this regard, are
not essentially different from texts like the poems of Cavalcanti and Dante, which we would certainly not
define as magical” (99). “The breath that animates the universe, circulates in the arteries, and fertilizes the
sperm is the same one that, in the brain and in the heart, receives and forms the phantasms of the things we
see, imagine, dream, and love. Insofar as it is the subtle body of the soul, it is in addition the intermediary
between the soul and matter, the divine and the human.” (Agamben, 1993, 94)

172
Agamben, 1993, 92.

173
Agamben, 1993, 94.

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the same one that, in the brain and in the heart, receives and forms the
phantasms of the thing we see, imagine, dream, and love. Insofar as it is the
subtle body of the soul, it is in addition the intermediary between the soul and
the matter, the divine and the human, and, as such, allows the explanation of
all the influxes between corporeal and incorporeal, from magical fascination
to astrological inclinations. (Agamben, 1993, 94)

In pneumo-phantasmology, then, the pneuma appears to be “a quid medium
between corporeal and the incorporeal” which functions as a “concrete and real” mediator
of the “ineffable union” between soul and body.”
174
Phantasmological pneuma can not be
merely understood as a “spirit” that acquires meaning “only in opposition to the term
matter,” but rather it constitutes a trope that makes possible the over-coming of a number
of dichotomies. In pneumo-phantasmology, in short, “the limits separating internal and
external, corporeal and incorporeal, desire and its object, are abolished.”
175

Agamben’s consideration of the pneumo-phantasmological doctrine, as well as his
insights on the capability the poetic sign has to capture the “unappropriable” when it
challenges the distance between material and immaterial, provide us with a key to discuss
both Benvenuto’s transformation into gold and his relationship to the alma that, given by
God, makes him alive. A first example of how the Vita deals with the phantasmological
pneuma is presented at the end of Book I. Here, Benvenuto manipulates the primordial
matters of water and earth and envisions the spheres of the sun, while he also perceives
the entrance of a vivifying force, that the text calls “the fire of poiesis,” into his own body:
The, then came the fire of Poesy [poesia]
Into my carcase, by the way methought

174
Agamben, 1993, 99.

175
Agamben, 1993, 108.

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Whence bread goes forth: there was none else at all. (Vita, capitolo, lines 57-
59)
176

As we can read in this passage, like the Stilnovistic poets Benvenuto conceives
the pneuma is a “living breath” that enters, and transforms, bodies. On a note, it should
also be added that, unlike the Stilnovist pneuma that as Agamben recalls enters and exits
the poet’s body through his eyes, in the case of Benvenuto the living principle of the
universe enters the body through the posterior. A second reference to the pneuma that, in
pneumo-phantasmological theories, vivifies and animates the universe and the living
beings is given in the initial sonnet of the Vita. Here, the poet praises the God of Nature
for having provided him with his alma, and for having taken care of it so that he, the poet,
can undertake and, literally, “live” his highest undertakings:
This troubled life of mine I write
to thank the God of nature,
who conveyed my soul to me and then took care of it,
that various noble undertakings I have done and live. (Vita, opening sonnet,
lines 1-4)
177

A reading of the Vita informed by a pneumo-phantasmologic perspective helps to
do more than simply assessing the text’s references to a pneuma, or spirit, that
“penetrates every living thing.”
178
It can be used, in fact, to assess the status of the entire
Vita as a text that, at least of a rhetorical level, performs the “appropriation of the

176
“Allora allor della poesia il fuoco / M’entrò nel corpo, e credo che la via / Ond’esce il pan: ché non
v’era altro loco.” (Vita, capitolo, lines 55-59)

177
“Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo / per ringraziar lo Dio della natura, / che mi diè l’alma e poi ne ha
‘uto cura, / alte diverse ‘mprese ho fatte e vivo.” (Vita, capitolo, lines 1-4)

178
Agamben, 1993, 92.

94
unappropriable.” The fetish object that the Vita captures is, specifically, the initiation to
the secrets of generation. If considered this way, the Vita can be considered a “poetic
sign” that, besides accounting for its main character’s provision of an alma and his
initiation to the knowledge of creation, also tends to the elusion of the binary between
materiality and immateriality. It does so not only mediating, like the Stilnovist lyric,
between the soul and the matter but also constituting, at least on a performative level, an
accomplishment to which Benvenuto “gives breath” after he has been transformed into
gold and he has acquired the inner secrets of generation. Among other implications, this
would support the hypothesis that the Vita constitutes, like the bronze Perseus and the
golden saltcellar, one of Benvenuto’s living accomplishments. The alma, then, is the
“lively” pneuma that god has given to Benvenuto and that Benvenuto becomes capable,
by means of poetic making, of transmitting to metals. It also constitutes, as the beginning
of the text suggests, the living pneuma that the poet suffuses, by means of writing, into
the literary matter that he manipulates.
On a broader level, Agamben’s conception of the “poetic sign” as a medium by
which literature can succeed in the “impossible task” to capture the unappropriable can
also help to analyze the status and the functioning of “language” in a literary text that, as
the Vita does, challenges “imperative” notions of gold and fatherhood as “master
signifiers.” Language, gold, the father and the phallus, we have seen, share for Goux an
analogous function when they are conceived of as the general equivalents in a universal
logic of exchanges. Still, we have also seen, literature also retains the potential to subvert
the whole system of general equivalents that establishes direct correspondences between

95
the gold and financial value, the language and the things it designates, fatherhood and
nomos. We can now add that, in employing language as a “poetic sign” instead of a
mirror directly depicting “reality,” the Vita also recasts language as not a general
equivalent of value, but rather as a “sign open to an infinity of possibilities.” The text
contests, then, the truth of language alongside with the truths of gold and of the father,
and it recasts language itself as a medium capable of performing the “impossible task” of
appropriating what must remain in all cases unappropriable. In the case of Cellini’s Vita,
the poetic sign allows Benvenuto to capture the living pneuma that animates the universe,
therefore making his literary accomplishment result into an organism permeated with life.

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INTERMEZZO : GOLD IN THE METAMORPHOSES AND PETROLIO
The account for the ages of mankind presented in Book I of the Metamorphoses,
Rhoda Hendricks writes in Classical Gods and Heros, parallels the description of the
“early periods of man’s life on earth” described by Hesiod in his Works and Days.
179

Both Hesiod’s and Ovid’s narratives, for example, depict the passage from the “golden”
age to the age of iron “iron” as a transition from an ‘originary’ state of happiness to a
later moment in time characterized by toil, hardship, destruction and suffering. Still, the
Metamorphoses and Works and Days diverge under a variety of perspectives. While the
Works and Days “gives five races of man, putting a race or Age of Heroes between the
ages of Bronze and Iron,” Ovid’s text gives only four Ages, namely those of gold, silver,
bronze and iron.
180
In addition, while Hesiod’s account states that each age of mankind
follows the creation, performed by Zeus, of a “new” race of men, in the Metamorphoses
each age is characterized by a progressive “corruption” of the same and one mankind,
with no acts of creation performed by gods. Finally, the two texts differ in their
representations of the iron age. In the account from the Works and Days, the iron age has
“some good fortune mingled with the bad.” In Ovid’s version, the age of iron features the
extraction and presence, alongside iron, of “harmful” gold—a metal that is not mentioned
in Hesiod.
In dissimilarity to the Works and Days, then, Metamorphoses’ Book I
distinguishes between two kinds of gold. One is the gold that designates “the first age

179
Hendricks, 26. This quote refers to Met. I, 89-162 and Work and Days 106-180.

180
Hendricks, 26.

97
born” or the aurea prima aetas. The other is the gold that, during the age of iron,
mankind extracts from “the bowels of the earth.”
181
In the description of the aurea aetas,
the text does not mention the usage of “physical” gold as means of measurement and
exchange of financial value. In the context of the iron age, instead, gold is mainly
understood as a material substance that, once it is put in circulation among men, causes
treachery, pillages, and disputes.
During the golden age, the Metamorphoses also explains, mankind was nourished
by the fruits spontaneously produced by the uncultivated earth, and men gathered the
products of the soil without engaging in either labor or war. In this context, Ovid’s
narrative employs gold as a trope to designate earth’s intrinsic procreative powers:
Golden was the first age born; with no avenger,
Of its own free will and without law it cultivated faith and right.
There was no punishment or fear, no threatening words were etched
Upon the fixed bronze, no crowd or suppliants
Feared the judge’s face, but, without an avenger, all were safe.
Not yet had the felled pine tree come down from its own mountain
To the flowing waves to visit a foreign world,
And mortals knew no shores besides their own.
Not yet were towns enclosed by steep ditches,
There was no bulge with straight bronze, there were no twisted horns,
No helmets and no sword; without the need for soldiers
The races lived out their peaceful leisure, free of care.
The earth too, unworked and untouched by the hoe,
And uninjured by any ploughs, gave everything of its own accord,
And, content with foods produced by no one’s labour,
Men gathered arbutus fruits and mountain strawberries,
Cornels and blackberries that cling to the tough brambles,
And acorns which had fallen from the spreading tree of Jove.
Spring was eternal, and gentle Zephyr’s with warming
Breezes soothed the flowers that had sprung up unsown.
Soon even the unploughed earth was bearing corn
And the untilled field grew white with swelling ears of grain;

181
Met. I, 89 and I, 138.

98
Now there ran rivers of milk, now rivers of nectar
And yellow honey dripped from the green holm-oak. (Met., I, 89-112)
182

The first age is “golden,” then, because characterized by the earth’s spontaneous
generation of its fruits, while the absence of processes the cultivation and in the
excavation of the land makes men free from labor and fear. A very similar emphasis on
the relationship between the splendor of gold and the earthly generation of fruits is
presented at the beginning of Book II, where the text describes the golden radiance of the
Palace of the Sun. Here, the sun reverberates with the “universal light of the
immeasurable world” which sustains the earth in nourishing “men and cities, wood and
beasts, rivers and nymphs.”
183

After having described the ages of gold, and after having established a
correspondence between the image of gold and the generative potential of the soil,
Metamorphoses’ Book I accounts for mankind’s transition from the aurea aetas to the
ages of silver, bronze, and then iron. As these four different ages represent the
progressive passage of mankind from an “originary” condition of “happiness” to a state
of corruption and deterioration, the text suggests we can put these four metals in

182
“Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae uindice nullo, / sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat. / Poena
metusque aberant, nec uerba minantia fixo / aere ligabantur, nec supplex turba timebat / iudicis ora sui, sed
errant sine uindice tuti. / Nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut uiseret orbem, / montibus in liquidas pinus
descenderat undas, / nullaque mortales praeter tua litora norant. / Nondum praecipites cingebant oppida
fossae; / non tuba derecti, non aeris cornua flexi, / non galeae, non ensis erat; sine militis usu / mollia
securae peragebant otia gentes. / Ipse quoue immunis rastroque intacta nec ullis / saucia uomeribus per se
dabat omnia tellus; / contentique cibis nullo cogente creatis / arbuteos fetus montanaque fraga legebant /
cornaque et in duris haerentia mora rubetis / et quae deciderant patula Iouis arbore glandes. / Uer erat
aeternum, placidique tepentibus auris / mulcebant zephyri natos sine semine flores. / Mox etiam fruges
tellus inarata ferebat, / nec renouatus ager grauidis canebat aristis; / flumina iam lactis, iam flumina necatris
ibant, / flauaque de uiridi stillabant ilice mella.” (Met., I, 89-112)

183
II, 35 and II, 15-6.

99
“hierarchical” order. More pointedly, as the text says accounting for the arrival of Jupiter,
gold is “superior” to silver. Silver, in turn, is said to be “more precious than the yellow
bronze.”
184
Finally, iron is “baser” than bronze:
185

After Saturn had been sent to shadowy Tartarus
And the world was under Jupiter, there succeeded the silver race,
Inferior to gold, but more precious than yellow bronze. (I, 113-115)
186

…
Third after that followed the bronze race,
Fiercer of character and readier to turn to dreadful arms,
Yet not sunk in sin. From hard iron was the last race made;
At once there burst upon this age of baser vein
All evil; and shame and truth and trust fled away,
And in their place succeeded fraud and treachery
And plots and violence and sinful love of possession. (I, 125-131)
187

Immediately after having introduced this “taxonomy,” though, the text also
challenges unproblematic understandings of gold as, simply, the most “precious” of the
four metals. The text states, in fact, that iron age is characterized by the presence of not
one but two metals. These metals are gold and iron, and both constitute an “incitement to
evils.”
188
As they both appear at a moment when “truth and trust” are substituted, among
mankind, by “fraud and treachery, plots and violence and sinful love of possession,” gold

184
I, 115.

185
I, 128.

186
“Postquam Saturno tenebrosa in Tartara misso / sub Ioue mundus erat, subiit argentea proles, / auro
deterior, fuluo pretiosior aere.” (I, 113-5)

187
“Tertia post illam successit aenea proles, / saueor ingeniis et ad horrida promptior arma, / non scelerata
tamen. De duro est ultima ferro; / protinus inrupit uenae peioris in aeuum / omne nefas; fugere pudor
uerumque fidesque, / in quorum subiere locum fraudesque dolique / insidiaeque et uis at amor sceleratus
habendi.” (I, 125-131)

188
I, 140.

100
and iron determine the propagation among men of “slaughter” and “violence.”
189
In the
iron age, the text also suggests, both gold and iron also retain some kind of economic
value, because they are both “produced” when the bowels of the earth are dug out to
extract “the riches” there concealed:
And not only grain and due foods were demanded
of the rich soil, but a way was made into the bowels of the earth,
and riches, which it had concealed and moved to Stygian
shadows, were dug up to be an incitement to evils.
And now harmful iron, and gold more harmful than iron,
had emerged; there emerged war; there emerged war which fights with both
and shakes its clashing arms with bloody hand.” (I, 137-143).
190

Finally, in the iron age the soil ceases to spontaneously generate its products, and
it has to be cultivated in order to produce its “demanded” nourishment:
The soil, held in common before, like the light of the sun
Or the air, was marked with a long boundary by a cautious surveyor. (I, 135-
6)
191

In the golden age, where mankind is “content with foods produced by no one’s
labour” and men sustain themselves gathering “arbutus fruits and mountain strawberries,

189
I, 129-131and I, 161-2. A differentiation between two different types of gold is also made explicit in the
last book of the poem, in the course of the speech of Pythagoras. First, Pythagoras states that generations
“have come to iron / from gold” (XV, 260-1), therefore identifying the aurea aetas described in book I as,
simply, “gold.”

190
“Nec tantum segetes alimentaque debita diues / poscebatur humus, sed itum est in uiscera terrae /
quasque recondiderat Stygiisque admouerat umbris / effodiuntur opes, inritamenta malorum. / Iamque
nocens ferrum ferroque nocentius aurum / prodierat; prodit bellum, quod pugan utroque / sanguineaque
manu crepitantia concutit arma.” (I, 135-143)

191
“Communemque prius ceu lumina solis et auras / cautus humum longo signauit limite mensor. ” (I, 135-
6)

101
cornels and blackberries,” the soil remains “uninjured by any ploughs.”
192
Also, all land
is “held in common” and it is not divided by boundaries, so that the human race does not
know “shores besides their own.”
193
In the light of the distinction between different the
“pater” and the “genitor” outlined in my previous section, we can also add that, in the
poem’s representation of both the aurea aetas and the doors of the Palace of the Sun,
earth appears to be a procreative figure that brings forth its fruits without recurring to the
intervention of any “father.” Procreation therefore appears to be “entirely inscribed” as
Goux would say, in the realm of “nature.”
In the age of iron, in turn, man cultivates earth so that the soil can produce its
“grain and due foods,” Also, “a way” is “made into the bowels of the earth” with the
purpose to dig out its “riches.”
194
Finally, land is no more “held in common,” because the
soil has been “marked by a long boundary by a cautious surveyor.”
195

We can observe here how the appearance, among mankind, of financial value
(serving, for example, that measure value of the “riches” mankind extracts from earth), is
simultaneous to both the transformation of land from a matter that is “held in common”
into a commodity whose possession originates treachery, warfare and fear, and to the

192
“The unploughed earth was bearing corn / and the untilled field grew white with swelling ears of grain; /
now there run rivers of milk, now rivers of nectar / and yellow honey dripped from the green holm-oak” (I,
109-112). “The earth […], unworked and untouched by the hoe, / and uninjured by any ploughs, gave
everything of its own accord” (I, 101-2: “Per se dabat omnia tellus”). In this way, man could gather
“arbutus fruits and mountain strawberries, / cornels and blackberries.” (I, 104-5)

193
I,138. Also, the towns are not “enclosed by steep ditches” (I, 97).

194
I, 137-9.

195
I, 136. The marking of boundaries performed by the surveyor who first appeared in the age of iron
resonates with Roman colonialism, that as Emilio Sereni writes in his History of the Italian Agricultural
Landscape (1961), originates from the Roman colonialist practice of giving limits and boundaries to the
conquered land.

102
advent of the practices of cultivation that put the generative potential of the soil to work.
In this context, the text also specifies, gold is even more “harmful” than iron. Since here
gold is primarily understood for its financial functions, and its accumulation is an
“incitement to evils,” this gold resonates with the metal that in the Vita is used as a means
of payment, an instrument to settle contrasts, a cause of disputes and, as it is exemplarily
put in the account of the dramatic events occurring during the Sack of Rome, as a
substance used to hoard reserves and protect them from theft.
The distinction between the two different valences of gold brought forward in
Book I is reiterated in several other passages of the Metamorphoses. A paradigmatic
representation of the “harmful” valence of the gold that first appeared in the iron age is
presented in the story of King Midas. Driven by his greed and thirst for accumulation,
Midas asks Bacchus to give him the gift of transforming anything into gold. He says:
“make whatever / I touch with my body turn to yellow gold.”
196

Midas’s request, defined by the text both “ill” and “sinful”, is fulfilled literally by
Bacchus.
197
Midas’ capability to transform into gold anything he touches quickly
becomes a form of punishment, as it condemns him to the impossibility of nourishing
himself with the products of earth:
… if he touched the reward of Ceres
With his right hand, the gifts of Ceres began to grow hard;
Or if he prepared to tear at the food with his eager teeth,
Sheets of yellow metal was the food he pressed against as he touched it with
his teeth;

196
“Effice, quidquid / corpore contigero, fulvum vertatur in aurum.” (XI, 102-3)

197
XI, 132.

103
He had mixed the source of his gift with pure water:
You could have seen liquid gold flowing down his open mouth. (XI, 121-6)
198

Midas’s gold resonates with the “harmful” metal that, from the iron age onwards,
leads men to “fraud and treachery, and plots and violence and sinful love of
possession.”
199
It has a distinct economical value, because it makes Midas “both rich and
pitiable.”
200
It is a “sinful” substance, because it bewilders for “the strangeness of its
evil.”
201
Finally, it also relates the functioning of gold as a general equivalent of exchange
to those forms of authority whose power derives, in systems of materialized economy,
specifically from gold’s functioning as a general equivalent of exchange. Midas is a king
and not, for example, a poet. This might suggest that Mida’s punishment of remaining
physically captured by the gold he accumulates exemplifies, besides gold’s
“harmfulness,” also the correspondence that exists between gold and nomos.
A further depiction of gold as a metal that, functioning both as an instrument for
the circulation of financial value and as a physical substance in which such a value can be

198
“Sive ille sue Cerealia dextra / munera contigerat, Cerealia dona rigebant; / sive dapes avido convellere
dente parabat, / lamina fulva dapes, admoto dente, premebat; / miscuerat puris auctorem muneris undis: /
fusile per rictus aurum fluitare videres. ” (XI, 121-126).

199
I, 130-131.

200
XI, 127. Said to be “tormented” by the gold he “had prayed for” (XI,130,128), in his final speech to
Bacchus Midas directly associates his greed with sin, therefore reinforcing the notion of gold’s
“harmfulness” presented by the text in the description of the iron age from Book I: “ ‘Give pardon, Lenaean
father! I have sinned,’ he said, / ‘but have mercy, I pray, and snatch me from this fair-seeming curse’.” (XI,
132-3)
The characterization of monetary gold as an incitement to greed, envy and disputes—consistently with the
depiction of the gold that disseminates treachery and warfare among mankind in the iron age—also
emerges in the course of the description of Bacchus’s visit to the vineyards of Timolus alongside the river
Pactolos. The text says that before the arrival of Midas, the river Pactolos was not “golden,” and as such it
was not an object of dispute and it was not “envied for its costly sands.” (XI, 87-8)

201
XI, 127.

104
stored, leads men to “evil” is given in the context of the stories of Ulixes. When in Book
XIII this character persuades the Danääns that they have been betrayed, gold is depicted
as a physical substance that physically embodies value, and in this acceptance it is used
as “bodily” evidence that demonstrates treachery.
202
In Book XIV, when it accounts for
the moment in which Ulixes’ companions open the Aeolos’ oxhide, the text again
presents gold as a financially precious matter whose possession disseminates greed and
envy among men:
His comrades, overcome by envy and desire for plunder,
thought that there was gold there and removed the strings from the winds.
(XIV, 229-30)
203

At other points of the narration, the Metamorphoses reiterates the association
between gold’s “sinful” or “harmful” potential and warfare, disputes, and greed. In the
context of the Trojan War, for example, Laomedon establishes a reward in gold for
building the city walls for the king of Phrygia.
204
Also in the dramatic episode of
Polyxena’s condemnation to death, the text evokes gold’s functioning as a measure of
value and a physical means of monetary exchange. Polyxena states, in fact, that her
mother does not own any precious metal that she can use to pay a ransom.
205
Finally, gold
is used to make payments also in the history of Aglauros and Minerva and in Book VII,

202
XIII, 60.

203
“Invidia socios praedaeque cupidine victos / esse ratos aurum, dempisse ligamina ventis.” (XIV, 229-
230)

204
“Pactus pro moenibus aurum.” (XI, 204)

205
Shortly before dying, Polyxena asks that her own corpse will be given back to her mother without a
ransom, because her mother does not own any gold: “let her not pay with gold for the sad rite of the burial,
/ but with tears; before, when she could, she used indeed to pay with gold.” (XIII, 473)

105
where it is “greedily demanded,” gold causes Arne’s punishment and her transformation
into a bird.
206

In contrast to this series of depictions of gold as harmful substance, which
embodies financial value and also circulates among Kings, warriors, and other figures,
other passages from the Metamorphoses instead present gold as a matter that has no
financial value. In these passages, the depiction of gold resonates with the textual
description of the golden age, because the metal is at different degrees presented as a
lively substance related to processes of gestation, generation and procreation. The
generative potential of gold, for example, is alluded to in book IV where, while
accounting for the generation of Perseus, the text represents gold as the substance with
which Iupiter fecundates Danaë.
207
As a fecundating substance, this gold resonates with
the “lively spirit” that, as Agamben has pointed out, according to pneumatic doctrines
pervaded the whole universe and vivifies all living things.
Another evident example of how the Metamorphoses depicts gold as a generative
matter is presented where the text describes the Palace of the Sun.
208
The description
originates at the end of Book I, where Clymene states that the sun, with his radiance,

206
II, 750-2; VII, 466-7. Aglauros asks Minerva “for her services, a great weight of gold” (II, 750-1). Other
references to gold can be found in the description of Hercules, who owns a golden belt (IX, 189) and who
dwells at the extreme portion of land, where trees present branches and fruits in gold (IV, 637). Trees
produce golden fruits in the stories of Hippomenes and Atalanta (a golden tree has three golden apples, X,
650) and when Sybil of Cumae orders to Aeneas to pick a golden branch from a tree (XIV,114). In Jason’s
conquest of the Fleece, a dragon protects the tree’s gold. (VII, 151)

207
IV, 611 and 698. After having stated that that Danaë has been fecundated by Iupiter “in a shower of
gold” (IV, 611), the text says that Perseus as was born “to Iupiter and to her [Danaë] whom Iupiter made
pregnant with fertile gold.” (IV, 698)

208
I, 765-771 and II, 1-43.

106
“regulates the world” and is Phaethon’s “true father.”
209
Book II of the Metamorphoses
begins with a detailed portrayal of the regia solis. It states that the palace is bright with,
and it is also made of, flashing gold:
The palace of the Sun was tall with lofty columns,
And bright with flashing gold and pyrope that mimics flames
Its gable top was covered with gleaming ivory,
the double doors radiated the brightness of their silver (II, 1-4)
210

As Robert Brown has remarked, the text puts a remarkable emphasis on the
golden splendor of the palace of the sun:
the external characteristics of the palace symbolize the nature of the sun. […]
Its brightness and warmth, in particular, already stressed at the end of book
one, are conveyed through the enumeration of shiny precious materials – a
traditional feature of such ekphraseis which Ovid had taken over […] for the
sake of its symbolic value. Lines 2-4 contain no less than six words implying
brightness (clara, micante, flammas , nitidum, radiabant, lumine) and four for
shiny materials (auro, pyropo, ebur, argenti) […] here, and in the reference to
the ‘flickering gold’ (micante) and doors which ‘radiate’ with light
(‘radiabant lumine’), the symbolism becomes more specific. (Brown, 212)

After its initial reference to the golden brightness of the palace, the text engages
into an ekphrastic depiction of its doors. These have been carved by Mulciber:
Artistry outdid the medium; for on them Mulciber
Had carved the seas that surround the earth with them,
The earth’s disk and the sky which hangs above the disk.
…
The land had men and cities, woods and beasts,
Rivers and nymphs and all the spirits of the countryside. (II, 5-16)
211

209
I, 771-765 and following. While stretching “both arms toward heaven and gazing at the sun’s light” (I,
767) Clymene tells Paheton: “I swear to you, my son, by this bright radiance, / with its flashing beams,
which hears and sees us, / that you were fathered by the Sun that you behold, by him / who regulates the
world.” (I, 768-771)

210
“Regia solis erat sublimibus alta columnis, / clara micante auro flammasque imitante pyropo; / cuius
ebur nitidum fastigia summa tegebat, / argenti bifore radiabant lumine ualuae.” (II, 1-4)

107
Like the golden saliera that Benvenuto makes for the King of France,

the doors of
the regia solis are shaped to give a representation of the earth generating its fruits.
212
The
text evidently suggests, in addition, that earth constitutes here a “maternal figure” for it
nourishes “men and cities wood and beasts, river and nymphs.”
213
Still, the text’s
understanding of earth as a “mother” of life does not envision the presence of any
mastering, fecundating or cultivating father. Even the Sun, whose Phaeton is the son,
does not directly participate (for example by means of insemination) in the earth’s
generation of its fruits, because the Sun merely “regulates the life on earth” while sitting
at the center of the four seasons, the Hours, the Day, the Month, the Year and the
Centuries.
214
Mutating Goux’s words, here earth is not anthropomorphically conceived of
as “a mother in the sense of a character of the human family,” and it is not the “opposite”
of any father. Rather, the text brings forward an understanding of earth as a lively matter
that spontaneously generates its offspring, and whose begetting of life occurs outside
what Goux names the “supreme principles” of patriarchal monotheism. Earth does not
constitute, in other words, a “maternal” figure that complements fatherhood, nor is it

211
“Materiam superabat opus; nam Mulciber illic / Aequora caelarat medias cingentia terras / Terrarumque
orbem caelumque, quod imminet orbi, / caeruleos habet unda deos, Tritona canorum / proteaque ambiguum
ballenarumque prementem / aegaeona suis immania terga lacertis / doridaque et natas, quarum pars nare
uidetur, / pars in mole sedens uiridis siccare capillos, / pisce uehi quaedam; facies non omnibus una, / non
diuersa tamen, qualem decet esse sororum. / Terra uiros urbesque gerit siluasque ferasque / fulminaque et
nymphas et cetera numina ruris. / Haec super inposita est caeli fulgentis imago / signaque sex foribus
dextris totidemque sinistris.” (II, 5-18)

212
Describing the saltcellar, the Vita reads: “per la Terra avevo figurato una bellissima donna [...] Sotto a
questa femina avevo fatto i più belli animali che produca la terra; e i suoi scogli terrestri avevo parte
ismaltati e parte lasciati d’oro.” (II, XXXVI, 485-6)

213
II, 15.

214
I, 768-71 and II, 20; I, 770; II, 25.

108
conceived of as a “feminine” matter that brings forward its offspring after a “masculine”
agency has cultivated or inseminated her.
After the description of the palace of the sun and its doors, the text moves on to
Phaeton’s visit to the sun. The text presents here a number of similarities to the account,
contained in Cellini’s Vita, of Benvenuto’s vision of the spheres of the sun. The two texts
converge in associating the image of the Sun with the reverberation of gold: in the
Metamorphoses, the sun is “bright with flashing gold and pyrope that mimic flames.”
215

In the Vita, the sun is a disk of “pure melted gold” that, with its radiance, blinds
Benvenuto.
216
In the Metamorphoses , Phaeton, has to come to a stop at some point of his
ascension towards his “father,” because he is blinded by the sun’s brightness.
217
In the
Vita, Benvenuto cannot bear the light and has to close his eyes before “keeping them
wide open.”
Like the gold from Book’s I prima aetas (I, 90), which is “more precious” than
silver but does not function as money, also the gold of the Sun’s Palace cannot circulate
among men, and it does not cause the battles, disputes, treacheries and pillage that
characterize the iron age. And, like the gold into which Benvenuto transforms in the
Vita’s capitolo, the gold that Mulciber has craftily shaped to make the doors of the Palace
of the Sun is never said to have been extracted from the earth’s belly, it is not owned and
exchanged by Kings and warriors, and it is not considered for its financial value.

215
Met., II, 2.

216
Vita, I, CXXII.

217
Phaeton can “not bear the light / too close.” (II, 21-2)

109
Lastly, a juxtaposition between the Vita and the Metamorphoses could also
develop a re-reading of the obscure statement “the artistry outdid the medium” (II, 5),
with which the Latin text begins the description of the doors of the palace that have been
carved by Mulciber. Some scholars have argued that the phrase materiam superabat opus
might refer to both the work done by Vulcan, who created the palace of the sun, and
Ovid’s poetic act of production of the Metamorphoses. Robert Brown, for example, has
argued that there is an “analogous significance” between the description of the door
carvings of the Sun’s palace and the whole text of the Metamorphoses. For Brown, in fact,
“Vulcan’s universe recalls Ovid’s account of creation,” and both the Metamorphoses and
Vulcan’s doors share a common “cosmic breath”:
the phrase ‘materiam superabat opus’ means ‘the artistry surpassed the raw
materials’, i.e. the precious metals which are Vulcan’s medium, […] and its
words and connotations are applicable to Ovid’s treatment of metamorphoses
and myth. (Brown, 219)

To Brown’s statement, one might add that the phrase “materiam superabat opus”
also opens the possibility that, according to the narrative, poetic matter is “precious”
specifically because inflated, and shining, with the living pneuma that permeates the
cosmos. Such matter, vitalized by what Brown names the “cosmic breath” of the universe,
resonates with both the gold of the poets (the means by which the doors are made) and
the earth, or the mother of life that spontaneously generates its fruits without the
intervention of any cultivating, fecundating, or fathering agency. Mulciber in this frame
would not appear to constitute a fecundating father, but rather as a Prometheus-like figure
which shapes matter capturing the living breath that permeates the cosmos. The products

110
of poiesis (including both the palace’s doors and the literary text) would become, in this
last perspective, the lively product of a manipulation of language, in which words
function not merely as general equivalents of value and meaning, but rather shape the
“treasure” a poet “conjures in the imagination.”
218

The phrase “materiam superabat opus” seems indeed to function as a zeugma that
relates the gold of procreation to the aurea aetas, that throughout the narrative is a
prerogative of the gods, and the gold (as a non financial matter) that the poet manipulates.
As we have seen, according to the Metamorphoses the gold that circulates among men is
cause of treachery and envy; it propagates slaughter and pillage, and it instigates (as in
the case of King Midas) thirst for accumulation and possession. The gold of the aurea
aetas, we have also seen, is on the contrary a generative matter that symbolizes
procreation and spontaneous begetting of fruits. These two golds would then appear, at a
first sight, as two distinct substances, of which one is related to the gods and the nature—
and the other to mankind. Ovid’s poem opens up, tough, the possibility that humans can
engage in a quest for the immaterial, yet incommensurably valuable, gold of creation, and
it does so in the account of the Argonauts’ search for the Golden Fleece. The search for
the Fleece accounted for in the first portion of Book VII of the Metamorphoses can be
read as an initiative journey towards the origins of the world, but it also corresponds to
the possibility men have—in this case, Jason—to acquire the appearance of a god,
therefore invalidating the distinction between the human and the divine.

218
Goux and Di Piero, 110.

111
The version of the story of the Argonauts presented by the Metamorphoses is one
among the several variants of the story told by ancient and modern texts. Ancient sources
include Greek texts, such as Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode and Apollonius of Rhodes’s
Argonautica, and a number of Latin texts such as Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica and the
literary work by Varro Aticinus.
219
Compared to Apollonius’ Argonautica, the
Metamorphoses seems to operate a process of both selection and expansion of the
different episodes. The story of Jason antecedent to his arrival in Colchis, that in the
Argonautica occupies three books (1618 lines), is in the Metamorphoses summarized in a
few verses. The episode of Jason’s casting of the dragon’s teeth in the earth, that in the
Greek text is presented at the end of Book II, is in the Metamoprhoses given great
emphasis, and it occupies about 30 lines.
The incipit from Book VII of the Metamorphoses summarizes in few sentences
the content of the first three book of Apollonius’ Argonautica:
And now the Minyans in their Pagasean ship, were cutting through the sea,
And they had seen Phineus dragging out his helpless old age
In eternal night and the young men born to Aquilo
Had chased the virgin birds from the unhappy old man’s face,
And, after enduring many things under famous Jason, at last
They had reached the swift waters of the muddy Phasis;

219
The story of the Argonauts is of “ancient origin” (Bridgman, 141), and it was probably widely known at
the time Apollonius of Rhodes wrote his Argonautica. For Parke, the “Argonautic legend” was originally
an epic of Thessaly, dating back to the Myceneaean priod. (Parke, 37). It was possibly known in some form
to the poet(s) of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and it is mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony (992ff) and in
Euripide’s Medea. The earliest (known) complete work on the Argonautic expedition is a sixth-century
poem ascribed to Epimonides of Creete. It dates from the same period as the Naupactia, a catalogue of
Heroines, which covered part of the material of the Argonautica and that may have served as a source for
Apollonius (Huxley, esp. 80-84). In the sixth and fifth centuries, Herodorus of Heraclea, Pherecydes of
Syros, Simonides of Ceos and Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote about the Argonauts; and in the fourth
century Antimachus of Colophon probably dealt with the love of Jason and Medea in his elegy the Lyde. In
this frame, according to Bridgman, Apollonius’ text shows that “the Argonautic voyage is in part an
acculturation establishing Greek tradition.” (Bridgman, 143)

112
And when they approached the king and demanded Phrixus’ fleece,
A dreadful condition of great toils was given to the Minyans. (VII, 1-8)
220

After this passage, Book VII indulges in describing Medea’s love for Jason. To
provide a brief summary, at first Medea explicitly states that she “would never exchange
what the whole world possesses” for the man she loves.
221
Then, the text describes the
love Medea experiences for Jason as a “mighty fire” that, “hidden beneath a spread of
ash” grows bright and glows “all over Medea’s face.”
222
Medea then promises Jason to
help him in exchange for the promise of their marriage. Jason swears his oath by the Sun,
defined by the text as the “all-seeing father.”
223

The next day, in order to win the Golden Fleece Jason has to undergo a series of
“dreadful toils” that Aeëtes has asked him to perform. The text explains in advance that
Jason is capable of accomplishing these difficult tasks specifically because he has been
told by Medea the secrets of how to use her “enchanted herbs.” We also know, from a
later passage from the narration, that these herbs are a product spontaneously given to
sorcerers by the earth.
224
Using these herbs, Jason faces the bulls with no fear:
The peoples assembled at Mars’ sacred fields
And took their places of the slope; the king himself sat down in the middle

220
“Iamque fretum Minyae Pagasaea puppe secabant, / Perpetuaque trahens inopem sub nocte senectam /
Phineus visus erat, iuvenesque Aquilone creati / Virgineas volucres miseri senis ore fugurant; / Multaque
perpessi claro sub iasone tandem / Contigerant rapidas limosi Phasidos undas. / Dumque adeunt regem
Phrixeaque vellera poscunt, / Lex dicitur Minyis magnorum horrenda laborum.” (VII, 1-8).

221
VII, 59-60.

222
VII, 9, VII, 80 and VII, 78.

223
VII, 96.

224
Invocating the Earth, Medea says: “you, Earth, who provide sorcerers with their potent herbs, / and
breezes and winds, mountains, streams and lakes.” (VII,196-197).

113
Of his host, clad in purple and conspicuous with his ivory sceptre.
Look, the bronze-footed bulls are breathing Vulcan
From their adamantine nostrils, and the grass touched by the heat
Caught light; and as full forges will resound,
Or stones when freed from the earth kiln
Catch fire from a sprinkling of clear water,
So did their breasts revolving flames shut up within,
And their burnt throats sound; yet Aeson’s son went
To meet them. (VII, 101-111)
225

This passage seems to make reference to metallurgy, because it juxtaposes the life
that permeates the “bronze-footed” bulls with the animated “fire” that emerges from the
furnace. The breath of the bulls, released from their metallic nostrils, is compared by the
text to the vapor emerging from the furnace at the moment the matter catches fire from a
sprinkling of clear water. Having been initiated by Medea into her secret knowledge, at
this point in the narrative Jason knows how to domesticate the bulls. He puts them
“beneath the yoke” and he forces “them to draw the heavy weight / of the plough and to
cut into a plain unused to iron.”
226

Jason then casts the snake’s teeth into the trace the bulls have excavated in the
earth:
Then from the bronze helmet he took
The viper’s teeth and scattered them over the fields he had ploughed.
(VII,121-2)
227

225
“Conveniunt populi sacrum Mavortis in arvum / consistuntque iugis. Mexio rex ipse resedit / agmine
purpureus sceptroque insignis eburno. / Ecce adamanteis Vulcanum naribus efflant / aeripedes tauri,
tactaeque vaporibus herbae / ardent; utque solent pleni resonare camini, / aut ubi terrena silices fornace
soluti / concipiunt ignem liquidarum adspergine aquarum, / pectora sic intus clausas volventia flammas /
gutturaque usta sonant. Tamen illis Aesone natus / obvius it.” (VII, 101-111)

226
VII,118-9. “Subpositosque iugo pondus grave cogit aratri / ducere et insuetum ferro proscindere
campum.” (VII, 119-120)

227
Galea tum sumit aëna / vipereos dentes, et aratos spargit in agros. (VII, 121-122)

114
It is at this point in the narration that the text shows the terra mater displaying its
generative potential. Humus appears to be a mater of life, because it is a locus of
foetalization where anthropomorphic figures arise:
The earth softened the seeds pre-steeped with powerful poison
And the teeth he had sown grew and became new bodies;
And as a baby takes on human appearance in its mother’s
Womb and is built up within part by part
And, unless it’s due, does not come out into the common air,
So, when human forms had been made in the bowels
Of the pregnant earth, they rose up in the fruitful field
And, what was more amazing, they clashed arms produced at the same time.
(VII, 123-130)
228

After his confrontation with the three supernatural challenges of Aeëtes—the fire-
breathing bulls (VII, 104-119), the army grown from the serpent’s teeth (120-142), and
the dragon that guards the golden fleece (149-156)—Jason “gains the gold” (155-156).
229

It should be noted that, as the text suggests, the Fleece is (like the sun) characterized by a
distinct radiance (VI, 720) and its value is not measurable in financial terms (VII, 59).
230

The Metamorphoses’ depiction of the search and the recovery, by Jason and the
Argonauts, of the Golden Fleece is relevant, for the purpose of the present work, not only
because it shows an understanding of gold as a “precious matter” subtracted from the

228
“Semina mollit humus valido praetincta veneno, / et crescunt fiuntque sati nova corpora dentes; / utque
hominis speciem materna sumit in alvo / perque suos intus numeros componitur infans / nec nisi matures
communes exit in auras, / sic, ubi visceribus gravidae telluris imago / effecta est hominis, feto consurgit in
arvo, / quodque magis mirum est, simul edita concuit arma” (VII, 123-130). The episode is also recounted
in Apollonius’ Argon. III, 1383.

229
“Et auro / heros Aesonius potitur.” (VII, 155-6)

230
As the text puts it, Medea would not “exchange” Jason for all the world’s goods.

115
imperatives of economic exchange, but also because it can be juxtaposed to the series of
Appunti, enclosed in Petrolio, entitled “Gli Argonauti.”
231

Petrolio’s Argonautica is preceded by a fragmentary note, titled Appunto 34ter,
and then by the lengthy Appunto 34bis. In this second note, an anonymous narrator
recounts the story of the petrifaction of a “neurotic” intellectual. This character becomes
“heavy mass” and falls “like lead from the Third Heaven” as soon as it is no longer
illuminated by the “luminous force” that has “the face of God.” The matter into which the
intellectual has been transformed, being both “precious” and “toxic,” constitutes an
enigma that the scientists cannot explain:
some geologists found the mass in a melancholy little valley in a desert lost in
the middle of another desert. In the middle was, in fact, the stone that had
fallen from the sky: it was divinely beautiful, like a conch shell or a Moore
statue. All the tints of the desert seen from a distance were concentrated in it:
the paradisiacal rose, the veining of a sublime orange, red, ocher, violet–an
indefinable violet, similar to the luminous indigo of tropical evenings when
the sun has just set. The geologists loaded that precious find into their Land
Rover as well as they could and carried it to the civilized world to analyze it.
But they did not succeed, and today the stone remains a pure enigma. The
infinite variety of its soft colors corresponds to an infinite variety of materials,
but none of them have really been identified, because each mineral presents
contradictory characteristics, both in relation to itself and in relation to the
other minerals with which it is amalgamated or compounded; it has not been
possible to distinguish in that rock what appeared precious from what
appeared to be worthless or even /toxic/; it has not been possible so far to
determine if the analysis is impossible and the contradictions absolute,
because the fact is, the research, which has never been suspended, always
gives good partial results. (Note 34bis, 115)
232

231
These Appunti are numbered: 36-40, 36, 36b, 36b, 36c, a second Appunto titled 36d, 36e, 36f, 36g, 36h,
36i, 36l, 36m and 36n.

232
“Dei geologi trovarono il masso nella malinconica valletta di un deserto perduto in mezzo a un altro
deserto. Nel mezzo, c’era appunto, la pietra caduta dal cielo: che era divinamente bella, come una
conchiglia o una statua di Moore. Tutte le tinte del deserto visto da lontano si concentravano in essa: il rosa
paradisiaco, le venature d’un sublime rosso ranciato, l’ocra, il violetto – un violetto indefinibile, simile
piuttosto all’indaco luminoso delle sere tropicali quando è appena calato il sole. I geologi caricarono come

116
The section that follows, constituted by a series of appunti titled “Gli Argonauti,”
is explicitly presented to the reader as notes to be developed. The text initially specifies
that the Argonautica presented here is an embryonic form of a text that will have to be
written—at least its main sections—“in Greek.” The fragmentary note titled Appunti 36-
40, then, states that from the first paragraph onwards the subject of Petrolio’s
Argonautica will consist in both a process of “mapping of an unmapped place” and a
process of initiation. It reads:
“Mythical” journey to the Orient, reconstruction of Apollonius Rhodius.
Unmapped place (where the figure of the Hero who has gone before appears.
Series of “visions” reconstructed on the Myth of the journey as initiation, etc.,
mixed with realistic visions of true journeys (without names or precise
information, as in dreams, etc.)
↓
Write it all in Greek (with the translation summarized telegraphically but
exhaustively in the titles of the sections)
↑
Understood as initiation, the basis of the second journey–but also as the
passage of time for the maturation of a “political era”: bringing the situation to
an end through the substitution of Troya for the president of ENI and therefore
the assassination of the latter. The arrival of Carlo from a “dreamed” trip to
the Orient puts him like a dreaming automaton in the hands of the assassins.
(Notes 36-40, 116)
233

poterono sulla land rover quel prezioso reperto, e lo portarono nel mondo della civiltà per analizzarlo. Ma
non ci riuscirono, e ancor oggi quella pietra resta un puro enigma. L’infinita varietà dei suoi soavi colori
corrisponde a un’infinita varietà di materie, ma nessuna di esse è stata realmente individuata, perché ogni
minerale presenta caratteri contraddittori, sia in rapporto a se stesso sia in rapporto agli altri minerali con
cui è amalgamato o composto: non è stato possibile separare in quella pietra ciò che appariva prezioso da
ciò che appariva privo di ogni valore o addirittura ⌐venefico¬: non è stato possibile finora neanche
definirne l’impossibilità all’analisi e la contraddittorietà assoluta, perché, in concreto, le ricerche, mai
sospese, danno sempre dei buoni risultati parziali.” (Appunto 34bis, 136-7)

233
“Viaggio ‘mitico’ in Oriente, rifacimento di Apollonio Rodio. Angolo non mappizzato (dove appare la
figura dell’Eroe che ha preceduto¹. Serie di ‘visioni’ rifatte sul Mito del Viaggio come iniziazione ecc.,
miste a visioni realistiche di viaggi veri (senza nomi o precisazioni, come nei sogni ecc.)
↓
scriverlo tutto in greco (con la traduzione riassunta telegraficamente ma esaurientemente nei titoli dei
paragrafi)
↑

117
After this fragment, the other appunti titled “Gli Argonuati” present a series of
telegraphic notes that depict a “departure by jet,” the “landing in Tehran,” and Carlo’s
finding of the “traces of heroes who passed in the preceding centuries through the first
/mapping/ of the world” (Appunto 36). It should be noted that, as the telegraphic series of
notes that makes up Appunti 36-40 suggest, the whole section titled “Gli Argonauti”
seems to embody the “transitional form” which, from the first written fragment onwards,
characterizes the entire structure of Petrolio.
There are several analogies between Ovid’s version of the story of Jason and the
events in the section titled “Gli Argonauti” in Petrolio. Both Jason and Carlo travel
towards the orient. At the very end of Book VI from the Metamorphoses, Jason is said to
travel on a shoreless sea, or a space that has not been yet mapped or colonized. In
Petrolio, Carlo travels in a desert that, as the text states, has not been mapped yet. Both
characters seem to move in a space that, like the land depicted in the account of the aurea
aetas in Book I in the Metamorphoses, has not been colonized or cultivated. And as the
search for the Golden Fleece provides in the Metamorphoses the context for Jason’s
initiation to the secrets of Medea and his cultivation of the earth into anthropomorphic
figures, so in Petrolio the search for oil appears as the journey that makes Carlo an
initiated. As the text reads, Carlo’s “‘Mythical’ journey to the Orient” is a “reconstruction
of Apollonius Rhodius” that ought to be “understood as initiation.”
234

Inteso come iniziazione, fondamento del viaggio secondo – ma anche come passaggio di tempo per la
maturazione di un ‘tempo politico’: l’arrestarsi della situazione per la sostituzione di troya al Presidente
dell’Eni e quindi dell’assassinio di quest’ultimo. L’arrivo di Carlo da un ‘sognato’ viaggio in Oriente lo
mette come sognante automa nelle mani dei sicari.” (Appunti 36-60, Gli Argonauti, 139).

