There is a story that is slowly being forgotten or talked about less and less, and it concerns a famous, a very famous person of the Italian star system and beyond: Vittorio Sgarbi, art critic, TV pundit, politician, essayist, intellectual, salon entertainer and memorable provocateur.
Vittorio, I dare to call him that because although we are not friends in the strict sense of the word we have known each other professionally (and therefore also somewhat humanly) for many years, is sick. He is in the hospital, thin and aging, and prey to that dark evil called depression.
Many, including myself, sent a video of affection and encouragement to return among us, pissed off, overwhelming and vital as he has accustomed us to for decades. At the time of writing I have no information about his reaction to this dutiful wave of warmth and attention even if it is virtual.
The affair, however, seems complex and profound to me, and he himself spoke about it with sincerity but a disarming sense of helplessness. “My current melancholy is a moral and physical condition that I cannot avoid … as we have the body so there are also the shadows of the mind, of thoughts, ghosts that are with us and that we cannot push away,” so said Sgarbi to Robinson, insert of the newspaper “La Repubblica.”
I am familiar with psychoanalysis but I do not want to venture into a remote clinical interpretation that would be meaningless. Nor do I want to go into the semantic and historical meanderings of the words, although he would appreciate it, how many times he has analytically dissected melancholy in Art…and perhaps melancholy, as a loss of meaning (and libido) in the world does not take us far from the truth.
This is Diderot’s paradox about the actor, an illuminating essay on theater in late 18th-century France. The acteur, says Diderot, treads the physical proscenium of the stage, the comedien treads instead the immense proscenium of the world.
Vittorio, the great contemporary comedian, withdrawing from that cosmic scene that no longer has meaning (narcissistic withdrawal of libidinal energy, Freud on mourning and melancholy). If she was not murdered, Marilyn Monroe voluntarily detached herself from the world out of excessive loneliness; everyone loved her as a sex symbol, but no one as a real person.
Let us then not leave alone in his battle our great Vittorio, who so many times kept us company with his immense and generous intelligence.
The article For Vittorio Sgarbi comes from TheNewyorker.
