La forma crudele: letteratura e tradizione minoritaria

If 'cruelty' has a consolidated position in the Surrealist sphere, thanks to Antonin Artaud, the essay focuses on the attribution of a narrative connotation to the notion of cruelty. By resorting to the analysis of Deleuze and Guattari, and of George Bataille, the essay aims at broadening the perimeter of that concept to the point of indicating a convergence between motivation and literary form: 'cruelty' is not mimesis, it is not naturalist reconstruction, it is not a “descriptive or impressionistic ascertainment of a fact” but acts as a type of analysis and as a methodology for investigating the world and the experience. Overall, the essay tries to identify both the logical and aesthetic faces of the narrative of cruelty, which results in a paradoxical communication pushed to the opposite point of incommunicability by a fracture between words and things recorded on several levels by Michel Foucault, Reinhardt Koselleck, Walter Benjamin, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Fausto Curi.