234
Notes 36-40, 116.

118
More specifically, in Petrolio Carlo travels eastwards for the Italian oil company
ENI, but the search does not result in the finding, or the extraction, of any black gold.
Rather, Carlo’s journey is depicted as an “initiation” that makes him capable, in the
fragments that immediately follow Petrolio’s “Argonautica” to undergo the first of his
transsexual metamorphoses, as we can read in a note titled “first fundamental moment” of
the poem.
Carlo’s chest grew heavy. It was an unnatural weight, a mass that crushed him
as it rose. At the same time, his lower abdomen became light and empty. […]
He went straight to his room and undressed, looking at himself in the big plain
mirror <…> of virile intimacy. Suddenly he saw what had happened to him.
Two large breasts–no longer young–hung from his chest; and below his belly
there was nothing: the hair between his legs had disappeared, and–only by
touching it and pulling apart the lips–did Carlo, with the clear gaze of one who
from his experience as an outlaw has learned the philosophy of the poor, see the
little fold that was his new sex. (Note 51, 162-3)
235

The comparison between Jason and Carlo can be used to draw a series of parallels
between the Metamorphoses, Petrolio and Cellini’s Vita. In the first place the figures of
Jason, Benvenuto and Carlo can be all posited as figures of initiation. In the case of Jason,
initiation occurs at the moment he learns from the sun’s niece, Medea, how to use the
herbs she provided. For Benvenuto, the initiation to the secrets of creation occurs when
he is sees the spheres of the sun and he is transformed into gold. In Petrolio, Carlo is
“initiated” in the course of his first journey towards the Orient and after this journey,

235
“⌐Il petto di Carlo si appesantí. Era un peso innaturale, un cumulo che lo schiacciava levitando. Nel
tempo stesso, il basso ventre si alleggerí e si svuotò. [...] Andò dritto in camera e si spogliò, guardandosi al
grande specchio disadorno <...> dell’intimità virile. Subito vide che cos’era successo di lui. Due grandi seni
gli pendevano – non piú freschi – nel petto; e nel ventre non c’era niente: il pelame gli scompariva tra le
gambe, e solo toccandola e allargandone le labbra, Carlo, con lo sguardo lucido di chi ha imparato da
un’esperienza di bandito la filosofia del povero, vide la piccola piaga ch’era il suo nuovo sesso.” (Appunto
51, 194).

119
during which he sees the “trembling light” of oil reverberating in the desert, and after
which he undergoes his first transformation into woman.
In the second place, Jason’s, Benvenuto’s and Carlo’s initiations are all related to
these characters’ acquisition of the capability to inflate life into matter. In the
Metamorphoses Jason makes the bulls plough the soil and, casting the snake’s teeth into
the ground, he cultivates the earth and makes it generate a number of anthropomorphic
figures. In the Vita, after his initiation to the “secrets of nature” Benvenuto becomes
capable, as the descriptions of his saltcellar, his Perseus and his literary accomplishment
entitled Vita show, of inflating a living breath into different matters. In Petrolio, the
search for the Golden Fleece brings Carlo to a journey towards an “unmapped place”
where he first transforms from man into woman. We also know, from a fragment
following the section titled “Gli Argonauti,” that Carlo’s sexual transformation is related
to his capability to write. A few fragments after Carlo’s return from the Orient, in fact,
the text suggests that Carlo has be initiated to the secrets of poiesis. More specifically,
Petrolio states that Carlo has now become a poet capable of “writing” his “poetry” by
means of “living.”
236

The three text converge, in conclusion, not only in bringing forward a
representation of gold as both a precious matter with a distinct financial value, that as a
commodity circulates among men, but also as a symbolic matter related to procreation
and poetic making. In addition, in representing the quest towards symbolic gold

236
Note 50 (158) reads: “in a certain sense Carlo was a poet, even though the idea of writing verses was far
removed from him. Like many people, he wrote poetry by living” (“Carlo era inqualche modo un poeta,
anche se era lontana da lui l’idea di scrivere versi. Scriveva, come tanti, la poesia vivendo.” Appunto 50,
189)

120
respectively performed by the characters of Jason, Benvenuto and Carlo, the
Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio all show, at least on the level of their narrative,
how a human can “travel” towards the accession of the inner secrets of creation. In
Ovid’s carmen, Jason “gains” the gold that makes the Fleece immediately after the earth
has transformed into a series of anthropomorphic figures. In the Vita, Benvenuto’s
acquisition of the secrets of Nature makes him a character that “resembles” God “like no
other man on earth.” In Petrolio, Carlo’s argonautica is depicted as a “mythical journey”
towards origins and it is related to his capability to “write” his life. In all three the cases,
the search for “poetic” gold entails not only the initiation of Jason, Benvenuto and Carlo
to secret knowledge, but also the transformation of matter into life. The three characters’
transformative and initiatory processes, besides giving them the capability to procreate
life by manipulating the matter, also converge in recasting poiesis as a process of
transformation of matter into life. Bringing forward an understanding of poiesis as a
generative process, whose byproduct results in what Goux would call the “gold of the
poets,” all three the texts challenge the imperative according to which gold should be
primarily understood for its financial value and they all show, at least on the rhetorical
level, how the human “resemble the god of nature” at the moment he is initiated into the
secrets of life and ceases to be a figure of father. Poetic begetting of life appears, in the
last instance, as a mode of manipulation, and not of insemination, of matter.

121
CHAPTER TWO : OIL IN PETROLIO
In several of its Appunti, Petrolio depicts crude oil as a substance that comes to
Italy from the Middle East and that, once refined, provides heating, illumination and
energy to propel cars, buses, planes and machines. In the context of Carlo’s journeys
towards the “Orient” oil is instead defined as a “renewed” Golden Fleece that emanates,
in the desert, a trembling radiance and whose search is connected with this character’s
multiple trans-sexual transformations. Throughout the narrative, oil (petrolio) is also
figuratively depicted as substance that Petrolio’s narrator manipulates in the gestation of
the literary text we are reading. In these different acceptances, oil is mainly conceived of
a generative substance that both transforms and causes transformation. When it is refined
and then used to provide illumination and fuel, for example, oil is a commodity whose
circulation sustains economic development and financial growth. When it is used as a
trope to depict the malleable matter that Petrolio’s narrator manipulates, in turn, oil is
depicted as a viscous fluid that captures the “flow of life and time.”
The text’s narrative distinguishes between different ways in which the lively
potential of oil is put to work. When the circulation of oil is depicted in relationship with
the passage from the natural “cycle” of the season to a “new” industrial cycle of
production and consumption, the burning of refined oil generates a radiance that
substitutes the light of the sun and which lights a never-ending series of “days of
summer.” In this context, mankind is deprived of what the text calls its “inner life.” Every
person imitates a series of universal models that exemplify what the text names processes
of cultural “homologation” and “petrifaction.”

122
To the fragments detailing these usages of oil, Petrolio alternates passages in
which crude oil can be better seen retaining it is “originary” living potential. In the course
of Carlo’s travels towards the orient, for example, oil is a substance that reverberates, sua
sponte, in the desert, and whose search engages a kind of “return” to the origins of the
world. In the context of Petrolio’s narrator’s meta-narrative interventions in which he
directly addresses the reader, oil is conceived of as lively matter whose mere image, as
one of the last fragments explains, instigates the poet to produce the text we are reading.
Petrolio therefore depicts oil in ambivalence.
On the one hand, the text shows how oil’s living potential, once it is subordinated
to the economic imperatives of industrialization, ultimately leads to processes cultural
“genocide” and “petrifaction.” On the other hand, Petrolio shows how a poet, while
manipulating oil, can subtract this precious matter from the capitalist imperatives of
economic profit and exchange. Like the Metamorphoses’ treatment of earth and the
Vita’s depiction of gold, then, the representation of oil in Petrolio is informed by a
critique of the very way in which mankind makes use of the lively potential of matter.
When oil (or earth, or gold) is not understood as a material commodity and its value is
not mainly understood in financial terms, its manipulation transform poiesis into a
process that gains access to the “secrets” of creation and that shows matter’s lively
potential.
At the end of Appunto 62, when Carmelo and Carlo leave Rome to enter the
“nothing” and the “emptiness” of the city’s outskirts, the text indulges in a lengthy
description of the contrast between the countryside and the city. In this context, roads,

123
gas pumps and vehicles are all portrayed as “signs of life” that interrupt the vast
emptiness of the desert. Here, oil mainly appears to be a commodity that functions as a
combustible that puts into motion vehicles and machines:
there were big lumberyards here and there; broken hedges and, behind them,
the empty spaces of abandoned construction sites, the plowed and fragrant
earth of gardens … and, behind them, an immense world of immense
skyscrapers, their light burning in nothingness. That road, which was now in
the country or the extreme periphery, led by roundabout route /to Tiburtina/,
still in the heart of the city, <…> with traffic signals whose breathless yellow
lights blinked on and off; <…> and they passed hysterical cars returning from
the movies …
The consular road that headed toward the luckless hills of the Ciociaria joined,
by means of a short connecting road, a big new four-lane highway set between
high embankments. /There/ the car began to go at a more /sustained/ speed. A
short ascent led that trunk of highway up toward the hills and level with the
great plain, its reddish lights in groups here and there under the setting moon,
which had suddenly reappeared, Along with the moon, a big used-car lot
appeared, on the right, below the embankment, illuminated as if by the
blinding white light of a village festival; in the middle was a shed from which
radiated an even stronger white light (in the emptiness and silence), and all
around in the asphalt parking lot, surrounded by a high chain-link fence, were
long shining rows of Fiats, Alfa Romeos, Volkswagens, Citroëns, BMWs.
Difficult to distinguish in all that light and that orderly chaos of cars, but just
beside it, was a little Shell station, which added its yellow light to that sea of
lights between the highway lost in the plain at the foot of the mountains and
an immense suburb of small grey, unwhitewashed houses densely crowded
together in the moonless part of the sky. (Note 62, p. 257-9)
237

237
“C’erano grandi depositi di legname qua e là; siepi sventrate con dietro i vuoti di sterri deserti; casupole
coi tetti di bandone, capannoni sprangati e vuoti, orti colmi di terra smossa e odorosa, con disordinate file
di grassi cavoli o fave, e fichi inselvatichiti: e, dietro, una barriera immensa di grattacieli lontani, con le
loro luci accese sul nulla. Con un lungo giro, quella strada ormai di campagna o di estrema periferia,
portava alla ⌐Tiburtina¬, ancora nel cuore della città, <...> coi semafori di cui si accendevano e spegnevano
le sfiatate luci gialle; <...> e passavano isteriche macchine di ritorno dai cinema ...
Con un piccolo raccordo, la strada consolare che puntava verso gli sfortunati colli della Ciociaria, si
immetteva in una grande strada, incassata tra profondi argini, con una doppia corsia, nuova. ⌐Lungo
quella¬ la macchina cominciò ad andare a velocità piú ⌐sostenuta¬. Una breve salita portò quel tronco di
autostrada incassata all’altezza della grande pianura in salita verso i colli, con le sue luci rossicce a gruppi
qua e là, sotto la luna – improvvisamente riapparsa – che tramontava. Con la luna, apparve, a destra, sotto
l’argine, illuminata dalla luce bianca e accecante di una festa paesana, un grande deposito di macchine
usate: in mezzo c’era un capannone da cui raggiava una luce ancora piú bianca e forte (nel vuoto e nel
silenzio), e tutto intorno nello spiazzo asfaltato e recintato di alte reti metalliche, si stendevano le Fiat, le
Alfa Romeo, le Volkswagen, le Citroën, le Bmw, in lunghe, accecanti file. Era difficile indivduarlo, in
mezzo a tutta quella luce e a quell’ordinato caos di macchine, ma proprio lí accanto c’era un piccolo

124
Albeit never explicitly mentioning the “black gold,” this passage indicates that the
circulation of refined oil, and its massive usage as fuel, are central characteristics that
shape the physiognomy of the social space Carlo navigates. The city appears to be an
“immense grey space” whose life is “signaled” by the presence of roads, traffic signs and
yellow lights, and within which the circulation of vehicles produces an “orderly chaos”
punctuated by shining radiance of gas stations, parking lots and car show-rooms. A
commodity and fuel, refined oil is combusted to put into motion the “life” of the space of
Italy.
In other Appunti that represent oil as a capitalist commodity, the production,
exchange and consumption of “black gold” are directly associated to the functioning of
political power as well as to the development of entrepreneurial structures. In Appunto 5,
for example, Italian state-run oil company ENI is portrayed as a “space where real power
is found” and that is connected, by means of a complex system of ramifications, to the
centers of political and economic power. In two later Appunti (both entitled 22c) the text
describes how the refinement and commercialization of oil leads not only to the
development of ENI, but also to the “proliferation” of the different ramification of
powerful political and economic “Empires.” In Appunto 36h, which depicts the Italian
government’s and ENI’s search for the “black gold” in Damascus, Palmyra and Kuwait,
oil is used to fuel “little oil stoves” in a hotel hosting Italian government’s

distributore della Shell, che contribuiva con la sua luce gialla, a tutta quella luminaria, tra l’autostrada persa
nella pianura pedemontana e una borgata immensa dalle fitte piccole case grigie senza calce assiepata dalla
parte senza luna del cielo.” (Appunto 62, 296,298).

125
functionaries.
238
In Appunto 97, which depicts a meeting in which a number of politicians
gather around the Head of the State and decide how to “restructure” ENI, the functioning
of Italian politics is presented as being based on the financial enterprises that manage the
circulation of oil. This Appunto, which features a long list of names of real politicians
that ruled Italian government in the first decades after WWII, also suggests that the
circulation of oil is a crucial factor in wider processes of cultural and social
“homologation” and deprivation of life within the social space of Italy. Making reference
to the mythological figure of Medea, at this point in its narrative the text designates
Italian politicians as “petrifiers” who turn “everything to stone.”
239
Then the text explains
that the “orientation of the government’s politics with respect to the oil companies”
corresponds to an act of “exhibitionism” in which “the heads of Medusa were ‘cut off’,”
and through which Italy is ultimately deprived of all its life.
240

The combustion of the oil used to provide heating and fuel, Petrolio indicates,
also gives off a distinctive radiance that uninterruptedly extends from the ultimate
borders of the “civilization” to its inner core. Combusted oil’s “reverberation” is
undistinguishable from the light of the sun and, as a number of fragments suggest, it
permeates the entire space of the “cosmos.” The “cosmic light” generated by the burning
of oil, the text indicates, is figuratively connected to the transformation of society brought
by the advent of intensive industrialization. As Appunto 4 explains, Carlo’s “childhood”
belonged to a time in which the cosmos was exclusively illuminated by the light of the

238
Note 36h, 124.

239
Note 97, 346.

240
Note 97, 347-350.

126
sun, and in which the flow of time was punctuated by the rotation of the different seasons.
This “age” in which Carlo lived when he was a child, then, was not only characterized by
the illumination of the sun and by the transition between seasons, but it also staged a
“continuity” in the modes of living of subsequent generations. It was:
a period in the life of the protagonist of this novel that was spent in a world
that coincides perfectly with the one of the preceding generation and, I would
say, of all the preceding generations. (Note 4, 22)
241

At this moment in time, society did not feature those patterns of “cultural
homologation” that, as the text puts it, deprive humans of “their inner life” and model
society according to a series of conventional models “learned from television.” In
Pasolini’s imaginary scheme,
Children behaved the same way with their parents; the houses were the same
(no television, no refrigerators, no waste of consumer goods; heat provided by
a stove in the important rooms; not, for example, in the bedrooms, where we
were kept warm with quilts or bed warmers, etc.); the food was identical;
identical the smells along the street … identical the reappearance of the
seasons. (Note 4, 22)
242

With Carlo’s passage to adulthood, we know from the narration, the rotation of
the seasons ceases to exist. The light that the combustion of oil generates, in fact, now
radiates on the earth providing an endless sequence of “days of summer,” and it also

241
“Un periodo della vita del protagonista di questo romanzo che è stata trascorsa in un mondoche coincide
perfettamente con quello della generazione precedente, e […] di tutte le generazioni precedenti.” (Appunto
4, 30)

242
“I bambini si comportavano allo stesso modo coi genitori; le case erano le stesse (niente televisione,
niente frigoriferi, niente spreco di beni di consumo; il riscaldamento assicurato dalla stufa, nelle stanze
privilegiate; non, per esempio, nelle camere da letto, dove ci si teneva caldi con le imbottite o con il
scandaletto ecc.); identici erano i cibi; identici gli odori che si sentivano per strada [...] identiche le
riapparizioni delle stagioni.” (Appunto 4, 30)

127
“weakens” the radiance of the sun. In Appunto 8, where the “light” generated by the
burning of oil is at first introduced in the narration, the sun appears to be deprived of its
strength:
that light of the sun, although warm, already had in it an emptiness, a lack of
strength, and from it emanated, along with the joyous purity that foretold an
unchanging series of equally blue-skied days, a kind of desperate melancholy.
(untitled note, 46)
243

The text then adds that, with advent of oil, the cosmos is no more illuminated by
the sun, but it is rather lit by the combustion of fossil fuels:
people were going home, turning their backs to the light, which, however,
persisted, a burning fossil that lighted up the olive-green sky. … The flowers
in the garden /absorbed/ the light, became piercing \cruel\ in shadow that hurt
the eyes. (Note 10 bis, 54)
244

In Appunto 74a, the text reiterates the notion that the refinement, circulation and
usage of oil are all related to the passage from one stage of “civilization” to another. This
transition is explicitly portrayed as a
cosmic crisis, consisting of the passage from the natural “Cycle” of the
seasons to the industrial “Cycle” of production and consumption. The first
was slow and common to all members of a community: the grain was sown,

243
“[Carlo] felt the sun. He did not have to open the windows to know that the light of that sun, just barely
faded on the edges, was flooding through the streets and squares of the city. That it had a whitish, marine
transparency in the sky that appeared between the roofs at the ends of the streets. That light of the sun,
although warm, already had in it an emptiness, a lack of strength, and from it emanated, along with the
joyous purity that foretold an unchanging series of equally blue-skied days, a kind of desperate
melancholy.” The Italian reads: “[Carlo] Subito sentí il sole. Non aveva bisogno di aprire le finestre per
sapere che la luce di quel sole dilagava appena appena smarrita ai bordi per le strade e le piazze della città.
Che essa aveva una trasparenza marina, un po’ biancastra, nell’azzurro che appariva tra i tetti, in fondo alle
vie. E che il lume del sole, benché caldo, già aveva dentro un vuoto, una mancanza di forza da cui, insieme
alla gioia della sua immacolateza che faceva prevedere una serie inalterabile di giorni ugualmente azzurri,
si spandeva una specie di disperata malinconia senza dolore.” (untitled Appunto, 57)

244
“La gente rincasava, voltando le spalle alla luce che pure persisteva come un fossile ardente
imbiancando il cielo olivastro.” (Appunto 10 bis, 67).

128
the grain was harvested, the grain was processed, the grain was eaten. The
second is purely abstract and diachronic. Thus it has no dates, rites,
recurrences. Every different product has its own different and, moreover,
rapid cycle. Every product requires its own recurring ritual, but according to a
rhythm really so decentralized and pluralistic as to be inconceivable. (Note
74a, 335)
245

As it is shown by the emphasis the text puts on the passage from a phase in which
mankind’s life was regulated by seasons and recurrences into a “new” epoch in which
every product has its own cycle, the circulation and refinement of oil can be seen as
practices that, like the circulation of “harmful” gold that in Metamorphoses, deeply affect
not only mankind’s modes of cultivating of the soil, but also the way mankind inhabits
the space of the world. As we have seen in my previous section, in Ovid’s poem the
transition from the age of bronze to that of iron is marked by the appearance of war,
treachery, pillage and violence. In Petrolio, the passage from the cycle of the seasons to
the industrial cycle is propelled by the circulation of refined oil. Industrialization stages a
‘substitution’ of the light of the sun by the radiance of combusted oil, and it also features
the development of social patterns of “homologation” and “hopeless conventionality”:
246

Children are immediately educated in general to imitate ‘patterns’: they enter
society already initiated. Therefore the laugh, among other things, has lost all
its revitalizing holiness.” (Note 74a, 335)
247

245
“La crisi … è una crisi cosmica consistente nel passaggio dal ‘Ciclo’ naturale delle stagioni, al ‘Ciclo’
industriale della produzione e del consumo. Il primo era lento e comune a tutti gli uomini di una
collettività: il grano veniva seminato, il grano veniva raccolto, il grano veniva lavorato, il grano veniva
consumato. Il secondo è puramente astratto e diacronico. Non ha quindi date, solennità, ritorni. Ogni
diverso prodotto ha il suo diverso ciclo, peraltro rapidissimo. Per ogni prodotto occorrerebbe quindi un suo
proprio cerimoniale ricorrente, ma secondo un ritmo, appunto, cosí decentrato e pluralistico da riuscire
inconcepibile.” (Appunto 74a, 386)

246
Note 81, 337.

247
“I bambini sono subito educati all’imitazione generale dei ‘patterns’: entrano nella società già iniziati.
Dunque il riso, fra l’altro, ha perso ogni sacralità rivitalizzante.” (Appunto 74a, 386)

129
The “eternal” radiance of the oil combusted in the cycle of industrial consumption
comes to an end at the very beginning of Part Two, where a telegraphic note entitled
“FINALE” speaks of a “cosmic crisis” marked by the “end of oil, water, air.”
248
It
important to observe that, in the narration, the cosmic crisis determined by the end of oil
is not presented as an irreversible event after which oil ceases to circulate as a commodity,
but it is rather presented as a “digression,” in the life of the narration’s protagonist, where
chronological time is suspended. At this point in the narration, the railway station of
Turin explodes and Carlo, who has arrived there by train, exits the ruined building and
engages in a journey into a “boundless expanse” of “uncultivated countryside.” Carlo’s
journey is explicitly defined as an initiatory process. The text says in fact that by means
of this journey Carlo, after having spent his (previous) existence “buried” within himself
the knowledge of a certain “phenomenon” and after having continued “for his whole life
the work of burial,” finally “returns to the light.”
249
Upon his return from this journey, it
must be noticed, Carlo undergoes one of the four sexual transformations that are referred
to, in the text, as its four fundamental moments.
In the course of this “digression,” which is contained in a series of Appunti all
titled “I Godoari,” Carlo travels from the center of Turin to the extreme boundaries of
“civilization,” across a desert of dry and barren earth. Later, he approaches a series of
springs whose waters make the “Piedmont plain” green and “/verdant/.”
250
As Carlo
continues his journey “in the direction of the mountains,” the plain starts resembling a

248
Note 103b, 405.

249
Note 104, 406.

250
Note 112, 413.

130
savannah and then to a forest where “the only sign of life was those golden bees on the
still, slightly putrid water.”
251
Finally, Carlo reaches “the limitless horizon” that runs
“clear below the dark, cloudy base of the mountains,” and beyond the horizon’s “shore”
he sees a boundless expanse of “uncultivated land (…) grazed by the light of the sun.”
252

The boundless expanse of uncultivated land is depicted as a space where nature is
“abandoned to itself” and it spontaneously produces, like in the Metamorphoses’s
account of the golden age, its fruits:
The fruit trees, unpruned for decades or centuries, had tough, twisted branches,
too many leaves, small unrecognizable fruits; they grew haphazardly among the
brambles, which, along with nettles and xxx, appeared to be gradually covering
the whole countryside.

(Note 112, 415)

Within this immense space where “the wildness of nature” is abandoned to itself,
Carlo suddenly recognizes a “little field of wheat, with a few rows of vines in the middle,
in which the … of a human hand could be clearly discerned.”
253
He passes through this
field and he then follows “the traces of a path” that leads him back to the city of Turin.
In accounting for Carlo’s journey from Turin’s “new periphery” to the city center,
the text reinforces the notion, exemplarily brought forward in Appunto 62, that the usage
of oil as a fuel not only marks the difference between the space of “civilization” and the
“desert,” but it is also responsible for the propagation, among mankind, of a series of
universal “patterns” of cultural homologation. As a fragment immediately following the
digression reads, coming back from the desert Carlo sees a “first sign” of civilization

251
Note 112, 414.

252
Note 112, 415.

253
Note 112, 415.

131
constituted by “the end of the first bus route.”
254
Like Appunto 62, this note brings
forward the notion that the “furious” circulation of “thousands of cars and trucks” is
directly connected to the deprivation, of the people who inhabit this space, of “their real
life.”
255
The city and its periphery are in fact “crowded” by life-less “people” whose
actions are “conventional, learned /from television/” and who all follow a same, and
universal, “cultural” pattern:
People like those at the bus stop were the model that would be repeated not ten,
not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of times on the journey to
the city. […] One of them was posing besides a small economy car, shiny /as a
mirror/, the way young man do in ads for automobiles or for clothes or some
accessory. (Note 123, 425)

The text gives at this point a long ekphrastic description of the “people” that are
“going to the center of the city” and it explicitly defines their bodies as inert matter. The
“physical presence of those people,” we read, is deprived of its inner life because it loses
any capability to transform either society or its politics:
Those people were no longer the people of a former time, those people no
longer had the purity (even if forced on them) of poverty, those people no
longer had the old respect, those people no longer had the old anxiety about
blackmail, those people no longer created their own human model, those
people no longer set their culture against that of their bosses, those people no
longer knew the sanctity of resignation, those people no longer knew the silent
will of revolution. (Note 124, 426)

Once in the inner core of the city of Turin, Carlo undergoes sexual transformation.
As the Note 127 (titled “Fourth Fundamental moment of the poem”) explains in detail, at
first Carlo perceives a “frightening pain in his stomach.” Then, he sees that “his chest”

254
Note 123, 424.

255
Note 123, 425 and 424.

132
had become “a flat chest, without breasts.” Finally, he sees his penis “dangling down his
belly again, under the thin hair.”
256
Carlo’s transformation is related to the crisis of oil,
the text suggests, because it is specifically at the moment oil ceases to circulate that this
character’s journey towards the boundless expanse of uncultivated land begins. This
journey, in turn, constitutes for Carlo an “initiation” that distinguishes him from the
“mass of people ... without destiny, put at the margins of the history of the world at the
very moment they became like everyone else.”
257
Carlo’s search for oil, then, brings him
to a re-discovery of the living potential that crude oil retains prior to its refining and
commodificaton.
We can now put the trans-sexual metamorphosis of Carlo portrayed in Appunto
127—that, as we have seen, comes after a long digression in which oil ceases to circulate
as a commodity, historical time is suspended, and Carlo leaves the space of the city for
the shoreless expanse of uncultivated land where nature is abandoned to itself—in
relation to the other three episodes of trans-sexual transformation to which Petrolio refers
to as its four “fundamental moments.” All these episodes do not constitute a linear series
of sexual transformations, because they display Carlo’s becoming woman two
consecutive times (“First” and “Second” fundamental moments) and then portray him as
a male character that undergoes castration (“Third” fundamental moment). In addition,
they are all related to some form of initiatory journey that has been accomplished by
Carlo. In the case of the first of Carlo’s transformations (when he becomes a woman),

256
Note 127, 433.

257
Note 127, 432. Carlo’s initiation culminating with his becoming male also makies him understand “that
what had already happened to him was happening to him.” (433)

133
Carlo is returning from a “mythical journey to the Orient,” titled “The Argonauts,” during
which he had traveled to the Middle East for ENI, and during which oil—a physical
substance which is never found—is only seen reverberating, at a distance, in the middle
of the desert.
258
The second fundamental moment of the poem, in turn, occurs when Carlo
comes back from the vision of a medieval garden, in which he had seen himself “bound
naked” to a revolving wheel “suspended in the void” and is “born for the second time.”
259

In the third fundamental moment of the poem, Carlo again “returns” from a long vision,
this time titled “The Shit (Vision)” that had brought to a taxonomy of the different social
models (or patterns) that have deprived mankind of life.
260

At the beginning of Petrolio’s Part Two the reader encounters a section of notes
which is entitled—recalling the name of the protagonists of a novella, published in 1971
by Italian writer Anna Banti—“I Godoari”.
261
In Banti’s novella, Godoari are the
inhabitants of a rural region of northern Italy whose customs and habits remain
unchanged throughout the different historical eras. In Petrolio’s section entitled
“Godoari,” Carlo moves after the explosion of a bomb from the train station of Torino to
a deserted countryside and then to an unmapped territory where uncultivated earth
spontaneously generates its fruits. As the text explicitly says, in the course of this journey
Carlo observes how the soil, irrigated with the water coming out of an alpine spring,

258
Note 36d, 120.

259
Note 58, 226-7.

260
Note 82, 340.

261
Pseudonym of Lucia Lopresti-Longhi (1895-1985).

134
appears to give birth to abundant vegetation and multiplicity of fruits. The earth’s
spontaneous productivity is catalyzed, the text says, by the radiant light of the sun:
262

The desert before him [Carlo] was a kind of green plain, with embankments
here and there and small groves of deciduous trees-stunted alders and leafless
acacias. Wild, scrubby grasses had grown up everywhere, there were no traces
of roads and paths. … Carlo went out into that Piedmont plain, went in the
direction of the mountains, which, gray or /bluish/, like clouds, obstructed the
sky; only a white tread of snow marked their profile, distinguishing their hazy
outlines from the scarcely more transparent haze of the summer sky.
As Carlo went on, the earth gradually became less dry and barren; perhaps he
was approaching a series of springs, whose waters, arriving underground from
the snows of those milky \hazy\ mountains, were emerging and, no longer
confined by banks, were spreading over the plain, making it green. (Note 111,
413)
263

In the following Appunti also titled “Godoari,” the text provides further
information concerning Carlo’s journey towards mankind’s originary condition of
happiness. Carlo’s experience is depicted as a movement consisting in a “return of life.”
In the world of the origins, the action of air, of water, and of the light of the sun concur in
a “cosmic” generative process. The action of the elements become indistinguishable, and
while no man cultivates the soil, as in the golden age described by the Metamorphoses,
the un-worked soil spontaneously generates its own products:

262
Previously, in Appunto 63, the text alludes to alpine springs and states that these are related to an
unspecified “profound call” that the text’s narrator does “not even dare to name.” (Appunto 63, 204).

263
“Il deserto davanti a lui era una specie di brughiera verde, con qualche argine qua e là e qualche
boschettino ceduo, fatta di magri ontani, e di spelacchiate gaggie. L’erba era cresciuta, stenta e selvaggia
dappertutto, non c’erano tracce di strade o sentieri. ... Carlo si inoltrò in mezzo a quella pianura
pedemontana, appunto, in direzione dei monti, che ostrivano, grigi o ⌐bluastri¬ come nuvole, il cielo: solo
un filo bianco di neve disegnava il loro profilo, distinguendo le nebulosità delle loro sagome da quella,
appena piú trasparente, del cielo estivo.
Man mano che Carlo avanzava, la terra di faceva però meno stenta e arida: forse egli si avvicinava a una
linea di risorgive, da cui, acque senza piú argini, giunte sotrterraneamente dai nevai di quei monti
lattiginosi |nebulosi|, uscivano e si spandevano sulla pianura, facendola verdeggiante.” (Appunto 111, 477)

135
It was more difficult to walk through these /verdant/ places. It was no longer a
desert but a savanna, the edge of a forest. His legs sank into grass so thick that
neither earth nor mud could be seen at its roots. All around, the wood became
denser: elders with hard, dry leaves and slender branches; blackberry bushes;
wild figs: now in a hollow where the grass was even more /luxuriant/ and the
ground was muddy, now on one of the /plateaus/ that, from their regularity,
seemed to have been dikes once. ... Where the trees became thicker, surrounded
by dry shrubs that seemed to be nourished more on air and sun than on water,
the cicadas did not chirp but raged. ... And the birds had returned, masters of the
sky and the plants. Sometimes they were so many that the sky appeared to be
swarming. And so, too, the creatures of the earth: reptiles, lizards, snails, beetles,
flies. Behind the barrier of a hedge that looked like marble, among cypresses
encircled by ivy dotted with bluebells and some low medlars that had grown up
by chance, there was a canal, fed by a stream of deep green water, more
transparent than crystal; into those depths the sunlight penetrated obliquely,
mottling the stream and its banks. Hundreds and hundreds of bees had gathered
around a pool and were drinking. (Note 112, 413-4)
264

Upon his return from this “journey towards the origins,” in Appunto 125 Carlo
observes that oil has ceased to function as a commodity. More specifically, as the text
says, “life seemed to come to a halt” as “cars began stopping and soon were backed up,
blocking the entire street.” It is also at this point that Carlo undergoes trans-sexual
metamorphosis and transforms from man into woman.
265

264
“Per quei luoghi ⌐verdeggianti¬, era però piú difficile camminare. Non si trattava piú di un deserto, ma
di una savana, il margine di una foresta. Le gambe affondavano nell’erba folta, in fondo a cui non si vedeva
la terra o il fango. Intorno si facevano sempre piú fitti i boschetti cedui: sambuchi con le foglie dure e
secche e i deboli rami; rovi di more; fichi selvatici: ora in fondo a una depressione dell’erba ancora piú
⌐lussureggiante¬ e dal fondo melmoso, ora su certe ⌐alture¬, che, dalla loro regolarità, avevano l’aria di
essere state un tempo degli argini. ... Dove gli alberi si facevano piú folti, con intorno gli arbusti secchi che
sembravano nutrirsi piú d’aria e sole che d’acqua, le cicale piú che frinire, infuriavano. ... Anche gli uccelli
erano completamente tornati padroni del cielo e delle piante. In certi momenti erano cosí fitti che il cielo
pareva un formicaio. E cosí gli animali della terra: i rettili, le lucertole, le lumache, gli scarabei, le mosche.
Dietro a una barriera di siepi che parevano di marmo, tra cipressi avvolti da edera piena di campanelle
azzurre, e, nati lí per caso, dei bassi nespoli, c’era una fossa, alimentata da un corso d’acqua profonda e
verde, piú trasparente del cristallo: lí, nel folto il sole entrava obliquamente, illuminando a macchie l’acqua
e le rive. Intorno a una pozza d’acqua rotonda, erano riunite centinaia e centinaia d’api, che bevevano.”
(Appunto 112, 478)

265
Note 127, 433.

136
Considering the passages excerpted above, we can draw the conclusion that oil is
ambiguously represented in Petrolio as both a financial and a figurative matter. In both
usages, oil is in some way responsible for processes of transformation. On the one hand,
the text depicts oil as an agent for the transformation of the society Carlo lives in. More
specifically, the “black gold” is associated to the deterioration of society, because it is
seen as a (refined) fossil fuel which, in providing heating, light, and fuel, marks the
transition from an era characterized by the rotation of the seasons to a present
“continuum” in which the sky is perennially lit by oil’s “burning”. In this context, oil
appears not only as a “motor” of economic development, but also as a commodity which,
like the gold that the men extract from the soil in the Metamorphoses’ account of the iron
age, is also a “harmful” substance because it propels the transition from the cycle of the
seasons to the industrial cycles of consumption.
On the other hand, the very same process of search for oil that brings Carlo to
“the Orient” also appears to be a motor for the development of the transformation of
Carlo’s own body. In the context of Carlo’s first journey to the “Orient,” for example, oil
is a figurative matter that reverberates “with an oily and barely trembling red light, here
and there throughout the desert.”
266
Albeit Carlo’s search of oil for Eni, as the text
explains, is never successful, his journeys result in a sort of “initiation” that brings him to
transsexual metamorphosis.
267
In this frame, oil’s reverberation is associated with

266
Note 36d, 120.

267
As shown by Petrolio’s four “fundamental moments” (Notes 51, 58, 82 and 127).

137
Petrolio’s main character’s journey towards East and its “unmapped” territories.
268
This
makes oil a substance that, while not being measurable in financial terms, gives access to
the moment of origins and makes Carlo, in the course of his transsexual mutations, gain
access to the moment of origins, or a kind of “golden age” in which—like in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses—mankind does not know treachery and fraud, and generation of life is a
spontaneous process performed, with no cultivating agency, by earth. It should be also
noted that, in Petrolio, the search for black gold is explicitly associated with a sort of
“initiatory” process that makes Carlo travel to a site where life can begin:
set against all that external becoming, being, and dissolving of the cosmos was
the body-now sitting in the hot air where it felt as though a fire had just been
put out and there was not a breath of wind-in which life really began: a life
that still had everything to give. (Note 10 quater, 63)
269

The text of Petrolio spectacularly presents a third understanding of oil. In this
third acceptance, oil is one matter that Petrolio’s narrator figuratively manipulates in
giving birth to the literary text that we are reading. A paramount example can be found in

268
The text conceives Carlo’s journey to “orient” as an “atto inaugurale,” for “a trip to the East is not an
everyday event, the real explanation of its meaning is found in myth; it is the repetition of one of those
“inaugural acts” of man (/if/ such a thing can be evaluated).” (Appunto 32, 104)
In the first fragment of Petrolio in which the world petrolio appears, oil is seen as a cause for the
“mapping” of everything. “Now” the text reads, “everything is mapped (above all, because of Oil)”
(Fragment entitled ‘The Journey’, p.28. “Ormai tutto e’ mappizzato, per eccellenza, a causa del Petrolio.”)
In the same fragment, the text also states that “A single corner remains unmapped (in the desert, by chance).
It is in that unmapped place that Carlo’s begins (cf. the fall of Damascus); he will reconvert to a
mystical religion.” (“Resta un angolo non mappizzato (nel deserto, casualmente). È in quel punto non
mappizzato che comincia (cfr. la caduta di Damasco) la di Carlo che poi si riconvertirà alla religione
mistica.”) In the same fragment, the text says that the Argonaut’s travel is a voyage “toward an elsewhere
barely mapped” (Fragment entitled ‘The Journey’, p.28)

269
“A tutto quell farsi, esserci e dissorleveri esterno, del cosmo, si opponeva il corpo-ora seduto, nell’aria
calda dove pareva essersi appena spento un fuoco, e introno non si muoveva un alito di vento-in cui
cominciava realmente la vita: una vita che aveva ancora tutto da dare.” (Appunto 10 quater, 76)

138
the conclusion of one of the last fragments of the book. Here, oil is presented as fertile
substance from which the entire text of “Petrolio (Romanzo)” originates:
my eyes fell by chance on the word “Petrolio” in an article in, I think, L’Unità,
and the mere thought of the word “Petrolio” as the title of a book spurred me
on to think of the plot of that book. In less than an hour this sketch was
conceived and written. (fragment, xvii)
270

As one can read in this passage, Petrolio’s narrator conceives oil as a substance
that both inspires the poet and constitutes the base matter from which the text is
generated. In Appunti 42 and 43, Petrolio is presented as a fluid substance that embodies
life, being depicted first as a “deep lava flow,” then as “a boundless, bottomless river that
runs,” and finally as a text animated by “bursts of life”.
271
As the narrator specifies, it is
specifically this characteristic of being inflated with life, along with the text’s own bodily
“concreteness,” what makes Petrolio readable:
It is the second theme (that of obsession with identity and its destruction) that
gives birth to the bursts of life and the concreteness, however mad and
aberrant, that make legible the pedantic, vertical,
inhuman ………………… …….. ……………………………………………
…………. sign of impotence (needing the help of literature) and the evidence
of the end of the novel.” (Note 42, 150)
272

270
“Mi sono caduti per caso gli occhi sulla parola “Petrolio” in un articoletto credo dell’Unità, e solo dopo
aver pensato la parola “Petrolio” come il titolo di un libro mi ha spinto poi a pensare alla trama di tale libro.
In nemmeno un’ora questa ‘traccia’ era pensata e scritta.” (543)

271
Note 43a, 157 (“Un vasto e profondo fronte lavico, ... un illimitato fiume senza fondo, che scorre.”
Appunto 43a, 188)

272
“È dal secondo motivo (quello dell’ossessione dell’identità e della sua frantumazione) che nascono
quelle folate di vita e quella concretezza, sia pur folle ed aberrante (diversamente non potrebbe essere, a
meno di non subire la xxx della sua convenzione) che rendono illeggibile la pedantesca, verticale, disumana
............................................................. segno di impotenza (bisognosa dell’aiuto della letteratura) e
testimonianza della fine del romanzo.” (Appunto 42, 181)

139
In this passage, the themes of life and its generation are addressed directly twice.
First, the theme of the obsession with identity is said to “give birth” to the bursts of life
that make the text readable. Second, in positing literature as a subject that provides “help”
to counteract “impotence,” this excerpt opens the possibility to understand literary poesis
as a means to overcome impotence and, hence, generate life. Shortly after this excerpt,
another fragment reinforces the understanding of Petrolio as a flow of matter presented in
Appunto 42. Appunto 43 specifies that the textual body is capable of capturing, within its
viscosity, both the passing of “time” and “life.” Petrolio’s fluidity, the narrator also
argues, requires the use of the “inchoative imperfect.” The inchoative imperfect, the
narrator specifies, “signifies the habitual repetition of an action, generally for quite long
periods of time,” and it is the only available tense that can capture life by means of
constructing the narration as a sort of temporal “continuum” which has no beginning or
end. By proclaiming “the thickness of the story” and reflecting both the “spirit” of the
present “work” and “the rules that this spirit, in getting established, had issued,” the
inchoative imperfect also captures, in the narrator’s words, the flow “of time and of
life.”
273
In short, “in that imperfect, in sum, c’est la vie.”
274

The emphasis given to the viscous, malleable, and fluid “nature” of the matter that
the poet manipulates, alongside with the depiction of petroleum as a living and generative
figurative substance, is relevant not only because it brings forward and understanding of

273
Note 43a, 156-7. (“L’imprefetto incoativo indica il ripetersi abitudinario delle azioni per un periodo di
tempo generalmente abbastanza lungo ... Ciò che io racconto dovrebbe essere, secondo lo spirito che ha
emanato istituendosi, sempre al presente. ... L’imperfetto incoativo, alludendo al passare del tempo e della
vita, denuncia invece lo spessore della storia: lo presenta come una vasto e profondo dronte lavico, anzi,
come un illimitato fiume senza fondo, che scorre.” Appunto 43a, 188)

274
Note 43a, 157. (“In quell’imperfetto insomma c’est la vie.” Appunto 43a, 188)

140
poiesis as a promethean practice that while shaping matter also activates its living
potential, but also because it recasts matter as a very specific kind of “maternal” figure
which generates life even without the intervention of a masculine, penetrating agency.
Poetic generation of life, in fact, is here presented as a matter of mutation of forms, and
not as a process of gestation necessarily engaged by a masculine “insemination” of the
feminine. Petrolio’s narrator’s insistence on the thickness and fluidity of literary matter,
then, can be better explored if considered alongside Luce Irigaray’s critique of Western
philosophy’s assumptions, according to which men are traditionally associated with
rational ideas and women are associated with matter. As Irigaray explains, these
associations are significant because they demonstrate how traditional Western
metaphysics is founded on a “subordinative” understanding of matter, according to which
this latter be always conceived of as inferior to the realm of pure unchanging forms and
ideas. The subordination of matter to masculine ideas of solidity, stability, immutability
and universality, for Irigaray, both underpins a number of conventional binaries (such as
those opposing idea and object, immaterial and material, ēpistēmē and tekhnē, being and
becoming) and brings to a consideration of women as inadequate “physical
reproductions” of men’s intellect. In opposition to Western metaphysics’ negative
characterization of the feminine and its understanding as an “empty” vessel, container, or
volume, which is passive until it is used or activated by a male agent, Irigaray argues that
women’s productive powers are irreducible to the masculine understanding of solid
metaphysics, and she promotes a re-evaluation of the women’s powers of material and
procreative transformation:

141
The/A woman is never closed/shut (up) in one volume. That this
representation is inescapable for the figure of the mother makes us forget that
the woman can become all the more fluid in that she is also pregnant/enclosed
[enceinte], in that, unless the womb is reduced—by him, by him in her—in
phallic appropriation, it does not seal the opening [écart] of the lips. (Irigaray,
65)

Women’s productive powers, we can read in this passage, challenge hierarchical
subordination of matter to the masculine, and they envision an entirely different way to
conceptualize women, as well as the connection between the feminine and matter. In
contrast to understandings of matter as “inadequate because it embodies change, diversity
and local difference, not pure, universal and constant ideas or origins,” Irigaray argues
that “women embody active material processes through which they originate particularly
positive productions of reality; for example, a woman’s unique role in childbirth.”
275

Irigaray’s re-conceptualization of matter as intrinsically concerned with movement,
fluidity, and flow, in the last instance, brings her to a reconfiguration of the female body
as a dynamic site of generation and procreation, whose irreproducibility derives from its
intrinsic powers of transformation and production.
With reference to Petrolio’s configuration of matter as a fluid entity, whose
metamorphoses determine the generation and procreation of life, Irigaray’s analysis seem
particularly poignant because it discloses the text’s engagement with a non gender-biased
metaphysical understanding of both literary matter and poiesis. Petrolio would configure
oil, in other words, as a fluid maternal substance, and the the text itself—as a byproduct
of the manipulation of oil—would cease to constitute either an empty volume or a

275
Rawes, 38.

142
receiving container, rather becoming a living organism that translates the generative
potential of matter into a literary “form.” Once “poetic matter” is no longer seen as a
passive recipient of pure forms, in addition, the very notion of poiesis needs to be
reconsidered. More specifically, Petrolio posits poetic making is neither a process of
creation ex nihilo or a mere practice of instilling pure ideas into inert physical substances,
but it rather depicts poiesis as a composite process by means of which the generative
potential that is intrinsic to matter leads the begetting of life.
With regard to the text’s fluidity, as well as its capability to register, in its body,
the eternal movement of life and time, it should be noted that at several points in the
narration Petrolio is posited as a provisional, malleable “work” in which “things” are
temporarily captured as if they were crystallized and petrified:
In this work the point of view is always at the peak. Things are caught at a
moment of actuality so extreme that they appear crystallized or petrified.
Everything is a series of friezes or statues. (Note 43, 151-2)
276

Petrolio’s “point of view,” though, does more than “catch” the things “at the
height of [their] expressiveness.”
277
It is able to observe the growth of “things,” or the
entire process of their transformation from the gestation in the depths of the soil to the
appearance on the surface of the earth. In this frame, the text appears to function as a
pleromatic space in which both living things and life, with its bursts and explosions, “are
caught”:

276
“In quest’opera il punto di vista è sempre al vertice. Le cose sono colte in un loro momento di attualità
così estrema da presentarsi come cristallizate e pietrificate.” (Appunto 43, 182-3)

277
Note 43, 152.

143
yet this heightened point of view does not disdain to consider ... the depths of
abyss; not only that but, indeed, to observe how things formed down in the
abyss slowly rise up until they emerge and are crystallized into peaks; in sum,
to capture them exactly, in their movement, in their evolution, in their history.
(Note 43, 152)
278

Finally, an understanding of the literary text as a fluid, transformative and oily
matter to which the poet gives provisionally shape is exemplified in appunto 65. Here,
Petrolio’s narrator states that:
what is said is ruled by what is not said; testimony by reserve … The form is
based only on what is not the form. And the exclusion of form is always
planned, calculated. (Note 65, 274)
279

The literary text, in addition, is also conceived of as a site where the narrator can
achieve, by means of poetic making, his own regeneration and re-birth. In appunto 99,
speaking in the first person, Petrolio’s narrator asserts that
At the time as I was planning and writing my novel-that is, looking for the
meaning of reality and taking possession of it, immersed in the creative act
that all of that involves-I also wished to free myself from myself, that is, to
die. To die in my creation: to die as, in effect, one dies in birth: to die as in
effect one dies, ejaculating into the mother’s womb. (Note 99, 364)
280

278
“Tuttavia questo punto di vista culminante non disdegna di prendere in considerazione … le profondità
dei baratri: non solo, ma addiritttura di osservare come le cose, formandosi laggiú nei baratri, salgano
lentamente di quota, fino a emergere e a cristallizzarsi nei vertici: a coglierle addirittura, insomma, nel loro
moto, nella loro evoluzione, nella loro storia.” (Appunto 43, 183)

279
“Solo fondandosi si ciò che non è forma, la forma è tale. E l’esclusione della forma è sempre un progetto,
un calcolo.” (Appunto 65, 315)

280
“Nello stesso tempo in cui progettavo e scrivevo il mio romanzo, cioè ricercavo il senso della realtà e ne
prendevo possesso, proprio nell’atto creativo che tutto questo implicava, io desideravo anche di liberarmi
da me stesso, cioè di morire. Morire nella mia creazione: morire come in effetti si muore, eiaculando nel
ventre materno.” (Appunto 99, 419)

144
In the same Appunto, Petrolio’s narrator also understands the characters that his
own imagination has generated as “human” beings. These characters do not merely to
represent, but they rather constitute an “integral” part, of “reality”:
Now that whole crowd of characters at the disposal of my novelist’s fantasy
could no longer be called ‘symbols.’ They were random parts of a whole and
had mysteriously became totalities; that is, men. They were part of reality.
(Note 99, 361)
281

The poetic process of generation of Petrolio appears to be, at least on a rhetorical
level, a practice that captures and “crystallizes” the flow of life and of time. This entails
that the literary text we are reading is made of a signified and fluid matter to which the
poet, as Prometheus does when manipulating a mixture of water and earth, gives shape.
The manipulation of Petrolio’s viscous matter entails both the generation of the
narrative’s living characters that, in being part of reality, are conceived of as “men,” and
the transformation of the poet’s own persona. In giving a provisional shape to the literary
matter, in fact, Petrolio’s narrator overcomes death and, like the poet that speaks in the
final lines of the Metamorphoses, is born again forever.

