The metropolis of fools and “imbestiati”: dystopia and class conflict in Conspiratio Oppositorum by Mario Spinella

Abstract

This paper examines the second novel by Mario Spinella, distinguished Marxist intellectual founder of the magazine «Utopia» (1971-1973), and aims to investigate the ways in which the conventions of dystopic literature are assumed in an ironic key (in line with the author's experimental poetics) without renouncing the vehement denunciation of the social order of the neo-capitalist polis (an ideological position in dialogue with the elaboration, by the exponents of the Frankfurt School, of a radical critique of the System). Spinella's inclination for the human sciences pushes him in Conspiratio oppositorum to bring into play the psychoanalytic categories (from Freud to Lacan: Spinella was among the animators of the magazine «Il piccolo Hans»), political (the book, written from 1968 to 1971, attempts to verify the topicality of the concept of class conflict) and divergent thinking (the ‘unreliable’ perspective of the insane, common to the contemporary novels of Volponi and Malerba, is made to interact with Foucaultian theories on the total institution).