«Risolverà drasticamente tutti i dubbi?». An 'autopsy tòpos' in Nanni Balestrini's political narratives

Abstract

The essay aims to retrace Nanni Balestrini’s political narratives and map the scenes in which a violence exercised by power over bodies is represented; scenes with a strong visual imprint, that fit into a stream of uninterrupted images from the 1970s to the present. The variant of autoptic examination is specifically analysed with particular interest: if images of dead bodies crowd Balestrini’s pages indeed, the autopsy recurs in them determining the constitution of a topos, with a stratification of meanings fundamental to understand the writer’s poetics. On one hand, the autopsy is an impossible attempt to solve an enigma through the enunciation of a truth that the author punctually shatters, making contradictions implode, and revealing the language of media as a form of violence; on the other, the body becomes a political and textual metaphor at the same time. If in fact it is possible to interpret autoptic examination as an example of the take of power over the body itself, including these images in a biopolitical conception, there is also a correspondence between the dissection performed by the doctor on the corpse and the cut-up carried out by the author on the text to compose his own sequences.