281
“Ora tutta quella forma di personaggi che era a disposizione della mia fantasia di romanziere non
potevano piú dirsi ‘simboli’. Essi erano casuali parti di un tutto, divenuti misteriosamente totalità, ossia
uomini. Facevano caoticamente parte della realtà.” (Appunto 99, 416)

145
CHAPTER THREE : EARTH IN THE METAMORPHOSES
The English word Culture, the Italian cultura, as well as the French culture or the
German Kultur, all derive from the same Latin root colere, which means ‘to cultivate’,
‘to protect’ and ‘to inhabit’. The word colony and its derivates (such as the noun
colonialism and the adjectival compound post-colonial) also come from the Latin
colonus, a noun that besides referring to the human figure performing a material activity
over earth and soil (such as a peasant or a colonizer) also designates the personage of the
Roman settler. The etymological rooting of the term culture in the Latin verb colere is
mirrored by the two main definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary. In a first
acceptance, the term conveys a number of meanings that range from “the action or
practice of cultivating the soil” to “a piece of tilled land, a cultivated field”, “the artificial
development of microscopic organisms”, “the training of the human body”, “the
cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners, etc.)”, “the training,
development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners”, and eventually “the
intellectual side of civilization” or “a particular form or type of intellectual
development.” In current English, culture also refers to “the civilization, customs, artistic
achievements, of a people, especially at a certain stage of its development or history” and
to “the prosecution with special attention or study of any subject or pursuit”. A second
entry from the OED identifies Culture as an obsolete form for coulter, or “the iron blade
fixed in front of the share in a plough” that “makes a vertical cut in the soil, which is then
sliced horizontally by the share”. If we take them together, these definitions speak for the

146
strict intertwinement relating the “materiality” inscribed in the etymology of culture with
its more transcendental, “immaterial” meaning.
In his The Idea of Culture, Terry Eagleton draws intensively on the existing
relationship between an understanding of culture as “the act of working the soil” and its
potential to designate a less “material” (albeit highly problematic) notion of intellectual
activity:
‘Culture’ is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the
English language […] One of its original meanings is 'husbandry', or the
tending of natural growth. The same is true of our words for law and justice,
as well as of terms like 'capital', 'stock', 'pecuniary' and 'sterling'. The word
'coulter', which is a cognate of 'culture', means the blade of a ploughshare. We
derive our word for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture,
crops and cultivation […]'Culture' at first denoted a thoroughly material
process, which was then metaphorically transposed to affairs of the spirit.
(Eagleton, 1)

After these preliminary remarks, Eagleton looks at religion and religiosity to trace
a third valence belonging to the term culture. This third understanding of culture, which
adds to the term a specifically authoritative value, is also etymologically derived from
colere:
colere also ends up via the Latin cultus as the religious term 'cult', just as the
idea of culture itself in the modern age comes to substitute itself for a fading
sense of divinity and transcendence. Cultural truths – whether high art or the
traditions of a people – are sometimes sacred ones, to be protected and revered.
Culture, then, inherits the imposing mantle of religious authority, but also has
uneasy affinities with occupation and invasion; and it is between these two
poles, positive and negative, that the concept is currently pitched […] Its
social history is thus exceptionally tangled and ambivalent. (Eagleton, 2)
282

282
Eagleton adds: “The idea of culture, then, signifies a double refusal: of organic determinism on the one
hand, and of the autonomy of spirit on the other. It is a rebuff to both naturalism and idealism, insisting
against the former that there is that within nature which exceeds and undoes it.” (Eagleton, 4)

147
The authoritative-religious resonance of culture identified by Eagleton is at the
basis of Homi Bhabha’s analysis of multiculturalism. In being “perceived to be an ethical
mission,” says Bhabha, cultural commonality is contained in a “supposedly ‘impersonal’
discourse.”
283
And as an ambivalent and productive agency of the nation’s ambivalent
narration (that is to say in its negative sense of “force for subordination, fracturing,
diffusing”) culture for Bhabha also constitutes a metaphorical concept that “reaches out
to create a symbolic textuality, to give the alienating everyday an ‘aura’ of selfhood, a
promise of pleasure.”
284

In the Metamorphoses, several of the meanings of culture summarized above are
challenged, because the text shows how earth can also be understood as lively matter that
brings forth life when it is not ploughed or cut by coulter or blades. As other ancient
cosmogonies do, the Metamorphoses depicts earth as a “mother” of life. Earth’s
generative potential, however, appears in Ovid’s text to be intrinsic to the matter. The
first episode featuring the transformation of earth into life is contained in the account of
the creation of man, presented in the first Book of the Metamorphoses immmediately
after the cosmogony. The narration tells us that after the moment the stars, the fishes, the
wild beasts and the birds appeared in sky, water, earth and air, “a holier living thing than
these was still required.” At this point in its narrative, the poem abruptly states that “man
was born.”
285
It is not clear, the text states, whether man was made by the creator god

283
Bhabha, 1992, 234 and 239 respectively.

284
Bhabha, 1990, 75.

285
Met., I, 77 and 78.

148
from divine seed, or whether earth still kept some residual seeds of the sky, that
Prometheus mixed with rainwater to mold into the likeness of the gods:
Man was born; perhaps he was made from divine seed
By the universal Craftsman, the source of a better world;
Perhaps the new earth freshly separated from the high
Ether retained the seeds of the kindred sky,
Which the son of Iapetus mixed with rain water
And shaped into the likeness of the all-controlling gods. (I, 78-83)
286

The Metamorphoses does not ascribe with certainty the paternity of mankind to
either the “universal Craftsman” or Prometheus. Still, the poem posits the universal
Craftsman’s and Prometheus’ creative processes as two quite different practices. The god
of creation, possibly the same “kindly Nature” that had ordered chaos, simply makes man
“from the divine seed.”
287
Prometheus, on the contrary, “cultivates” the divine seed
mixing two opposite elements, namely rainwater and earth. This makes Prometheus a
paradigmatic figure of poiesis, whose work interconnects the poetic act of making and the
process of cultivating the soil. Prometheus’ action consists in suffusing life to matter,
since the product of the manipulation of the earth is said in the in the first place to be
“living.”
288

A second example of how humidified earth can transform into a living product is
contained in Book I after the cosmogony, the creation of man, and the four ages of

286
“Natus homo est / siue diuino semine fecit / ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo, / siue recens tellus
seductaque nuper ab alto / Aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli; / Quam satus Iapeto mixtam pluuialibus
undis / Finxit in effigiem modernatum cuncta deorum; / Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / Os
homini sublime dedit caelumque tueri / Iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere uultus. / Sic, modo quae fuerat
rudis et sine imagine, tellus / Induit ignotas hominum conuersa figuras.” (I, 78-88)

287
I, 21 and I, 78.

288
I, 76.

149
mankind. At this point the Giants, believing that “the lofty ether should be safer than the
land,” build “a pile of mountains up to the high starts.”
289
The Giants’ “attempt to the
heavenly kingdom” causes the anger of Jupiter who, shattering the Olympus, gives slays
them. The Giants fall on the ground, where they “lay overwhelmed by their mass.”
290
The
blood of their corpses flows into the earth. At this point the ground is drenched in blood
and it begins a process of transformation. Earth gives life to men:
When the horrible bodies lay overwhelmed by their mass,
That say that Earth, drenched with much blood from her sons,
Grew wet and breathed life into the warm blood,
And, in case no memorial of her offspring should remain,
Turned it into the likeness of men. (I, 156-160)
291

The next representation of earth as matter that can transform into life is presented
in the course of description of the episode of Deucalion and Pyrrha. These two characters,
the only survivors after the universal flood caused by Jupiter, restore mankind by
spreading a series of stones over the soil. Again, earth appears here to be malleable
humus softened by water. At this point in the narration Lychaon had attempted to kill
Jupiter, and Jupiter had decided, in response, to “destroy the human race.”
292
After
having originated a violent storm, with the help of his “acquamarine brother,” Neptune,

289
I, 51 and 53.

290
I, 152 and 156.

291
“Obruta mole sua cum corpora dira iacerent, / perfusam multo natorum sanguine Terram / Inmaduisse
ferunt calidumque animasse cruorem / Et, ne nulla suae stirpis monimenta manerent, / in faciem uertisse
hominum.” (I, 156-160)

292
I, 260.

150
Jupiter deviates the course of all rivers. In this way, the waters submerge all lands.
293
The
text describes the effects of Jupiter’s action focusing on what happens to a number of
men that at the moment of the deluge were engaged in cultivating the soil:
One man seized on a hill, another sat in his curved skiff
And plied the oars where, just now, he had been ploughing;
One man sailed above the crops on the roof of his drowned
Farmhouse, another caught a fish at the very top of an elm tree (I, 293-296)
294

Inundated by the waters, the world now appears as an assemblage of
undistinguished elements: “the sea and the land had no distinction,/ the sea was
everything, a sea too that was without a shore.”
295
Only two characters survive the deluge.
These are Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, and Pyrrha, the daughter of Prometheus’
brother Epimetheus. Deucalion and Pyrrha are saved from the world’s drowning because,
using a little boat, they have landed on the only portion of land place that had not been
submerged by Jupiter’s “swirling floods,” namely Parnassus. From Parnassus, Deucalion
and Phyrra see that at the end of the flood the world is “restored.” But mankind has
disappeared: while the world is “empty,” the desolated lands stand now “in deep silence”
Deucalion and Pyrrha are caught by despair.
296
In addressing Pyrrha as both the “only
surviving woman” and his own “sister” and “wife,” Deucalion states:

293
Jupiter rushes the waters, as the text states, “through open fields, / seizing not only crops but trees as
well and livestock / men and houses and temples.” (I, 285-7)

294
“Occupabat hic collem, cumba sedet alter adunca / et ducit remos illic, ubi nuper arabat; / ille supra
segetes aut mersae culmina villae / navigat, hic summa piscem deprendit in ulmo.” (I, 293-296)

295
“Iamque mare et tellus nullum discrimen habebant: / omnia pontus erant, deerant quoque litora ponto.”
(I, 291-2)

296
I, 324; I, 348 and I, 359.

151
Oh sister, oh wife, oh only surviving woman,
A common race, and the brotherhood of our fathers, and then
The marriage bed united you to me; now we are united by our perils.
Of whatever lands are seen by the setting and the rising sun,
We two are all the population; the sea has claimed the rest. (I,351-5)
…
Now the mortal race survives in us two
(so have the gods decided) and we remain as patterns of mankind. (I, 365-6)
297

In acknowledging the fact he and Pyrrha are the only survivors of mankind,
Deucalion regrets his incapability to generate men, as his father Prometheus did, inflating
life into the clay. He says: “If only I could restore the nations with my father’s / Skills
and pour souls into moulded earth!”
298

Deucalion and Pyrrha resolve to ask advice of Themis. At the goddess’ shrine,
they both fall “flat upon the ground” and interpellate the augur kissing “the cold stone”
which is on the ground.
299
Themis gives an obscure response: “Depart from the temple, /
Veil your heads, undo robes’ girding / And throw the bones of your great mother behind
your backs.”
300
Themis’ advice astonishes Deucalion and Pyrrha. While Deuchalion is
uncertain about what Themis’ words might mean, Pyrrha is afraid to offend their

297
“O soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes, / quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo, / deinde
torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt, / terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus, / nos duo turba
sumus: possedit cetera pontus. / ... / Nunc genus in nobis restat mortale duobus / (sic visum superis)
hominumque exempla manemus.” (I, 351-5 and 365-6)

298
“O utinam possem populos reparare paternis /Artibus atque animas formatae infundere taerre.” (I, 363-
64)

299
I, 375-6.

300
“Discedite templo / et velate caput cinctasque resolvite vestes, / ossaque post tergum magnae iactate
parentis.” (I, 381-83)

152
mother’s spirit by scattering her bones.
301
After a first moment of bewilderment,
Deucalion attempts to interpret the goddess’ words. If oracles are godly and they never
urge one to commit any sacrilege, Deucalion says, it might follow that the great mother
must be the earth (magna parens terra est.)
302
Thus, Deucalion concludes, Themis has
suggested that they “throw behind” the stones that are in the body of the earth. Following
Themis’ advice, at this point, Deucalion and Pyrrha veil their heads and cast behind them
the stones. The rocks, disseminated on the soil, begin “to shed their hardness and their
rigidity, / and after a while to be softened and, once softened, to take on a shape.”
303
By
means of a chthonic process of culture, then, the rocks transform into human bodies:
…the rocks
Dispatched by the man’s hand took on the likeness of men,
And woman was restored by the woman’s throwing.
And so wee are a hard race that endures toil
And we give proof of the source from which we have been born. (I, 411-
415)
304

Besides showing that Deucalion’s understanding of earth as mother of mankind is
correct, this passage ends with the obscure statement that men, or the “hard race that
endures toil,” gives proof of the earthly origin from which it is born. Some clarification is
given in the lines that follow. Here, besides asserting that the earth is capable of
generating not only mankind but also the animals, the text specifies that procreation is a

301
I, 387.

302
I, 391-4.

303
I, 401-2.

304
“Saxa / missi viri manibus faciem traxere virorum, / et de femineo reparata est femina iactu. / Inde genus
durum sumus experiensque laborum, / et documenta damus, que simus origine nati.” (I, 411-415)

153
process of “discordant concordance,” because earth appears to procreate life when it is
has been mixed with water and then exposed to the light of the sun:
The other animals, in their various forms, were produced
Spontaneously by the earth, when the lingering moisture had been warmed
By the sun’s fire, and the mud and the dumb marshes
Had swelled up in the heat, and the fertile seeds of things
Nourished in the life-supporting earth, as if in a mother’s womb,
Waited and grew and took on a particular likeness.
Just so, when the seven-mouthed Nile has left the drenched
Fields and returned its streams to their original course,
And the fresh mud is heated by the ethereal star,
The farmers, as they turn the clods, find many
Animals; and they see among them some complete and at the very
Point of birth, some only just begun, stunted
And without their limbs, and often in the same body
One part is alive and the other part is raw earth.
For when a balance is formed of moisture and of heat,
They conceive, and from the two of them arises everything.
And though fire fights water, a moist warmth creates
All things, and a discordant concord is adept at procreation. (I, 416-33)
305

As we can read in this passage, not only does the text represent earth as a womb
in which life is gestated, but it also recalls, consistent with other passages from the
Metamorphoses, an understanding of the sun as a “golden” father that sustains and
nourishes the earth’s generation of its fruits. Earth spontaneously generates animals, it
“supports” life and it nourishes the “seeds of things” once illuminated by the light of the
sun and moistened by rivers and water. The text also defines procreation as “a discordant

305
“Cetera diversis tellus animalia formis / sponte sua peperit, postquem vetus umor ab igne / percaluit
solis caenumque udaeque paludes / intumere aestu, fecundaque semina rerum / vivaci nutrita solo ceu
matris in alvo / creverunt faciemque aliquam capere morando. / Sic, ubi deseruit madidos septemfluus
agros / Nilus et antique sua flumina reddidit alveo / aetherioque recens exarsit sidere limus, / plurima
cultores versis animalia glaebis / inveniunt, et in his quaedam modo coepta sub ipsum / trunce vident
numeris, et eodem in corpore saepe / altera pars vivit, rudis est pars altera tellus. / Quippe ubi temperiem
sumpsere umorque calorque, / concipiunt, et ab his oriuntur cuncta duobus; / cumque sit ignis aquae
pugnax, vapor umidus omnes / res creat, et discors concordia fetibus apta est.” (I, 416-433)

154
concord,” or a process originating when a balance is obtained between moisture and
heat.
306
This is particularly relevant if we consider the fact than in the account of the
creation of man, as we have seen, Prometheus is portrayed as operating a process of
conjugation of the different elements, and this is apparently different from the process of
separation of the elements performed by the deity who had ordered, in the account of the
cosmogony, the primordial chaos.
On the basis of the excerpts considered so far, we can reach the conclusions that
Deucalion and Pyrrha are indeed able, as we see in the account of the generation of man
subsequent to their throwing of the stones on the soil, to reproduce their fathers’ act of
procreation. This process takes the form of a process of “manipulation” of the soil which
features no coulters or blades, and in which earth appears to be moistened with water and
then heated by the light and warmth of the sun. If considered this way, the account of the
survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha and their generation of mankind constitutes a paradigm
of poiesis, and shows a continuity between the figure of Prometheus and mankind. As
Deucalion’s father Prometheus was the creator of mankind, so mankind retains the
promethean capability to generate life from earth insofar as it engages in processes of
cultivation of the soil. The capability to manipulate viscous matter to generate life, in
other words, is transmitted by Prometheus to mankind. Generation is no more a divine
prerogative, but it is rather the feature that defines the human as such.
307

306
I, 433 and 430.

307
Another allusion to earth’s generative potential is contained, later on in the text, in Jupiter’s response to
Juno about Io’s transformation into cow. To hide his own responsibility for Io’s metamorphosis, Jupiter
says that the cow is born from earth: “Saturnia, though unwilling, / admired the look of the cow and
enquired, as if she did not know / the truth, whose she was, from where she came, and from what herd. / To

155
The Metamorphoses contain a number of further episodes showing how life can
originate from “life-supporting” earth. At times, earth’s generation of live is activated by
practices of cultivation, in which men engage into the manipulation and insemination of
the soil. Representative examples are provided by the account of Cadmus’ foundation of
Thebes in Book III, Jason’s dissemination of the dragon’s teeth in Book VIII, and Tage’s
cultivation of the soil in Book XV. When taken together, all these chthonic narratives
speak for the continuity established by the text between Promethean creation of man and
Deucalion and Pyrrha’s repopulation of mankind.
In the account of the foundation of Thebes, earth transforms into a human product
after Cadmus’ seeding of the teeth of dragon in the soil. At the beginning of Book III,
Cadmus is portrayed as a wandering character who interrogated Phoebus’ oracle “to find
out what land he ought to dwell in.”
308
The oracle tells Cadmus that he will find, in a
“deserted” countryside a cow that “has never endured the yoke and has been exempt from
the curved plough.”
309
Where this cow rests upon the grass, the oracle also tells, Cadmus
will have to establish city walls and call them Boeotian.
310
Cadmus’ foundation of
Thebes corresponds to a process of establishing a boundary, and more specifically to the
construction of a “city wall” upon a lonely, un-habited and unmapped land. Being aimed
to the foundation of a city wall, Cadmus’ process of cultivation of the soil appears to

bring these questions on her origin to an end, Jupiter lied / and said that she was born from earth.”
(“Speciem Saturnia uaccae, / quamquam inuita, probat nec non et cuius et unde, / quoque sit armento, ueri
quasi nescia, quaerit. / Iuppiter e terra genitam mentitur, ut auctor / desinat inquiri.” I, 612-616).

308
I, 9.

309
I, 10-11.

310
III, 13.

156
stage a repetition of the act of demarcation performed by the originary surveyor who, at
the beginning of the age of iron, marked the land with the first boundary line. Telling the
story of Cadmus, the text specifies that this character had killed the snake who dwelled in
“an ancient wood defiled by no axe.”
311
Since the snake is golden, at this point of the
narrative the text seems to reiterate the notion, previously brought forward in the account
of the prima aetas, that there is a continuity between the image of gold and lack of
boundaries ascribed by mankind to earth. The figure of Cadmus, on the contrary, appears
to be related to the textual representation of the age of iron, and this is represented by the
detail that Cadmus had killed the snake using a tip made of iron.
312
The text therefore
also established a difference between earth’s spontaneous generation of life and
procreative practices engaged by masculine figures that penetrate of the soil. Cadmus, in
particular, seems to be an agency of masculine insemination as well as a representative
example of gendered conceptions of the soil as a feminine, and passive, “container” of
masculine action. After having killed the serpent, in fact, Cadmus indulges in “gazing at
the size of his vanquished enemy.” He suddenly hears a threatening voice that asks him:
“Why, son of Agenor, are you looking at / the serpent you destroyed? You too will be a
serpent to be looked at.”
313
Cadmus is astonished by these words, and he stands in despair.
But his patroness Pallas, who “had glided down through the upper air,” intervenes to give

311
III, 28.

312
III, 71.

313
“Quid, Agenore nate, peremptum / Serpents spects? Et tu spectabere serpens.” (III,97-8)

157
aid. Pallas addresses Cadmus and urges him to “turn the earth over and plant / the snake’s
teeth, from which the people were to grow.”
314

Cadmus follows Pallas’ advice and he activates, seeding the serpent’s teeth in the
soil, a process by which earth generates the birth of anthropomorphic figures. The teeth
develop, in fact, into a shield of soldiers. Cadmus’ action shows that culture, as in its
etymological meaning, is here presented as a chthonic process, or an event of generation
of life that occurs in and beneath the surface of earth:
He obeyed and, as he drove his plough and exposed a furrow,
He scattered the teeth, the seeds of mortals, as bidden, on the gorund.
And then (it is beyond belief) the ploughed field began to be disturbed;
First to appear from the furrows was a spear tip,
Soon there were head-pieces with dyed plumes nodding,
There soon emerged shoulders and a breast and arms loaded
With weapons, and a crop of shield-bearing men began to grow. (III, 104-
110)
315

Cadmus at first perceives these soldiers as his enemies, and then he prepares “to
take up his arms” to engage in battle. “One of the people created by the earth,” at this
point, admonishes Cadmus not to fight. He tells Cadmus: “Don’t take your arms up …
/ … and do not plant yourself in our civil war.”
316
After having uttered these words, this
character engages in a battle and eventually dies:

314
“Ecce viri fautrix superas delapsa per auras / Pallas adest motaeque iubet subponere terrae / vipereos
dentes, populi incrementa futuri.” (III, 101-103)

315
“Paret, et, ut presso sulcum patefecit aratro, / spargit humi iussos, mortalia semina, dentes. / Inde, fide
maius, glaebae coepere moveri, / primaque de sulcis acies apparuit hastae, / tegmina mox capitum picto
nutantia cono, / mox umeri pectusque onerataque bracchia telis / existunt, crescitque seges clipeata
virorum.” (III,104-10)

316
“ «Ne cape» de populo, quem terra creaverat, unus / exclamat «nec te civilibus insere bellis!». ” (III,
116-117)

158
He struck one of his earth-born brothers
With his firm sword at close range; and fell himself to a javelin from long
range.
And that one too who had sent him to his death did not live longer
Than him, but expired on the breath he had just taken in;
And the whole throng raged in the same fashion, as the sudden
Brothers fell in their own war from mutual injuries.
And now these young men, whose lot had been so brief a span of life,
Were striking their blood-strained mother on her warm breast
And there were five surviving, of whom one was Echion.
…
Thebes was now standing. (III, 123-126 and 131)
317

As in the episode of Deucalion and Pyrrha, also in the case of Cadmus humus
appears to generate life. The juxtaposition of these two episodes, though, shows that the
two creation narratives differ in representing, respectively, the procreation of mankind
and the generation of a shield of soldiers. While Deucalion and Pyrrha operate in a
context that resembles the first age of gold, since the land has not been divided or marked
by boundaries, Cadmus performs cultivation within the context of the narrative of the
foundation of the walls of Thebes, he uses an iron tool to kill the snake, and he therefore
moves within a context that, inscribed into the age of iron, is characterized by warfare
and violence. As the narrative puts it, the soldiers that have emerged from earth are
engaged in a violent dispute that the text designates as “civil war.”
318
Civil war, then,
develops after the earth has been cultivated and ploughed.
Earth generates anthropomorphic figures engaged in battle and that fight also in
Book VII, where Jason sows the teeth of the snake in the soil, and formations of warriors

317
“Exemploque pari furit omnis turba, suoque / Marte cadunt subiti per mutua vulnera fratres. / Iamque
brevis vitae spatium sortita iuventus / sanguineo tepidam plangebat pectore matrem, / quinque superstibus:
quorum fuit unus Echion. / ... / Iam stabant Thebae. ” (III, 122-126 and 131)

318
III, 117.

159
are born. As in the case of Cadmus, so in the episode of Jason the process of earthly
generation of men is not a process of Promethean manipulating of a soft mixture of earth
and water, but it rather occurs after a process of plowing of the soil with an iron tool.
Jason, who had at this point in the narration traveled upon “unknown seas,” in the field of
Mars domesticates the bulls, and
Putting them beneath the yoke he forced them to draw the heavy weight
of the plough and to cut into a plain unused to iron.
… Then from the bronze helmet he took
The viper’s teeth and scattered them over the fields he had ploughed.
The earth softened the seeds pre-steeped with powerful poison
And the teeth he had sown grew and became new bodies;
And as a baby takes on human appearance in its mother’s
Womb and is built up within part by part
And, unless it’s due, does not come out into the common air,
So, when human forms had been made in the bowels
Of the pregnant earth, they rose up in the fruitful field
And, what was more amazing, they clashed arms produced at the same time
(VII, 118-119 and 121-130)
319

While in Deucalion’s understanding the earth was a “magna parens”, or a
malleable humus that is mater of life, so in the story of Jason the “cultivation” of the soil
by means of an iron tool determines the growth not only of anthropomorphic figures, but
it also causes—as happens in the description of the Iron Age—the propagation of
violence and war. More pointedly, the text specifies that the act of plowing performed by
Jason occurs “into a plain unused to iron,” and this resonates with the process of marking
the soil with a cut performed by the “first surveyor” that, at the beginning of the age of

319
“Subpositosque iugo pondus grave cogit aratri / ducere et insuetum ferro proscindere campum / ...
/ ...Galea tum sumit aëna / vipereos dentes, et aratos spargit in agros. / Semina mollit humus valido
praetincta veneno, / et crescunt fiuntque sati nova corpora dentes; / utque hominis speciem materna summit
in alvo / perque suos intus numeros componitur infans / nec nisi matures communes exit in auras, / sic, ubi
visceribus gravidae telluris imago / effecta est hominis, feto consurgit in arvo, / quodque magis mirum est,
simul edita concuit arma. ” (VII, 118-119 and 121-130)

160
iron, divides for the first time the undivided land, and in this way creates an originary
boundary line. Jason’s act, then, can be conceived not only as process of “cultivation” but
also as a process of colonization that determines warfare and violence. As in the episode
of Cadmus, in fact, again the homini that arise from the soil are armed and they engage in
civil war: “The earth-born brothers perished from mutual injuries / And fell in their civil
war.”
320

In the last book of The Metamorphoses, the generation of Tages is narrated. In
this episode, there is no sowing of teeth or dissemination of stones. Life grows directly
from humus at the time a Tyrrhenian plowman tills the soil, still with no intervention of
any ploughing agency. In the middle of the fields, the Tyrrhenian plowman sees in the
middle of the fields
…a fatal clod
Moving of its own accord, and with no one touching it
Taking on the form of man and losing its earthly shape
And finally opening its new-made mouth to speak things that were to be.
The natives called him Tages, who first the Etruscans
Taught how to read the future. (XV, 554-9)
321

The generation of Tages, born from the clod, shows a remarkable dissimilarity to
the episodes of Jason and Cadmus: here life springs from earth itself. The transformation
of the clod into the body of Tages occurs, in other words, without the intervention of any
external agent. Earth has a constitutive potential per se, and the text’s insistence on the

320
VII, 119 and VII, 141-142 : “Terrigenae pereunt per mutua vulnera fratres / civilique cadunt acie.”

321
“Tyrrhenus arator / fatlem glaebam mediis adspexit in arvis, / sponte sua primum nulloque agitante
moveri, / sumere mox hominis terraque amittere formam / oraque venturis asperire recentia fatis.” (XV,
553-56)

161
fact that the clod generates Tages without any “external” intervention is spectacularly
juxtaposed to the process of cultivation performed by the peasant plowing the soil.
Taking all these different episodes together, we can conclude that earth is
presented by the text not only as a womb in which stones and teeth become peoples and
warriors, but also as a humus from which living bodies are generated. There is a
substantial relation of continuity, and perhaps of identity, between the earth and the
bodies inhabiting it. Living product is brought to life after the work of sowing performed
by different subjects (as Prometheus, the two descendents of Titans, the son of a king, an
Etruscan peasant are) but it may also come from earth itself. The potential to be
transformed into life is immanent within humus. Earth ceases to constitute an inert matter.
It is an immanently alive substance that transforms into living bodies. Earth is, literally, a
mother of life.
Mankind is the living offspring of the earth and it has the capability, as it is shown
in the episode of Deucalion and Pyrrha, to “repeat” the promethean act of inflation of life
into matter. There is a difference, though, between the different “creation” narratives
accounted for throughout the poem. While some happen in a context in which the land is
not enclosed by boundaries, and in this way they seem to have access to the moment of
the origins described in the beginning of the poem as the golden age, others processes of
cultivation are inserted in a context that repeats the age of iron. On the one hand, there is
the “poetic” cultivation of the earth depicted in the episodes of Prometheus, Deucalion
and Pyrrha, and Tages, where the procreative potential of the earth occurs in an

162
undifferentiated context. On the other hand, there is the cultivation of the matter by
means of iron, and this leads to warfare and civil war.
This difference seems to be mirrored in the distinction the text makes, in the very
conclusion of Book XV, between the poetic act of creating the literary text, which
appears as a form of cultivation of the matter that gives immortality and that knows no
territorial boundaries, and the colonizing practices of the Augustan empire. The last lines
of the Metamorphoses state that, now that the book is finished, the poet can aspire to
immortality. This will happen because the poem (said to be a work that neither Jupiter’s
anger or fire, steel or time can erode) will make the poet born again and again forever.
The poet’s name will be spoken of wherever Rome’s domination will be extended.
Provided with eternal fame, as the last word (vivam) of the poem explicitly indicates, the
poet “shall live” forever:
And now I have completed a work which neither Jove’s anger, nor fire,
Nor sword, nor devouring age will be able to destroy.
When it wishes, let the day, which has no power except
Over this body, finish the span of my uncertain lifetime;
But, with the better part of me, I shall be borne forever
Above the stars on high, and my name will be indelible;
And, where Roman power extends over subdued lands,
I shall be read by the peoples, and, through the ages, in fame,
(if there is any truth in the predictions of bards) I shall live. (XV, 871-879)
322

As this passage suggests, on the one hand there is the colonization of the land
performed by Roman expansionism, which corresponds to the act of taking possession of

322
“Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. / Cum
volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat haevi: / parte tamen
meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. / Quaque patet domitis
Romana potentia terris, / ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum presagia,
vivam.” (XV, 871-9)

163
the lands and which results, as we have already seen, in processes of pacification and
domestication of the land originating with the inscription of a boundary-line. On the other
hand, there is the “promethean” process of cultivation of matter that, besides making the
product of the poet’s work alive, also allows the poet to remain alive forever.
If considered this way, poetic making is not only a form of culture that, standing
beyond the opposition between materiality and immateriality, constitutes a form of
production of space. It also constitutes a process that, when it activates the earth’s
potential to generate life, retains a political valence. More specifically, the text posits the
poet as a promethean figure who, in accessing the moment of the origins, creates a land
which is undivided and unmarked by boundary lines, and that for this reasons stands in
opposition to the processes of colonization performed by Roman coloni. This means that
the poetic act may constitute a politically subversive practice in regards to the Roman
expansionist processes of colonization of the land alluded to at the very end of the
Metamorphoses. As the golden age and the age of iron differ for the way mankind makes
use of the soil and the two ages respectively represent two opposite understandings of
gold, so the poetic act of manipulation of matter and Roman territorial expansionism
enact two antagonist processes of production of space. On the one hand, while the poetic
manipulation of matter appears to enact a repetition of the golden age, poiesis seems to
stage a process of production of space in which earth is held in common and the land, as
it was in the origins, is not marked by boundary lines. On the other hand, Roman
“colonization” of foreign lands appears, with its processes of establishment and
enforcement of territorial boundaries, a practice that continues the process of division of

164
the land performed by the first “cautious surveyor” that the Metamorphoses introduces in
the description of the age of iron.

165
INTERMEZZO : EARTH IN THE VITA
After his initiation to the secrets of nature, his vision of the sphere of the Sun, and
the subsequent transformation of his own body into gold, in Book II of the Vita
Benvenuto repeatedly refers to the products of his work as his own offspring. In the first
pages from Book II, Benvenuto not only expresses his “great affection” for the artifacts
he makes, but he also understands them as “children” to which he “gives birth” with his
art. Addressing the Cardinal of Ferrara and his friend Messer Gabriel Cesano, for
example, Benvenuto says:
It is apparent, my Lords, of what vast consequence are the sons of kings and
emperors, and what a marvelous brightness of divinity appears in them;
nevertheless, if you ask some poor humble shepherd which he loves best,
those royal children or his sons, he will certainly tell you that he loves his own
sons best. Now I too have a great affection for the children which I bring forth
from my art (Vita, II, II, 245)
323

While uttering these words, Benvenuto shows the Cardinal a first work that he
considers his own “son.” This is a model in wax for an elaborate saltcellar that Benvenuto
intends to realize in “pure gold.”
324
The model, which Benvenuto considers to be of his
“own making and invention,” is intended to provide a representation of the

323
“Vedete, Signiori, di quanta importanza sono i figliuoli de’ re e degli inperatori, e quel maraviglioso
splendore e divinità che in loro apparisce. Niente di manco se voi dimandate un povero umile pastorello, a
chi gli ha più amore e più affezione, o a quei detti figliuoli o ai sua, per cosa certa dirà d’avere più amore ai
sua figliuoli. Però ancora io ho grande amore ai miei figliuoli, che di questa mia professione partorisco: sì
che ‘l primo che io vi mostrerrò, Monsignior reverendissimo mio patrone, sarà mia opera e mia
invenzione.” (Vita, II, II, 411)

324
According to the narration, both the Cardinal and Messer Cesano are impressed by Benvenuto’s model.
In attempting to persuade the Cardinal to commission the final execution of the saltcellar, Messer Cesano
reiterates the notion the Benvenuto’s work are his own living offspring. He states: “Benvenuto, it seems,
has chosen to display his children.” (II, II, 247)

166
“interminglement of land and ocean.”
325
The saltcellar features, then, two
anthropomorphic figures:
Whishing to suggest the interminglement of land and ocean, I modeled two
figures, considerably taller than a palm in height, which were seated with their
legs interlaced, suggesting those lengthier branches of sea which run up into
the continents. The sea was a man, and in his hand I placed a ship, elaborately
wrought in all its details, and well adapted to hold a quantity of salt. Beneath
him I grouped the four sea-horses, and in his right hand he held his trident.
The earth I fashioned like a woman, with all the beauty of form, the grace, and
charm of which my art was capable. She had a richly decorated temple firmly
based upon the ground at one side; and here her hand rested. This I intended to
receive the pepper. In the other hand I put a cornucopia, overflowing with all
the worldly treasures I could think of. (II, II, 246)
326

Shortly thereafter, the text provides clarification of the meaning of Benvenuto’s
conclusive sentence, according to which the saltcellar represents “all the worldly
treasures” he could think of. What Benvenuto considers to be the treasures of earth are
the living beings that the earth generates and sustains:
Below this goddess, in the part which represented earth, I collected the fairest
animals that the earth produces. In the quarter presided over by the deity of
the ocean, I fashioned such choice of fishes and shells as could be properly
displayed in that small space. (II, II, 246).
327

325
II, II, 246.

326
“Io feci una forma ovata di grandezza di più d’un mezzo braccio assai bene, qusi dua terzi, e sopra la
detta forma, sicondo che mostra il Mare abbracciarsi con la Terra, feci dua figure grande più d’un palmo
assai bene, le quale stavano a sedere entrando colle gambe l’una nell’altra, si come si vede certi rami di
mare lunghi che entran nella terra; e in mano al mastio Mare messi una nave ricchissimamente lavorata: in
essa nave accomodatamente e bene stava di molto sale; sotto al detto avevo accomodato quei quattro
cavalli marittimi; in nella destra del ditto Mare avevo messo il suo tridente. La Terra avevo fatta una
femmina tanto di bella forma quanto io aveva potuto e saputo, bella e graziata; e in mano alla ditta avevo
posto un tempio ricco e adorno, posato in terra; e lei in sun esso s’appoggiava con la ditta mano: questo
avevo fatto per tenere il pepe. Nell’altra mano posto un corno di dovizia, addorno con tutte le bellezze che
io sapevo al mondo.” (II, II, 412).

327
“Sotto questa iddea, e in quella parte che si mostrava esser terra, avevo accomodato tutti qui più bei
animali che produce la terra.” (II, II, 412-13)

167
As we can read in these passages, earth is conceived of as an “uncultivated”
matter that brings forth and sustains its living offspring specifically because of its
interminglement with water. In Benvenuto’s saltcellar, indeed, earth is represented as a
feminine figure that generates living product, and the ocean is depicted as a masculine
figure. Still, land and ocean are not engaged in “sexual” intercourse, but they are
“intermingled” in such a way that the animals, fishes and shells are brought forth from an
amalgamation of opposites. This resonates not only with the Metamorphoses’s
description of primordial chaos, in which all elements were heaped together, but also
with the poem’s account of the creation of man, according to which man “was born” from
the manipulation of a mixture of water and earth. It should be also noticed that, in the text,
the living products of the earth are explicitly depicted as “worldly treasures.” Still, in
similarity with the “precious” gold into which Benvenuto is transformed in the course of
the capitolo in terza rima, the value of these “treasures” is not conceived in financial
terms.
The Vita’s understanding of the intermingling of water and earth as procreative
substance is reiterated, later in the text, at the moment Benvenuto describes the saltcellar
he has realized after the model shown to the Cardinal of Ferrara. The saltcellar, which is
now entirely made of gold, is presented to the King of France.
328
Consistent with its
model, the saltcellar gives an anthropomorphic representation of the interminglement of
the ocean and the land. Again, while the animals are said to be “products” of the soil,

328
II, XXVI.

168
earth is depicted as a generator of life as far as it is moistened, softened and plastered by
water:
The King had now returned from Paris; and when I paid him my respects, I
took the salt-cellar with me. As I have already related, it was oval in form,
standing about two-thirds of a cubit, wrought of solid gold, and worked
entirely with the chisel. While speaking of the model, I said before how I had
represented Sea and Earth, seated, with their legs interlaced, as we observe in
the case of firths and promontories; this attitude was therefore metaphorically
appropriate. The Sea carried a trident in his right hand, and in his left I put a
ship of delicate workmanship to hold the salt. Below him were his four sea-
horses, fashioned like our horses from the head to the front hoofs; all the rest
of their body, from the middle backwards, resembled a fish, and the tails of
these creatures were agreeably interwoven. Above this group the Sea sat
throned in an attitude of pride and dignity; around him were many kinds of
fishes and other creatures of the ocean. The water was represented with its
waves, and enameled in the appropriate color. I had portrayed Earth under the
form of a very handsome woman, holding her horn of plenty, entirely nude
like the man figure; in her left hand a placed a little temple of Ionic
architecture, most delicately wrought, which was meant to contain the pepper.
Beneath her were the handsomest living creatures which the earth produces;
and the rocks were partly enameled, partly left in gold. (II, XXVI, 302)
329

As we can read in this passage, earth and water are intertwined (the text says
“interlaced”) so that their amalgamation constitutes a malleable substance, or a soft
humus, from which life is generated. As in the Metamorphoses’s account of the

329
“Era ritornato il Re a Parigi, e io l’andai a trovare, portandogli la detta saliera finita; la quale, sì come io
ho detto sopra, era in forma ovata ed era di grandezza di dua terzi di braccio in circa, tutta d’oro, lavorata
per virtù di cesello. E sì come io dissi quando ragionai del modello, avevo figurato il Mare e la Terra a
sedere l’uno e l’altro, e s’intramettevano le gambe, sì come entra certi rami del mare infra la terra, e la terra
infra del detto mare: così propriamente avevo dato loro quella grazia. A il Mare avevo posto in mano un
tridente innella destra; e innella sinistra avevo posto una barca sottilmente lavorata, innella quale si metteva
la salina. Era sotto a questa detta figura i sua quattro cavalli marittimi, che insino al petto e le zampe
dinnanzi erano di cavallo; tutta la parte del mezzo indietro era di pesce: queste code di pesce con piacevol
modo s’intrecciavano insieme; in su qual gruppo sedeva con finissima attitudine il detto Mare: aveva
all’intorno molta sorte di pesci e altri animali marittimi. L’acqua era figurata con le sue onde; di poi era
benissimo smaltata del suo proprio colore. Per la Terra avevo figurato una bellissima donna, con il corpo
della sua dovizia in mano, tutta ignuda come il mastio appunto; nell’altra sua sinistra mano avevo fatto un
tempietto di ordine ionico, sottilissimamente lavorato; e in questo avevo accomodato il pepe. Sotto a questa
femina avevo fatto i più belli animali che produca la terra; e i suoi scogli terrestri avevo parte ismaltati e
parte lasciati d’oro.” (II, XXXVI, 485-6)

169
generation of man, soil is not exactly a ground that human labor ploughs, digs or
cultivates, but it rather constitutes a generative substance that, once it is moistened by
water, spontaneously brings forth its living offspring. Benvenuto’s saltcellar, and its
anthropomorphic depiction of water and earth as, respectively, a masculine and feminine
figure, is then particularly relevant because it configures procreation as a process that
occurs without the intervention of either a phallus or a coulter. Moistened earth is, rather,
a humus from which life is generated, and within which procreation is, to use Goux’s
words, “deprived of the presence of the phallus,” and therefore “entirely subordinated to
the domain if nature.”
330
The saltcellar is not only mainly made in gold, but it also
features a problematic embodiment of the continuous processes of metamorphosis of the
earth’s living offspring as well as of the earth itself. The terrestrial rocks, for example, are
partially enameled and partially left in gold, while the horses, which represent the seasons,
are shaped as horses only from their heads to the front hoofs, while the rest of their
bodies resembles a fish.
It should be also noticed that, in textual description of the saltcellar, Benvenuto is
indirectly depicted as a promethean figure that, while giving shape to the
interminglement of water and earth, also “gives life” to the gold he is manipulating. Like
Prometheus in the Metamorphoses, in fact, Benvenuto is a poet who suffuses life into
matter, for he conceives his golden saltcellar to be the first of the “sons” he generates by
means of his art.
331
Both Prometheus and Benvenuto appear then to be “genitorial” and

330
Goux, 1988, 112.

331
II, II, 245.

170
not paternal figures, for they engage processes of earthly generation of life that, as in the
saltcellar’s depiction of the interminglement of ocean and land, occur without the
intervention of a phallus or a “cultivating” coulter that ploughs the soil and they both
intervene in the humus’ generation of life by simply shaping a malleable matter that
already retains in its body, as Book I from the Metamorphoses suggests, the kindred seed
of life.
The capability Benvenuto has to properly manipulate the earth appears, at
different points in the narration, as a necessary prerequisite for the realization of his
bronze statues. In Fontainebleau, for example, Benvenuto’s skillful manipulation of the
earth leads to his realization of two bronze heads, while the French metallurgists, who did
not follow Benvenuto’s advice at the moment of pouring the metal in the ground, fail in
their attempted to cast a Jupiter.
332
Also in the context of the making of the Bust of
Cosimo Benvenuto gives great emphasis to the importance of the manipulation of earth
for the purposes of casting. At first, Benvenuto uses earth to build the statue’s model:
The Duke came frequently into the wardrobe, and took great pleasure in
watching me at work and talking to me. When my health improved, I had clay

332
The French masters “put their own piece into the [hole in the ground that is part of the] furnace with
much laughter; while I, maintaining a firm carriage, showing neither mirth nor anger (though I felt it),
placed my two heads, one of each side of Jupiter. The metal came all right to melting, and we let it in with
joy and gladness; it filled the mould of the Jupiter most admirably, and at the same time my two heads […]
At daybreak they begun, quite quietly, to break into the pit of the furnace. They could not uncover their
large mould until they had extracted my two heads; these were in excellent condition, and they placed them
where they could well be seen. When they came to Jupiter, and had dug but scarcely two cubits, they sent
up such a yell, they and their four workmen, that it woke me up.” (II, XVIII, 275). “Con gran risa messono
in fossa l’opera loro; e io saldo, sanza nissuna dimostrazione né di risa né di stizza – che l’avevo – messi
con le mie dua forme in mezzo il Giove; e quando il nostro metallo fu benissimo fonduto, con grandissimo
piacere demmo la via al ditto metallo, e benissimo s’empié la forma del Giove; innel medesimo tempo
s’empié la forma delle mie due teste [...] Venuti la mattina, cheti cheti cominciarno a a cavare di fossa; e
perché loro non potevano iscoprire la loro gran froma, se prima egli non cavavano quelle mie due teste, le
quali cavarno e stavono benissimo, e le avevano messe in piede, che benissimo si vedevano. Cominciato
poi a scoprire il Giove, non furno dua braccia in giù, che loro con quattro lor lavoranti messono sì grande il
grido, che io li sentii.” (II, XVIII, 451)

171
brought, and took a portrait of his Excellency, considerably larger than life-
size, which I modeled while he stayed with me for pastime. (II, LVIII, 334)
…
And the first piece I cast in bronze was the great bust, the portrait of his
Excellency, which I had modeled with earth in the goldsmith’s workroom. (II,
LXIII, 341)
333

Then, Benvenuto proceeds to the actual process of casting of the bust. As
Benvenuto remarks, the realization of this bronze statue is intended to experiment with
earth that might be used for casting:
It gave much pleasure when it was completed, though my sole object in
making it was to obtain experience of clays suitable for bronze-casting. I was
of course aware that the admirable sculptor Donatello had cast his bronzes
with the clay of Florence; yet it seemed to me that he had met with enormous
difficulties in their execution. As I thought that this was due to some fault in
the earth, I wanted to make these first experiments before I undertook my
Perseus. From them I learned that the clay was good enough. (II, LVIII, 342-
3)
334

In the lengthy accounts of bronze casting contained in Book II, the text depicts
Benvenuto not only manipulating the earth with the purpose of preparing models for his
perspective works, but also excavating the ground in order to prepare the cavity in which
the liquefied metal, after having been poured in its earthly mould, can solidify and

333
“Veniva a ogni poco il Duca in questa guardaroba, e pigliavasi piacere grandissimo di veder lavorare e
di ragionare con esso meco. Cominciato un poco a migliorare delle mie rene, mi feci portar della terra, ed
inmentre che ‘l Duca si stava quivi a passar tempo, io lo ritrassi, faccendo una testa assai maggiore del
vivo” (II, LVIII, 531). “E la prima opera che io gittai di bronzo fu quella testa grande, ritratto di sua
Eccellenzia, che io avevo fatta di terra nell’oreficerie.” (II, LXIII, 540)

334
“Questa fu un’opera che piacque e io non la feci per altra causa se non per fare sperienza delle terre da
gittare il bronzo. E se bene io vedevo che quel mirabil Donatello aveva fatto le sue opere di bronzo, quale
aveva gittate con la terra di Firenze, e’ mi pareva che l’avessi condutte con grandissima difficultà; e
pensando che venissi dal difetto della terra, innanzi che io mi mettessi a gittare il mio Perseo io volsi fare
queste prime diligenzie: per le quali trovai esser buona la terra, se bene non era stata bene intesa da quel
mirabil Donatello, perché con grandissima difficultà vedevo condotte le sue opere. Così, come io dico di
sopra, per virtù d’arte io composi la terra, la quale mi servì benissimo.” (II, LXIII, 540-541)

172
acquire its final form. In the course of the casting of Perseus, for example, earth is
particularly important because it is both a matter that the metallurgist manipulates and the
site, or womb, where liquefied metal acquires its final form.
It might be useful, at this point, to briefly summarize the subsequent phases of
Benvenuto’s casting of his Perseus. Benvenuto begins preparing a model, in wax, of the
statue. Then, he proceeds to the “clothing” of this wax model with earth: “I clothed my
Perseus with the clay which I had prepared many months beforehand, in order that it
might be duly seasoned.”
335
Next, Benvenuto empties the clay, which retains the form of
the Perseus, of wax. In this way, he obtains the cavity in which the liquefied metal will be
poured: “After making its clay tunic (for this is the term used in this art) and properly
arming it and fencing it with iron girders, I begun to draw the wax out by means of a slow
fire.”
336

In order to reinforce the mould he had made with earth, Benvenuto puts some
bricks around it:
When I had finished drawing off the wax, I constructed a funnel-shaped
furnace all round the model of my Perseus. It was built of bricks, so interlaced,
the one above the other, that numerous apertures were left for the fire to
exhale at. (II, LXXV, 360)
337

335
II, LXXV, 360. (“Io vestivo il mio Perseo di quelle terre che io avevo acconcie parecchi mesi in prima,
acciò che l’avessino la loro stagione.” II, LXXV, 566)

336
II, LXXV, 360. (“E fatto che io ebbi la sua tonaca di terra, che tonaca si dimanda innell’arte, e
benissimo armatola e recinta con gran diligenza di ferramenti, comincia con lente fuoco a trarne la cera, la
quali usciva per molti sfiatatoi che io avevo fatti.” II, LXXV, 566)

337
“E finito che io ebbi di cavar la cera, io feci una manica intorno al mio Perseo, cioè alla detta forma, di
mattoni, tessendo l’uno sopra l’altro, e lasciavo molti spazi, dove ‘l fuoco potessi meglio esalare.” (II,
LXXV, 566)

173
Benvenuto then makes the mould solidify, keeping “it burning two whole days
and nights” (II, LXXV, 360). In the meantime, “with scrupulous regard to all the rules of
art,” Benvenuto prepares a pit, in the ground, that will serve as furnace. When the mould
is completely “baked,” Benvenuto puts it at the very bottom of the furnace and then
entirely fills the pit of the furnace with earth. In this way, the mould is entirely covered
by a thick stratum of earth:
When I finished that part of my work, I raised the mould by windlasses and
stout ropes to a perpendicular position, and suspending it with the greatest
care one cubit above the level of the furnace, so that it hung exactly above the
middle of the pit, I next lowered it gently down into the very bottom of the
furnace, and I had it firmly placed with every possible precaution for its safety.
When this delicate operation was accomplished, I began to bank it up with the
earth I had excavated; and, ever as the earth grew higher, I introduced its
proper air-vents, which were little tubes of earthenware, such as folk use for
drains and suchlike purposes. (II, LXXV, 360)
338

Benvenuto can finally proceed to the infusion of the metal into the mold. He
places portions of copper and bronze in the furnace and he begins, setting fire to the
wood, the long process of liquefaction of the metal:
I next turned to my furnace, which I had filled with numerous pigs of copper
and other bronze stuff. The pieces were piled according to the laws of art, that
is to say, so resting one upon the other that the flames could play freely
through them, in order that the metal might heat and liquefy the sooner. (II,
LXXV, 360-1)
339

338
“Quand’io ebbi finito di votar la detta fossa, allora io presi la mia forma, e con virtù d’argani e di buoni
canapi diligentemente la drizzai; e sospesala un braccio sopra ’l piano della mia fornacie, avendola
benissimo dirizzata di sorte che la si spenzolava appunto nel mezzo della sua fossa, pian piano la feci
discendere in sino nel fondo della fornacie, e si posò con tutte quelle diligenzie che immaginar si possano al
mondo. E fatto che io ebbi questa bella fatica, cominciai a incalzarla con la medesima terra che io ne avevo
cavata; e di mano in mano che io vi alzavo la terra, vi mettevo i sua sfiatatoi, i quali erano cannoncini di
terra cotta che si adoprano per gli acquai e altre simil cose.” (II, LXXV, 567)

339
“Io mi volsi alla mia fornacie, la quale avevo fatta empiere di molti masselli di rame e altri pezzi di
bronzi; e accomodatigli l’uno sopra l’altro in quel modo che l’arte ci mostra, cioè sollevati, faccendo la via

174

The casting of Perseus is a very complex process and, as the narrative explains, it
succeeds despite an exceptional series of adverse circumstances. A copious rain and a fire
that destroy the workshop, as well as his helpers’ ineptitude, cause a series of unexpected
problems to which Benvenuto has to respond with enormous effort. Despite a first
moment of despair, and a violent attack of fever, Benvenuto manages nonetheless to
proceed with casting and he eventually succeeds in bringing the matter from “death to
live again.”
340

After it has been poured in the underground mould, the liquefied metal solidifies,
giving birth to the statue of Perseus. At this point, Benvenuto can begin with the process
of extraction of the bronze from the ground:
After I had let my statue cool for two whole days, I began to uncover it by
slow degrees. The first thing I found was that the head of Medusa had come
out most admirably […]; upon advancing farther, I discovered that the other
head, that, namely, of Perseus, had succeeded no less admirably; and this
astonished me far more, because it is at a considerably lower level than that of
the Medusa. Now the mouths of the mould were placed above the head of
Perseus and behind his shoulders; and I found that all the bronze my furnace
contained had been exhausted in the head of this figure. It was a miracle to
observe that not one fragment remained in the orifice of the channel, and that
nothing was wanting to the statue. In my great astonishment I seemed to see in
this the hand of God arranging and controlling all. I went uncovering the
statue with success.” (II, LXXVIII, 365)
341

alle fiamme del fuoco, perché più presto il detto metallo piglia il suo calore e son quello si fonde e riducesi
in bagno.” (II, LXXV, 567)

340
II, LXXVII, 363 (“Or veduto di avere risuscitato un morto.” II, LXXVII, 571)

341
“Lasciato che io ebbi dua giorni freddare la mia gittata opera, cominciai a scoprirla pian piano; e trovai,
la prima cosa, la testa della Medusa, che era venuta benissimo […]; di poi seguitai di scoprire il resto, e
trovai l’altra testa, cioè quella del Perseo, che era venuta similmente benissimo; e questa mi dette molto più
di meraviglia, perché sì come e’ si vede, l’è più bassa assai bene di quella della Medusa. E perché le bocche
di detta opera si erano poste nel disopra della testa del Perseo e per le spalle, io trovai che alla fine della
detta testa del Perseo si era appunto finito tutto ‘l bronzo che era nella mia fornacie. E fu cosa meravigliosa,

175
The “marvelous” event of giving birth to Perseus, that Benvenuto considers to be
a “devilish” undertaking that “no craft of the art could do,” literally occurs within
earth.
342
Since the gestation of the bronze statue occurs underground, and Benvenuto’s
“children” literally emerge from the soil, earth appears in this context as the womb in
which the inflation of the lively breath in the metal takes place.
343

The Vita’s direct representations of the earth as a mother of life, exemplified by
both the passages describing Benvenuto’s golden saltcellar and the accounts of metal
casting, resonate with the understanding of earth as a mother of life brought forward by
the Metamorphoses. First, as in the Latin text moistened earth is said to generate animals
and living beings, so in the Vita Bevevenuto’s saltcellar represents earth as a humus
which, intermingled with water, procreates animals and life. Second, as the
Metamorphoses repeatedly presents the generation of life as a chthonic process that
develops in the fecund and generative substratum of earth’s humus, so the Vita depicts
the generation of Benvenuto’s “offspring” as a process of transformation of the liquefied
metals poured in the earth. In addition, the Metamorphoses also states that the generation
of man comes from processes of manipulation of earth. More specifically, as we have
seen, the first book of the Metamorphoses depicts Prometheus creating man from a

che e’ non avanzò punto di bocca di getto, né manco non mancò nulla: ché questo mi dette tanta maraviglia,
che e’ parve propio che la fussi cosa miracolosa, veramente guidata e maneggiata da Iddio. Tiravo
feliciemente innanzi di finire di scoprirla.” (II, LXXVIII, 574)

342
“I suspected of having caked my metal for me said I was no man, but of certainty some powerful devil,
since I had accomplished what no craft of the art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary
fiend could work such miracles as I in other ways had shown.” (II, LXXVII, 365)

343
Cellini’s writing has been widely used to reconstruct, in particular, the technique of bronze casting
known as “a cera persa.” The terminology used by Pettorelli to describe this technique is rich of
procreative and anthropomorphic metaphors, such as modello, camicia, bocca, midollo, anima, sfiatare,
smagrire. (Pettorelli, 1929, 60-61)

176
mixture of water and earth. In the final sections of Book I from the Vita, and more
specifically when the narration is set in the underground prison of Tor di Nona,
Benvenuto perceives the inflation of his own body with “fire of poiesis” specifically after
engaging into a repetition of the promethean process of manipulating a mixture of water
and earth.
At the end of Book I, to provide a brief summary, Benvenuto is kept by the Papal
guards in an underground cell. As stated in the capitolo, in the underground cell
Benvenuto is deprived of “paper, pen, ink, iron and fire,” but also impelled to action by
his spirit. Encountering the problem of not having any matter to manipulate, Benvenuto
resolves to crumbling a brick of earth into powder, and mixing the sand with some “dead
water” he obtains a malleable matter he can work.
344
Immediately after having
amalgamated earth and water, Benvenuto perceives the “fire of poiesis” entering his
body.
345

344
Capitolo, line 57.

345
During the same imprisonment, Benvenuto had previously been “saved” from the attacks of his guards
by means of a drawing he had realized using a piece of charcoal he had extracted from the cell’s ground:
“Captain Sandrino Monaldi came at once into my prison with about twenty of the castellan’s servants. They
found me on my knees; and I did not turn at their approach, but went on paying my orisons before a God
the Father, surrounded with angels, and a Christ arising victorious from the grave, which I had sketched
upon the wall with a little piece of charcoal I had found covered up with earth.” The text continues:
“Meanwhile the men were carrying me away with a great lighted torch; and I thought that they were about
to throw me down the oubliette of Sammabo” (I, CXX, 224-5).
“Venne dalla mia prigione il capitano Sandrino Monaldi con circa venti di quei servitori del Castellano; e
mi trovorno che io ero ginocchioni, e non mi volgevo a loro, anzi adoravo un Dio Padre addorno di Angeli
e un Cristo risuscitante vittorioso, che io mi avevo disegniati innel muro con un poco di carbone, che io
avevo trovato ricoperto della terra. Costoro mi portavano via con un torchiaccio acceso: pensavo io che mi
volessino gittare innel trabocchetto del Sammalò: così chiamato un luogo paventoso, il quale n’ha
inghiottiti assai così vivi. … Questo non m’intervenne: per la qual cosa me ne parve avere un bonissimo
mercato: perché loro mi possono in quella bruttissima caverna sopra detta, dove era morto il Foiano di
fame, e ivi mi lasciarono istare, non mi faccendo altro male.” (I, CXX, 383-4)

177
This corresponds, we also know from the last passages in prose of Book I, to the
arrival of an “invisible” spirit that, “like a whirlwind,” delivers him from imprisonment
and leads him to the vision of the sun. In this context, the narration explicitly posits
Benvenuto’s journey to the sphere of the sun as a trajectory bringing him to light from the
womb of the earth. The invisible spirit that brings Benvenuto to see the sphere of the sun
carries, in fact, literally leads Benvenuto out of the earth:
That invisible being, like a whirlwind, caught me up and bore me away into a
large room […] He led me onwards, and went forth in front of me through a
little low door into a place which looked like a narrow street; and when he
drew me after him into the street, at the moment of leaving the hall, I was
disarmed. […] I was seized with wonder, because I did not recognize the
street; and when I lifted my eyes, I discerned that the splendor of the sun was
striking on a wall, as it were a house-front, just above my head. Then I said:
‘Oh my friend! What must I do in order to be able to ascend so high that I may
gaze upon the sphere of the sun himself?’ He pointed out some huge stairs
which were on my right hand, and said to me: ‘Go up thither by thyself.’
Quitting his side, I ascended the stairs backwards, and gradually began to
come within the region of the sunlight. Then I hastened my steps, and went on,
always walking backwards as I have described, until I discovered the whole
sphere of the sun. (I, CXXII, 228-9)
346

The transformative processes of Benvenuto’s initiation to the secrets of God, his
becoming gold, and his acquisition of the capability to inflate life into matter originate
from his act of manipulation of a mixture of earth and water. Benvenuto’s composite
transformation begins at a moment in which he is “gestated” within the earth’s womb.

346
“A modo che un vento io fui preso e portato via, e fui menato in una stanza. [...] Menatomi innanzi, uscì
innanzi a me per una piccola porticella in un luogo come una strada istretta; e quando egli mi tirò drieto a
sé innella iddetta istrada, all’uscire di quella stanza mi trovai disarmato. [...] Io mi maravigliavo, perché
non ricognoscevo quella istada; e alzato gli occhi, viddi che il chiarore del sole batteva in una pariete di
muro, modo che una facciata di casa, sopra il mio capo. Allora io dissi: “O amico mio, come io ho da fare,
che io mi potessi alzare tanto che io vedessi la propia spera del sole?” Lui mi mostrò parecchi scaglioni che
erano quivi alla mia man ritta, e mi disse: “Va quivi da te.” Io spicciatomi un poco da lui, salivo con le
calcagnia allo indietro su per quei parecchi scaglioni, e cominciavo poco a poco a scoprire la vicinità del
sole. M’affrettavo a salire; e tanto andai in sù a quel modo ditto che io scopersi tutta la spera del sole.” (I,
CXXII, 387-8).

178
This opens the possibility to consider the Vita not only as a text that posits earth is a
mother of life, but also as a narrative according to which, in similarity to the
Metamorphoses, mankind is literally a product of earth. Benvenuto’s transformation into
a poet, then, appears to be a process strictly related to the generative potential that, like
the Metamorphoses, the Vita ascribe to the amalgamation of water and earth. As in
several episodes from the Metamorphoses the humus is represented as a generative
substratum from which life is generated, so in the Vita the process of Benvenuto’s
transformation into gold appears to be both the result of the manipulation of water and
earth and as a “journey” which delivers him from underground imprisonment and
elevates him to the light of the sun.
Benvenuto’s casting of metals, as well as his own transformation into gold,
constitute acts of poiesis which are founded on a substantial continuity between the
figures of the earth, Prometheus and mankind. As Prometheus in the Metamorphoses
creates mankind manipulating a mixture of water and earth, so the main character of the
Vita acquires the promethean capability to shape matter into life specifically at the
moment he manipulates, in the underground cell, a soft mixture of water and earth.
Benvenuto’s poetics does more than simply “repeat” the promethean process of creation.
It also opens an interstice in historical time that gives the poet access to the moment of
the origin corresponding to the “first” age, or the moment in time which the
Metamorphoses names “golden age.” This reinforces my argument that the gold into
which Benvenuto transforms corresponds to a purely “signified” matter whose value can
not be understood with the arithmetical tools of finance. This gold does not appear to

179
generate economic profit, and it cannot be stored with the purpose of accumulating
monetary wealth. Rather, it initiates Benvenuto into the capability to generate life by
manipulating matter. This character’s relationship with the element of earth is therefore
neatly distinguished from the processes of extraction of riches from the soil that, as we
are going to see in the following pages, is brought forward by several other characters in
the Vita.
Vita’s Chapter XXVII, enclosed in Book I, recounts the encounter between
Benvenuto and a number of Lombard peasants who, while working in the Roman
countryside to till the vineyards, find in the soil ancient jewels, “precious” stones, and
other “valuable” artifacts:
I made acquaintance with certain hunters after curiosities, who followed the
track of those Lombard peasants who used to come to Rome to till the
vineyards at the proper season. While digging the ground, they frequently
turned up antique medals, agates, chrysoprases, cornelians and cameos; also
sometimes jewels, as, for instance, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and rubies.
The peasants used to sell things of this sort to the traders for a mere trifle. (I,
XXVII, 43-4)
347

This passage is particularly important because it establishes a clear distinction
between the “treasures” that earth spontaneously generates when it is amalgamated with
water and the “riches” found in the earth at the moment the soil is dug and excavated. In
this passage, in fact, there is no reference to the earth’s generative potential. Here earth is
represented as a site in which “ancient treasures” are preserved and from which, as in the

347
“M’avevo fatto amicizie di certi cercatori, li quali stavano alle velette di certi villani lombardi, che
venivano al suo tempo a Roma a zappare le vigne. Questi tali innel zappare la terra sempre trovavono
medaglie antiche, agate, prasme, corniuole, commei; ancora trovavano delle gioie, come s’è dire ismeraldi,
zaffini, diamanti e rubini. Questi tali cercatori da quei tai villani avevano alcuna volta per pochissimi danari
di queste cose ditte.” (I, XXVII, 141)

180
Metamorphoses’s account of the age of iron, men extract riches. The jewels, antique
medals, and precious stones found by the Lombard peasants in the soil are neither living
organisms nor products of the earth’s fecundity, but commodities that can be immediately
put into commerce and that generate financial profit.
The Vita reiterates a representation of earth as an element that can be dug to
extract “financial” riches in the conclusion of Book II, when Benvenuto collaborates with
Duke Cosimo in restoring a number of ancient bronzes. At this point in the narration
Benvenuto is engaged in finalizing the surface of his Perseus, but he cannot immediately
complete his work because he is ordered by Cosimo to secretly join him, on a daily basis,
in his stanzino.
348
Cosimo is engaged, the text explains, in the restoration of a number of
Etruscan bronzes that had he found in the countryside around Arezzo. The Duke needs
Benvenuto’s help to clean the statuettes and to reconstruct their missing parts:
During those days some antiquities had been discovered in the country around
Arezzo. Among them was the Chimaera […] Together with the Chimaera a
number of little statuettes, likewise in bronze, had been brought to light; they
were covered with earth and rust, and each of them lacked either head or
hands or feet. The Duke amused his leisure hours by cleaning up these
statuettes himself with certain little chisels used by goldsmiths. […] While we
were talking, he reached me a little hammer, with which I struck the chisels
the Duke held, and so the figures were disengaged from their earth and rust. In
this way we passed several evenings, and then the Duke commissioned me to
restore the statuettes. (II, LXXXVII, 378)
349

348
Cosimo I, Van Lennep recalls, was “grand-duc de Toscane et alchimiste impénitent.” (Van Lennep,
1985, 361)

349
“Essendosi in questi giorni trovato certe anticaglie nel contado d’Arezzo, in fra le quali si era la Chimera
[…] e insieme con la detta Chimera si era trovato una quantità di piccole statuette, pur di bronzo, le quali
erano coperte di terra e di ruggine, e a ciascuna di esse mancava o la testa o le mani o i piedi; il Duca
pigliava piacere di rinettarsele da per se medesimo con certi cesellini di orefici. […] Mentre che io
ragionavo seco, ei mi porse un piccol martellino con el quale io percotevo quei cesellini che ‘l Duca teneva
in mano, e in quel modo le ditte figurine si scoprivano dalla terra e dalla ruggine. Così passando innanzi
parecchie sere, il Duca mi misse in opera, dove io cominciai a rifare quei membri che mancavano alle dette
figurine.” (II, LXXXVII, 591-92)

181
As we can read in this passage, earth can be seen as a deposit of “treasures,” and
the restoration of the ancient artifacts begins with their extraction from the crust earth has
formed around them. In cleaning up the Etruscan bronzes, the Duke and Benvenuto use
“certain little chisels used by goldsmiths” (II, LXXXVII, 378), but their work of
extraction is not depicted as a promethean process of generation of life, nor it is presented
as a procedure aiming at inflating a living breath into matter. The emphasis given to the
fact that Benvenuto, being engaged in this work of polishing the statuettes, cannot
complete his most urgent work of finalizing the Perseus, suggests that there is a
substantial difference between the work of restoration performed by the Duke and the
acts of procreation accomplished by Benvenuto in making his bronzes. The Duke’s work
consists in a mere reconstruction of the bronze artifacts that the earth has preserved
throughout the ages. In giving life to the metal and realizing his Perseus, on the contrary,
Benvenuto engages into processes of life-giving, and he understands earth not as an
element to be stripped of its riches, but rather as a humus which gestates the
metallurgist’s offspring.
Finally, the Vita presents a clear distinction between Benvenuto’s understanding
of earth and the notion that the soil should be excavated to gain profit in Book I, Chapter
LXIV. Here, in the course of two necromantic sessions held near Rome’s Coliseum, a
necromancer attempts to persuade Benvenuto to assist him in the consecration of a

182
book.
350
The necromancer promises Benvenuto, in reward for his help, the knowledge of
a secret that will allow him to possess all the “treasures” the earth is full of:
The necromancer tried to persuade me to assist him in consecrating a book, by
means of which we should extract immeasurable wealth, since we could call
up fiends to show us where treasures were, whereof the earth is full. (I, LXIV,
120)
351

Benvenuto, however, declines the necromancer’s invitation. The possibility to
possess all the “riches of the earth,” in fact, does not seem appealing to him. Rather, he
prefers to leave the necromancer alone, go back to his workshop, and continue his own
work as metallurgist:
As we were in the habit of meeting daily, the necromancer kept urging me to
join him in his adventure. Accordingly, I asked him how long it would take,
and where we should have to go. […] This priestly sorcerer moved me so by
his persuasions that I was well disposed to comply with his request; but I said
I wanted first to finish the medals I was making for the Pope. […] However, I
had made my mind up, come what may, to finish my medal, and we were now
approaching the end of the month. I was so absorbed and enamoured by my

350
Benvenuto encounters the necromancer while, in Rome, he participates to two necromantic sessions
with a Sicilian priest. In both sessions, a native of Pistoia (Vincenzio Romoli, said to “also cultivate the
black art.”)

351
Benvenuto’s response to Vincenzio, who asks him to assist in consecrating a book, is obscure: “I replied
that if I were a Latin scholar I should be very willing to do what he suggested. He continued to persuade me
by arguing that Latin scholarship was of no importance, and that if he wanted, he could have found plenty
of good Latinists; but that he had never met with a man of soul so firm as mine, and that I ought to follow
his counsel. Engaged in this conversation, we reached our homes, and each one of us dreamed all that night
of devils” (I, LXIV, 120): “Il negromante diceva che di tante volte quante lui era entrato inelli circuli, non
mai gli era intervenuto una così gran cosa, e mi persuadeva che io fussi contento di volere esser seco a
consacrare un libro: da il quale noi trarremmo infinita ricchezza, perché noi dimanderemmo li demonii che
ci insegnassino delli tesori, i quali n’è pien la terra, e a quel modo noi diventeremmo ricchissimi; e che
queste cose d’amore si erano vanità e pazzie, le quali non rilevavano nulla.” (I, LXIV,244) “Io li dissi che
se io avessi lettere latine, che molto volentieri farei una tal cosa. Pur lui mi persuadeva, dicendomi che le
lettere latine non mi servivano a nulla, e che se lui avessi voluto, trovava di molti con buone lettere latine;
ma che non aveva mai trovato nessuno d’un saldo animo come ero io, e che io dovessi attenermi al suo
consiglio. Con questi ragionamenti noi arrivammo alle case nostre, e ciascun di noi tutta quella notte
sogniammo diavoli.” (I, LXIV,244)
In the chapter that follows (I, LXV), we read that Benvenuto, despite declaring himself to be “very willing”
to do what the necromancer suggests, eventually decides not to comply with the necromancer’s requests.

183
work that I thought no more about Angelica or anything of that kind, but gave
my whole self up to my work. (I, LXV, 121-2)
352

The juxtaposition between the figure of the necromancer and Benvenuto seems to
mirror the distinction the text makes between the excavation of the soil to extract its
(financial) “riches” and the shaping a malleable mixture of water and earth as a process
of generation of life—a process that leads, as in the case of the “making” of the gold of
the poets described by Goux, to the generation of “incommensurably rich” products. As
the text provides two different understandings of gold, according to which this metal can
either be conceived of as a dead matter—that is to say a means of monetary exchange—
or a “signified,” living matter into which Benvenuto transforms, so two opposite ways to
inhabit and manipulate the earth are brought forward at this point in the text. One is
represented by the necromancer’s view, according to which the earth can be excavated in
order to extract treasures and generate financial profit. In this frame, the generative
potential of the earth is erased and soil is seen, as in the Metamorphoses’s depiction of
the age of iron, as matter whose excavation causes the mankind’s greed and thirst for
accumulation. The other representation of earth is brought forward, in contrast, by
Benvenuto’s processes of metallurgic creation. In this second frame, earth has a
generative potential and it is a crucial element used in Benvenuto’s process of inflation of
life into matter. Earth has no financial value, and the poetic act of creation, like the gold

352
“Rivedendoci poi alla giornata, il negromante mi stringeva che io dovessi attendere a quella inpresa [...].
Questo prete negromante certissimamente mi aveva persuaso tanto, che io volentieri mi ero disposto a far
tal cosa, ma dicevo che volevo prima finire quelle medaglie che io facevo per il Papa. [...] Essendomi io
disposto in tutto e per tutto di voler prima finir la mia medaglia, di già eravamo vicini al fine del mese: al
quale, per essere invaghito tanto inella medaglia, io non mi ricordavo più né di Angelica né di null’altra
cotal cosa, ma tutto ero intento a quella mia opera.” (I, LXV, 544-6)

184
into which Benvenuto transforms, is not measurable in economic terms. Poiesis is rather
understood as a mode of participating into earth’s generative potential, while the poet
repeats the promethean act of giving a shape to the life inscribed within softened earth.

185
PART 2 –AUTOPOIESIS

CHAPTER FOUR : AUTOPOIESIS
In Autopoiesis, the Organization of the Living (1972) Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela argue that the question: “What is common to all living systems that we
qualify them as living?”, at least within the discipline of biology, has neither been
exhaustively addressed nor fully answered.
353
Life has frequently been taken as a self-
explaining or self-evident category, and the characteristic of being “alive” has often been
ascribed to organisms (such as in the case of animals and plants) not moving from an
inquiry concerning the definition of what constitutes life or what is peculiar to living
organisms, but rather through an a posteriori “enumeration” of these systems’
“properties.”
354
For example, Maturana and Varela tell us, “vitalist theories” have
defined life referring to a kind of hidden “spark” that would animate living beings, while
“system theories” have explained the functioning of “living organisms” referring to
organizational properties (such as the tendency towards organizational equilibrium)
which are mainly made manifest by the systems reaction to outside stimulation, as in the
case of a system’s production of responsive feedback loops. Darwinian narratives of
evolution, too, have for Maturana and Varela contributed to the mystification of the
problem of the definition of life. In evolutionary theories, in fact, life has been primarily
understood in terms of a given system’s capability to enact reproductive functions, and

353
Maturana and Varela, 74-75.

354
Maturana and Varela, 83.

186
the problem of what is constitutive of the living has been either eluded or conflated with
processes of transmission of genetic codes.
According to Maturana and Varela, then, a number of commonly accepted
assumptions, such as the notion that “observation and experimentation are alone
sufficient for a characterization of the living organization,” have led to a systematic
process of elusion of both a comprehensive inquiry concerning the definition of life and a
serious discussion concerning the identification of the characteristics that lead us to
consider a given living organism alive.
355
Within this frame, Maturana and Varela also
argue, not only has biology failed in providing a comprehensive definition of life, but it
has also (and systematically) foreclosed the possibility of including non-organic systems
within the category of living beings.

For example, man-made machines have always been
conceived of as “dead” matter, for they were considered to be “human made artifacts
with completely known deterministic properties.”
356

Maturana’s and Varela’s attempt to “disclose the nature of the living
organization” takes, in the two authors’ own words, a “point of departure” which is quite
different from the vitalist, systematic or evolutionary theories mentioned above. The two
authors’ starting-point consists in a mode of observation centered upon “the unitary
character of a living system.”
357
Such a peculiar frame of observation, Maturana and
Varela argue, constitutes a powerful antidote against both the unproblematic
understandings of the “living” that have posited life as a self-evident category and the

355
Maturana and Varela, 83.

356
Maturana and Varela, 82.

357
Maturana and Varela, 75.

187
teleological approaches that are used to explain the functioning of non-organic machines
in purely deterministic terms. Maturana and Varela do acknowledge the fact that “an
explanation [of the functioning of a system] is always given by us as observers.”
358
Still,
they attempt to re-define biological life putting at the center of their observation the
constituent features that characterize individual systems rather than moving from the
need of categorization that, in their perspective, has organized the entire history of
knowledge from Aristotle onwards.
359
In other words, while acknowledging that the
recognition of the “unity” of a given system is a process that can not be performed
without an act of observation, Maturana and Varela attempt “to understand the
organization of living systems in relation to their [own] unitary character” and not in
relationship to the determinism of teleological narratives that observation imposes. As
they say in a crucial passage from the first chapter of Autopoiesis, “purpose, or aim, or
function, are not constitutive properties of the machine which we describe with them.”
360

As this excerpt suggests, according to Maturana and Varela it is essential to
distinguish between a given system’s structure and its function. On the basis of such a
distinction, Maturana and Varela acknowledge that the problem of defining life can not
be solved simply looking at the “properties” that an observer can ascribe to a given
organism, but it should rather be addressed scrutinizing the whole functioning of the
system, that is to say by means of an analysis focused on “the processes and relations

358
Maturana and Varela, 75.

359
“After Aristotle, and as variation of his fundamental notions, the history of biology features many
theories that attempt in a way or another to frame the whole phenomenology of living systems within some
peculiar organizational force.” (Maturana and Varela, 126)

360
Maturana and Varela, 75 and 78.

188
between processes realized through [a system’s] components.”
361
For the two authors, in
fact, “there is an organization that is common to all living systems, whichever the nature
of their components,” and this common organization can be grasped only if we do not
make “distinctions between classes and types of living systems.”
362
After having made
clear that that they consider all living systems “machines,” Maturana and Varela provide
a preliminary explanation of what they mean by “structure” and “organization”:
the relations that define a machine as a unity (…) constitute the organization
of the machine (…) The relations which hold among the components which
integrate a machine in a given space constitutes their structure. (Maturana and
Varela, 77)

In this frame, the two authors continue, autopoiesis constitute a specific form of
systemic organization. More specifically, in an autopoietic frame the term “organization”
designates a peculiar mode of functioning where a system, by means of generating a
series of recursive process, produces its own elements and integrates them in its own
network. The term “structure,” in turn, refers to the status of a given system, and the
relations that take place among the components that integrate a machine, in a given space
and at a specific point in time. Autopoietic machines are therefore structure-determined
systems: anything that happens in or to a system is determined by the system’s structure.
What is then an autopoietic machine? According to Maturana and Varela, a first
step towards answering such a question might come from a discussion of the difference
between autopoietic and allopoietic systems. A machine can be considered allopoietic
when it produces something other than the system itself. Examples of allopoietic

361
Maturana and Varela, 75.

362
Maturana and Varela, 76.

189
machines include the assembly-line that “deterministically” transforms raw matter into
objects and the crystal, which is a system whose organization is specified by the spatial
relations which define its relative components. Both the assembly-line of a factory and
the crystal constitute, for the two Chilean scholars, non-autopoietic dynamic systems. An
autopoietic machine, on the contrary,
is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of
production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through
their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the
network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the
machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by
specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.
(Maturana and Varela, 78-9)

As we can read in this passage, Maturana and Varela put a strong emphasis on the
mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system, and this leads
them to reframe not only the way we understand a system’s “unity” and “functioning,”
but also the way we conceptualize the notion of “information” that a system seems to
“produce” when it is observed from an external point of view. Autopoietic systems do not
merely generate messages, signals, or information, but they rather (and problematically)
capture “information” within their own organizational properties. As in Maturana and
Varela’s views “autopoietic machines […] transform matter into themselves in a manner
such that the product of their operation is their own organization” one can conclude, as
Katherine Hayles has done, that autopoiesis “changes the explanation of what circulates
through the system to make it work as a system.” In an autopoietic system, in other words,
information “has sunk so deeply into the system as to become indistinguishable from the

190
organizational properties defining the system as such.”
363
After having clarified what
they mean by system, unity, function and organization, Maturana and Varela give their
own definition of autopoietic machine:
an autopoetic machine is a (…) system which has its own organization
(defining network of relations) as the fundamental variable which it maintains
constant. (Maturana and Varela, 79)

A concrete example of autopoietic machine is, according to the two authors,
provided by the biological cell. The fact the cell might constitute a paradigmatic example
of autopoietic machine, though, does not necessarily entail that autopoiesis should
exclusively belong to organic beings. Autopoiesis can in fact also be recognized,
Maturana and Varela suggest, in the mode of functioning of a number of non-organic
systems. In order to give further clarification about this point, Maturana and Varela
describe a series of corollary characteristics that pertain exclusively to autopoietic
systems. These are summarized as follows:
1) autopoietic machines are autonomous; that is, they subordinate all changes
to the maintenance of their own organization (…).
2) autopoietic machines have individuality; that is, by keeping their
organization as invariable through its continuous production they actively
maintain an identity which is independent of their interactions with an
observer. (…)
3) autopoietic machines are unities because, and only because, of their
specific autopoietic organization: their operations specify their own
boundaries in the processes of self-production. This is not the case with an
allopoietic machine whose boundaries are defined by an observer. (…)
4) autopoietic machines do not have inputs or outputs. They can be perturbed
by independent events and undergo internal structural changes which
compensate these perturbations. If the perturbations are repeated, the machine
may undergo repeated series of internal changes which may or may not be
identical. (Maturana and Varela, 80-1)

363
Maturana and Varela, 82, and Hayles, 1991, 11.

191
Next, Maturana and Varela come to identify autopoiesis as the invariant
characteristic that defines “living systems” as living. Since it “continuously generates and
specifies its own organization through its operation as system of production of its own
components,” an autopoietic machine is a homeostatic system which has its own
organization as the fundamental variable which it maintains constant.
364
On this basis,
Maturana and Varela argue, the characteristic that defines living systems is neither their
capability to reproduce themselves nor their ability to transmit, or replicate, their genetic
code. Rather, as life can be properly defined as the network of processes of production of
components that are produced by such a network, “the notion of autopoiesis is necessary
and sufficient to characterize the organization of living systems.”
365

In the remaining part of their essay, Maturana and Varela explain the implications
of a consideration of how “the phenomenology of living systems, including reproduction
and evolution, indeed requires and depends on autopoiesis.”
366
In the first place, an
understanding of autopoiesis as the peculiar characteristic that defines living beings as
“living” leads to the consideration of the notions of teleology and teleonomy as
“unnecessary for the understanding of the living organization.”
367
In other words,
Maturana and Varela reiterate that autopoiesis can be better understood outside both the
vitalist and Darwinian narratives according to which life can be unproblematically
equated with either the potential a given system might have to “reproduce” itself or its

364
Maturana and Varela, 79.

365
Maturana and Varela, 82.

366
Maturana and Varela, 84.

367
Maturana and Varela, 85.

192
capability to duplicate its genetic code. In the second place, autopoiesis entails a radical
reconsideration of the notion of cognition. Since for Maturana and Varela all living
systems are responsive to external stimuli through structure-dependent processes, it
follows that all living systems, even those without a nervous system, can be considered to
be cognitive systems. In the third place, autopoiesis would help discard the notion
according to which a living system could be not only reproduced, but even designed and
procreated by man:
Machines are generally viewed as human made artifacts with completely
known deterministic properties which make them, at least conceptually,
perfectly predictable. Contrariwise, living systems are a priori frequently
viewed as autonomous, ultimately unpredictable systems, with purposeful
behavior similar to ours. If living systems were machines, they could be made
by man and, according to the view mentioned above, it seems unbelievable
that man could manufacture a living system. […] There seems to be an
intimate fear that the awe with respect to life and the living would disappear if
a living system could be not only reproduced, but designed by man. This is
nonsense.” (Maturana and Varela, 83)

When Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis was first published in English in 1980,
it was presented to the reader by Sir Stafford Beer as “a really important book” that,
albeit very “small” in size, contained the whole “living universe.”
368
The English
translation of Autopoiesis was indeed released by one of the most prestigious series in
philosophy (namely the “Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science”) not as a work
exclusively belonging to the discipline of biology but rather, and relevantly, as an
inherently interdisciplinary project. While presenting Maturana and Varela’s text as a
“major theoretical work” integrating “biological theory, formal construction,

368
Beer, in Maturana and Varela, 63.

193
epistemology,” for instance, in their editorial preface Robert Coen and Marx Wartofsky
have defined Autopoiesis as both an original attempt “at a systematic biology” and “a
profoundly philosophical work.”
369

Some clarification of the reasons for which Autopoiesis can be considered as a
work that, moving from a crucial question such as “how can life be defined?”, tends to
the invalidation to the distinction between biology and philosophy, comes from Beer’s
Preface to the essay entitled “The Organization of the Living” contained in the same
volume. Beer begins arguing that the entire organization of knowledge belonging to
Western culture has been framed on the philosophical notions and practices of
‘categorization’ and ‘distinction’:
We are the inheritors of categorized knowledge; therefore we inherit also a
world view that consists of parts strung together, rather than of wholes
regarded through different sets of filters. Historically, synthesis seems to have
been too much for the human mind. (…) The modern world of science and
technology is bred from Aristotle and Aquinas by analysis. The categorization
that took hold of medieval scholasticism has really lasted it out. We may see
with hindsight that the historic revolts against the scholastics did not shake
free from the shackles of their reductionism.
The revolt of the rationalists – Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz – began from a
principle of ‘methodological doubt’. But they became lost in mechanism,
dualism and more and more categorization. (…) The revolt of the
empiricists – Locke, Berkeley, Hume – began from the nature of
understanding about the environment. But analysis was still the method, and
categorization still the practical tool of advance. (…)
By the time Kant was devoting his prodigious mind to sorting all this out, the
battle was lost. (Beer, 63)

369
Coen and Wartofsky, in Maturana and Varela, vi.

194
Thereafter, Beer states that an analogous pattern of “advancement”, that is to say
a mode of “development of knowledge” which is based on categorization, distinction and
classification, can be found not only within philosophy but also in the realm of sciences:
science is ordered knowledge. It began with classification. From Galen in the
second century through Linnaeus in the eighteenth, analysis and
categorization provided the natural instrumentality of scientific progress. Ally
this fact with the background of philosophical thought, and the scene is set for
the inexorable development of the world view that is so difficult to challenge
today. It is a world view in which real systems are annihilated in trying to
understand them, in which relations are lost because they are not categorized.
(Beer, 64)

Finally, Beer draws the conclusion that the entire history of knowledge has been
based on procedures of distinction and categorization. While promoting specialization
and partition of knowledge into tiny disciplinary “bits,” for Beer, such a mode of
“development” has lead not only to privilege teleological and disciplinary methodologies,
but it has also failed to grasp the wide interactions governing “the world” in its entirety.
Against this “disciplinary” background, Beer argues, Maturana and Varela’s notion of
autopoiesis provides a powerful theoretical tool that allows us not merely to develop
“interdisciplinary” and “meta-disciplinary” studies, but also to dissolve the “deadlock
within the disciplinary system” that organizes and structures contemporary approaches to
knowledge. In other words, Beer argues that Maturana and Varela’s work provides a
comprehensive framework that, in proposing a broadly constructed understanding of the
notions of life and poiesis, cannot be “classified under the old categories” of biology,
philosophy or literary criticism.
370

370
Beer, in Maturana and Varela, 65.

195
As Jakob Arnoldi has noted, as of today Maturana and Varela’s work “has not
attained a paradigmatic status in biology, which has maintained its focus on reproduction
(DNA),” but it has influenced cybernetics and related fields of study, such as informatics
and artificial intelligence theories.
371
While some scholars, such as John Mingers, have
found theoretical affinities between the theories of autopoiesis and Heideggerian
phenomenology, others have taken Maturana and Varela’s theoretical frame as a point of
departure for the elaboration of theories of social and cognitive systems. This is the case,
for example, of Niklas Luhmann, who starting from the early 1990’s has applied the
concept of autopoiesis to the study of social systems and organizations. As Arnoldi has
put it, while defining social systems as communicative systems, Luhmann has developed
“a theory of communication that understands communication not as a transmission of
meaning or information from one subject to another but as an autopoietic system that
emerges out of the double contingent encounter of subjects.”
372
Thus, for Luhmann,
communication constitutes an autopoetic system that, developing independently from the
conscious processes of the subjects’ communicating, tends to evolve on its own. More
recently, Ira Livingston has drawn upon Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis in order to
support the possibility that language and culture, and not only cells and social systems,
can be considered to be wholly self-referential and inherently autopoietic machines.
373
A

371
Arnoldi, 117. On the topic see also the endnotes 19 and 20 to Empire part 3, chapter 5, where Hardt and
Negri acknowledge the heuristic potential of autopoietic theories writing that: “the first variable [of the
struggle over the Empire's constitution] and the analysis of the functioning of the network in constitutional
terms relates in certain respects to the various autopoietic theories of networks.” (Hardt and Negri, 466).

372
Arnoldi, 117.

196
further example of how can one make the concept of autopoiesis travel across disciplines
is provided by Katherine Hayles’ book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature and Science (1999). Moving from the assumption that “the
observer’s perceptions construct reality rather than passively perceive it, and this
construction depends on positionality rather than personality,” Hayles calls our attention
to the possibility that, when engaged in processes of observation, even the observer can
constitute him or her self as an autopoietic system.
374
This has the paramount
consequence, for Hayles, to shift “the center of interest” from “the cybernetics of the
observed system to the cybernetic of the observer.”
375
In addition, Hayles points out,
even a (autopoietic) system interacting recursively with its own representations can
transform itself into an observer, thus becoming “an observing system observing itself
observing.”
376

For the purpose of my “autopoietic” reading of the Metamorphoses, the Vita, and
Petrolio, it is important at this point to mention Ben Stoltzfus’ essay titled “Robbe-
Grillet’s and John’s Targets.” In this work, Stoltzfus draws upon Maturana and Varela’s
theory of autopoiesis, as well as on the work done by Luhmann, Hayles and others, in

373
In Livingston’s perspective, the “self-making” of living creatures does not only belong to the “unitary
organization of life at the cellular level” and, as suggested by Luhmann, to the process of functioning of
social systems, but it can also been observed at the wider level of functioning of both language and culture.
In order to both “vernacularize the word” autopoiesis and to “remove from the concept its reliance on
specific, ideologically bound notions of the self, the I” Livingston rewrites the term “autopoiesis” dropping
an “i.” In this way, he coins a new term–autopoesis–that in his perspective is capable of “referencing
poetics more pointedly” and therefore to mark the inclusion, within the fields of autopoietic theory, of “the
realms of culture and meaning.” (Livingston, 2)

374
Hayles, 143.

375
Hayles, 11.

376
Hayles 144.

197
order to provide a comparative reading of Robbe-Grillet’s La Cible and a series of
sculptural and visual works by Jasper Johns. Arguing that “Pop art and nouveau roman”
seem to bridge the gap between artist and observer and “challenge discursive modes that
seek communicative transparency,” Stoltzfus reaches the conclusion that Robbe-Grillet’s
La Cible and some of John’s visual works function as autopoietic machines as far as they
capture readers and observers in their meta-narrative recursive loops.
377
In discussing the
problem of the indistinguishability between “inside” and “outside” of an autopoietic text,
Stoltzfus also introduces the image of the Moebius strip, which in his views can be used
as a “powerful metaphor” for representing the mediation “between undecidability and the
inside-outside dialectic” that characterizes autopoiesis.
378
Besides constituting a source
of inspiration for my own work, Stoltzfus’s understanding of autopoiesis as a continuous
process of production of “undecidable” information “that cannot be interpreted unless we,
as observers, move from the recursive loops inside the [autopoietic] system to the objects
outside” supports my fundamental claim that besides constituting a ground for discussing
the functioning of social systems (Luhmann), of language (Livingston), and of observing
processes (Hayles), autopoietic theories can be used for the reading of literary texts.

AUTOPOIESIS IN THE METAMORPHOSES, THE VITA AND PETROLIO
I consider the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio to be autopoietic systems
because these texts appear to be “continuously generate and specify their own

377
Stoltzfus 21

378
Stoltzfus 10.

198
organization through their operation as systems of production of their own
components.”
379
More specifically, these literary works appear to maintain a structural
unity (assured by their written body) while generating, and capturing in their rhetorical
functioning, the new components that are made up by the processes of interpretation that
they engage in their readers. The three texts show a constant concern with transformation;
they seem to lack definite narrative points of beginning and end; and they posit, as one of
their peculiar characteristics that assures their unities, the possibility to include in their
textual “body” what they do not “immediately” contain, for example the proliferation of
meanings that the “observation” of each text generates. Thus, the three texts appear to
constitute autopoietic spectacles of language that both generate their components and
specify their own “organizational properties” each time they are observed. The three texts
make the “information” they convey indistinguishable from their structural organization,
and while capturing their readers’ positionality within their open-ended narratives, they
remind us that the reader’s interaction is a constitutive component of each text’s
functioning. These literary works, in other words, appear to paradigmatically exemplify
how a literary text can embody an autopoietic machine ultimately “organized (defined as
unity) as a network of processes of production of components.”
380

In the second place, the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio seem all to
constitute autopoietic machines because they construct time not as a progressive or
developmental line, but rather as a continuous “present” that is problematically

379
Maturana and Varela, 79.

380
Maturana and Varela, 78-9.

199
“actualized” at the moment a reader interacts with the text. This corresponds, I argue, to
Maturana’s statement that autopoiesis always occurs within “the present”, while notions
of “past, future, and time exist only for the observer.”
381
As the initial and final lines
from the Metamorphoses state, for example, the time of the poem’s action is not enclosed
between two definite points of beginning and end, but it rather appears as a perpetual
movement that, developing from the origins of the world to the poet’s own “present,” will
also indefinitely continue as far as the text will continue to be read. Albeit long sections
from the text seem at a first sight to depict in a chronologically ordered frame the bildung
of the persona of its main character Benvenuto, also the Vita’s narrative presents a very
problematic understanding of time. As the lyrical incipit of the text explicitly suggests, in
fact, the Vita presents itself as a product of poetic making (namely, writing) that occurs
and recurs in a continuous present that will indefinitely continue. Finally, several Appunti
from Petrolio contain either empty spaces, notes to be developed or “missing” blocks of
text that remain forever “to be written.” These fragments render the book that we are
reading an infinite work in progress, which organizes its matter only in a transitional
shape. Petrolio, we also know from the first page, is a textual body that continuously
fluctuates between the present form of the text (the one that we read), and its future
“draft” that remains forever in progress.
In the third place, the three literary works seem to constitute autopoietic texts
because they all converge in “capturing” the position of their reader within their self-
constitutive organizational loops. All three texts, in fact, envision observation and reading

381
Maturana 1970, in Maturana and Varela, 18.

200
as processes that are constitutive (and not secondary or subsequent) to their narratives.
More specifically, each book seems to construct reading as a process whereby one
introduces a “differential angle” of signification in the texts’ narrative. In doing so, each
text responds to reading generating a series of “amplifications” that may take the form,
for example, of the proliferation of a potentially infinite series of “new” meanings. The
readers’ processes of production of new meanings are captured within each text’s
autopoietic functioning for each text rhetorically posits its transformation as the
fundamental feature that assures its own unitary structure. Each text captures its
observation within the movements of the system’s creation of its own components and,
more pointedly, it captures the processes of their observation within the recursive loops
of its own autopoietic functioning. Among other consequences, this process of capture
seems to have relevant implications in making the “difference” between the inside and
the outside of literary text blur into a zone of indifferentiation, as well as in offering the
opportunity for a reconsideration of authorship when writing means to give shape to an
autopoetic literary text.

THE PRODUCTION OF COMPONENTS
One main feature of autopoietic systems, Maturana and Varela point out, is their
capability to “continuously generate and specify their own organization through their
operation as systems of production of their own components.”
382
The Metamorphoses,
the Vita and Petrolio appear to be autopoietic systems of signification because these texts,

382
Maturana and Varela, 79.

201
at least on a rhetorical level, all appear to produce new components. More specifically,
the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio not only all present a polycentric structure
made of a multiplicity of narratives that continuously intersect, and simultaneously
diverge but they also tend to the inclusion in their textual “body” of what they do not
contain, for example the proliferation of meanings that the “observation” of each text
generates. Such a problematic structural characteristic belonging to the three texts can be
better observed if we consider the fact that each text consists of the “assembly” of
materials that elude the possibility to determine, from the point of view of the reader,
definite points of narrative beginning and end.
In the first lines of the Metamorphoses, for example, the poet presents his poem as
a “perpetuum carmen” that develops (and that will continue to develop) uninterruptedly
from the origins of the world to the “present.” In the opening sonnet of the Vita, the text
is said to be a work that can continue to grow, indefinitely and potentially ad infinitum, as
far as the poet will be able to retain his capability to “remember” or to engage in poetic
creation. The first two written fragments of Petrolio, in turn, respectively posit the text as
a transitional draft of a work that remains forever to be developed and a literary text that
“does not begin.” In addition, as several critics have observed, Petrolio contains a
multiplicity of “prefatory interventions” that continuously defer the narrative’s incipit and
that in doing so appear to obliterate the possibility, from the point of view of an observer,
to identify a clear point of beginning of the whole text.
The “capability” all three of these texts have to specify their own organization
while operating as systems of production of components is also expressed by the fact that

202
they are made of an assembly of narrative episodes that are not organized around a linear,
or a chronological, general frame. More specifically, the three texts autopoietically
converge in making the “information” they convey indistinguishable from their structural
organization, and this feature resonates with Maturana’s arguments that autopoietic
“living systems are cognitive systems” and living “is a process of cognition.”
383
In the
Metamorphoses, for example, the passage from an episode of transformation to another is
often marked by means of a break that interrupts the “development” of one specific
action and marks the beginning of another one, and the transition from one narrative
event to the next is only occasionally explained in terms of causal, logic, or sequentially
order. Despite the appearances, also the narration of the Vita is not really constructed
around a progressive, or chronological, developmental line. Indulging in anachronisms,
digressions, and ekphrastic descriptions, the Vita’s multifarious text rather merges
material of different kind to provide a fragmentary, rhyzomatic and un-linear ensemble of
narrative episodes whose unity is assured by their reciprocal interconnection. Also
Petrolio is not at all scrupulous about narrative sequencing. This text, too, appears in fact
to be made of a multi-layered assembly of narrative episodes constituted by a series of
passages in prose of different length, interruptions, blank pages, and notes that remain
forever “to be developed.” Because some of Petrolio’s Appunti share the same title and
other numbered fragments are not presented in a progressive order, and also because the
text we are reading is conceived of, from its “initial” fragments onwards, as a provisional
form of a textual organism that remains forever in progress, what assures Petrolio’s unity

383
Maturana, 1970, 15.

203
appears to be its capability to specify its own organization by producing its own
components.
Besides representing the “information” they convey as apparently
indistinguishable from their own structural organization, the Metamorphoses, the Vita
and Petrolio also converge in explicitly presenting themselves, at least on the level of
their rhetorical functioning, as living textual organisms. This characteristic is made
evident not simply by the fact the three narratives’ problematically present themselves in
terms of structural open-endeness but also, and more relevantly, by the fact they all
explicitly posit at different points in their narratives the process of writing as a poetic
practice of inflating life into matter. In the final lines of the Metamorphoses, for example,
the poet depicts his “making” of the literary text as a continuous process of gestation that
both resists its inscription into a linear understanding of time and provides the poet with
eternal life. Cellini’s Vita, in turn, not only does this text present “life” (as the title
suggests) as one of its main concerns, but it also depicts the poetic act of making, in
analogy to the Metamorphoses, as a process of parthenogenesis that results in the
generation of living organisms. Pasolini’s Petrolio is explicitly conceived as a living
product, too. For example, Appunto 43a depicts the fragmentary and provisional structure
Petrolio as a “mass” of liquefied “magma” that captures and crystallizes (and does not
merely represent) the “flow of time and life.”

204
THE PROBLEM OF TIME
The problem of time is central in the theory of autopoiesis. As Maturana has
stated in Biology of Cognition (1970), when facing an autopoietic system we must
constantly remind ourselves that “the present is the time interval necessary for any
interaction to take place. Past, future and time exist only for the observer.”
384
This means
that Maturana not only understands the circular interplay of autopoietic functioning as a
process that can manifest itself at any given moment, but also that the construct of “time”
emerges only at the moment an autopoietic machine is observed. More specifically, in
Maturana’s frame time appears to be a category that, while being necessarily and
unavoidably introduced by the very participation of the observer in the acknowledging of
autopoiesis, is neither intrinsically nor inherently proper to autopoietic machines.
Furthermore, one might argue elaborating on Maturana’s statement, as the time of
autopoietic processes belong properly to an ever renewing, perpetual present, notions of
past and future can be conceived of as byproducts of the autopoietic response of the
machine to observation.
All three the literary texts present a problematic representation of time. Petrolio’s
narrative, for example, is not organized as a temporal continuum. It is a work that
remains forever in progress, or a text that oscillates between its present “status” and a
future condition that “(from the second draft) should be presented in the form of a critical
edition of an unpublished text.”
385
Petrolio also contains both a multiplicity of incipits

384
Maturana, 1970, in Maturana and Varela, 1972, 18.

385
Petrolio, ix: “Tutto PETROLIO (dalla seconda stesura) dovrà presentarsi sotto forma di edizione critica
di un testo inedito.” (3)

205
scattered throughout various Appunti and a number of “prefatory interventions” that
constantly deprive the narrative of a fixed, or clearly defined, beginning. Examples of the
textual continuous “deferral” of its incipit can be found in Appunti 3a, 3b, 3c, 3e (all
titled “postponed preface,”) in Appunti 4, 5 and 6 (containing the statement that “the
prefatory folly continues” in their titles), in Appunto 6b (Preamble), Appunto 103b
(Preamble) and in a series of passages that challenge, as Appunto 103a does, the notion
that “a formal structure really contains the entire reality of a book.”
386
A non-linear
representation of time is also given by Appunto 1, whose blank page is followed by a note
stating that Petrolio “does not begin.”
Petrolio’s rhyzomic multiple narratives seem to continuously destabilize any
strategic center upon which one can organize the reading of the text, and its whole
structure is apparently not organized around either a linear pattern of development or a
chronological understanding of the development of time. Rather the text seems to
function as an autopoietic machine that “transforms matter into itself in a manner such
that the product of its operation is its own organization” and that operates within the
“suspended” time of a perpetual present where past and future exist only form the
perspective of the readers.
387
It should be noted, on the subject, that also the multiple
anonymous narrators who intervene at different points in Petrolio conceive its narrative
“gestation” and “development” as occurring, and forever renewing themselves, in

386
Petrolio, 369.

387
Maturana and Varela, 82.

206
suspended time and not, as in classical novel, in a chronological or linearly
developmental time-frame.
In Appunto 6 sexies, the narrator uses the present tense to conflate his own
process of “living” and his act of gestating and generating of the book. Directly
addressing the reader, here Petrolio’s narrator states: “may the reader forgive me if I
annoy him with these matters, but I am living the genesis of my book.”
388
In Appunto
43a, to provide another example, the narrator explains that he has chosen to use for the
narration the time of the “inchoative imperfect.” The use of this tense is intended to
display the “thickness” of Petrolio’s story and to capture the flow of time and life:
the inchoative imperfect, alluding to the passing of time and of life, proclaims
instead the thickness of the story: presents it as a vast, deep, lava flow; or,
rather, a boundless, bottomless river that runs /in the imperfect. […] in that
imperfect, in sum, c’est la vie. (Note 43a, 157)
389

With its allusion to the textual capture of life, and its use of the present tense, the
narrator’s explicit statement that in Petrolio “c’est la vie” shows how in autopoiesis “the
present is the time interval necessary for any interaction to take place,” while “past,
future and time exist only for the observer.”
390
Petrolio, in conclusion, suspends time and
configures itself as a constant process of self-production that captures, in its organization,
even the reader’s construction of time. The use of the inchoative imperfect, in this frame,

388
Note 6 sexies: “Il lettore mi perdoni se lo annoio con queste cose: ma io vivo la genesi del mio libro.”
(48)

389
“L’imperfetto incoativo, alludendo al passare del tempo e della vita, denuncia invece lo spessore della
storia: lo presenta come un vasto e profondo fronte lavico, anci, come un illimitato fiume senza fondo, che
scorre, ⌐in quell’imperfetto [...] In quell’imperfetto insomma c’est la vie.” (Appunto 43a, 188)

390
Maturana, 1970, in Maturana and Varela, 18.

207
shows how autopoetic machines “transform matter in such a manner that the product of
their own operation is their own organization.”
391

The Metamorphoses present narrative episodes taken from various sources, and
its overall narration mainly deals with a subject–mythology–that does not really seems
apt to an interpretative work centered upon chronological, “historical” or linear
understandings of time. In addition, as we have already seen, in both the incipit and the
final lines the poet designates the whole poem as a perpetuum carmen that extends, like a
continuum without breaks, from the origins of the world to his own present time. He
states:
My spirit impels me to speak of shapes changed into new
Bodies; oh gods (for you changed even those)
Inspire my beginnings and from the origin of the world
To my own times, draw my song without breaks. (Met, I, 1-4)
392

The very word perpetuum (referring to carmen) in line 4 can be read as
emphasizing continuity between the original chaos and the (poet’s own) present, and
even as a rhetorical device that inserts the poem itself in the continuum of the universe’s
transformation. In this frame, one might conclude, from its initial lines onwards the poem
not only accounts for different episodes of transformation and appears to embody the
transformative processes of the matter it is made of, but it also appears to resist the
possibility to order the different episodes it accounts for along a linear, or developmental,
time line.

391
Maturana and Varela, 82.

392
“In noua fert animus mutates dicere formas / Corpora; di, coeptis, nam uos mutastis et illa, / Adspirate
meis primasque ab origine mundi / Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora Carmen.” (Met., I, 1-4).

208
In turn, in the last lines of Book XV the poet states that now that he had
accomplished the task of writing his poem, he can overcome physical death and be born
again forever:
When it wishes, let the day, which has no power except
Over this body, finish the span of my uncertain lifetime;
But, with the better part of me, I shall be borne forever
Above the stars on high, and my name will be indelible;
And, where Roman power extends over subdued lands,
I shall be read by the peoples, and, through the ages, in fame,
(if there is any truth in the predictions of bards) I shall live. (Met, XV, 871-
879)
393

Considering both the initial lines from Book I and the conclusive lines of Book
XV, and emphasizing the fact that both passages allude to the problematic, and on-going,
“present-ness” which characterizes the narrative of the Metamorphoses, we can conclude
that analogously to Pasolini’s Petrolio Ovid’s poem also seem to enclose a narrative
action that is located, as for the autopoietic functioning of the biological cell studied by
Maturana and Varela, in a present that renews itself each time an observer approaches the
reading of the literary text.
Even if this issue has sometimes neglected by critics, also Cellini’s Vita presents
to its reader problems of chronological continuity and linearity.
394
In the sonnet that

393
“Cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat haevi: / parte
tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. / Quaque patet
domitis Romana potentia terris, / ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum
presagia, vivam.” (XV, 871-9)

394
The Vita has been often considered a case of “traditional” autobiographical writing or a milestone in the
elaboration of the autobiographical “genre” that has emerged, as Jonathan Goldberg has suggested, in
modernity. Within such a frame, some critics have even discussed the development of the textual narrative
in parallel to Cellini’s “biological” life. If considered this way, the text seems to present, at least in some
lengthy portions, a linear development of time, because it would tell the story of the life of Benvenuto from
his birth to the moment, accounted for at the end of Book II, he abruptly leaves Florence for Pisa. I argue

209
opens the Vita, for example, Benvenuto depicts his own writing as a process ultimately
taking place in the present. He begins stating: “This troubled life of mine I write” (line
1).
395
Immediately thereafter, though, he adds that “other remarkable undertakings I have
done and I live,” therefore conflating the act of writing with the “process” of living.
396

Just like writing, also “living” is conceived of as a process that takes place ad perpetuum,
and both actions are at one time simultaneous and ever going. In other words, from its
incipit onwards the text posits writing and living as two interconnected processes, related
by a mode of interaction that, recalling the words Maturana has used to describe
autopoiesis, occurs within “the time interval necessary for any interaction to take place,”
namely “the present.” Further evidence of the conflation between writing and living, as
well as reference to their location within an ongoing perpetual “present” outside time, can
be found looking at the short section in prose that immediately follows the sonnet. Here,
Benvenuto explains how, after having initially written a long portion of the text “of his
own hand,” he decided to dictate the rest to a young scribe:

that this mode of reading establishes a hierarchical understanding of some portions of the text over other
sections, and that in doing so it posits a number of crucial passages from the Vita, such as the opening
sonnet and the capitolo in terza rima that is presented between the end of Book I and the beginning of
Book II, as secondary elements within the overall narrative. In opposition to these strategies of reading the
text, no portion in the Vita can be considered secondary, marginal or less “meaningful” than the rest of the
text. Deconstructive criticism has shown how the information conveyed at “the margins” of a given literary
text or work of art cannot be considered by any means “secondary” to what is said, or represented, at “the
center.” Rather, one might posit the process of selective “marginalization” of this information as a process
indicating the literary critic’s, or the art historian’s, more or less implicit ideological assumptions.
Ascribing centrality to some aspects of a text over the rest of the work, in addition, can be even seen as a
symptom of what psychoanalytic theories designate as “repression.” For a discussion of the margins and
the ornaments as elements pointing “to the incompleteness, lack, or hollowness in the original entity” from
a perspective informed by Derrida’s notion of supplement, see Norman Bryson’s “Centers and Margins in
David” (1988).

395
“Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo.” (line 1)

396
“Alte diverse ’mprese ho fatte e vivo.” (line 4)

210
I had begun to write this Life of myself with my own hand, as may be seen in
certain mended pages. But I reflected that I was losing too much time, and that
this was but excessive vanity. So falling in with a son of Michele di Goro of
Pieve a Groppine, a lad of about fourteen years old, and weakly, I set him to
write for me. Thus while I worked I dictated to him my Life. And as I took no
little pleasure in the thing, I worked all the more diligently and was the more
productive. So I left the burden of the writing to the boy: and I hope to go
forward with the task as far as my recollections will serve me.
397

As we the final sentence of this except suggests, at this point in the narrative
Benvenuto posits the Vita, adopting a rhetorical strategy very similar to the one expressed
in the first passage in prose from Petrolio, as a work that remains, at least on the
rhetorical level, forever in progress. More specifically, the text is presented as a work
characterized by a lack of a definite a point of ending, as the narration will indefinitely
continue as far as its author, Benvenuto, will be able to “remember.” If considered
together, then, the opening lines of the sonnet and the passage in prose that immediately
follows both allude to the possibility that the Vita can be read as an autopoietic system of
signification. While the text knows no definite conclusion, its narrative is made by the
very process of “living” that pertains to both Benvenuto, his process of remembrance,
and the living product of his work, namely the literary text we are reading.
Like the conclusive lines of Book XV of the Metamorphoses the conclusive lines
of the first paragraph in prose from the Vita provide specific information about the poet’s
process of writing. Furthermore, as in the final line of the Metamorphoses, so the

397
Anne Macdonell trans. (1926). The original reads: “Io avevo cominciato a scrivere di mia mano questa
mia Vita, come si può vedere in certe carte rappiccate, ma considerando che io perdevo troppo tempo e
parendomi una smisurata vanità, mi capitò innanzi un figliuolo di Michele di Goro della Pieve a Groppine,
fanciullino di età di anni XIII incirca ed era ammalatuccio. Io lo cominciai a fare scrivere e inmentre che io
lavoravo, gli dittavo la Vita mia; e perché ne pigliavo qualche piacere, lavoravo molto più assiduo e facevo
assai più opera. Così lasciai al ditto tal carica, quale io spero di continuare tanto innanzi quanto mi
ricorderò.” (80)

211
conclusive sentence of the first passage in prose from the Vita frames the entire narration
of the literary work into an on-going, and potentially renewable ad infinitum, present.
Even more strikingly, both passages end with a verb conjugated both in the first person
(of the poet) and in the future tense (“vivam” in Met. XV, and “ricorderò” in the Vita).
This apparent analogy, in my view, seems not only to point at a problematic relationship
between past and future that become meaningful constructs not in themselves but rather
(and only) in relation to the author’s process of writing, but they also posit the time of the
narration, as an ongoing, perpetual continuum that each time an observer approaches the
text is made present.
Further spectacular support to my claim that this text can be considered as a
narrative which eludes both chronological and linear understanding of time can be found
in the capitolo in terza rima that separates Book I and Book II. This portion of the text, as
we have seen in the previous chapters, constitutes a crucial portion of the narrative,
because it both reiterates the events in the conclusive chapters of Book I (when
Benvenuto was in prison) and it introduces the account of Benvenuto’s simultaneous
transformation into “symbolic” gold and his initiation into the “secrets” of creation. Seen
from the perspective of a consideration of the text of the Vita in its entirety, the capitolo
in terza rima, analogously to the opening sonnet which antecedes the beginning of Book I,
operates a move of suspension of the linear time of the narration of Benvenuto’s life. This
suspension is all the more relevant because it provides the frame within which the reader
is introduced to the “most remarkable event” in the course of Benvenuto’s life, namely
his acquisition of the capability to inflate life into the products of his work. It is

212
specifically in the light of what happens in the capitolo, namely the processes of
transformation there depicted, that Benvenuto starts considering the products of his poetic
making as his own “living offspring.” From the consideration of the initial sonnet and the
capitolo, we can derive the conclusion that we can consider the Vita a linear or
chronological narrative only if we operate a selective process of “marginalization” of
crucial portions of the text, therefore failing in acknowledging its inherently autopoietic
structure.

THE CAPTURE OF OBSERVATION
Maturana and Varela acknowledge the fact that the recognition of a given
system’s organization, unity, and structure is ultimately (and necessarily) performed by
an observer, and they elaborate at some degree on the aporetic status that observation
retains when, considering the functioning of an autopoietic system, it remains captured
within the autopoietic loops of that system’s functioning. More specifically, Maturana
and Varela point out, from an autopoietic perspective systems are not properly defined in
relation to any other construct (including the observer) as far as they maintain constant
the “invariant” characteristic of retaining an “identity” which is independent of their
interactions with an observer.”
398
In contrast to allopoietic machines “whose boundaries
are defined by an observer,” then, autopoietic machines maintain their irreducible
“individuality” while keeping “their organization as an invariant through its continuous

398
Maturana and Varela, 80.

213
production they actively maintain.”
399
As a consequence, Maturana and Varela state,
autopoietic machines do not have inputs or outputs:
they can be perturbated by independent events and undergo internal structural
changes which compensate these perturbations. If the perturbations are
repeated, the machine may undergo repeated series of internal changes which
may or may not be identical. (Maturana and Varela, 81)

From the perspective of “what we make” of the reading of a literary text,
Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis and its corollary observations concerning
the paradoxes of observation seem to constitute powerful tools for the invalidation of a
number of binaries that include, among others, the oppositions between the inside and the
outside of a literary text, the notions of reality and fiction, and the distance between a text,
its author and the reader.
If we read a literary work as an autopoetic machine, in fact, the text can no longer
be measured in terms of conformity with any “reality” other than that of operations lying
on the plane of the text’s own autopoietic functioning. This means not only that a literary
text can no longer be addressed as a more or less “loyal” representation of—to use a term
employed by Sir Beer—“the world,” but also that the text’s meanings, analogously to the
repeated series of internal changes that belong to an autopoetic machine “may and may
not be identical” among themselves. The “significance” of an autopoietic literary text, as
well as its supposed representation of “reality”, becomes in this way not purely a product
of ever-changing perspectives (as happens when we posit a literary text as the site for the
origination and proliferation of meanings) but it more properly appears to be an un-
ending process of constant “deferral” of meaning centered around the paradoxical capture

399
Maturana and Varela, 80.

214
of the reader within, on the one hand, the necessity of his or her observation as a starting
point for the interpretative process and, on the other hand, the preclusion of his or her
observing process from the autopoietic functioning of the textual machine. Because of
this paradox, an autopoietic literary text would also exemplarily perform the processes of
undecidability of all meaning (based on the endless process of deferral that makes
“meaning” a non-graspable, and therefore never fixed, construct) that Derrida has named
différance.
In addition, in the context of an autopoietic functioning of a literary text, the
reader’s (or the observer’s) processes of interpretation can be also considered to be part
of the balancing relations of the system itself. If autopoiesis—as Maturana and Varela
have suggested—means self-making and describes the circularity of a system’s
organization whereby each system constructs its own environment through a network of
recursive interactions, then the reader’s processes of interpreting, writing or commenting
on a given text do not constitute “detached” processes of provision of meaning, but they
rather appear to be processes from the start “captured” by the very autopoietic
functioning of the literary textual machine. As a consequence, the supposed distance
between the text and the reader blurs, disappearing, into a zone of indistinction where
there is no clear line separating the reader from the literary text. Each time in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, Cellini’s Vita and Pasolini’s Petrolio a narrator interpellates the reader,
in short, the figure of the observer becomes captured in a Moebius strip-like mechanism
of undistinguishability between the “inside” and the “outside” of these literary texts.

215
As we can read in the last two lines of the poem, the possibility of the poet’s
acquisition of fame, and the consequent provision to the figure of the author of an eternal
life, cannot be conceived of without the active participation of the readers within the
narrative dynamics that pertain to the book. In the final lines of the Metamorphoses, the
poet states:
where Roman power extends over subdued lands,
I shall be read by the peoples, and, through the ages, in fame,
(if there is any truth in the predictions of bards) I shall live. (Met, XV, 871-
879)
400

The act of reading performed by the “people” inhabiting the extension of
territories under the control of Rome, in fact, is the agency which will grant the poet the
possibility to remain forever alive. In making the act of reading a part of the processes of
these systems’ self-production, and in positing the matter of the poet’s life as integral part
of the poem’s own narrative, this passage from the Metamorphoses seems to point
towards the invalidation of the binary opposition that distinguishes between an “inside”
and an “outside” of the literary text. On the one hand, the poet’s acquisition of eternal
fame cannot occur without the active engagement, of those who will read the poem, in
the poet’s own process of production of fame. On the other hand, the information the
narrators provide at the end of the Metamorphoses cannot be interpreted unless we, as
observers, move from the recursive loops inside the narration to the objects outside.
A pattern of “capture” of the process of reading within the textual processes of
self-generation which seems to be apparently analogous to the one performed in the

400
“Quaque patet domitis Romana potential terries / ore legar populi perque omnia secula fama / siquid
habent ueri vatum praesagia, vivam.” (XV, 877-79)

216
conclusive lines of Book XV from the Metamorphoses is presented at the beginning of
Cellini’s Vita, and more specifically in the passage in prose located between the end of
the sonnet which constitutes the textual incipit and the beginning of the series of chapters
that make Book I. At this point in the narration, as we have already seen, the text
introduces to the reader the figure of a scribe, namely the “figliuolo di Michele di Goro
della Pieve a Groppine, fanciullino di età di anni XIII incirca,” to whom Benvenuto
dictates the text of the Vita:
I had begun to write this Life of myself with my own hand, as may be seen in
certain mended pages. But I reflected that I was losing too much time, and that
this was but excessive vanity. So falling in with a son of Michele di Goro of
Pieve a Groppine, a lad of about fourteen years old, and weakly, I set him to
write for me. Thus while I worked I dictated to him my Life. And as I took no
little pleasure in the thing, I worked all the more diligently and was the more
productive. So I left the burden of the writing to the boy: and I hope to go
forward with the task as far as my recollections will serve me.
401

In this passage, Benvenuto does more than convey the fact he has been dictating
his Vita to a scribe. He specifies that while the first draft of the Vita that he had been
writing “by his own hand” had resulted in a number of “carte rappiccate,” the entire work
(as we read it now) had been elaborated specifically thanks to the participation into the
process of writing of the scribe. While Benevenuto posits the fanciullino as a
paradigmatic figure of “observer” that is captured within the poiesis of the literary work,
he also specifies that it is specifically because of the scribe’s participation to poiesis that
the Vita work has become “aggrandized” (“facevo assai più opera”).

401
Passage translated into English by Amme Macdonell, p.80. Other editions do not contain this fragment.

217
Emphasizing the specific kind of representation of the fanciullino as a participant-
observer that Benvenuto gives in the passage excerpted above, one can conclude that the
Vita is presented from its very beginning as an autopoietic text, because it evolves from a
first, “rappiccato” status into an “aggrandized” form specifically by means of subsuming,
in its organizational structure, not only the product of the poet’s dictation but also the
process of the scribe’s writing. Also, the scribe appears to be a paradigmatic figure of
observer that is captured by the text’s autopoiesis, because he is at one time engaged in
both observation and production of the text’s components. Both Benvenuto and the
fanciullino are captured within the process of the text’s own self-production and they are
both subsumed within the textual autopoietic dynamics. The figure of the fanciullino
embodies a metonymical representation of the figure of an observer captured within the
functioning of an autopoietic machine.
Another important portion of the text, namely the capitolo in terza rima that
separates Books I and II, can be used by the reader as a key to enter within the Vita’s
functioning as an autopoietic machine. At the exactly calculated center of the poem,
while describing Benvenuto’s initiation to the secrets of nature, the text reads: “I do not
want to say more. Now I’m become fine gold.”
402
As we can read in this line, the first-
person account of Benvenuto’s transformation is accompanied by the specification that
he, as the author of the text, he “does not want to tell more” to his readers. This is a quite
common rhetorical trope, especially at the time Cellini was writing his Vita, but it can
nonetheless be opened up to a confrontation with the capacity autopoietic systems have to

402
“Non vo’ dir più: son diventato d’oro.” (Vita, capitolo, line 94)

218
capture observation in their signification. Benvenuto’s specification, in fact, can be read
as a mode of rhetorical inclusion, within the textual narrative, of new components that are
not included in the topological unity of the text’s written corpus. The narrative works as
an autopoietic systems as far as it puts “under erasure” at least one portion of the meaning
it conveys, and in doing so it becomes an index of the “undecidability” and deferral of
meaning notably discussed by Derrida in Of Grammatology.
403
For the purpose of my
reading of the Vita, then, the act of “erasure” performed by Benvenuto’s words makes the
process of reading an integral part of the autopoietic functioning of the Vita. Within this
frame, adopting Maturana and Varela’s views on autopoiesis, one might say that the text
here constructs its own environment through a network of recursive interactions which
blurs the distance that interpretation puts between the text and the reader. While
apparently pointing to the invalidation of the binary opposition that separates the “inside”
and the “outside” of the literary text, in fact, here the Vita responds to observation forcing
its observer to mediate between undecidability and the inside-outside dialectic. Stating
that Benvenuto “prefers not to” say any more than that he has transformed into gold, the
text provides information that cannot be interpreted unless we, as participant-observers,
move from the recursive loops inside the system to the objects outside.
As the Vita portrays its main character, Benvenuto, stating at a crucial passage of
the narration that he “does not want to tell more” (and therefore referring to a process of
production of meaning that is not enclosed either in his own speech or in the whole
literary text,) so in Petrolio the narrator repeatedly addresses the reader and declares that

403
Esp. Derrida, 1974, 64 and ff.

219
the literary text, in its present organizational form, points to the inclusion of entire blocks
of signs that are not currently included in the book. Adopting a rhetorical strategy
apparently analogous to the one used by Benvenuto in his capitolo, in these passages also
Petrolio’s narrator put under “erasure” the recursive interactions that the text, with its
own fragmented structure and empty spaces, autopoietically engages. Furthermore, the
text is repeatedly presented to the reader as an autopoietic organism, because it is
conceived of as both a “self-sufficient construction” (Appunto 37) and a “self-supporting
and self-sufficient form” (Appunto 131). A first reference to the text’s capability to
include, in its self-sufficient organization, even what it does not say is enclosed in the
incipit of Petrolio’s first passage in prose:
All of Petrolio (from the second draft) should be presented in the form of a
critical edition of an unpublished text (considered a monumental work, a
modern Satyricon). […] this reconstruction makes use […] of the contribution
of other materials. (ix)
404

A second paramount example is provided by appunto 65, entitled “Confidences
with the reader”. Here, the text is referred to as a progetto, or calcolo, that constantly re-
asserts its own functioning by including in its “body” even what it does not say: “what is
said is ruled by what is not said; testimony by reserve […] The form is based only on
what is not the form. And the exclusion of form is always planned, calculated.”
405

404
“Tutto PETROLIO (dalla seconda stesura) dovrà presentarsi sotto forma di edizione critica di un testo
inedito (considerato opera monumentale, un Satyricon moderno). [...] La ricostruzione si vale [...]
dell’apporto di altri materiali.” (3)

405
Petrolio, 274. The original reads: “Solo fondandosi si ciò che non è forma, la forma è tale. E l’esclusione
della forma è sempre un progetto, un calcolo.” (315)

220
Further representations of the autopoetic nature of Petrolio are located in the
Appunti 37 and 131. In Appunto 37, entitled “Something written,” the narrator mentions a
series of pages to be written in “Greek or neo-Greek” and states that at some point these
“illegible” blocks of text ought to be inserted into the manuscript. These insertions will
be functional to demonstrate to Petrolio’s readers the authorial “decision; that is, not to
write a story but to construct a form (as will become clearer later on): a form consisting
simply of “something written.”
406
In Appunto 131, the narrator adds that Petrolio contains,
besides a series of “components” written in Greek, also lengthy “illegible” sections in
Japanese. “This second insertion,” the narrator tells us, is intended to make clear to the
reader that Petrolio is meant not merely to represent, but rather to “actualize,” autopoetic
processes of self-production: “what I wished to do is realized precisely, and even literally,
by the work’s own self-creation and self-explanation.”
407

In conclusion, the three texts’ problematic structures, their representation of time,
their transformation of the sources into integral components of their narratives, and the
processes of “capture” of readership they perform are four main features indicating that
these three texts all function as autopoietic machines. The Metamorphoses, the Vita and
Petrolio do not then offer to the reader a mere set of signals, messages or “contents” to be

406
Petrolio, 129. “Sento che devo qualche spiegazione al lettore (...) queste pagine stampate ma illeggibili
vogliono proclamare in modo estremo (...) la mia decisione: che non è quella di scrivere una storia, ma di
costruire una forma (come risulterà meglio più avanti): forma consistente semplicemente in qualcosa di
scritto.” (155)

407
Petrolio, 459. “Ciò che io desideravo fare si attua proprio in questo farsi e spiegarsi dell’opera con se
stessa, anche letteralmente” (534). While urging the reader to re-read the appunto 3c (discussed above) and
a series of other notes, and immediately after introducing the decision to insert within the manuscript, for
example in appunto 37, entire blocks of fonts in Japanese language, the narrator reiterates his “ambizione a
costruire una forma ⌐con le sue leggi autopromuoventisi¬ e autosufficienti, piuttosto che a scrivere una
storia che si spieghi attraverso concordanze, piú o meno ‘a chiave’, con la pericolosissima realtà.” (534)

221
deciphered, but they rather make “information” indistinguishable from their textual
organizational properties, their structures, and the generation of their own components. If
considered this way, the three texts can be considered to be “living.” One main
consequence of the three texts’ functioning as autopoietic systems of signification is their
invalidation of a clear line dividing text and reader. All three these literary works make
the distinction between textual “insides” and the “outsides” blur into indifferentiation. All
three of the narratives, then, contribute to the invalidation of the assumption that a literary
text, instead of mirroring “the world” or constituting a mere spectacle of representation of
a reality which is unproblematically taken as being simply “out there,” rather functions as
a machine that actively intervenes, and constitutively participates into the production, of
Sir Beer has called “the entire world.”

222
INTERMEZZO : PETROLIO, AUTONOMY AND AUTOPOIESIS
In Self-Organizing Systems (1981) Francisco Varela delineates a clear distinction
between autonomy and autopoiesis. While autonomy “means literally self-law,”
autopoiesis derives from the Greek terms auto and poiesis and means “self-
production.”
408
A given system can be considered to be “autonomous” as far as, being
“organizationally closed,” it asserts its own “identity through its functioning.”
409

Autopoietic organisms, in contrast, maintain their structural unity engaging processes of
“production of [their own] components.”
410
Unlike autonomy, autopoeisis is therefore
properly “restricted to relations of productions of some kind” and it engages process of
production that occur either inside and outside a given system’s organizational closure.

The problem of the attribution, to a given system, of “life” plays a crucial role in the
distinction between autonomy and autopoiesis. Even if often “the basis of autonomy is
clearer in living systems,” especially when these systems are organizationally closed,
autonomy does not designate, per se, life. Autopoiesis, on the contrary, is the
characteristic that in Varela’s words makes a given “mechanistic (dynamic) system,”
either organic or not, alive. Moving from a broad understanding of life as “capability to
generate,” Varela concludes that autopoiesis can be even conceived of as the “explication
of the autonomy of the living.”
For Varela, then, autonomy and autopoiesis are not opposite and mutually
exclusive categories: “organizational closure” or, autonomy, “is but one form” of

408
Varela, 20.

409
Varela, 14.

410
Varela, 15.

223
autopoiesis; autopoiesis, in turn, is “a case of, and not synonymous with, autonomy in
general.” In conclusion, Varela warns us, while it is often the case that autonomous
“dynamic mechanisms” appear to be autopoietic, and even if autopoetic organisms often
show a certain degree of “autonomy,” one should never conflate autonomy and
autopoiesis, instead maintaining a clear theoretical distinction between the two terms.
411

Petrolio contains several statements that allude to the text’s own functioning as an
autonomous system. In Appunto 37, for example, we read that Petrolio is a “self-
sufficient construction.”
412
Later on, and more specifically in Appunto 131, Petrolio is
described as “a form /with its own self-supporting/ and self-sufficient /laws/”.
413
Petrolio
is also presented as an “autonomous” mechanism in Appunto 98, where the narrator states
that “our story isolates and analyzes in itself the moment of the autonomy of the form.”
414

Considering this series of passages, Petrolio can be conceived of in the first place as an
autonomous textual “form” which asserts its own “identity through its functioning.”
415

But at other points in the narration Petrolio is also ascribed with “autopoetic” features
that problematize an understanding of this literary text as a “merely” autonomous
machine. The text is presented, in fact, as a mechanism capable not only of undergoing
transformation, but also of “generating” the production of its components.

411
Varela, 14-17.

412
Petrolio, 129 (The Italian reads: “costruzione autosufficiente.”)

413
Petrolio, 459. (“Una forma ⌐con le sue leggi autopromuoventisi¬ e autosufficienti.” 534)
This statement is preceded by the narrator’s statement that it is necessary, “at this point,” to “find the
proper distance from my material”: “Prendere le distanze dalla mia stessa materia.” (534)

414
Petrolio, 355. (“La nostra storia isola e analizza in sé il momento dell’autonomia della forma.” 410)

415
Varela, 15.

224
A first example of the autopoetic character of Petrolio can be found in the opening
lines of its very first written fragment. Here, the literary work presents itself as a
provisional “first draft” of a text that remains to be written:
All of Petrolio (from the second draft) should be presented in the form of a
critical edition of an unpublished text (considered a monumental work, a
modern Satyricon). […] this reconstruction makes use […] of the contribution
of other materials: letters from the author (concerning whose identity there is
an unresolved philological problem, etc.), letters of friends of the author who
know about the manuscript (and disagree among themselves), oral testimony
reported in newspapers or elsewhere, songs, etc. (Petrolio, ix)
416

An even clearer representation of Petrolio as an autopoetic organism can be found
in Appunto 65, entitled “Confidences with the reader”. Here, the text is referred to as a
“project,” or “calculation,” that constantly re-asserts its own functioning by including in
its “body” also what it does not say:
what is said is ruled by what is not said; testimony by reserve … The form is
based only on what is not the form. And the exclusion of form is always
planned, calculated. (Petrolio, 274)
417

Further representations of the autopoetic nature of Petrolio are enclosed in the
Appunti 37 and 131. In Appunto 37, entitled “Something written,” the narrator mentions a
series of pages to be written in “Greek or neo-Greek” and states that at some point these

416
“Tutto PETROLIO (dalla seconda stesura) dovrà presentarsi sotto forma di edizione critica di un testo
inedito (considerato opera monumentale, un Satyricon moderno). Di tale testo sopravvivono quattro o
cinque manoscritti, concordanti e discordanti, di cui alcuni contengono dei fatti e altri no ecc. La
ricostruzione si vale dunque del confronto dei vari manoscritti conservati (di cui, per es., due apocrifi, con
varianti curiose, caricaturali, ingenue o ‘rifatte alla maniera’): non solo ma anche dell’apporto di altri
materiali: lettere dell’autore (sulla cui identità c’è un problema filologico irrisolto ecc.), lettere di amici
dell’autore a conoscenza del manoscritto (discordanti tra loro), testimonianze orali riportate su giornali o
miscellanee, canzonette ecc.” (3)

417
“Solo fondandosi si ciò che non è forma, la forma è tale. E l’esclusione della forma è sempre un progetto,
un calcolo.” (315) This note seems to address to what Philippe Sollers has named “the empty site” to which
a text “is addressed in order to become readable.” (Sollers, 15)

225
“illegible” blocks of text ought to be inserted into the manuscript. These insertions will
be functional to demonstrate to Petrolio’s readers the authorial
decision; that is, not to write a story but to construct a form (as will become
clearer later on): a form consisting simply of “something written.” (Petrolio,
129)
418

In appunto 131, the narrator adds that Petrolio contains, besides a series of
“components” written in Greek, also lengthy “illegible” sections in Japanese. “This
second insertion,” the narrator tells us, is intended to make clear to the reader that
Petrolio is aimed not merely to represent, but rather to “actualize,” autopoetic processes
of self-production: “what I wished to do is realized precisely, and even literally, by the
work’s own self-creation and self-explanation.”
419

An autopoetic understanding of the book is both reiterated and problematized in
one of the two notes titled Appunto 129c. This fragment not only reiterates a conception
of the literary work as an autonomous and self-sufficient mechanism, but it also tells us
that the text works as a site where opposites are conjugated, and that the text also
“contains” a surplus of “value” that neither the commercial circulation of the book nor a
“formalist” understanding of the text is able capture:
Works as “merchandise” –the narrator from appunto 129c maintains- present
an insoluble form of ambiguity; the “linguistic” is not contradicted by the
“nonlinguistic” (that is, the moment of commercialization) following the
traditional rules of Hegelian logic; there is no possible synthesis, in a work,
between “linguistic” and “nonlinguistic.” Thus it would in fact be more
precise to speak of “opposition” rather than a “contradiction,” <…> /which/

418
“Decisione: che non è quella di scrivere una storia, ma di costruire una forma (come risulterà meglio più
avanti): forma consistente semplicemente in qualcosa di scritto.” (155)

419
Petrolio, 459. “Ciò che io desideravo fare si attua proprio in questo farsi e spiegarsi dell’opera con se
stessa, anche letteralmente.” (534)

226
produces an ambiguous amalgam rather than a synthesis (the work). Now, this
problem has always been resolved idealistically; that is, postulating the
innocent unity of the work. It’s true: in the work there is the moment of the
unity, of total autonomy, in that it is a form self-constituted by means of rules
then self-sufficient. But that is in the laboratory. In the laboratory of a
formalist or a structuralist, for example. (Petrolio, 450)
420

In alluding to the fact that the autopoietic and the autonomous features of Petrolio
appear to “function” only within the space of the “laboratory of a structuralist or a
formalist,” and in also referring to “the innocent unity” that can be “idealistically”
ascribed to the literary work, this fragment addresses two crucial issues that have been
widely confronted by Varela and other theorists of autopoiesis.
421
The first problem
concerns the modalities we adopt, “observers,” to conceive the organizational overall
“structure” of a given mechanism under scrutiny (in our case, the literary text). The other
issue interests the wide problem of the definition of reader’s (or in biological terms, the
observer’s) “positionality.”
422
Petrolio addresses both issues. The text’s own organization

420
“È vero: nell’opera c’è il momento dell’unità, e della totale autonomia, in quanto essa è una froma
autocostituitasi attraverso norme poi autosufficienti.
Ma ciò in laboratorio. Per esempio, nel laboratorio di un formalista o di uno strutturalista. Fin che a
postulare l’innocente unità dell’arte è un tecnico che esamica ‘come è fatta’, ‘come funziona’ ecc., tutto va
benissimo. Ma se a postulare l’innocente unità dell’arte è un filosofo, allora costui si macchia della colpa
imperdonabile dell’irrazionalismo e dell’idealismo.” (Appunto 129c, 524)

421
See: Udwin, 1-13. The introduction of the concept of autopoieis in literary critic discourses, Udwin
suggests, can provide us with a “way out” of the “interpretative paradox” denounced, implicitly or not, by a
range of thinkers ranging from Heidegger to Derrida and Barbara Johnson. More specifically, Udwin
suggests that an autopoetic “model” of reading shifts the attention to “interpretation to observation,” and
replaces “the paradox of castration with the paradox of the observed observer” (13): “unlike Marxist,
Freudian, Girardian, and feminist theories, which tend to overlook problems of textuality per se and
interpose between reading subject and work of art new sub-texts (namely: the means of production; the
Oedipus complex; an interdict against twins; the male point of view),” Udwin argues, Maturana and
Varela’s model “begins with a redefinition of consciousness and language in terms of operational closure
and an ability, characteristic of some systems, to reorganize their own operations.” (Udwin, 2-3)

422
In “Autonomy and Autopoiesis” Varela reiterates this and states that the notion of autopoiesis has
brought to a reconceptualization of the notion of “organizational closure” on which the idea of autonomy is

227
appears, more specifically, to function in “autonomy” only if we move from the
assumption that the text, as a mechanism, is “organizationally closed” (Varela 14). But
such an assertion is obliterated by the fact that Petrolio appears to be, as we have seen, a
literary work that is not only capable of transforming itself and including what it does not
say, but that also lacks of a beginning and end, and that therefore presents itself in
structural “open-endedness.”
If considered this way, Petrolio appears to be not purely an autonomous literary
work, but rather an autopoetic organism that, while showing a degree of autonomy, is
capable of generating and including new components. The text can be therefore be
considered, adopting Varela’s theoretical framework, “alive.” The new components the
text generates are not “physically” present in the written pages we actually read, but they
rather appear as “notes to be developed” which can be found for example, as the incipit
of Petrolio suggests, in the “critical” work of interpretation and re-writing of the text that
each reader performs. This makes act of writing about Petrolio also a practice of writing
within the text.
Petrolio’s structural open-endeness also addresses the other main theoretical
problem addressed by Varela, namely the question of the position the observer (or the
reader) takes in approaching a given system. An autopoetic understanding of Petrolio, I

based. This notion cannot be conceived of outside “the proper recognition” of the observer’s positionality.
(Varela, 1981, 15)
Scholars that have attempted to “apply” the notion of autopoiesis to literary studies, too, have assessed the
“problematic status” of the reader which, “interpreting” a literary work, also engages into a process of
“selection” of the text’s own “boundaries.” Victor Udwin, in particular, has argued that the reader’s
“observation” unavoidably “interferes” with the phenomenon under study, and on this basis he has argued
that all literary criticism has failed in discerning “some boundary between the phenomenon to be observed
and the event of its observation.” In literary criticism, for Udwin, “it has become apparent that the
‘interpreting’ text literally places itself between the reader and the ‘primary’ (or target) text, thus increasing,
and not decreasing the distance between them” (Udwin, 2).

228
argue, does more than bring evidence to the assumption that a text can be considered as
an autonomous system of signification. It also challenges the definition of the text’s own
boundaries, and for this reason it appears to radically problematize a series of
oppositional distinction that, in literary studies, have often informed the definition of
authorship, readership, and text. The possibility that Petrolio cannot be conceived of in
isolation from either the proliferation of meanings it generates or the position of the
reader, it seems, raises the question of how can we retain a distinction between author,
text and the reader once these agencies are all simultaneously engaged in a wider process
of textual generation of components. If we conceive Petrolio as a mechanism that
transforms and reasserts its “unity” by means of a constant process of production of its
components, in fact, we face the problem of how to rethink the “distance” that most
interpretative discourses seem to posit between reader and text. Finally, while any act of
textual interpretation appears to be inherently founded on the ascription to Petrolio of
some kind of “organizational closure,” the literary work not only seems to elude the
possibility to be inscribed into a definite set of “boundaries,” but it also presents the
problem of how can we develop, operating by means of selection, a close reading of one
or more specific passages from the text. Both an approach to the whole text as a “unity”
(that is to say, an autonomous “organizationally closed” mechanism) and the
consideration of specific “blocks of signs” in isolation from the rest of the book, seem in
fact to constitute aporetic moves for they do not take in account that one of the ultimate
characteristics of the text is to function as a “whole-subsuming” mechanism.

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PART 3 – VISCOUS MATTERS

CHAPTER FIVE : CHAOS, POIESIS, AUTOPOIESIS
There is a difference between self-generation and autopoiesis. Broadly speaking,
the concept of self-generation designates the capability of a system to generate itself, for
example by means of self-organization. The notion of autopoiesis refers instead to the
capability of an organism to generate (not itself but) its own components. As we have
seen, according to Maturana and Varela, the capacity a system has to produce its own
components is crucial in the definition of that system’s life. However, autopoietic
theories do not explain why autopoietic living systems exist, what are their origins, or
which agent has “created” them. When Maturana and Varela say that autopoietic systems
are alive, in fact, they consider these living systems to be “out there” in the physical
world, and they do not really address the problem of how, or when, either the physical
world or its autopoietic machines have came into existence.
The possibility that “the universe” has came to existence by means of self-
organization from chaos has been widely discussed in variety of disciplinary and
interdisciplinary frames, and various scholars, such as Ilya Prigogine, have spoken in
favor of the possibility that the entire universe is a self-generating system.
423
Still, they
have notably left open the question of “how can we provide an explanation of the

423
Among numerous other works: Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty (1996), From Being to Becoming
(1980) and, with Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (1984); Chaos: the New Science, edited by John
Holte (1993); Self-Organizing Systems: the Emergence of Order. (1987), edited by F. Eugene Yates; Chaos
and Order (1991), edited by Katherine Hayles.

230
existence of the chaos from which the universe was born.”
424
Thus, while remarkable
advancements have been made in the study of the emergence of the universe as a “self-
organizing” system that has generated itself on the background of chaos, the problem of
the “beginnings of the universe” has remained unsolved. The origins of chaos have
remained, as medical engineer Eugene Yates has put it, a “mystery”: “neither the
assumption that thermodynamic fluctuations following a ‘smooth’ beginning nor that of a
chaotic beginning can itself account for stars and galaxies. A mystery remains.”
425

Of course, I will not provide here an answer to the question of how “primordial”
chaos might have originated, but I think it is important to mention that recent scholarly
work done about the possibility that the universe has at some point emerged out of chaos
by means of self-organization has contributed to a series of important “advancements”
not only in the disciplines of physics and mathematics, but also in philosophy and literary
studies. In the first place, a series of scholars from different theoretical approaches
(among others: Serres, Hayles, Holte, Prigogine and Stengers) have converged in positing
that by chaos one should mean a network of “extremely complex information” rather than
a mere, and unproblematic, condition of “absence of order.”
426
In addition, chaos theories
have helped broadening the notion of “information,” as Stoltzfus has indicated, to include
both “pattern and randomness.”
427
Finally, while dismantling negative understanding of
chaos as “the opposite” of order, theories of chaos and self-organization have contributed

424
Yates, 17.

425
Yates, 17.

426
Hayles, 1991, 1.

427
Stoltzfus, 13.

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to the transformation of chaos “as in Hesiod’s ancient account in the Theogony, into the
progenitor of the universe, order’s precursor and partner rather than its antagonist.”
428

In this section, I address a set of inter-related problems constituted by our
understanding of the contact zone between the problem of the origins, the notion of chaos,
and the autopoietic functioning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cellini’s Vita and Pasolini’s
Petrolio. My move is finalized to the discussion of the problem of how we should
conceive the figure of the poet that, by means of a poetic act of making, brings into
existence an autopoietic literary text. I engage in these issues drawing upon the
theoretical frame offered by the work of Michel Serres, who in discussing the problem of
origins, makes reference to the concepts of “noise,” “chanson” and “multiplicity” to posit
the origination of a literary text as the product of a casual fluctuation occurring at some
point on the background of the “perennial” fluxes of chaos. Before doing so, I want to
specify that in my frame the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio are three autopoietic
literary texts that have not, of course, emerged spontaneously out of chaos, for example
by means of self-organization. Such an assumption, in fact, would imply that these three
texts have not been written. Rather, I consider these three texts to be extremely
problematic because, while being products of poetic making, they retain the characteristic,
at least on the level of their rhetorical functioning, to produce their own components and
therefore to embody autopoiesis.

428
Hayles, 1991, 14.

232
Michel Serres’ theoretical work amounts to a variety of texts that, as signaled by
several scholars, constitute in their whole a non-linear systemic ensemble.
429
Mainly for
this reason, I will not provide here a summary of Serres’ corpus of works, nor will I take
Serres’ theoretical background as an ultimate prescriptive frame.
430
Rather, I will operate
by means of analogy and selection to disclose the “fertility” that Serres’ works might
offer to the reading of the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio once we come to
consider them to be autopoietic. More specifically, I argue that Serres’ understanding of
poiesis as a “fluctuation” that occurs within the fluxes of chaos can provide us with a
powerful tool to illuminate both the three text’s representation of poiesis as process of
transformation of matter and their peculiar depiction of the poet as a promethean figure
who inflates life into the material he transforms.
The Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio all present poiesis as a process of
transformation of viscous matter, and they all emphasize the fact that the poet, at the
moment he inflates life respectively into a mixture of water and earth, liquefied metals,
and a spectacle of language that embodies the flows of life and time, does not engage into
process of creation “out of nothing” but he rather provides a “stable form to the
instability” that characterizes the infinite fluxes of chaos. As a first consequence, when
applied to the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio, a consideration of poiesis as
“fluctuation” performed by the poet within the fluxes of chaos seems to provide support
to my claim that all the three texts lack definite points of beginning and end or, as Serres

429
See: Harari and Bell in Hermes, ix-xl.

430
For a comprehensive summary of Serres’ works, “methodological approach” and critique of
“disciplinary and conceptual divisions” (Brown 1), see Brown (2002).

233
suggests, that we should rather understand the problem of the origins as a multiplicity of
beginnings. As a second outcome, my consideration of the Metamorphoses, the Vita and
Petrolio as the products of a process of provisionary poetic stabilization of the instability
of chaos can lead to a consideration of these three texts as literary works as belonging to
what Serres calls the tradition of “liquid history.” This tradition, that for Serres has for a
long time been repressed and therefore remains in large part to be “invented,” would
replace the predominant importance that has been given to a series of notions, such as
linearity, order and coherence, that all pertain to “solids.” More precisely, the notion of
“liquid history” would offer for Serres an alternative paradigm to the metaphysics of
solids because it would put at the center of the debate the conceptual metaphors of fluxes,
cataracts, cascades, and liquids. The uncovering of such a tradition of “liquid history,”
Serres also suggests, retains a political value, because it speaks against the dominant
paradigms of physics as a “mechanics of solid systems” that have informed much of
Western thought.
One paramount example of the political implication of the liquid history Serres
refers to, which is not fully explored by Serres in his own writing, is the problem of how
to conceptualize fluid, transformative and procreative matter with regard to the gender
issue. As Luce Irigaray has demonstrated, matter has been traditionally conceived, by
Western metaphysics, as “secondary” the realm of pure unchanging forms and ideas.
While juxtaposing masculine ideas of solidity, stability, immutability and universality to
a conventional understanding of the feminine as an empty volumes, passive recipient, and
even “physical reproductions” of men’s intellect, Western thought has in facts

234
subordinated women’s irreproducible powers of material and procreative transformation
to an abstract, and dominant, masculine consideration of solids and their pure forms.
Exploring unstable understandings of the physical materials, Irigaray examines the
positive nature of women’s power of material and physic transformation, and she
promotes a re-evaluation of transience, mutability and fluidity as constitutive, and
politically relevant, features of matter. If considered alongside Serres’ and Irigaray’s
arguments on, respectively, the history and the mechanics of fluids, the Metamorphoses,
the Vita and Petrolio all disclose the potential a literary work has to register
transformation and, in this way, to recast fluidity and liquidity as central concepts that
subvert a series of central biases of Western thought.

VISCOUS MATTERS
In La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce (1977), Michel Serres
develops a reading of Lucretius’ epic poem De Rerum Natura and argues that this poem
can be read as a “scientific” rather than a mythic account because, at least in several
passages, it accurately describes social and physical reality. Serres begins by showing
how Lucretius’ poem, echoing Democritus, describes atoms falling all in a straight line
until a clinamen makes interaction possible. The clinamen can be thought of as a
stochastic swerving or random fluctuation in chaos, because it appears to be (in Lucretius)
a sort of interruption, or more specifically a random combination occurring at uncertain
times and indefinite places, of the fall of the atoms. Following Lucretius, Serres
conceptualizes the clinamen as “the smallest imaginable condition for the original

235
formation of turbulence” and argues that chaos is the originary condition (a condition in
which the origins are multiplied and therefore dispersed, indeed) of the universe.
431

Next, Serres provides further elaboration on Lucretius’ notion of the clinamen and
observes how such a “random fluctuation” is followed by an indefinite number of
subsequent amplifications. As the atoms begin now to collide, for Serres, the clinamen
ensues the emergence of a vortex or, more specifically, a turbulence beginning in a
previously laminar flow that heralds the beginning of the world. Given the fact that the
clinamen occurs randomly and occasionally, Serres suggests that reality does not exist
“necessarily” in itself, but it has rather came into being by chance. Only because of the
accidental swerving of the clinamen, in fact, there is “something rather than nothing” so
that, in more general term, “all which exists is improbable.”
Moving from the conclusions summarized above, as well as elaborating on both
the reception of Lucretius’ text and a number of philosophical and literary works, Serres
detects in Western thought the presence of a certain mode of understanding, namely the
“linearity of Martian order,” that throughout the centuries has privileged war over love,
order over creativity, abstraction over embodiment, aggression over sympathy, and death
over life. Against this background, Serres focuses on the powerful image of the birth of
Aphrodite accounted for by Lucretius’ poem, and he reads this image as a representation
of the possibility to find alternative “kinds of knowledge” to Martian order. More
specifically, Serres invokes a paradigm of “liquid history” as an index of the possibility
to trace a genealogy of the fecundity of disorder. In the conclusive paragraphs of La

431
Serres, 1977, 6.

236
naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce, then, Serres detects a certain emphasis
given to the unruly and unknowable turbulences that pertain to the ocean from which
Aphrodite comes, and on this basis he argues that we need to develop an understanding of
history which is free of linear and teleological modes of reasoning. Liquid metaphors
such as the vortex, the wave, the cloud, and the waterfall all become powerful metaphors
subverting the physics of “solid systems” and its emphasis on linearity, order and
coherence:
Once upon a time there was a golden age. Where and when, I do not know.
After it, they say, came the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Myths or history,
always metal. Metal or stone: polished, shaped, neolithic or palaeolithic. We
can only write of solids. Why? Because of their order and their relations. (…)
Thus we write history in which the local goes back to the global under the
repetition of a homogenous law. The discourse is no different than the hard
matter upon which it is written. A mechanics of solid systems.
Here are the waters, cataracts and flows, rivers and vortices, of Epicurean
physics. Here the local rolls its weak viscosity without much affecting the
global volume. Not far from its proximity, constraints evaporate. There are, as
they say, many degrees of freedom. The vortex forms and fades away within
uncertainty, but elsewhere the plane is tranquil, one way or another. Space
seeded with circumstances.
Invent liquid history and the ages of water. (Serres, 1977, 191)
432

In my understanding, the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio can be all seen as
texts belonging to the “liquid history” Serres alludes to in this passage. These three

432
« Il était une fois l’âge d’or. Où et quand, je l’ignore. Après lui, dit-on, vinrent l’âge du bronze et le
siècle de fer. Mythes ou histoires, toujours des métaux. Des métaux ou bien de la pierre : polie, taillée,
néolithique ou paléolithique. Nous ne savons parler que de solides, nous ne savons écrire que sur des
solides. Pourquoi ? En raison de leur ordre et de leur liaison. Cohérence, rigueur et rigidité (...). Ainsi écrit-
on l’histoire où le local revient au global sous la répétition d’une loi homogène. Le discours n’est pas
différent de la matière dure sur quoi il est écrit. Mécanique des systèmes solides. Voici les eaux, cataractes
et flux, fleuves et turbulences, de la physique épicurienne. Le local, ici, roule sa viscosité faible, sans
affecter beaucoup le volume global. Les contraintes s’évanouissent non loin de son voisinage. Il y a,
comme on dit, bien des degrés de liberté. Le tourbillon se forme et se défait, dans l’incertitude, mais partout
ailleurs la plaine est tranquille, selon et selon. Espace ensemencé de circonstances. Inventer l’histoire
liquide et les âges d’eaux. » (La naissance, 237)

237
literary works, in fact, all posit the poetic act of making, as well as the inflation of life
into matter, as modes of manipulating, working and transforming viscous and malleable
substances. Also, the three texts provide a ground where reinstate generation as a feature
related to matter’s fluidity, therefore opening the possibility to envision procreation—as
Irigaray does—outside the phallocentric structure that maintains a superiority of solid
forms, pure ideas, and other masculine metaphors of insemination. Matter appears, in the
three narratives, a maternal substance that captures procreation within transformation,
and it becomes, as the title of the present dissertation suggests, a mater of transformation.
In the first book from the Metamorphoses we find, indeed, the enumeration of the
ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron that Serres refers to in the final page of La naissance
de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce. The description of the ages of mankind, though,
immediately follows the account—by no means marginal in the poem’s narrative—of the
creation of man. More specifically, as we can read at the lines 78-83 of Book I, in Ovid’s
poem the creation of man is introduced by the narrative immediately after the account of
the separation of the elements and the provision to the Earth of the shape of a globe by an
indefinite agency, possibly a divinity. The creation of man, we also know from the text,
might have occurred at the moment Prometheus had manipulated a mixture of water and
earth:
Man was born; perhaps he was made from divine seed
By the universal Craftsman, the source of a better world;
Perhaps the new earth freshly separated from the high
Ether retained the seeds of the kindred sky,
Which the son of Iapetus mixed with rain water

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And shaped into the likeness of the all-controlling gods. (Met., I, 78-83)
433

As we can read in this passage, the matter Prometheus works is not exactly solid.
Rather, it consists of a soft, malleable and viscous mixture he obtains from the
amalgamation of water and earth.
In Cellini’s Vita, the creation of Benvenuto’s “living offspring” is depicted not a
matter of working solid metals, but rather as a process resulting from a composite work
of liquefaction and solidification. In Book II from the Vita, and exemplarily in the
account of his making of Perseus, Benvenuto understands casting as a process that gives
life to metal. For example, he says that his act of making consists into a process that
brings metal from “death to live again.”
434
In the same account, the text puts a remarkable
emphasis on the fact that a skillful liquefaction of metal is crucial for the achievement of
the entire work. As Benvenuto states, accounting for the final stages of his making of the
Perseus:
I next turned to my furnace, which I had filled with numerous pigs of copper
and other bronze stuff. The pieces were piled according to the laws of art, that
is to say, so resting one upon the other that the flames could play freely
through them, in order that the metal might heat and liquefy the sooner. (II,
LXXV, 360-1)
435

433
“Natus homo est / siue diuino semine fecit / ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo, / siue recens tellus
seductaque nuper ab alto / Aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli; / Quam satus Iapeto mixtam pluuialibus
undis / Finxit in effigiem modernatum cuncta deorum; / Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / Os
homini sublime dedit caelumque tueri / Iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere uultus. / Sic, modo quae fuerat
rudis et sine imagine, tellus / Induit ignotas hominum conuersa figuras.” (Met. I, 78-88)

434
Vita, II, LXXVII, 363.

435
“Io mi volsi alla mia fornacie, la quale avevo fatta empiere di molti masselli di rame e altri pezzi di
bronzi; e accomodatigli l’uno sopra l’altro in quel modo che l’arte ci mostra, cioè sollevati, faccendo la via
alle fiamme del fuoco, perché più presto il detto metallo piglia il suo calore e son quello si fonde e riducesi
in bagno.” (Vita, II, LXXV, 567)

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As we can read in this passage, Benvenuto understands casting as a process of
inflating life into matter, but he also clarifies that such a process is made possible only
because it occurs by means of manipulation of a malleable and non-solid matter, namely
the liquefied metal he pours into the mold. A process of manipulation of a non-solid
matter, this time obtained by means of the amalgamation of water and earth, is also
presented in the context of the account of Benvenuto’s initiation to the secrets of nature.
In prison, Benvenuto perceives the “fire of poiesis” entering his body at the moment he
manipulates a soft mixture that he had obtained mixing earthy powder and water:
Next find a piece of brick upon the floor,
Crumble a part thereof to powder small,
And form a paste by sprinkling water o’er.
The, then came the fire of Poesy [poesia]
Into my carcase, by the way methought
Whence bread goes forth: there was none else at all. (capitolo, lines 55-59)
436

Both these excerpts from the Vita show that Benvenuto’s capability to give life to
his “offspring” and his own initiation to poiesis are both strictly related to his
manipulation of non-solid matter. More specifically, both the entrance of poiesis into
Benvenuto’s body, his subsequent bodily aureification, and his acquisition of the capacity
to inflate life into metal are inherently associated with the manipulation of viscous
matters, respectively represented in the text by a mixture of water and earth and the
liquefied bronze. This resonates with the account of Prometheus’ creation of man
described in Book I from the Metamorphoses. And, as we are going to see in the next

436
“E presi un pezzo di matton per sorta, / e rotto in polver ne ridussi un poco; / poi ne feci un savor
coll’acqua morta. / Allora allor della poesia il fuoco / M’entrò nel corpo, e credo che la via / Ond’esce il
pan: ché non v’era altro loco.” (Vita, capitolo, lines 55-59)

240
paragraphs, it also presents evident analogies with the representation of poiesis that is
given by appunto 43a from Petrolio.
In Petrolio’s Appunto 43a, the process and the product of poiesis (that is to say,
both the process of the generation of the text and the literary outcome that such a work
brings into existence), are explicitly presented as a mode of giving form to liquefied
matter. As the narrator of this fragment exemplarily puts it, the imperfect tense is
massively used throughout Petrolio because it is the most appropriate available tense, in
Italian language, to “render” the magmatic flows of time and life. But the text of Petrolio,
the narrator also states, aims to do more that simply “render” the flowing of time and life:
it transforms the text we are reading into a flow of lava and that, as such, is permeated
with life:
the inchoative imperfect, alluding to the passing of time and of life, proclaims
instead the thickness of the story: presents it as a vast, deep, lava flow; or,
rather, a boundless, bottomless river that runs /in the imperfect. […] in that
imperfect, in sum, c’est la vie. (Note 43a, 157)
437

We have already seen, in my previous sections, how this passage from Petrolio
opens the possibility to understand the entire book as an autopoietic organism that
“knows only the present” and that constantly produces its own components. Now, it is
important to acknowledge the fact that this appunto also depicts the poet’s act of making,
in analogy to the processes of creation of man performed by Prometheus in the
Metamorphoses and by Benvenuto in the Vita, as a practice of transformation of viscous

437
“L’imperfetto incoativo, alludendo al passare del tempo e della vita, denuncia invece lo spessore della
storia: lo presenta come un vasto e profondo fornte lavico, anzi, come un illimitato fiume senza fondo, che
scorre, ⌐in quell’imperfetto [...] In quell’imperfetto insomma c’est la vie.” (Appunto 43a, 188)

241
matter. Similarly to the man created by Prometheus, and analogously to the statue of
Perseus forged by Benvenuto, Petrolio is also a fluid matter that the poet manipulates to
capture the passing of life and time. As Appunto 43a explains, in fact, the use of the
inchoative imperfect serves an ambivalent purpose. On the one hand, it rhetorically
captures within the text’s narrative the flows of life. On the other hand, the use of the
inchoative imperfect “makes” the very product of poiesis, namely the “story” we are
reading, a “bottomless river” that presents itself as a flow of magma. It should be also
noted that it is specifically at this point of the narration that the narrator explicitly posits
Petrolio as a living organism. In the text’s bottomless flow, to use its narrator’s own
words, “c’est la vie.”
Keeping the considerations outlined above in mind, we can now contrast what
Petrolio says in Appunto 43a and what Serres states in a crucial passage from La
naissance de la physique about chaos and the stochastic “écart” that, occurring randomly
within it, determines the “temporary” growth of letters, words, and sentences. Serres
reads:
The beam no longer has a balance-point. Here or there, yesterday or tomorrow,
deviations appear stochastically. Or differential angles of inclination. Here is
something rather than nothing, here is existence, here are vortices, spirals,
volutes, all models out of equilibrium. They are brought back to zero by
deterioration, ruin and death. But, temporarily, they form. If they exist, it is as
deviations from equilibrium, and if they form, it is by the differential of
deviation, its suspended inchoation. Now atoms are letters, they are combined
into sentences, and join to form volumes. (my emphasis, Serres, 1977, 22).
438

438
« Le fléau n’a plus de point fixe. Ici ou là, jadis ou demain, apparaissent stochastiquement des écarts. Ou
des angles différentiels d’inclinaison. Voici quelque chose plutôt que rien, voice l’existence, voici des
turbulences, des spirales, volutes, tous schémas hors de l’équilibre. Ils sont ramenés à zéro par la
dégradation, les ruines et la mort. Mais, temporairement, ils se forment. S’ils existent, c’est comme écarts à
l’équilibre, et s’ils se forment, c’est par la différentielle d’ écart, son inchoatif suspendu. Or les atomes sont
des lettres, ils s’associent en phrases et se rassemblent en volumes. » (La naissance, 32)

242

In this passage, Serres depicts the letters as atoms that can be combined together
in sentences. This move allows Serres to extend Lucretius’ understanding of the
origination of the world as a casual deviation in the fall of atoms to the spheres of writing
and language, and to propose to understand a “poet” as a “semi-conductor” that,
introducing a fluctuation within the eternal fluxes of chaos, gives birth to an
agglomeration of atoms (letters) as well as to a series of amplifications. This opens the
possibility to consider written products of poiesis, such as Petrolio, as byproducts of an
introduction of an “écart” within the fluxes of the cosmos.
439

With its allusion to an “inchoative” suspension of time as the ultimate framework
of the occurrence of the “écart,” in addition, Serres’ words echo appunto 43a from
Petrolio, where the narrator specifies that the inchoative imperfect tense is “the best
available” option to maintain, in the text and its magmatic narrative, its ultimate
connection with the fluxes of time and life. This shows the possibility to read Pasolini’s
text as a product of the growth into life of letters and texts that, according to Serres,
might follow the occurrence of his occasional and casual écart in chaos. Within this
frame, the generation of the literary text would appear as a mode of introducing a
multiplicity of differential angles within the fluxes of chaos and not, for instance, a
process of creation from scratch. The poet generates a series of fluctuations that are
amplified in the organization of the atoms and the letters into words, and that provide a

439
Serres vehemently reiterates this notion later on in his reading of Lucretius, stating for example that:
“that atoms are letters is not an arbitrary theory or a decision or a metaphor. It is a necessity of what
Lucretius and his predecessors called nature” (Serres, 1977, 147). « Que les atomes soient des lettres n’est
pas une thèse arbitraire ou une décision ou une métaphore. C’est une nécessité de ce que Lucrèce et ses
prédécesseurs appelaient la nature. » (La naissance, 182).

243
provisionally stable, and at the same time living, temporary organization to the instability
of chaos.
440

Finally, since Petrolio is also capable—as the narrator from Appunto 43a
suggests—of capturing the flows of life and time thus transforming itself into a lively and
viscous front of lava, we could add that this text maintains the prerogative of being,
recalling Serres’ words, a “temporary formation” that is capable of “degrading,
decomposing, and dying.” This makes the literary text an autopoietic agglomeration that
retains, in its structure, life.
It is also important to acknowledge, on the subject, the fact that the title of
Petrolio evidently appeals to a substance, namely oil, which is by its very nature viscous,
malleable, and unrefined. Fluid, and transformative, representations of oil are also
referred to by the text at several crucial points of its narrative. The search, extraction and
circulation of oil, for example, activate a series of transformations that range from the
main character’s changes of sex to the modification of the geopolitical spaces of its
extraction, transportation and consumption. Other fragments of Petrolio posit the search
for oil as a crucial “motor” that displaces the action towards the “Orient”. In Appunto 36c,
for instance, oil is explicitly defined as the “golden fleece” that leads the actions of the
characters who work at ENI on a continuous search outside the national boundaries of
Italy.
441
Further Appunti indirectly link the search for oil to the building of the character

440
For the poet as a semi-conductor, see Serres’ Genèse, 113.

441
See the Appunto 36-40, titled “The Argonauts”, and the Appunti 36, 36b, 36c, 36d, 36e, 36f, 36g, 36h,
36u, 36l, 36m, 36n as the “rifacimento di Apollonio Rodio” (p.139).

244
of Carlo, to several moments of “crisis” in Italian politics, and to the transformation of
Italian society.
442

On the basis of the different excerpts from the Metamorphoses, the Vita and
Petrolio considered above, it is apparent that the three texts converge in representing
different figures of poiesis as subjects manipulating fluid substances. The three “poets,”
remarkably, do not “generate” the products of their work out of nothing, but they rather
proceed by means of amalgamation of the elements and transformation of non-solid
matter. In addition, all three narratives also posit the poet’s work of transformation as a
practice of generation of life. In the Metamorphoses, in fact, Prometheus amalgamates
water and earth to create a creature, man, which is said from the start to be “born” and
alive.
443
In the Vita, Benvenuto casts liquefied metal in the mold to give life to his “living
offspring.” Petrolio’s narrator, finally, uses the inchoative imperfect to capture the fluxes
of time and life and to originate a text that, in its own words, presents itself as flows of
lava.
These poets’ processes of transformation of liquid matter and the inflation of life
do not occur within a specific teleological frame, nor they happen to be consequences of

442
The trans-sexual transformations of Carlo regularly happen in association with his traveling to the
Middle East and/or his participation to decisional sessions in the centers of economic and political power.
The “Primo momento basilare del poema” (first fundamental moment in the poem), in Appunto 51, is set in
Rome and it precedes Carlo’s “real travel to the Middle East”, in which he becomes woman. In the
“Secondo momento basilare del poema” (Appunto 58), Carlo becomes woman after having seen a fascist
demonstration in Rome. Still, if we follow the progressive numeration of the Appunti, this event takes
places in the Orient. In the “Terzo momento basilare del poema” (Appunto 82) Carlo decides to undergo
castration. This choice precedes his participation to a gala evening at the Quirinale. In the fourth
“fundamental moment of the poem” (part 2, Appunto 127) Carlo becomes man after his “visionary” rebirth
presented in the series of Appunti titled “I Godoari”. As in the first section of the book Carlo’s sexual
transformation was associated to his traveling towards east, in part two his transformation happens after his
travel westwards. As Appunto 131 states, the structure of Petrolio is “symmetric.” (Petrolio, 534)

443
Met. I, 78.

245
an external event, and they not even result in being processes of creation ex nihilo. Rather,
according to the three narratives poiesis can be thought of as the introduction of a
multiplicity of differential angles in perspective that determines, in analogy to the random
occurrence of what Lucretius calls clinamen and Serres renames écart, an indefinite
number of subsequent “cascades” and amplifications. It is specifically to this notion of
poietic écart and to its relationships with chaos that the next pages are dedicated.

PROMETHEUS’ POIESIS: BIFURCATION, MULTIPLICITY, AND
TRANSFORMATION (THE METAMORPHOSES)
Several scholars have outlined similarities between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and
Lucretius’ De rerum natura, and some have postulated that Lucretius’ work constituted an
influential source for Ovid’s narrative. Kenneth Knoespel, for example, has seen the
Metamorphoses’ description of the cosmos as a work “probably indebted to Lucretius.”
444

Italo Calvino has contrasted Lucretius’ De rerum natura and the Metamorphoses to argue
that both literary works present “lightness” as “something arising from the writing itself,
from the poet’s own linguistic power, quite independent of whatever philosophic doctrine
the poet claims to be following.”
445
Piero Bernardini Marzolla has developed a
juxtaposed reading of Lucretius’ text and the last book of the Metamorphoses to argue
that in Ovid’s recounting of Pythagoras’ speech we can read “a shortened version of De
Rerum Natura.”
446

444
Knoespel in Hayles, 1991, 105.

445
Calvino, 10.

246
As my main concern is to find out how the Metamorphoses posits the figure of
Prometheus as a paradigmatic figure of poet, and then to discuss how this figure can be
used to approach the reading of the Vita and Petrolio, I will refrain from discussing at this
point the problem of how, and in which ways, crucial portions of the Metamorphoses
(such as Books I and XV) can be read as a “variant” to Lucretius’ text. Rather, I will
focus on the specific representation of Prometheus in the Metamorphoses and I will show
how this text, while accounting for the creation of man, seems to embody a series of
tropes (such as randomness, casuality, and bifurcation) that are intensively employed by
Michel Serres.
After having defined chaos as a “whole and undistinguishable aspect of nature in
the whole universe” or a rough and unordered mass in which discordant opposites are
“heaped together,” Book I from the Metamorphoses accounts for the intervention of a
“god, or more benign disposition of nature” that separates the earth from the sky, the land
from the waves, and misty air from pure sky.
447
The text does not clarify who this god
might be, nor does it explain the reasons why this entity had intervened and separated the
elements within chaos. Also, the text specifies that this god might be simply understood
as a “more benign disposition of nature,” therefore opening the possibility that even this
deity is not a god at all but, rather, a casual combination of the matters that constitute
nature.

446
Bernardini Marzolla, xvii-lvii.

447
Met. I, 6-7; I, 9; I,21.

247
This possibility seems to be spectacularly reinforced by what the text adds a few
lines after having ambiguously represented this entity as either a god or a mere
disposition of nature. When it explains that the separation of the elements was followed
by the “agglomeration of all earth in the shape of a globe,” the text mentions for the
second (and last) time this “god” and leaves its definition unclear and undifferentiated.
The text in facts refers to the agency who “ordered” the undifferentiated mass as
“whichever of the gods it was.”
448

Besides leaving the problem of the definition of this primordial “ordering” agency
unsolved, and therefore putting this “originary” agency in a zone of indiscernibility, this
portion of the Metamorphoses also introduces a trope that is widely used by Michel
Serres in his theorization of the origination of forms and fluctuations out of the fluxes
chaos. This trope is bifurcation. Bifurcation is particularly important not only because it
is the basis on which Serres establishes a nexus between a random fluctuation within the
fluxes of chaos and the “generation” of literary texts but also because it is spectacularly
reiterated by the Metamorphoses’ depiction of the creation of man.
When in La naissance de la physique he defines “disorder” and “non-sense” as
“the only information” that one can “draw from chaos,” Serres argues that a literary text
can generate “meaning” [sense] only at the condition of the “suppression” of a provision
of a stable center common to the whole universe:
Disorder might be non-sense, but the only information that I can draw from
chaos is that the innumerable and countless multiplicity either dissipates in all
directions, or flows in one direction. (…) There is no sense when everything is
in all senses. (…) Hence the suppression of the centre common to the entire

448
Met. I, 32-35.

248
universe, which would suddenly freeze the emergence of meaning or of order.
(Serres, 1977, 144-5)
449

In other words, for Serres, the circulation of atoms and letters, the generation of
order, and the growth of language and texts, traces a series of “field lines” [lignes de
champ] within the context of an undifferentiated, and potentially infinite, void. The set of
“camp lines” produced by the casual agglomeration of atoms and letter determines, in the
first place, the proliferation of a multiplicity of significations. As a result, any stable
“meaning” we can find in the combinations of atoms and letters is constantly deferred or,
to use Serres’ own words, inevitably “dispersed.” The infinite number of possible
changes in the angle of perspective, tough, also assures a temporary ordering of chaos
and it therefore makes meaning possible out of the multiplicity it comes from:
Sense is (...) disperse. How is it formed ? In the most natural way in the world.
By a change in sense. Thus by a bifurcation : an angle of rotation on the
monotone transference that announces and begins another transference.
(Serres, 1977, 147).
450

With reference to Serres’ frame, the account of the “cosmogony” in the
Metamorphoses employs a series of rhetorical bifurcations that make the narrative stages,
and renews each time a reader approaches the text, a process of deferral of the origin.
More specifically, the text seems to constantly “change the angle” of the perspective in

449
Serres, 1977, 144-5. « Le désordre est le non-sens, peut-être, mais la seule information que je puis tirer
du chaos, c’est que la multiplicité innombrable sans compte s’éparpille dans tous les sens ou coule dans un
seul sens. (...) Il n’y a pas de sens lorsque tout a le même sens. (...) D’où la suppression du centre commun
à tout l’univers, qui gèlerait d’un coup l’émergence du sens ou de l’ordre. » (La naissance, 178-9).

450
Serres, 1977, 147. « Le sens est (…) dispersé. Comment se forme-t-il? Le plus naturellement du monde.
Par changement de sens. Soit donc une bifurcation. C’est un angle de rotation sur la translation monotone
qui annonce et commence une autre translation. » (La naissance, 181)

249
which the agency who ordered the elements is presented to the reader. A first bifurcation
is presented when the text does not clarify the distinction between a “god” and “a “benign
disposition of nature” who has separated the elements. A further bifurcation is
reiteratively employed at the point the text says that this agency can be either conceived
of as a specific god or as “whichever of the gods it was. The leaves the problem of the
definition of this “god” open, also posits the “origination” of the world as a process that
does not correspond at all to a work of creation ex nihilo. Rather, the creation of the
world that follows the separation of the elements appears to be the “pure” product of
process of transformation. Recalling Serres’ words,
the cataract is thereby without predecessor. (...) By this universal law, nothing
is created or formed. For something to exist rather than nothing, there must be
a fluctuation in this uniform flow, there must be a deviation from this
equilibrium. And this is the clinamen. Thus a connection, a conjunction is
produced. Turbulence remains stable in the cataract, a little time, a long time,
a very long time. It is maintained, as an open system, through the flow
upstream, in the flow downstream. (Serres, 1977, 148).
451

The amplifications produced by the changes in perspective entailed by bifurcation
retain, Serres also suggests, “a little something” of the originary chaos they occur in. As
Serres adds immediately after this passage, in fact, we ought to keep in mind that the
amplifications produced by the random fluctuation that generates meaning within chaos
always retain a portion of the chaotic fluxes it has been generated from:

451
Serres, 1977, 148. « La cataracte est donc bien sans prédécesseur. (...) Par cette loi universelle, rien ne
se crée ni se forme. Pour qu’il existe quelque chose plutôt que rien, il faut une fluctuation de ce flux
uniforme, il faut un écart par rapport à cet équilibre. Et c’est le clinamen. Alor une connexion, une
conjonction se produit. La turbulence reste stable dans la cataracte, peu de temps, longtemps, très
longtemps. Elle s’entretient, comme système ouvert, par le flux en amont, dans le flux en aval. » (La
naissance, 183)

250
[turbulence] is the recipient of atoms, it emits atoms. Feeds and excretes, a
black box with inputs and outputs. For the interconnections to be preserved,
they must retain something of their initial condition. (Serres, 1977, 148)
452

We can now move to the Metamorphoses’s account of the creation of man. Here,
the text puts into play all three the main theoretical points Serres’ writings refer to.
Ovid’s narration of the creation of man explicitly points to, in fact, to the notion of
bifurcation as a preliminary condition for the generation and change of meaning, the
understanding of the poetic activity as a process of transformation, and the consideration
of the living products of the fluctuation as a “black box” retaining, at least in a certain
degree, “a little something” of the chaos they come from.
In the Metamorphoses’ the creation of man is not staged by one definite agency,
but it is rather ambiguously presented as the outcome of the work done by two possible
figures of poiesis. According to the text, in fact, man might have been undistinguishably
made by either Prometheus or a “universal craftsman”:
Man was born; perhaps he was made from divine seed
By the universal Craftsman, the source of a better world;
Perhaps the new earth freshly separated from the high
Ether retained the seeds of the kindred sky,
Which the son of Iapetus mixed with rain water
And shaped into the likeness of the all-controlling gods. (Met. I, 78-83)
453

452
Serres, 1977, 148. « [La turbulence] se nourrit et excrète, boîte noire à imputs et outputs. Pour que cet
entrelacs se conserve, il faut qu’il retienne quelque chose de ses conditions initiales. » (La naissance, 183)

453
“Natus homo est / siue diuino semine fecit / ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo, / siue recens tellus
seductaque nuper ab alto / Aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli; / Quam satus Iapeto mixtam pluuialibus
undis / Finxit in effigiem modernatum cuncta deorum; / Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, / Os
homini sublime dedit caelumque tueri / Iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere uultus. / Sic, modo quae fuerat
rudis et sine imagine, tellus / Induit ignotas hominum conuersa figuras.” (Met. I, 78-88)

251
From the perspective of a Serrean reading of the text, this means that also the
“origination” of man, and not only the ordering of the elements and the shaping of the
world, is embedded in bifurcation.
In addition, either taking Prometheus or the universal craftsman as the one who
gave birth to man, it is apparent that poiesis is in any case not a matter of creation of
“something” out of “nothing” but rather, and relevantly, a process of transformation. If
the universal Craftsman is the one who created man, in fact, he did so cultivating and
transforming, in some indefinite way, a “divine seed.” If we pick Prometheus as the
creator of mankind, too, it is clear that his work consists in the amalgamation of rainwater
and earth (which also retains “the seeds of the kindred sky”) in order to obtain a
malleable matter that can be then transformed into man. In both cases, the poetic act of
making is related to the metaphor of the cultivation of the soil, and either in one direction
or the other of the bifurcation, man is apparently the product of a practice of
transformation of fluid matter.
Finally, the product of poiesis is not only presented in either case to be living
(man is said, indeed, to be “born” to life from the very beginning of the account of its
creation) but it also retains, at least in some degree, “something” of the “initial
conditions.”
454
Man is said by the text, in fact, to be “shaped into the likeness of the all-
controlling gods.” But these all-controlling gods, as we have seen in the account of the
cosmogony, have been already posited by the text as possibly being either an
undifferentiated “god” or a mere “more benign disposition of nature.” Thus, we can

454
“Quelque chose de ses conditions initiales.” (Serres, 1977, 183)

252
conclude, men are “like” gods as far as they are the mere product of a random fluctuation
occurred at some unspecified point and time in the fluxes of chaos. To reiterate, as the
“god” who has distinguished the elements once mixed in the originary chaos is, so also
man can be seen as the mere amplification of a random fluctuation, or mere disposition of
nature.
Looking at a series of conceptual metaphors proposed by Serres in his La
naissance de la physique and juxtaposing them to the accounts of the creation of the
world and then of man in Metamorphoses’ Book I, we can conclude that the poem depicts
chaos as an unordered mass of fluctuating matter that has no definite origin. Thus, both
the “ordering” of the elements, the shaping of the world, and the creation of man appear
to be processes of transformation of (non-solid) matter and not of creation ex nihilo. In
addition, the text presents itself as a product of an “intervention” within chaos only as far
as poiesis is not seen in teleological terms. The poet, in fact, introduces a “fluctuation”
among the fluxes of chaos, and the poet’s own condition, analogously to the status of the
god-like figure who ordered the elements in the primordial chaos, cannot be clearly
distinguished from a mere “disposition of nature.” Among other implications, this also
means that the text envisions the possibility that god, or gods, can be “reduced to” a mere
random fluctuation within the “natural” fluxes of chaos, and that they can be conceived
of as poets, too. Finally, in both the cosmogony and in the account of the creation of man,
the text employs the trope of bifurcation to locate both the figure of the primordial god
who ordered the mass and the figures that have created man into a zone of indiscernibility.
As a result, the text constantly reminds the reader that the process of signification is, as

253
Serres has suggested, always a matter of change in the angle of our perspective. This also
means that the Metamorphoses can be read as a reflexive text, or a space where, as Niklas
Luhmann has suggested “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a
system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it
generates.”
455
This is particularly helpful, I argue, in positing the Metamorphoses an
autopoietic system of signification that includes in its processes of production of its
components, and therefore constantly transforms, the textual sources it alludes to (in this
case, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura).
When considered in this perspective, the entire text of the Metamorphoses appears
no longer to be a series of distinct narrative episodes “opened by” a narrative account of
the cosmogony, but it can rather be reconceptualized as a narrative that stages from the
first page onwards a constant repetition of the origination of order out of chaos. In doing
so, the text also seems to capture chaos in its autopoietic networks of signification. As the
amplifications following the clinamen always retain, as Serres has suggested,
“something” of the “initial conditions,” so the Metamorphoses retain, in analogy to the
living man that might be ambivalently created either by the “universal craftsman” or
Prometheus, a “portion” of the chaotic fluxes they have been generated from. Finally, the
account of the creation of man provided in Book I, lines 76-83, gives us the possibility to
posit the figure of Prometheus as a paradigmatic figure of poiesis. More specifically,
Prometheus appears in the first place to be the “maker” of an autopoietic living organism,
namely man. In addition, and in analogy to the poetic figures of Benvenuto in the Vita

455
Luhmann, 8.

254
and the narrator in Petrolio, Prometheus works a non-solid matter. The inflation of life
into matter is indissolubly related to the fact the poet has amalgamated “distinct”
elements, in this case rainwater and earth, into a soft mixture.
In summary, Prometheus appears to be a poet who participates in chaos
occasionally (and not teleologically) producing a variation within its perennial fluxes.
Prometheus can be therefore seen as a paradigmatic figure of poet who, introducing an
écart within the constant fluctuation of viscous matter, brings into existence an
autopoietic product. He introduces a differential angle in the universe, and in doing so he
gives a provisional form to the structural instability of chaos. In the remaining portions of
this chapter, I further elaborate on both the figure of Prometheus and the juxtaposition
between Serres’ works, Cellini’s Vita and Pasolini’s Petrolio. While holding the figure of
Prometheus as a paradigmatic figure of poet who transforms matter into autopoietic
product, I show how a set of arguments proposed by Serres in La naissance de la
physique and in his later work Genèse can also be used as powerful tools to enter the
autopoietic functioning of the Vita and Petrolio.

THE SALINON AND THE SALTCELLAR (THE VITA)
In Cellini’s Vita, Benvenuto’s poietic work is depicted not only as a process of
manipulation of viscous matter (for example when he mixes water and earth in the
underground cell in Castel Sant’Angelo or when he casts the Perseus), but also as a
process of generation of life, as it is shown by Benvenuto’s conception of his work as his
own “living offspring.” The acquisition of Benvenuto’s capability to inflate life into non-

255
solid matter, in addition, is also at several points “extended” to his act of writing. A first
case of conception of the literary text we are reading as a living organism is brought
forward by the Vita’s own title. A second example of how the text is understood as a
living product of poiesis is introduced to the reader at very beginning of the text, more
precisely in the very first quatrain of the text’s opening sonnet. Here, besides putting a
strong emphasis on the theme of “life” (a term reiterated twice in the first four lines), the
text presents the alma as the living principle that, besides making the poet alive, assists
him in the creation of his literary accomplishment:
This troubled life of mine I write
to thank the God of nature,
which has given a soul to me and then took care of it,
various high undertakings I have done and live. (Vita, opening sonnet, lines 1-
4)
456

We have already seen how for Benvenuto the capability to inflate a “lively
breath” into the matter he manipulates corresponds to a practice of capture of the “living
spirit” that, according to the “pneumo-phantasmological doctrine” described by Agamben,
permeates the whole universe and relates the material and the immaterial by means of
functioning as “intermediary between soul and matter, the divine and the human.”
457

More specifically, as in Stoic philosophy the pneuma is a “corporeal principle a subtle
and luminous body, identical to the fire, which pervades the universe and penetrates
every living thing,” so in the narration of the Vita Benvenuto acquires a peculiar
“splendor” from the moment he reproduces the primordial process of mixing water and

456
“Questa mia vita travagliata io scrivo / per ringraziar lo Dio della natura, / che mi diè l’alma e poi ne ha
‘uto cura, / alte diverse ‘mprese ho fatte e vivo.” (Vita, 1-4, p.79)

457
Agamben, 1993, 94.

256
earth and he is subsequently introduced to the secrets of nature.
458
The “luminous aura”
that reverberates when Benvenuto’s body is exposed to the light of the sun becomes, in
this frame, a representation of the “amplification” determined by the entrance of “the fire
of poiesis” into his body, and the text clearly explains that this alma gives Benvenuto the
capability to inflate a living breath in his works.
In the second chapter from La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrètius,
Serres surveys Archimedes’ Liber Assumptorum. After having specified that there is no
real evidence in support the ascription of this work to Archimedes, Serres focuses his
attention on its fourteenth proposition. Here, the reader is introduced to the geometrical
salinon (σάλινον), that is a figure bounded by four semicircles, of which three are aligned
of one side of their diameter and the other is aligned on the opposite side.

Fig. 1 – A Salinon

458
Agamben, 1993, 92.

257
As Serres tells us, mathematicians have for a long time discussed whether we
should read the name of this figure as selinon (σελίνιον) meaning half-moon, or as
salinum (σάλινον) meaning saltcellar. While Barrow, Serres summarizes for us, has been
elaborating on Hyppocrates’ geometry of the lens to speak in favor of the first option,
Heath has advanced philological and archeological evidence for the second possibility. A
further available way to read the name of the Archimedean figure has been adopted by
Heiberg, according to which the name of the figure is selinon (σάλινον), meaning “celery
leaf.”
459
Serres is not interested in providing a clear resolution to this philological
problem because his main purpose is, at this point of his book, to demonstrate that
supposedly “exact” sciences are, in reality, founded on inexactitude. More precisely, after
having underlined that any resolution of this philological problem is in the last instance
purely “husserlian,” Serres takes the “multiplicity” of the figure’s different available
spellings as an index of the “inexactitude that informs all “geometry from the origins to
the topology, from the Greeks to Riemann.” All science, Serres concludes, “is rigorous,
anexact [sic]. And not precise, exact or inexact.”
460

In Serres’ theoretical project, it might be useful to recall here, “science” is a
“fundamentally ‘impure’ (…) mixture of overlapping paths between the varied sets of
ideas and practices (‘groups, institutions, capitals, people in agreement or in conflict,
machines and objects.)”
461
Also, the “historical developments in science” are by no
means a linear process, nor should they be conceived of as a gradual accumulation of

459
Serres, 1977, 19.

460
Serres, 1977, 19. « Elle est rigorouse, anexacte. Et non précise, exacte ou inexacte. » (La naissance, 29)

461
Brown, 10.

258
knowledge or a constant revolution. For Serres science is not the sole custodian of reason,
and this means that we have to come understand “wisdom” not by means of an appeal to
a more superior form of (scientific) reason” but rather developing a
tolerant ethics, of third-instruction, a harmonious middle/milieu, a daughter of
two banks, of scientific culture and of knowledge culled from the humanities,
of expert erudition and of artistic narrative. (Serres, 1997, 164-5)

Within this frame, the different available possible ways to read the name of the
salinon are for Serres highly indicative of the ever-changing criteria that have informed
the un-linear “development” of science, and the lack of agreement among mathematicians
about the way we should read the Greek term specifically points to the “foundational”
inexactitude of all geometry. In order to make clearer his point, Serres elaborates a fourth
possible etymological reading of the term salinon:
examine, if you please, the term σάλος, salos: it means the roughness or the
flood of a stream, the turbulence of the sea or the unrest of the soul. Σαλεύω,
saleuô, the verb: to shake, agitate, wreck ; set a horse into motion ; to be
balanced, as in a boat that rolls ; to be unsure, hesitant or confused. The
semantic field here is Lucretian, Archimedian as well. If you now turn to the
inflection indicating matter, you have the reduced model of this discord.
(Serres, 1977, 19-20)
462

As in his general theoretical frame Serres rethinks the physical universe not in
terms of its laws and regularities, but rather in terms of perturbations and turbulences to
better bring out the universe’s “multiple forms, uneven structures, and fluctuating
organizations,” in terms of the specific case of the salinon Serres concludes that this

462
« Voyez, je vous prie, le terme σάλος, salos: il signifie l’agitation ou le déferlement du flot, les
turbulences de la mer at les troubles de l’âme. Tremblement de terre, inquiétude. Σαλεύω, saleuô, le verbe:
ébanler, agiter, ruiner; mettre en movement un cheval; être balancé, ceci pour un bateau, d’un mouvement
de roulis; être incertain, hésitant et troublé. L’aire sémantique est ici lucrétienne, archimédienne aussi.
Passez maintenant à la désinence indiquant la matière, et vous obtenez le modèle réduit de ce trouble. » (La
naissance, 29-30)

259
geometrical figure might constitute a paradigmatic and archetypal embodiment of the
multiplicity of field lines that follow a random fluctuation occurring within the infinite
and indefinite fluxes of chaos.
463
In his own words, “the Salinon of the Lemmas is a
fluctuating curve, the disequilibrium of the swell, the pure matrix or model of the
turbantibus aequora ventis, and distant ancestor of our unfolding systems.”
464

The Vita’s representation of the golden saltcellar Benvenuto realizes for the King
of France embodies a set of features that seem to belong, if we take Serres’ frame as a
point of departure, to the “liquid history” of fluids. More specifically, Benvenuto’s
saltcellar is described by the literary text as a provisional transformation of the fluxes of
chaos into a temporarily stable shape. If considered in this light, the poet’s labor reveals
itself to be a non-teleological work of production that, instead of creating forms out of
nothing, engages process of transformation of pre-existent matter. In addition,
Benvenuto’s saltcellar would become, in analogy to his “living” Perseus, an autopoietic
product of the poet’s making.
Before engaging in a close reading of the Vita’s representation of Benvenuto’s
golden saltcellar, I want to make clear that my move wants to do more than just pointing
to the apparent semantic resonance between the names of Serres’ salinon and of
Benvenuto’s saliera. This resonance appears in fact, in the last analysis, to be purely
occasional. My juxtaposition of Serres’ understanding of the salinon and the Vita’s
description of the saliera is instead centered upon the very specific kind of making that a

463
Harari and Bell, xvii.

464
Serres, 1977, 20. « Le Salinon des Lemmes est une courbe fluctuante, déséquilibre de la houle, matrice
ou modèle purs du turbantibus aequora uentis, et ancêtre éloignée de nos systèmes déferlants. » (La
naissance, 30)

260
poet stages when he creates a living product on the background of the perennial fluxes of
chaos. The representation of poiesis that both Serres and Benvenuto bring forward, then,
is quite independent from the name we want to give, as observers of poietic processes, to
the production of a system components that autopoiesis entails.
The saltcellar Benvenuto prepares in Book II from the Vita is the first
achievement he realizes after his own body’s inflation with the fire of poiesis, his
initiation to the secrets of nature and his symbolic transformation into gold. In addition,
when the saltcellar is at first introduced in the narrative as a model in wax, to be later
developed into the final “version” in pure gold, it is the first product of his work that
Benvenuto explicitly defines to be his own living offspring.
465
The wax model, which
Benvenuto also considers to be of his “own making and invention,” features two
anthropomorphic figures respectively representing earth and water. In Benvenuto’s words,
the posture of these two figures is intended to provide a representation of the
“interminglement of land and ocean”:
Whishing to suggest the interminglement of land and ocean, I modeled two
figures, considerably taller than a palm in height, which were seated with their
legs interlaced, suggesting those lengthier branches of sea which run up into
the continents. The sea was a man, and in his hand I placed a ship, elaborately
wrought in all its details, and well adapted to hold a quantity of salt. Beneath
him I grouped the four sea-horses, and in his right hand he held his trident.
The earth I fashioned like a woman, with all the beauty of form, the grace, and
charm of which my art was capable. She had a richly decorated temple firmly
based upon the ground at one side; and here her hand rested. This I intended to

465
This is shown by the fact that in Book II, chapter II, while meeting with the Cardinal of Ferrara and his
friend Messer Gabriel Cesano, Benvenuto states about the model he had realized for the saltcellar that he
has “a great affection” for it, being this model one of the “children” he “brings forth from his art.” (Vita, II,
II, 245). “Io ho grande amore ai miei figliuoli, che di questa mia professione partorisco. (II, II, 411). Later
in the narration, Messer Cesano reiterates the notion the Benvenuto’s work are his own living offspring. To
persuade the Cardinal to commission Benvenuto the final execution of the saltcellar, Cesano states:
“Benvenuto, it seems, has chosen to display his children.” (Vita II, II, 247)

261
receive the pepper. In the other hand I put a cornucopia, overflowing with all
the worldly treasures I could think of. (II, II, 245-46)
466

As we can infer from the emphasis Benvenuto puts on the “interminglement” of
water and ocean, poiesis is depicted here as a process of amalgamation of different
elements, and not of their separation or distinction. Furthermore, the conjugation of Sea
and Land retains a generative potential, because it is exactly from the earth fecundated
with water that a series of living organism arises:
Below (…), I collected the fairest animals that the earth produces. In the
quarter presided over by the deity of the ocean, I fashioned such choice of
fishes and shells as could be properly displayed in that small space. (II, II,
246).
467

Benvenuto’s understanding of poiesis as a process of transformation of soft and
malleable matter into life is reinforced in Book II, chapter XXVI. Here, the finalized
saltcellar made of “pure gold” is presented to the King of France. The text engages into
an ekphrastic description of its shaping. The saltcellar gives an anthropomorphic
representation of the ocean and the land. Earth is feminine figure and she represents
motherhood and generation of life. Softened with water, she generates the ”handsomest
living creatures”:

466
“Io feci una forma ovata di grandezza di più d’un mezzo braccio assai bene, qusi dua terzi, e sopra la
detta forma, sicondo che mostra il Mare abbracciarsi con la Terra, feci dua figure grande più d’un palmo
assai bene, le quale stavano a sedere entrando colle gambe l’una nell’altra, si come si vede certi rami di
mare lunghi che entran nella terra; e in mano al mastio Mare messi una nave ricchissimamente lavorata: in
essa nave accomodatamente e bene stava di molto sale; sotto al detto avevo accomodato quei quattro
cavalli marittimi; in nella destra del ditto Mare avevo messo il suo tridente. La Terra avevo fatta una
femmina tanto di bella forma quanto io aveva potuto e saputo, bella e graziata; e in mano alla ditta avevo
posto un tempio ricco e adorno, posato in terra; e lei in sun esso s’appoggiava con la ditta mano: questo
avevo fatto per tenere il pepe. Nell’altra mano posto un corno di dovizia, addorno con tutte le bellezze che
io sapevo al mondo.” (Vita, II, II, 412)

467
“Sotto questa iddea, e in quella parte che si mostrava esser terra, avevo accomodato tutti qui più bei
animali che produce la terra.” (Vita II, II, 412-13)

262
The King had now returned from Paris; and when I paid him my respects, I
took the salt-cellar with me. As I have already related, it was oval in form,
standing about two-thirds of a cubit, wrought of solid gold, and worked
entirely with the chisel. While speaking of the model, I said before how I had
represented Sea and Earth, seated, with their legs interlaced, as we observe in
the case of firths and promontories; this attitude was therefore metaphorically
appropriate. The Sea carried a trident in his right hand, and in his left I put a
ship of delicate workmanship to hold the salt. Below him were his four sea-
horses, fashioned like our horses from the head to the front hoofs; all the rest
of their body, from the middle backwards, resembled a fish, and the tails of
these creatures were agreeably interwoven. Above this group the Sea sat
throned in an attitude of pride and dignity; around him were many kinds of
fishes and other creatures of the ocean. The water was represented with its
waves, and enameled in the appropriate color. I had portrayed Earth under the
form of a very handsome woman, holding her horn of plenty, entirely nude
like the man figure; in her left hand a placed a little temple of Ionic
architecture, most delicately wrought, which was meant to contain the pepper.
Beneath her were the handsomest living creatures which the earth produces;
and the rocks were partly enameled, partly left in gold. (II, XXVI, 302)
468

Scholars have widely elaborated on both Cellini’s and Benvenuto’s saltcellars,
sometimes not making a clear distinction between the physical golden artifact we can see
on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the object described in the
text of the Vita. Recalling the fact that, from today’s perspective, “we inevitably lose the
sense of the Heracletian flow of matter, of experience, of affect, because we study fixed

468
“Era ritornato il Re a Parigi, e io l’andai a trovare, portandogli la detta saliera finita; la quale, sì come io
ho detto sopra, era in forma ovata ed era di grandezza di dua terzi di braccio in circa, tutta d’oro, lavorata
per virtù di cesello. E sì come io dissi quando ragionai del modello, avevo figurato il Mare e la Terra a
sedere l’uno e l’altro, e s’intramettevano le gambe, sì come entra certi rami del mare infra la terra, e la terra
infra del detto mare: così propriamente avevo dato loro quella grazia. A il Mare avevo posto in mano un
tridente innella destra; e innella sinistra avevo posto una barca sottilmente lavorata, innella quale si metteva
la salina. Era sotto a questa detta figura i sua quattro cavalli marittimi, che insino al petto e le zampe
dinnanzi erano di cavallo; tutta la parte del mezzo indietro era di pesce: queste code di pesce con piacevol
modo s’intrecciavano insieme; in su qual gruppo sedeva con finissima attitudine il detto Mare: aveva
all’intorno molta sorte di pesci e altri animali marittimi. L’acqua era figurata con le sue onde; di poi era
benissimo smaltata del suo proprio colore. Per la Terra avevo figurato una bellissima donna, con il corpo
della sua dovizia in mano, tutta ignuda come il mastio appunto; nell’altra sua sinistra mano avevo fatto un
tempietto di ordine ionico, sottilissimamente lavorato; e in questo avevo accomodato il pepe. Sotto a questa
femina avevo fatto i più belli animali che produca la terra; e i suoi scogli terrestri avevo parte ismaltati e
parte lasciati d’oro.” (Vita II, XXXVI, 485-6)

263
and finished things: objects, not nonobjects,” in her Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold (2005)
Rebecca Zorach has discussed “the flowing, liquid character of abundance” embedded in
Cellini’s saltcellar and has shown how this work presents, in common with artistic
“objects” presented in the Galerie François Premier in Fontainebleau, a visual rhetoric
that “strongly emphasizes both femininity and natural abundance, identifying the one
with the other.”
469
According to Zorach, Cellini’s saltcellar not only has become “a
textbook example of the excessive luxury, the exquisite preciosity, of sixteenth-century
courts,” but it also combines “a diffuse eroticism with esoteric meaning, adding an
appropriate subtext of abundance.”
470
Thus, for Zorach, while the figures on the upper
part of the saltcellar “serve as a prosopopoeitic elaboration” of the origins of salt and
pepper as, respectively, commodities produced by Sean and Earth, in its wholeness the
saliera shows Cellini’s “appeal to topography” realized by means of the positioning of
sea and land in “an erotically allusive way.” Within this frame, Zorach concludes, Cellini
would have converted “potentially problematic, erotically charged visual representation
into a humanistically rationalized meaning.”
471

To these elaborations I want to add that the saltcellar, at least in its representation
provided by the narration of the Vita, is also the product of a poetic act of making not

469
Zorach, 20, 26 and 84.

470
Zorach, 90.

471
Zorach, 95. Zorach also argues that Cellini “established an analogy in his description of the golden
saltcellar between the topography of the earth and the anatomy of a reclining female figure. When the land
is imagined as a female body, mountains can be breasts, a cavern is a womb or belly, stones are bones, and
rivers carry nourishing bodily fluids. The maternal wealth of these bodies is linked to a notion of natural
wealth as infinitely renewable, as if no labor were required to bring forth the earth’s production, as if no
damage to the earth were possible, as if these maternal bodies were capable of giving endlessly without
cost.” (Zorach, 124)

264
only as far as it is, obviously, a byproduct of human labor, but also because it is portrayed
as capable of retaining, perhaps also in what Zorach defines to be “esoteric” terms, life. If
we underline Benvenuto’s emphasis on the living beings that from the interminglement of
water and earth arise, in fact, we can conceptualize the saltcellar as work that embodies
the fluctuations of the universe but that is able to do so specifically because of the poet’s
(Benvenuto’s) capability to transform rough physical gold into “living” product. In other
words, once conceived of as Benvenuto’s “living offspring,” the saltcellar would become
a product work of the poet’s transformation of the matter able to capture the pneumatic
spirit that permeates the whole universe. Within this frame, Benvenuto appears to fashion
himself as a poet capable of introducing “fluctuation” among the perennial fluxes of
chaos. And consistently with what the Vita’s poet says about his making as a mode to
bring his “children to life,” his poiesis gives birth to living organism that retains
“something” of the living chaotic fluxes it comes from.
Such a frame of reading can be further developed moving from what Michael
Cole argues in Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture. For Cole, in extreme summary,
Cellini’s writing about the saltcellar “tend to multiply its meaning rather than nail them
down.”
472
This statement can be developed noticing that the Vita’s depiction of the
saltcellar, as well as the visual abundance of the saltcellar itself, are conceptualized
around what Serres calls the “tiny differentiation” which poiesis introduces at the
moment it organizes noise, or chaos, into putative order. With its interminglement of sea
and land, in other words, the saltcellar appears to embody that minimal differentiation

472
Cole, cited by Zorach, 258.

265
that, while arising from chaos and indifferentiation, provides a series of point around
which the “reading” of a product of poetic making can be oriented. The organization of
this meaning, as Cole suggests, is embedded in multiplicity.
Benvenuto’s saltcellars would then embody, as does for Serres Balzac’s novella
The Unknown Masterpiece, a “chaos of colors, shades, and forms.”
473
In analogy to
Balzac’s text, in fact, the saltcellar gives a shape to “recognizable” forms that emerge
from chaos, and its golden figures provide a series of points around which multiple
readings of the sculpture can be oriented. The saltcellar can be therefore located in-
between what Serres defines to be two extremes of a same equivocation, namely absolute
chaos and absolute order, because it simultaneously embodies the fluid waves of chaos
and its poetic transformation into the anthropomorphic figures of Sea and Earth. In other
words, Benvenuto’s saltcellar, in analogy to the salinon from the Liber Assumptorum, “is
a fluctuating curve, the disequilibrium of the swell, the pure matrix or model of the
turbantibus aequora ventis,” and therefore a paradigmatic example of “our unfolding
systems.”
474

If considered this way, the figure of Benvenuto, or the poet who generates the
golden saltcellar, can be now be understood as a promethean figure that, besides inflating
life into gold, also “generates” an autopoietic product that embodies, at least in a certain
measure, the originary chaos it comes from. Furthermore, poiesis appears to be ultimately
a process of transformation of matter, and by no means it can be conceived of as a

473
Serres, 1982, 27.

474
Serres, 1977, 20.

266
process of creation ex nihilo. The poet inserts, into the waves of chaos, a “differential
angle” that makes meaning possible and whose amplifications take the shape of the
figures of Ocean, Land and other living “beings.” But the insertion of this differential
angle, that makes all multiple meanings possible, is in turn capable of being amplified by
the generation of a multiplicity of further meanings, it envisions the co-presence of order
and disorder, and it ultimately appears to be a casual fluctuation in the infinite flows of
chaos. In summary, Benvenuto’s saltcellar represents and captures both originary chaos
and the living pneuma that animates the universe and all living things. It gives shape to
both the perennial fluxes of chaos and the temporary fluctuations of the differential
angles poiesis produces. This makes Benvenuto a promethean figure of poietic making
that both transforms and vitalizes the matter. He is a poet who creates an autopopietic
system of signification.

ORIGINS, MULTIPLE INCIPITS, POIESIS (PETROLIO)
The book titled Genèse (1982) occupies a particular position within the context of
Serres’ writings, and it is considered to mark “a turning point” in his entire framework.
475

As Maria Assad has argued, a common “characteristic of all of Serres’ writings until
Genèse” is their concern with a critique of “the suppression of chaos and its knowledge,
as the condition of possibility for any organizing principle to function historically.”
476

From Genèse onwards, instead, Serres begins inviting his readers “to follow him as he

475
Hayles, 1991, 29.

476
Assad, 280.

267
opens the manholes, peers into the darkness, and listens to the cacophony of the
turbulence” of chaos.
477
According to Assad, then, in Genèse Serres approaches the
generative potential of chaos not merely theorizing the “genesis” of the world as a
composite process of signification that engages the amplification of multiple geneses,
“small generations, numerous becomings, abounding possibilities, and disappearances”
but also “constructing” a literary text that in its structure “embodies” a multiplicity of
epistemological geneses:
understood as a plurality of creative moments that surge forward, cross,
intersect, fall back, link and relink, “genèse,” (…) becomes itself a trope,
designating, not a unitary point of beginning, but multiple possibilities by
which various epistemological discourses generate themselves. (Assad, 278-9)

Assad’s views are echoed by Steve Brown’s reading of Genèse, according to
which Serres’ work textually “translates the emphasis on demonstration into a formal
stylistics.”
478
According to Brown Genèse, which deals with the founding role of noise
and disorder in the production of order, “is itself a disorderly a noisy text made up of
interleaving examples and discussions which resist singular summary but nevertheless
impress upon the reader the very sense of the matter at hand.”
479
In summary, for both
Assad and Brown Genèse does not merely describe, but it rather stages and embodies,
Serres’ understanding of the multiple origins of signification that arise from chaos.
One way in which Genèse “embodies” Serres’ understanding of the multiple
origins of signification that arise from chaos is represented by the dissemination, within

477
Assad, 280.

478
Brown, 4.

479
Brown, 4.

268
the text, of a multiplicity of “beginnings.” For example, the book does not follow a linear
progression, and at several points in the book Serres states that he is starting anew for a
“different” point of origination, and organization, of meaning. The text is disseminated,
for example, by a multiplicity of statements such as: “I begin again;” “I retrace my
steps;” “I speak now in several voices;” “I begin again. A fluctuation appears, it is lost in
the desert;” “I am building a tower and I have no name for it;” and shortly thereafter “I
am not building a tower […] I am not altogether building, it is making itself, I’m taking
part.”
480
Also, while holding that chaos is a both circumstance and a perennial flux,
Serres not only reiterates but he also exemplifies in the very way he writes how we can
not find a definite point where any origin begins. Such a process is exemplarily made
manifest, at a crucial point in the text, when Serres shows that his own act of “making” of
the text, that Serres poetically names “chanson,” appears to be a fluctuation inserted in
the perennial noise that pertains to the fluxes of chaos:
There is chaos, there is a circumstance, and suddenly there’s the whole
foundation. There is the background noise, then a noise in the midst of that
background noise, and suddenly there’s the whole song. There is the perennial
surge, then a fluctuation in that surge, and suddenly there’s the river of Time.
(Serres, 1982, 24)
481

To clarify his understanding of poiesis as a fluctuation within the perennial fluxes
of chaos, Serres defines himself a “semi-conductor,” or a poet that intervenes within the

480
Serres, 1982, respectively: 27, 49, 95, 119, 127, and 133. Trans. James and Nielson. « Je recommence »
(ch.2, 55); « Je reviens sur mes pas » (ch.3; 89); « Je parle maintenant à plusieurs voix » (ch.4, 157); « Je
recommence. Une fluctuation paraît, elle se perd dans le désert » (ch.4 ; 191); « Je construis une tour et je
n’ai pas de nom pour elle » (Rêve, 205) ; « Je ne construis pas une tour (...) je ne construis pas tout à fait,
cela se fait, j’y participe ». (Rêve, 213)

481
« Il y a le chaos, il y a une circonstance, et voilà tout le fondement. Il y a le bruit de fond, puis un bruit
dans ce bruit de fond, et voilà toute la chanson. Il y a le flot pérenne, puis une fluctuation dans ce flot, et
voilà le fleuve du temps ». (Genèse, 48)

269
primordial, noisy and viscous fluxes of chaos in order to generate an organized series of
written words:
The noises of space, the colors of the world are coming toward me. I am
plunged here and now in colors and noises to the point of dizziness. Here and
now means that a flux of noises and colors is coming at me. I am a
semiconductor. (Serres, 1982, 66)
482

The poet is then for Serres a semi-conductor who participates in the fluxes of
chaos by introducing in them a fluctuation. This fluctuation does not constitute a point of
absolute “beginning,” but it should be conceived of as the shift in inclination within the
context of a multiplicity of potentially infinite differential angles that are already present
in the turbines of chaos. Saying that “when a fluctuation appears or forms, it is never a
beginning, not a sowing, it is just one of the myriads, of noise, indistinguishable,
incapable of differentiation,” Serres specifies that a “poetic” fluctuation in never a
“beginning,” but it rather appears as one among infinite and undifferentiable possible
movements that are inscribed into chaos.
483
Serres’ poetic understanding of the
“originary” fluctuation that makes all infinite beginnings possible resonates with my
argument that Petrolio is a text disseminated with multiple incipits. As we have seen, this
characteristic is clearly expressed in Petrolio, among other features, by the conspicuous
number of “prefatory interventions” that constantly defer the beginning of the narrative
and by the several fragments that posit the book as a constant work in progress. In

482
« Les bruits de l’espace, les couleurs du monde viennent vers moi. Je suis plongé ici et maintenant dans
les couleurs et dans les bruits, jusqu’au vertige. Ici veut dire et maintenant veut dire qu’un flux de bruits et
de couleurs vient sur moi. Je suis un semi-conducteur ». (Genèse, 113)

483
Serres, 1982, 118. « Quand une fluctuation paraît ou se forme, elle n’est jamais un commencement, elle
n’est pas un ensemencement, elle n’est que l’une des myriades indiscernables, indifférenciables, de la
noise ». (Genèse, 190)

270
addition, Serres’ statements also open the possibility to understand the process of
generation of Petrolio as the consequence of a casual écart, or a form that is made of by
the series of amplification that a casual ordering of the atoms determines within the
fluxes of chaos.
In a crucial passage from the Genèse, Serres draws a parallel between the
fluctuation that marks the “beginning” of poetic making, the origins of time, and the birth
of movement. At this renewed point of “beginning” of his own text, Serres posits the
work of the poet as a fluctuation that “marks nothing” within the whiteness of chaos. One
of the multiple possible ways to start with poiesis is, for Serres, a mode of “beginning”
that leaves the space of the page blank:
Thus is movement born, thus, perhaps, is born time.
Not to touch the ground with one’s force, not to leave any trace of one’s
weight, to leave no mark, to leave nothing, to yield, to step aside. (...)
To leave at last the page blank. (Serres, 1982, 47)
484

Shortly thereafter, Serres says that the poetic act marks the “beginning” of all
formations by means of providing a first “original” determination on the background of
the infinite. This movement, previously said to leave the page blank, is now conceived of
as a determination of the negative or, as Serres states, “it is in the negative that
determination has its infinity.”
485
Considering these two passages together, it appears that
Serres’ “bifurcationally” posits poietic making as a movement that can operate either by

484
« Ainsi naît le mouvement, ainsi, peut-être, naît le temps. Ne pas toucher le sol de sa force, ne pas laisser
de trace de sa pesanteur, ne rien marquer, ne rien laisser, céder, laisser le pas. (...) Laisser enfin la page
blanche ». (Genèse, 83)

485
Serres, 1982, 49. « L’infinité de la determination est celle du négatif ». (Genèse, 89)

271
means of withdrawal (that is to say by leaving the page white) or by means of a negative
mode of determination of the infinite (that is to say providing a negation).
Appunto 1 from Petrolio seems to embody both valences of Serres’ bifurcation. At
first, the “beginning” of the text is posited as fluctuation that leaves the page white:
………………………………….
…………………………………..
……………….¹”

Immediately thereafter, that is to say at the bottom of the same page, Appunto 1
then reads: “this novel does not begin.”
Appunto 1 can be read as capturing both terms of Serres’ bifurcation because,
with a first movement, it does not provide any affirmation and it consists of an empty
page. But then, with another movement that we can consider to be as “originary” as the
first one, Appunto 1 problematically “negates” that the “novel” has a beginning, and it
therefore embodies what Serres names a determination of the negative.
In Genèse, besides positing as possible points of beginning of poetic genesis the
movement that leaves the page blank and the affirmation of the negative, Serres reiterates
his consideration of bifurcation as a crucial “generational” trope.
486
We have already seen
how this trope is employed in Book I from the Metamorphoses. Now, we can move to
Petrolio and observe how also this literary organism, besides employing the trope of
bifurcation in its narrative, also appears to “stage” a multiplicity of bifurcations
performed by the intersection between reader, author and text. To provide one example,

486
“It is the chain of genesis. It is not solid. It is never a chain of necessity. Suddenly, it will bifurcate.”
(Serres, 1982, 71) « C’est la chaîne de la genèse. Elle n’est pas solide, elle n’est jamais de nécessité.
Brusquement, elle bifurque ». (Genèse, 121)

272
the trope of the bifurcation appears in Appunto 3, where bifurcation marks the first stages
of Carlo’s story, as this character duplicates into two bodies. In this fragment, two beings
named Tetis and Polis, “probably descended from the sky-or come perhaps from the
depths of earth,” engage into a dispute over the body of Carlo. The dispute ends when
Carlo duplicates into two bodies, and Tetis and Polis take one of the bodies each.
Because in the rest of Petrolio’s narrative the two Carlo who have “originated” in
appunto 3 are undistinguishably related the one to the other, bifurcation appears to be one
more possible center to organize the re-reading of Petrolio—a reconsideration that would
acknowledge, to use Serres’ words, that “bifurcation is the law.”
487

It is now apparent that, given the extreme complexity and “density” that pertain to
both Pasolini’s Petrolio and Serres’ Genèse, the juxtaposition of these two texts opens a
multiplicity of possible “differential angles” to enter the reading of both texts. Each time
we introduce a variation in our mode of reading, in fact, both systems of signification
“respond” with the generation of multiple points of beginning and, significantly, they
produce a series of amplifications around which we can start anew our processes of
provision of these texts (as well of their juxtaposition) with meaning. This seems to bring
spectacular support to my claim that Petrolio is an autopoietic system of signification.
488

487
Serres, 1982, 58. (« La bifurcation est la loi ». Genèse, 101)

488
In Genèse, Serres specifies that while the “background noise” that characterizes chaos is at any rate
“non-finite,” the moment of the determination “pierces” such an infinite time with the occurrence of the
present: “background noise has no shore, it is infinite. I don’t know, in any case, it is not finite. The sharp,
piercing signal of the bell, the jingle bell or the cry, is a unitary and solitary sound. It pierces time in an
instant. ” (Serres, 1982, 65 : « Le bruit de fond est sans rivage, est-il infini, je ne sais, en tout cas, il n’est
pas fini. Le signal, effilé, pointu, de la cloche, du grelot ou du cri, est unitaire et solitaire. Il perce le temps
dans l’instant ». Genèse, 111)
Serres’ understanding of the poetic sign as a movement that pierces the perennial flux of chaos with the
“instant” seems to resonate with my understanding of the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio as non-

273
Disseminated with multiple points of multiple “origins,” Petrolio appears in facts to be a
spectacle of language that embodies both the fluxes of chaos and the “originary”
fluctuation that, introduced by the poet, organizes the instability of chaos into a
provisional form. Or, to use Serres’ words, Petrolio represents a fluctuation among the
fluxes of chaos, that is to say “an intermittence of void and plenitude” or “a multiplicity
of local unities and of pure multiplicities” that embodies “a chaotic multiplicity of orderly
or unitary multiplicities and chaotic multiplicities.”
489
Against the background of chaos,
the poet appears to correspond to the image of a “semi-conducteur,” or the agency around
which order, but only one kind of order among an infinite multiplicity of possibilities,
becomes organized:

finite and autopoietic narratives that, when they are considered from the perspective of an observer, erupt
into the “present.” In Genèse, Serres also discusses the problematical status of “observer” that, while
explaining the modus operandi of a dynamic system, becomes captured within the system’s own
functioning: “If there is no observer, or if the observer dies, the vortex is a demi-cone, as with calumny (64)
[...] Noise, you see, is also the trace of the observer. There is noise in the subject, there is noise in the object.
Meddling in the phenomenon, the receiver introduces or produces a certain noise there, his own, for no one
can live without noise. The condition of his being a receiver, a subject, an observer, is, precisely, that he
make less noise than the noise transmitted by the object observed. If he gives off more noise, it obliterates
the object, covers or hides it” (61). (« S’il n’y a pas d’observateur, ou si l’observateur meurt, le tourbillon
est un demi-cône, c’est le cas de la calomnie. (111) (...). Or le bruit est aussi la trace de l’observateur. Il est
de l’objet, il est du sujet. S’immisçant dans le phénomène, le récepteur y introduit ou y produit un certain
bruit, le sien propre, car nul ne peut vivre sans bruit. La condition pour qu’il soit récepteur, sujet,
observateur, est, même, qu’il y fasse moins de bruit que le bruit émis par l’objet observé. S’il en émet plus,
il efface l’objet, il le couvre ou le cache ». Genèse, 106) This excerpt seems to resonate with the peculiar
“making” of the position of the observer the autopoiesis of a literary text produces. While observation is
entangled within autopoietic dynamics of (textual) self-production, the work of interpretation appears as a
process of creation of “further noise,” that, while participating in the chaotic “noise,” is also captured in the
generation of the text’s components that autopoiesis produces.
Serres also argues that there is no clear distinction between the “noise” produced by the subject (or the text)
and the noise produced by the observer (or the reader): “Noise, you see, is also the trace of the observer.
There is noise in the subject, there is noise in the object. (61) (« Le bruit est aussi la trace de l’observateur.
Il est de l’objet, il est du sujet ». Genèse 106) Here, we can find a parallelism between Serres’
understanding of the noise and the paradoxical position of the observer that, while producing an
interpretation of an autopoietic text, can both be captured within the self-making of autopoiesis and
consider him or herself as an object that can undergo observation.

489
Serres, 1982, 109-110. « Une intermittence d’être et de néant » ; « une multiplicité d’unité locales et de
multiplicités pure » ; « une multiplicité chaotique de multiplicités ordonnées ou unitaires et de multiplicités
chaotiques » (Genèse, 178).

274
Background noise has no shore, it is infinite. I don’t know, in any case, it is
not finite. The sharp, piercing signal of the bell, the jingle bell or the cry, is a
unitary and solitary sound. It pierces time in an instant. (Serres, 1982, 65)
490

The poet ceases in this frame to be a god-like figure of creation from scratch. He
rather becomes, as Prometheus, as figure that in manipulating viscous matter, inflates life
into the flow of lava that is the text.

POETS’ POIESIS AND TEXTUAL AUTO-POIESIS
Serres’ framework might really help addressing the problem of how to consider
the status of a poet that, by means of poiesis, gives birth to an autopoietic organism. In
the case of the Metamorphoses, the Vita and Petrolio, the poet appears to manipulate
preexistent, viscous matter to give a provisional shape to the literary text, and the textual
product of poiesis appears to be a living system. For Serres, the poet acts by means of
introducing a differential “angle in perspective” within the infinite fluxes of chaos. This
leads to the agglomeration of fluctuational amplifications that, in the case of writing, are
made of letters and words. Also, for Serres, the poetic product retains a “something” of
the fluxes of chaos it comes from and it is, in a sense, alive. When producing an
autopoietic agglomeration of letters and words, then, the poet can be recast as a Serrean
“semiconductor” that, while moving from within the fluxes of chaos and providing
provisional shapes to its turbulence, remains captured within the chaos’ own dynamics:
If there is no observer, or if the observer dies, the vortex is a demi-cone, as
with calumny [...] Noise, you see, is also the trace of the observer. There is

490
« Le bruit de fond est sans rivage, est-il infini, je ne sais, en tout cas, il n’est pas fini. Le signal, effilé,
pointu, de la cloche, du grelot ou du cri, est unitaire et solitaire. Il perce le temps dans l’instant. » (Genèse,
111)

275
noise in the subject, there is noise in the object. Meddling in the phenomenon,
the receiver introduces or produces a certain noise there, his own, for no one
can live without noise. The condition of his being a receiver, a subject, an
observer, is, precisely, that he make less noise than the noise transmitted by
the object observed. If he gives off more noise, it obliterates the object, covers
or hides it. (Serres, 1982, 61).
491

In conclusion, the Metamorphoses, the Vita, and Petrolio all appear to be
autopoietic organisms inflated with life. They do not exactly lack a definite point of
origin, but they disperse the problem of their beginning into a multiplicity of incipits,
each introducing a differential angle that can be amplified, or not, by the reader’s process
of provision of meaning. Eventually, all texts “construct” the figure of the poet as a
promethean figure of making that transforms non-solid matters and that intervenes in the
perennial fluxes of chaos introducing an epistemological écart that makes, at one time,
signification possible and the products of his poetic work living.

491
« S’il n’y a pas d’observateur, ou si l’observateur meurt, le tourbillon est un demi-cône, c’est le cas de la
calomnie. (111) (...). Or le bruit est aussi la trace de l’observateur. Il est de l’objet, il est du sujet.
S’immisçant dans le phénomène, le récepteur y introduit ou y produit un certain bruit, le sien propre, car
nul ne peut vivre sans bruit. La condition pour qu’il soit récepteur, sujet, observateur, est, même, qu’il y
fasse moins de bruit que le bruit émis par l’objet observé. S’il en émet plus, il efface l’objet, il le couvre ou
le cache ». (Genèse, 106)

276
CHAPTER SIX : PROMETHEUS AND TECHNICS
Ancient Greek sources mainly depict Prometheus as a deceiver who, stealing fire
and giving it to mankind, causes the wrath of Zeus. This anger falls upon both
Prometheus and the human race. In the Works and Days, for example, Prometheus is an
“astute deceiver” who at first induces Zeus to choose the worst part between two portions
of a sacrificial oxen, and then steals fire to give it, as a present, to mankind.
492
Zeus’
anger, besides determining the punishment of Prometheus, also falls upon the human race
by means of the creation of Pandora, a woman that remarkably, in this version, is molded
by Hephaistos with water and earth.
493
In this narrative, Prometheus is also a transgressor
who causes mankind’s passage for from an original state in which men lived free from
labor to the later ages of silver, bronze and eventually iron, where “never by daytime will
there be an end to hard work and pain, nor in the night in weariness.”
494

A similar account of the myth is contained in the Theogony. Here Prometheus is
presented as an “intricate and twisting mind” who deceives Zeus both in occasion of the

492
Hesiod, Lines 535-ff. “For when the gods and mortal men disputed at Mekone, even then Prometheus
was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to befool the mind of Zeus. Before the
rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, covering them with an ox paunch; but for Zeus
he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat” (Kerényi, 41). The two
“tricks” are related, because Zeus hid the fire in response to what Prometheus had done in Mekone. Lines
42-ff: “For the gods keep hidden from men the means of fire. … But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it,
because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He
hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetos stole again for men from Zeus the counsellor in a hollow fennel-
stalk.” (Kerényi, 48)

493
Hephaistos molds Pandora (“in the likeness of a decorous young girl,” lines 70-1) after [Zeus] tells him
“to make haste, and plaster / earth with water, and to infuse it with a human voice / and vigor, and make the
face / like the immortal goddesses, / the bewitching features of a young girl” (lines 60-63). Pandora later
spreads evil and treachery among mankind.

494
In Lattimore’s translation, Prometheus is “devious-minded” (Hesiod, 48). Before the intervention of
Promethues, a man “in one day […] could work out / enough to keep you for a year, / with no more
working.” (lines 43-44)

277
sacrifice of the oxen and when he hides fire in a fennel stalk. Like to the account of the
myth presented in the Works and Days, in the Theogony Prometheus’s acts also cause
Zeus’s “heavy anger,” and for this reason Prometheus is “responsible for all the suffering
and worry with which humankind is burdened.”
495

Different accounts of the myth are presented by Aeschylus’ play Prometheus
Bound, the Platonic dialogue Protagoras and Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds. Unlike
the Theogony and the Works and Days, these works do not mention the sacrifical oxen,
but they give a certain emphasis to the fact that, alongside the fire he had stolen,

Prometheus gives mankind the gifts of reason, wisdom, and the “arts of civilization.”
496

While it puts a certain emphasis on Prometheus’s punishment, for example, Prometheus
Bound does not mention the creation of Pandora and it does not posit the suffering of
mankind as a direct result of Prometheus’s acts.
497
As Ziolkowski has suggested, then,
through his text “rather than a humankind declining from a glorious golden age to the
present deplorable iron age, Aeschylus sees humanity progressing by means of
knowledge-the crafts, arts, and sciences-from blindness and ignorance to its present

495
Prometheus is here “the amoral trickster whose deceitful ways set mankind on the slippery slope of
moral degeneration.” (Ziolkowski, 31)

496
These include divination, medicine, scripture, signs, numbers and skills for manual work. (lines 620-
764)

497
In the course of the play Prometheus states: “[I] saved humanity from going down / smashed to bits /
into the cave of death.” (350-2, p.41) and “I gave them intelligence, / I made them / masters of their own
thought.” (p.633-5, lines 660-639).

278
loftiness.”
498
Even if dictated by benevolence, Prometheus’ acts remain a transgression to
the divine order, and they are punished by Zeus.
499

In the Platonic Protagoras, the myth of Prometheus is recounted at length by
Protagoras himself and then briefly summarized, in the conclusion of the dialogue, by
Socrates.
500
Both Protagoras and Socrates agree on the fact that Prometheus, in stealing
fire and giving it to man, has bestowed a “gift on mankind,” because the provision of fire
gave to men “the wisdom pertaining to their life.”
501
Prometheus remains, throughout the
narrative, a figure of transgression. He steals the fire against the will of gods and for this
reason, as Protagoras clarifies, he is “prosecuted on a charge of theft.”
502

Like Prometheus Bound and Protagoras, Aristophanes’ play The Birds also
depicts Prometheus as a figure who, after having stolen fire gave it, in an act of
benevolence, to mankind.
503
The text reiterates, nonetheless, an understanding of

498
Ziolkowski, 38.

499
Prometheus is also present in works attributed to Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Indirect
antique testimonies ascribe to Aeschylus the production of a satiric drama entitled Incendiary Prometheus, ,
possibly represented around 472 BC (Duchemin 87). There is also some evidence regarding the redaction
of a play titled Pyrrha and Prometheus by Epicharmus.

500
320c-322a (Protagoras) and 361d (Socrates): “Prometheus was more pleasing to me in the myth than
was Epimetheus; and making use of him and exercising forethought for the sake of my own life as a whole,
I am concerned with all these things.” (361d: Bartlett, 65)

501
321d. According to Protagoras, after the gods have molded men and other living creatures with a
mixture of clay and fire, they asked to Epimetheus and Prometheus to distribute to the creatures different
qualities. Epimetheus begins the distribution giving to each animal a quality, so that each living creature
can survive nature’s adversities, but he leaves the men “naked and unshod, without bedding and weapons”
(321c). At this point of the myth, Prometheus intervenes stealing “from Hephaestus and Athena their
technical wisdom, together with fire” (321d) and giving it to mankind.

502
“Thanks to Epimetheus, [Prometheus] was prosecuted on a charge of theft, according to what is said”
(322a)

503
See also Duchemin, 89.

279
Prometheus as a transgressor of Zeus’s order.
504
This is made clear at several points, for
example at the moment the son of Iapetus gives to Peisetarios advice about how to
negotiate with Zeus.
505

None of these Greek narratives depict Prometheus as a poet, nor do they portray
Prometheus manipulating a mixture of water and earth. However, they all put a certain
emphasis on Prometheus’ antagonism toward the gods.
506

PROMETHEUS IN THE METAMORPHOSES
Ovid’s Metamorphoses presents one particular variant to the myth. In this variant
Prometheus does not steal fire, he does not bestow knowledge on mankind, and he is not
responsible for the transition of mankind from a golden condition to a subsequent, or

504
In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus can be even seen as “released from his sufferings and clearly
restored to the community of gods, as he can report their present food-shortages, but still so strongly anti-
Zeus that he takes the initiative in coming to betray him to his new enemies” (Dunbar, 694).

505
The Birds does not portray Prometheus engaged into any act of creation, and it contains no mention to
Pandora. (see also Dunbar, 693)

506
Prometheus’s antagonism to Zeus has served as background for Gaston Bachelard’s coinage of the
expression “Prometheus complex” to refer to “all those tendencies which impel us to know as much as our
fathers, more than our fathers, as much as our teachers, more than our teachers. … The Prometheus
complex is the Oedipus complex of the life of the intellect.” (Bachelard, 12). Prometheus’s antagonism is
also discussed by Walter Benjamin in his “critique of Violence.” For Benjamin, Prometheus is in the first
place a figure that “challenges fate with dignified courage, fights it with varying fortunes, and is not left by
the legend without hope of one day bringing a new law to men” (Benjamin, 294). In the second place, in
challenging his fate Prometheus allows the gods to manifest their presence. The gods’ affirmation of their
presence is crucial, for Benjamin, because it stages the founding of law: “in the Greek world, the
manifestation of divine violence in its mythic form founds a droit rather than enforcing an existing one by
distributing compensations and punishments. It is not a distributive justice, and Benjamin evokes the
legendary examples of Niobe, Apollo and Artemis, Prometheus. […] It is a matter of founding a new droit.
(Derrida, 1992, 52)

280
corrupted, age. In Ovid’s text, in fact, Prometheus appears to be exclusively a figure of
making because he inflates life into a mixture of water and earth.
507

507
The representation of Prometheus as a figure that manipulates the matter, and in this way inflates life
into it, is not totally absent from the Greek tradition. As Olga Raggio and Jacqueline Duchemin have
argued, representations of Prometheus as creator of man could “have been generally known in Athens in
the fourth century”

(Raggio, 46) and they might have permeated, at least in a certain measure, “a lively
portion of [ancient Greek] popular culture.” (Duchemin, 54). Two Fables conventionally associated to the
name of Aesop, the Bibliotheke ascribed to Apollodorus, and two dialogues by Lucian of Samosata, for
example, describe Prometheus as the creator of man from clay. The two fables attributed to Aesop (Fable
125 “Zeus, Prometheus, Athena and Momos”, and Fable 304 titled “Les deux besaces”) depict Prometheus
as the creator of man. In a third text, Fable 211, Prometheus creates animals. For Duchemin, these fables
speak for an oral, popular tradition, “parallel to the tradition of written literature”, that posits Prometheus as
the creator of living beings, wither these be humans or animals (Duchemin, 86).
The Bibliotheke attributed to Apollodorus, too, mentions Prometheus as the creator of man while also
accounting for Prometheus’ theft of fire and his provision of it as a gift to mankind.
In the Dialogues by Lucian of Samosata, the figure of Prometheus is related to both the creation of man and
to the stealing of fire. In the Dialogues des Dieux, Prometheus asks Zeus to deliver him from the
imprisonment. He had been punished, the text specifies, for having “fabriqué les êtres appelés hommes,
volé le feu et créé les femmes” (Lucian of Samosata I, p.63). In a second dialogue, « Prométhée en
paroles » (or "A un homme qui lui avait dit tu es un Prométhée dans tes discours"), Prometheus is defined
"le plus sage des titans" (I, p.7) because he created men where they did not exist ("Prométhée, quand les
hommes n'existaient pas encore, eut lìidée d'en fabriquer" III, p.8). In this text, considered by Agamben the
text “qui contient peut-être l’expression la plus énergique de la poétique de Lucien” (Agamben, 1992, 7)
the author opposes his own writings to the writings of the orators “qui s’affrontent dans le procès en
alléguant la vérité (xỳn alétheia) et dont les œuvres, de ce fait, sont « véritablement pleines de vie et de
souffle » ; « quant à nous, écrit-il, qui paraissons devant la foule pour donner lecture de semblables
déclamations, ce sont bien des images [eìdola] que nous faisons voir, et je viens de (7) dire qu’en gros nous
les modelons dans l’argile, à la menière des fabricants de figurines ; mais, pour le reste, il n’y a en elles ni
mouvement comme dans les vôtres, ni signe de vie ». (Agamben, 1992, 8).
In Lucian of Samosata's dialogue "Prométhée ou le caucase",finally, Hermes accuses Prometheus of both
having created men and women and having stolen the most precious good of the gods, the fire. (III, pag.56).
In his response, (7-19) Prometheus defends himself stating that his invention is a means to augment the
gods’ glory ("augmenter la gloire des dieux" 12, p.59) and that his act of having given the fire to the men
did not affect the fire owned by gods ("le feu ne s'éteint pas en allumant un autre feu" (18, p.61).
The figure of Prometheus as plasticator also “enjoyed a considerable success at the periphery of the Greek
world” (Raggio, 46). Prometheus appears in the act of shaping man, for example, in a number of Etruscan
and Italic gems from the third and second centuries B.C. Representations of Prometheus as plasticator are
also present in several works belonging to different moments in the history of Latin literature. As Raggio
put it: “the myth of Prometheus as the shaper of mankind and other living creatures took root firmly in the
culture of the Romans, as we may see from the Latin poets of the Augustan age. […] Horace, for example,
fancies that Prometheus in creating man bestowed on him a great many qualities peculiar to other animals;
Catullus and Propertius, in complaining about human nature, call it the imperfect work of Prometheus.
Writers of the Silver Age all at some point mention “Prometheus figulus” as a familiar figure” (Raggio, 46-
7). Consider for this purpose: Ovid. Met., I, 78 ff ; Horace Carm. I,3; I,16; Catullus, Carm. 64,294;
Propertius Eleg. 3,5; 2,1; Juvenal 4, 135; 15,84; Martial 10, 39, 4; Valerius Flaccus, Argon. 4, 58-81.
In his discussion of “Goethe’s Prometheus,” Kerényi makes reference to a Roman sarcophagus
(Montfaucon sarcophagus), possibily from the first half of the III century B.C., preserved at the Capitoline
Museum, that represents Prometheus sitting and “forming the image of a man, besides him a basket of clay,
before him a finished figure receiving from Minerva a soul in the form of a butterfly.” In addition to the

281
In the text, as we have already seen, Prometheus initially appears in the context of
the description of the birth of man. Once the “universal Craftsman” has finished his work
of separating the elements in the primordial chaos, Book I of the Metamorphoses tells us,
the stars, the fishes, the wild beasts and the birds appear in the sky, the water, the earth
and the air. But “a holier living thing than these”, the poem continues, “was still
required.” With an abrupt caesura, at this point in the narration the poem states that “man
was born.”
508
The text does not ascribe with certainty the paternity of mankind to either
the “universal Craftsman” or Prometheus. Rather, it emphasizes the earthly origin of man,
because this “holier living creature” can have been either generated by the universal
Craftsman from a divine seed or by the son of Iapetus in the process of manipulating a
mixture of water and earth. This makes Prometheus a subject that, in similarity to the
universal Craftsman who had divided the matter into parts, is capable of transforming
matter. In his juxtaposition with the figure of the universal Craftsman, Prometheus is
made, by the text, a paradigmatic figure of poiesis. Poiesis appears to be an “exceptional”
process of creation in which life is generated. As the text explicitly states, the product of
Prometheus’ work is man, and man is in the first place “living.”
509
Also, poietic making
does not appear to constitute a prerogative of the divine agency, nor, when it is performed
by Prometheus, does it constitute an act of transgression against the norm.

sources mentioned by Kerényi and Raggio, we should also mention the fact that Prometheus is portrayed as
a plasticator also in a text titled Pandora from the corpus of Fabulae attributed to Hyginus. Here (Fable
CXLII) Prometheus is said to have shaped mankind. A number of variations of Fable CXLIV, titled
Prometheus, accounts for Prometheus’ theft of fire.

508
Met., I, 77-78.

509
Met., I, 76.

282
As we have also seen, the representation of Prometheus as a “maker of life” is
reiterated in the course of the story of Deucalion and Phyrra. After the world has become,
because of the enraged action by Jupiter and Neptune, a “sea without a shore,” the human
race is exterminated, and Deucalion and Pyrrha remain its only survivors. As soon as
order is restored, from Parnassus they lament their condition. As Deucalion says to
Pyrrha:
Oh sister, oh wife, oh only surviving woman,
A common race, and the brotherhood of our fathers, and then
The marriage bed united you to me; now we are united by our perils.
Of whatever lands are seen by the setting and the rising sun,
We two are all the population; the sea has claimed the rest. (I, 351-5)
…
Now the mortal race survives in us two
(so have the gods decided) and we remain as patterns of mankind. (I, 365-6)
510

In the course of his lament, besides telling to Pyrrha that “the mortal race survives in us
two,” Deucalion refers to his father Prometheus as the creator of man.
511
Deucalion
specifies that Prometheus has created man by inflating life into the earth and he also
regrets, for himself, his incapability to generate life in the same way: “If only I could
restore the nations with my father’s / skills and pour souls into moulded earth!”
512

510
“O soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes, / quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo, / deinde
torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt, / terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus, / nos duo turba
sumus: possedit cetera pontus. / ... / Nunc genus in nobis restat mortale duobus / (sic visum superis)
hominumque exempla manemus.” (Met. I, 351-5 and 365-6)

511
Met., I, 365-366.

512
Met., I, 363-4. (“O utinam possem populos reparare paternis / Artibus atque animas formatae infundere
taerre.” I, 363-64)

283
Besides reiterating the understanding of Prometheus as a figure of making that, in
molding the earth, activates a process of generation of life, the following lines from the
Metamorphoses also tell us that Deucalion and Pyrrha, contrary to Deucalion’s belief, are
indeed capable of repeating Prometheus’ act. This is made clear at the moment Deucalion
and Pyrrha ask Themis for advice. Interrogated about the future of mankind, the goddess
responds: “Leave the temple, veil the head and loosen the clothes, / And cast behind the
bones of your great mother.”
513

Themis’ advice is not immediately accepted by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Pyrrha, in
particular, wants to refuse “to obey the goddess’s commands” because she is afraid that,
scattering its bones, she would to offend the “spirit” of the earth working against fate. But
after Pyrrha has expressed her doubt, Deucalion reconsiders Themis’ words and decides
to follow the goddess’ advice. If oracles are godly and they never urge us to commit any
sacrilege, Deucalion says, it follows that it is legitimate to throw back into earth, the
“great mother” of mankind, the stones that are in its body.
514
Deucalion and Pyrrha then
veil their heads and cast behind them the stones. These transform into human bodies. This
shows that Deucalion’s understanding of earth as mother is correct, and that the
possibility to generate life is not an prerogative exclusively belonging to either the
universal Craftsman or Prometheus.
515

513
Met., I, 381-383. (“Discedite templo / et velate caput cinctasque resolvite vestes, / ossaque post tergum
magnae iactate parentis.” I, 381-383)

514
“Magna parens terra est.” (I, 391-4)

515
Met. I, 400-413

284
Juxtaposing the portrayal of Prometheus given at the moment of the description of
the birth of mankind and the depiction of Deucalion and Pyrrha as two “mortals” who are
able to reproduce Prometheus’ act of procreation, we can conclude that the
Metamorphoses represent Prometheus as a paradigmatic figure of making, and that
mankind retains the capability to “repeat” the promethean act of manipulating malleable
matter to generate life. Poiesis appears, then, as an act of generation of life. Also, poiesis
is a process that can be performed not only by the universal Craftsman, but also by
Prometheus and man. While both the universal Craftsman and Prometheus are
represented as figures capable of having generated mankind, mankind itself not only
“retains the likeness of the all-controlling gods,” but is also capable of repeating
Prometheus’s act of inflating life into matter.
516

In addition, the Metamorphoses suggests, poetic making ceases to constitute an
act of transgression. Prometheus does not work against either fate or the divine will, and
Deucalion and Pyrrha’s procreation of men is neither sanctioned nor punished by the
gods but rather, as Themis’ words seems to suggest, encouraged. Poetic generation of life
does not break any order, and it does not cause the eruption of divine violence. Rather,
poiesis can be conceived as a capacity extended from the universal Craftsman to
Prometheus and then to man, that is to say, as the Vita puts it, a matter of “resemblance”
between human and god.

516
Before the creation of man, earth was in fact “rough and formless” (I, 87). Through its transformation,
earth is changed into the previously “unknown shapes of men” (I, 88). “ Sic modo quae fuerat rudis et sine
imagine tellus / induit ignotas hominum conuersa figures.” (I, 87-88).

285
PROMETHEUS AND THE FORGETTING OF EPIMETHEUS
In Technics and Time 1. The Fault of Epimetheus (1994), Bernard Stiegler
observes that “at its very origin and up until now, philosophy has repressed technics as an
object of thought.”
517
Against this background, Stiegler elaborates on the possibility that
technology is constitutive of (and not, for example, a product of the action by) the human
being. Stiegler uses the term “technics” to refer not merely to all technical tools
“invented” in the history of humanity but also, and more problematically, to everything
(from flint tools to systems of writing and modern telecommunications) that

has
constituted the human through human’s own processes of “prosthetization” and technical
support. In this frame, Stiegler argues, we should understand technics as “organized
inorganic matter,” or the ensemble of all processes of “exteriorization” by means of
which humans have pursued life by means other than life.
518
For Stiegler, then, there is
an aporetic and inextricable relation between the human and the technical: not only is
human life always “pre-mediated” by technology but man also appears to be, intrinsically,
technical life.
At the beginning of Western thought, Stiegler explains, Greek philosophy and
mythology dismissed the technical as a category considered to be “inferior” to
disinterested and speculative “philosophical” thought. Among other consequences, such a
dismissal of the technical has lead to the instauration of a series of fundamental binaries,
such as the opposition between tekhnē and ēpistēmē, that have permeated the entire

517
Stiegler, 1.

518
Stiegler, 17.

286
history of Western tradition. Philosophy’s disavowal of the technical has for Stiegler not
only led to the ascription of a privileged consideration to thought and the metaphysical
over the material, but it has also resulted in a reductive conceptualization of the technical
as a mere “product” of human intervention. In this line of thought, Stiegler continues,
Western “culture” has often considered philosophical speculative thought to be a
“disinterested” process of manifestation of human reason and intelligence, while
technology has been “reduced” to an ensemble of “material” practices inspired by
utilitarian purposes.
Against this background, Stiegler elaborates on the possibility that the relation
between a “who” (who invents?) and a “what” (what is invented?) “is an invention.”
519

Not only does this move serve Stiegler’s aim to obliterate the distinction between
material and metaphysical (and a number of following binary oppositions such as those
contrasting soul and body, infinite and finite, transcendental and empirical, logos and
techne, form and matter) but it also allows him to call for a radical reconsideration of the
relationship between the human and the technical and, eventually, to argue that there is
no human life outside technics. For Stiegler, technology is neither the “utilitarian”
outcome of the application of human thought, nor it is a simple manifestation of the
“evolution” of the human. And the human, in turn, is neither the “father” nor the
“creator” of the technical. Rather, the human and the technical have invented “each the
other.”
520

519
Stiegler, 134.

520
Stiegler, 175.

287
Technics, Stiegler continues, is not exactly a precondition for human evolution,
but it should rather be conceptualized as the very (Heideggerian) “being” that pertains to
the human. In this frame, acknowledging that the history of Western philosophy shows
how “in its panic before time and matter, philosophy has not yet considered the zoo-
techno-logical species called man”, Stiegler speaks in favor of a radical reconsideration
of the “aporetic” and “inextricable” relation between thought and technics.
521
More
specifically, Stiegler draws upon Derrida’s notion of différance to argue that the human
and the technical are both related by an aporetical, and common, condition of
simultaneous non-origin:
The ambiguity of the invention of the human, that which holds together the
who and the what, binding them while keeping them apart, is différance . . .
Différance is neither the who nor the what, but their co-possibility, the
movement of their mutual coming-to-be, of their coming into convention. The
who is nothing without the what and conversely. Différance is below and
beyond the who and the what; it poses them together, a composition
engendering the illusion of an opposition. The passage is a mirage: the
passage of the cortex into flint, like a mirror proto-stage. (Stiegler, 141)

As we can read in this passage, according to Stiegler the human and the
“technical” have simultaneously “grown” from a common condition of “non-origin,” that
cannot be properly conceptualized except as a kind of “originary” condition of “de-fault.”
As some scholars have argued, it is specifically this condition of de-fault that according
to Stiegler marks the peculiar status of the human. The human is a species with its non-
genetic specificity that is distinct from all other living species specifically because
characterized by an originary de-fault:

521
Beardsworth, 85-115.

288
[for Stiegler there is] an originary défaut [de-fault] of the human species
which makes of it a technical being, in distinction to other living species, and,
as a result, a contingent and undetermined being. (Beardsworth and Collins,
280)
522

In summary, then, according to Stiegler the “human” is constituted through its
exteriorization in tools, and the “origin” of the human
is neither biological (a particular arrangement of cells) nor transcendental (to
be found in something like consciousness). The origin of the human as the
prosthesis of the living is therefore fundamentally aporetic: one should speak,
for Stiegler, of a non-origin or default of origin.” (Roberts, 1)

In order to make clear how should one re-conceptualize the aporetic and
inextricable relation between human and technical, Stiegler dedicates specific attention to
the problem of the definitions of “matter” and writing. At first, Stiegler recalls Derrida’s
argument (developed at the beginning of the chapter ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’ in
Of Grammatology) concerning the impossibility of a science of the gramme:
writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science—and possibly
its object—but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in The Origin of
Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of
scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of
episteme. [...] historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the
possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in
the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and
without history. Before being the object of history—of an historical science—
writing opens the field of history—of historical becoming. And the former
(Historie in German) presupposes the latter (Geschichte). (Derrida, 1974, 27)

522
In Stiegler, 1998.

289
Then, Stiegler elaborates on Derrida’s analysis of arche-writing, as well as on the
concomitant thesis on the ‘closure’ of metaphysics,
523
bringing into the discussion the
problems of technicity and its disavowal. More specifically, Stiegler argues that it is on a
consideration of the as the support of the inscription of memory that the metaphysical
notion of transcendence has been founded:
since, following the Heideggerian destruction of ontology in terms of time,
transcendence is nothing but the transcendence of ‘now’, and since this
possibility is only given through a support which registers ‘indelibly’ (Husserl,
Derrida), then, for Stiegler, matter, organized as support, is its condition. In
other words, organized matter (the technical object) is the condition of
consciousness as such. In its absolute resistance to transcendental or
phenomenological reduction (epochality), the technical object (organized
matter) at the same time makes the transcendental gesture im-possible in its
possibility. Technics is thus—to use Derridean concepts at this stage—the
condition of (im-)possibility of the transcendental gesture which marks the
human species with its non-genetic specificity. Humanity ‘transcends’ its
genetic program in pursuing its life through means other than life (matter).
(Beardsworth, 85)

On this basis, Stiegler concludes that the foundation of metaphysics, which is for
Derrida originated by means of writing, is instead ultimately founded on a “disavowal” of
matter:
if it is explicitly as technical consciousness that man invents himself, then
experimentation is what is proper to man and the metaphysical (and in part
Heideggerian) divide between the Humanities and the sciences is accordingly
no longer tenable. Indeed, the divide is seen for what it is—a symptomatic
disavowal of matter. (Beardsworth, 110)

523
As Beardswoth has observed, in this passage Derrida argues that: “The condition of truth is the
possibility of writing, that is, of a material inscription. Rather than this inscription (mis-)reflecting the
truth—the argument which institutes ‘logocentrism’—its possibility is constitutive of truth as such. Thus,
for Derrida, metaphysics constitutes its oppositions (the non-worldly/the worldly, the ideal/the material) by
expelling into one term of the opposition the very possibility of the condition of such oppositions. Derrida
calls this general possibility of inscription arche-writing.” (Beardsworth, 85 and ff.)

290
Next, Stiegler moves from his own re-conceptualization of the relationship
between human and technical in order to discuss the problem of how we should conceive
“organized inorganic matter,” or the ensemble of all processes of “exteriorization” by
means of which “humans” have pursued life by means other than life.
524
First, Stiegler
argues, all “organized inorganic matter” is technics. Second, the transformation of all
matter into technical object is what locates the technical in time. It is only in historical
time, Stiegler argues, that
matter has a history when organized; it is precisely the evolution of the
relation between matter and the human: from the stone implement to the
portable computer to the immanent optical and memory ‘implants.’
(Beardsworth, 115)

The concept of organized inorganic matter allows Stiegler to rethink the
metaphysical opposition between organic life and inorganic matter, animating form and
inanimate matter, in terms of technical evolution. Organized inorganic matter is, in
Stiegler’s understanding, indexical of the originary co-implication of ‘matter’ and
‘humanity’. Organized inorganic matter is neither living nor non-living, and it precedes
the metaphysical determination that opposes matter to form-giving (divine or human).
Indeed, the metaphysical determination of matter (as what is given to form) should be
seen as a disavowal of the complex and interrelated relationship between the human and
the technical. It is this co-implication, for Stiegler, that distinguishes man from other
forms of life:

524
Stiegler, 17.

291
the zootechnological relation of man to matter is a particular case of the
relation of the living to the environment, that is, a relation of man to his
environment which passes through organized inert matter, the technical object.
The singularity of this relation is that the inert, although organized matter
which is the technical object evolves itself in its organization: it is no longer
simply inert matter, but it is not living matter either. It is an organized
inorganic matter which is transformed in time, just as living matter is
transformed in its interaction with the environment. Moreover, it becomes the
interface through which the living matter which is man enters into relation
with the environment. (Stiegler, 63)
In conclusion, what characterizes the human among other living species is for
Stiegler its specific (and aporetic) “technical” relation with matter. Man and matter
mutually “organize” and “invent” each the other without either of the two terms being the
“origin” of the other. In order to make this passage clearer, Stiegler at this point
introduces the concept of epiphylogenesis. Epiphylogenesis is a term that, while referring
to organized inorganic matter, is also able to capture the indissoluble and inextricable
condition of interdependence (or the simultaneous and aporetic condition of non-origin)
that relates the human and “technical” matter:
epiphylogenesis, a recapitulating, dynamic and morphogenetic (phylogenesis)
accumulation of individual experience (epi) designates the appearance of a
new relation between the organism and its environment, which is also a new
state of matter. If the individual is organic organized matter, then its relation
to its environment (to matter in general, organic or inorganic), when it is a
question of a who, is mediated by the organized but inorganic matter of the
organon, the tool with its instructive role (its role as instrument), the what. It
is in this sense that the what invents the who just as much as it is invented by
it. (Stiegler, 185)
Among other consequences, Stiegler’s notion of epiphylogenesis has relevant
consequences for the way one understands technology. For example, as Stiegler points
out, “technology, thought as epiphylogenesis, is a transcendental concept. However, this

292
concept puts itself into crisis [se met lui-même en crise]: it suspends the whole credit of
the empirico-transcendental divide.”
525
In addition, the concept of epiphylogenesis
allows Stiegler to read the entire history of Western metaphysics (from Plato to
Heidegger) as a trajectory based on a composite process of forgetting and de-fault, which
is made particularly clear in the paradigmatic example provided by the myth of
Prometheus.
526

This myth, according to Stiegler, inaugurates the divide that opposes the human
and the technical. It posits Prometheus as the father of technological progress, from
which derives the condition of mankind as a conqueror of the space and of the time, but it
does so by means of a double process of forgetting.
On the one hand, as Platonic texts and other Greek versions of the myth tell us,
Prometheus’ action is engaged by the process of forgetting staged by his brother
Epimetheus, who after having provided all living beings with “qualities” apt to survive in
the world, had forgotten to give a distinctive quality to the humans. Prometheus’
provision of wisdom to humans, then, is inherently motivated by the previous act of
forgetting performed by his brother Epimetheus. On the other hand, Stiegler suggests, all
philosophical readings of the myth of Prometheus (from Plato to Heidegger) have been

525
Stiegler, 248.

526
As Richard Beardswoth has suggested, Stiegler’s rewriting “of the divide between the transcendental
and the empirical is [also] translated into the very form of La Technique et le temps. The first part is
devoted to the history of technics (essentially the work of Bertrand Gille and Gilbert Simondon), to the
evolution of technics within time and to the dynamics particular to technical evolution. The second part is
given over to what could be called a ‘chiasmus’ between an anthropology which wishes to be
transcendental—Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of the Inequality between Men—and a
paleontological anthropology—the writings of the paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan—which explicitly
criticizes the transcendental approach of Rousseau.

(…). The third part begins with a profound
philosophical reading of the error or fault of Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother.” (Beardsworth, 85 and ff.)

293
based on a second process of disavowal, namely the forgetting of Epimetheus’ forgetting.
As Stiegler puts it:
in classical Greek culture a mythology of the origin of technics is to be found
which is also a mythology of the origin of mortality, a thanatology. […]
Ēpimētheia and prometheia form, in their very inseparability, two figures of
temporalization. What is of particular interest for us in this analysis is the fact
that the Promethean advance and the Epimethean withdrawal (which is also
the fault of Epimethues as the one who forgets) bring together promētheia as
foresight and ēpimētheia as both unconcerned distraction and after-thought. It
is their inextricability which gives mortals elpis, both hope and fear, which
compensates for their consciousness of irremediable mortality. But this
counterbalance is only possible given the de-fault of origin in which
Epimetheus’s fault consists-namely, the originary technicity, from which
ēpimētheia , idiocy as well as wisdom, ensues. (Stiegler, 16)

For Stiegler, then, the figure of Epimetheus is a figure of double forgetting. Not
only was Epimetheus the one who forgot to clothe and arm humanity in the process of
creation (thus framing Prometheus’ introduction of technics in a context of originary
lack), but he has also been regularly forgotten by both philosophy and mythology. Thus,
Epimetheus is for Stiegler not only a forgetful entity (the one who forgot to give
surviving qualities to man), but also the one who is forgotten. To use Stiegler’s own
words, in summary, “whenever Promethues is spoken of, Epimetheus is a figure of
forgetting that is forgotten.” In conclusion, as the title of his book also suggests, Stiegler
ultimately structures the relation between the human and the technical in terms of a
“double” process of de-fault:
two faults form the double ‘duplicity’ of man. On the one hand, Epimetheus’s
forgetting (precipitation) is constitutive of man, just as man's tardy reflection
(reflection in the après coup) is a consequence of the initial forgetting. Man is
thus both distracted and, distracted and empty-headed, he is at the same time
inheritor of all the faults of distraction. This is the structure of epimetheia.
What is most important here is the logic of forgetting and retrospective delay.

294
On the other hand, Prometheus’s review of his brother’s error (which leads to
the subsequent theft) foresees that man will need skill (itself foresight) in
order to survive. Man is thus, also, an animal of anticipation and technique.
This is the structure of prometheia. As both epimetheia and prometheia, man
is doubly at fault. (Beardsworth, 115)

Prometheus’s “fault,” namely his theft of the fire and his provision to man of
technology, “supplements” the fault of Epimetheus, who in distributing the qualities for
the survival of the living species had forgotten the humans.

PROMETHEUS AND EPIMETHEUS IN THE METAMORPHOSES
The text of the Metamorphoses offers a peculiar telling of Prometheus’ story,
where the representation of Prometheus differs considerably from the Greek versions of
the myth. In the poem’s account, we have seen, Prometheus does not steal the fire from
Gods, nor does he bestow the gift of knowledge to mankind. Rather, Prometheus is rather
represented as a problematic figure of making that, in manipulating a mixture of water
and earth, creates the human being. It is specifically for these reasons that, once
confronted to Stiegler’s reading of the myth and its subsequent “amplifications” in the
history of western philosophy, the Metamorphoses constitutes a problematic text which
both addresses and problematizes many of the arguments exposed in Technics and Time
1, the Fault of Epimetheus.
In the first place, Ovid’s account of the myth of Prometheus seems to be
“forgotten” by Stiegler in his inquiry. While realizing a “confrontation between the
Heideggerian existential analytic and the myths of Prometheus and of Epimetheus in their
most known versions (Hesiod, Aeschylus, Plato),” in fact, Stiegler seems to “forget” that,

295
in Western literary tradition, and especially in Latin literature, Prometheus has been also
represented as a creator of mankind, and in this role he has been represented as a subject
inflating life into matter. Stiegler’s work seems, in other words, being exclusively
informed by Greek sources, and this is particularly important because it is on this basis
that, pointing his attention to the double process of “forgetting” of Epimetheus, Stiegler
engages into a third movement of disavowal, which forgets the forgetting of Epimetheus’
forgetting. But at the same time, when confronted to Stiegler’s understanding of
“technics” as a form of “organization of inert matter,” the text of the Metamorphoses also
offers a representation of Prometheus as a paradigmatic mythical figure of making that,
while creating the human, engages into a primordial act of organization of inorganic
matter. In this frame, the product of Prometheus’ poietic making, namely man, appears to
be the result of a prosthetic process of “exteriorization.” The human, then, appears to be
(consistently with what Stiegler has suggested) intrinsically technical. More specifically,
while positing man as the product of Prometheus’ “technical” manipulation of water and
earth, Ovid’s text confirms that there is an aporetic and inextricable relation between the
human and the technical. In brief, the account of the creation of man contained in Book I
from the Metamorphoses would provide spectacular evidence to Stielger’s assumption
that not only is human life always “pre-mediated” by technology, but also that man
appears to intrinsically be technical life.
In the second place, if confronted to what it is stated in the final lines of the
Metamorphoses, where the poem is said to assure to poet both immortality and eternal
fame, Ovid’s text (and not only the account of Prometheus’ making) also seems to

296
constitute an exemplary case of what Stiegler calls the “prosthetization” of the living,
where not only do the human and the technical appear to be ultimately and inextricably
related, but also where the figure of the poet is made alive by means of his poietic act of
making (in this case, writing). In this frame, then, writing appears no longer an auxiliary
means in the service of science, nor does it constitute (as Derrida has suggested) the
fundamental condition of episteme, but it can rather be reconceptualized, as Stiegler
suggests, as a mode of manipulation and organization of inorganic matter that, while
“prosthetizing” the human, also makes the human human. A clear understanding of
writing as a process of both exteriorization and prosthetization, that provides the human
with life, is expressed in the conclusive lines of the Metamorphoses. Here, the poet states:
And now I have completed a work which neither Jove’s anger, nor fire,
Nor sword, nor devouring age will be able to destroy.
When it wishes, let the day, which has no power except
Over this body, finish the span of my uncertain lifetime;
But, with the better part of me, I shall be borne forever
Above the stars on high, and my name will be indelible;
And, where Roman power extends over subdued lands,
I shall be read by the peoples, and, through the ages, in fame,
(if there is any truth in the predictions of bards) I shall live. (Met, XV, 871-
879)
527

As we can read in this passage, at this point in the Metamorphoses the poet’s act
of writing appears to correspond to Stiegler’s understanding of writing as a (human)
mode of manipulation of the matter that pursues “life by means other than life.”
528

527
“Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis / nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. / Cum
volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat haevi: / parte tamen
meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum. / Quaque patet domitis
Romana potentia terris, / ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / siquid habent veri vatum presagia,
vivam.” (Met. XV, 871-9)

528
Stiegler, 17.

297
In the third place, the Metamorphoses constitutes an exception to both the logic of
Epimethean forgetting (that for Stiegler has “dominated” Western philosophy and
mythology) and Stiegler’s own re-conceptualization of epiphylogenesis in terms of
Epimethean delay and Promethean foreshadowing. In book I from the Metamorphoses, in
fact, Epimetheus is not only made present (and therefore not quite forgotten) at a crucial
moment of the narrative but he is also explicitly conceived of, alongside with Prometheus,
as the “father” of mankind. This point in the narration is the passage accounting
Deucalion and Phyrra’s restoration of mankind after the deluge. On the Parnassus,
Deucalion addresses Pyrrha as both the “only surviving woman” and his own “sister” and
“wife,” therefore implying that he and Phyrra both belong to the same human “species:”
Oh sister, oh wife, oh only surviving woman,
A common race, and the brotherhood of our fathers, and then
The marriage bed united you to me; now we are united by our perils.
Of whatever lands are seen by the setting and the rising sun,
We two are all the population; the sea has claimed the rest. (I, 351-5)
…
Now the mortal race survives in us two
(so have the gods decided) and we remain as patterns of mankind. (I, 365-6)
529

Then, Deucalion is said by the text to be Prometheus’ son, while Phyrra is
explicitly designated as the daughter of Epimetheus:
Then Prometheus’ son soothed Epimetheus’ daughter
With gentle words saying, ‘Either my skill deceives me,
Or oracles are holy and urge nothing sinful.
Our great mother is the earth; I think the stones on her body
Are meant by earth’s bones; it is these we are told to throw behind our backs.
(Met., I, 390-394)

529
“O soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes, / quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo, / deinde
torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt, / terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus, / nos duo turba
sumus: possedit cetera pontus. / ... / Nunc genus in nobis restat mortale duobus / (sic visum superis)
hominumque exempla manemus.” (Met. I, 351-5 and 365-6)

298
This passage is crucial, for a confrontation of the Metamorphoses to Stiegler’s
argument, because it refers to mankind as the product of the generation not only of
Prometheus and Epimetheus, but also of earth. More specifically, the text here shows that
not only is man intrinsically technical (being the product of earth’s generation, in fact,
man appears to be intrinsically “organized inorganic matter”), but also that the “origins”
of man are ambiguously and indistinguishably to be found in either the actions of
Prometheus or Epimetheus. The text of the Metamorphoses, then, not only presents
human life as always “pre-mediated” by technology, but it also seems not to “forget”
Epimetheus. Rather, and more problematically, Ovid’s poem seems to conceive
Epimetheus and his brother Prometheus of as two mythological figures that, analogously
to the human and the technical, have invented “each the other.”
It should be recalled the fact that, at the level of their narrative, not only the
Metamorphoses, but also the Vita and Petrolio are all concerned with the problem of their
author’s “life.” The conclusive lines of the Metamorphoses state that now that he has
realized his perpetuum carmen, the poet “shall be born forever.” Petrolio, in as much as it
can be considered as consistent narrative, is presented to the reader as a flow that captures,
in its open-ended and un-finishable structure, the life and the death of its own author. As
Petrolio’s narrator puts it:
As I was planning and writing my novel—that is, looking for the meaning of
reality and taking possession of it, immersed in the creative act and all that
involves—I also wished to free myself from myself, that is, to die. To die in
my creation: to die as, in effect, one dies in birth. (Note 99)
530

530
Appunto 99, 364.

299
In the sonnet with which the Vita begins, as we have seen, also Cellini states that
the literary text he is writing is a perpetual undertaking (he uses the word impresa) that
makes its maker forever alive. And the Vita, as also its title suggest, is presented to the
reader as being both one of the main undertakings realized by the protagonist Benvenuto
and the ultimate proof that this character, after being transformed into gold, has gained
access to the inner secrets of procreation.

CONCLUSIONS
The Metamorphoses does not configure promētheia as a complement to
ēpimētheia but it rather shows how, as Stiegler has suggested, the non-organic
organization of technical matter “calls for a new consideration of technics” within which
the technical is no longer an utilitaristic manifestation of thought.
531
On a narrative level,
for example, the poem does not actually “forget” Epimetheus insofar as it does not depict
Prometheus either bestowing technology upon men or “supplementing,” with the theft of
fire, Epimetheus’ forgetting to clothe and arm mankind. Instead of “introducing”
technology, in the Ovidian narrative Prometheus simply cultivates the lively potential that
is intrinsic to malleable matter. This makes him a paradigmatic figure of poiesis, whose
act of “making” shows that the “origins” of both human and technical are deferred into
their reciprocal constitutiveness.
Because of its autopoietic functioning the Metamorphoses in its entirety can be
conceived of as a product of “promethean” making. As an autopoietic machine, in fact,

531
Stiegler, 17.

300
this text shows how inorganic matter can organize into life, and as a “living” product of
poiesis it also exemplifies how life can be transmitted between humans and “technics.” In
its opening and conclusive lines Ovid’s poem provides spectacular exemplification of
how non-organic organized matter, in this case a written literary corpus, constitutes an
epiphylogenetic “exterioriation” of life. With reference to Maturana and Varela’s
argument according to which the notion of autopoiesis can help obliterate the widespread
assumption that life cannot be designed or procreated by man, a “stieglerian” reading of
the Metamorphoses also shows how an autopoietic literary work can, indeed, be a living
machine that has been manufactured by the human.
532

Cellini’s Vita and Pasolini’s Petrolio can also be seen, like the Metamorphoses, as
products of poiesis, that is to say as living aggregates of organized inorganic matter. On
the level of their narratives, these two texts depict different figures of poets that, like
Prometheus, manipulate fluid substances to capture the flow of life. On the level of their
structure, these works function as autopoietic organisms, therefore presenting themselves
as “living” products of three repetitions of Prometheus’ primordial act. When taken
together these texts then show that literature, when poietic making is neither reduced to a
mere process of creation ex nihilo or to an utilitaristic “practice,” appears to be ultimately
“technics,” that is to say a medium through which the human exteriorizes life by means
of poiesis. More specifically, the three narratives posit the poetic act as a means of

532
“Machines are generally viewed as human made artifacts with completely known deterministic
properties which make them, at least conceptually, perfectly predictable. Contrariwise, living systems are a
priori frequently viewed as autonomous, ultimately unpredictable systems, with purposeful behavior
similar to ours. If living systems were machines, they could be made by man and, according to the view
mentioned above, it seems unbelievable that man could manufacture a living system. […] There seems to
be an intimate fear that the awe with respect to life and the living would disappear if a living system could
be not only reproduced, but designed by man. This is nonsense.” (Maturana and Varela, 83)

301
capturing, through language, the living pneuma that animates fluid and malleable matter.
These three texts provide spectacular support to Stiegler’s claim that human life is always
“pre-mediated” by technology, for they give us paradigmatic examples of how, as far the
human is constitutive of the technical, the technical is also, in the last instance,
constitutive of the human.
The three texts’ reconfiguration of poiesis as a process of exteriorization of life
radically challenges the assumption that literature is dead matter. With their autopoietic
functioning, all three these texts show that, once it is conceived of as an autopoietic
producer of signification, any written text can be read as “technics.” This suggests that
literature can do more than just “resist” the system of universal equivalences that posits
the phallus and financial value as western culture’s master signifiers. When it is
conceived of as living matter, in fact, a text transforms into a productive ground on which
to observe how, when the traditional divide between tekhnē and ēpistēmē falls apart, a
number or corollary binary constructs, such as the subordination of the feminine to the
masculine, are also dismantled. The three texts’ recasting of poiesis as “technics”
challenges those critical perspectives that view literature as an ineffectual or “dead” form
of cultural production, and it also reinstates literature in its status of medium to intervene
into political and social life.

302
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In this project, I develop a comparative reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses (c.8 CE), Benvenuto Cellini's Vita (c.1558) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio (1975). These literary works belong to three eras in which Western culture faced crucial processes of geopolitical expansion, and they are all deeply concerned with the problem of transformation. On a thematic level, these narratives depict the transmutation of three precious substances (respectively: earth, gold and oil) into living products. On a structural level, these texts appear to embody continuous transformation because they defer their points of beginning, they present themselves as never-ending achievements, and they draw their readers into recursive signification loops that constantly renegotiate the boundaries between the textual 'inside' and 'outside.' Adopting a number of theoretical frameworks that range from Goux's analysis of economic value to Agamben's philosophical thought, and from Serres’s reconsideration of physics to Irigaray'sphilosophy of fluids, I argue that these three literary works do more than challenge the conventional binary opposition between materiality and transcendence. In my view, in fact, these narratives subvert the structural isomorphism that links the functioning of truth, financial value, and the phallus as Western culture's main master signifiers.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Matteucci, Paolo (author)

Core Title Mater of transformation. Poiesis and autopoiesis in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Benvenuto Cellini's Vita and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Degree Conferral Date 2008-08

Publication Date 07/23/2008

Defense Date 02/25/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag autopoiesis,Cellini,Metamorphoses,OAI-PMH Harvest,Ovid,Pasolini,Petrolio,poiesis,Vita

Language English

Advisor Pinkus, Karen (committee chair), Fogu, Claudio (committee member), Giorgi, Gabriel (committee member), Rosenthal, Margaret F. (committee member)

Creator Email paolomat@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1386

Unique identifier UC195678

Identifier etd-Matteucci-20080723 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-202836 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1386 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Matteucci-20080723.pdf

Dmrecord 202836

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Matteucci, Paolo

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu