A memory of Robert Klein
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 3, 2022
Dear Federicis, posthumous letters are very hateful things in the epistolary genre, I know it well, but this is a business letter — written affectionately, though. I am very sorry to create this embarrassment, but I have many impelling and constraining reasons to get off the train — the whole thing was to find the time when it could be done with as less drama as possible and the time is now. I would have liked to leave chores and cares to less kind and friendly people, but I cannot. It’s not worth bothering the Carabinieri to look for me; when you read these instructions (I’m sorry) everything was already decided days before. I went to the hills so as not to leave the corpus delicti in the beautiful room of Abbondanza, and for not annoying innocent hoteliers. I pray Mrs. Meller to take care of clearing out my things, with the participation of the concierge. All MMS, typewritten or not, are to be thrown out; perhaps leaving the photographs and bibliographic records for the study of the Tarot, and also the marked playing cards redigées utilisables, if Chastel wants some for a student assigned to deal with that subject one day. I am so grateful to you, as I’m writing. But it’s not good to talk about it. Yours Klein.
This letter was sent by Robert Klein to his friends Renzo and Graziella Federici shortly before committing suicide on the hills of Settignano on April 22, 1967. We’re not interested here in the letter as a biographical document, but just because it gives full and complete expression to the thought and character of this genial scholar, who has not only revolutionised the history of Renaissance art in many ways, but, with the essay Pilgrim Spirit, shed new light on the poetry of Dante and of love poets and, with the study on The Eclipse of the Work of Art, he prophetically described the fate of the so-called contemporary art. It is not for this that we intend here to remember him. Rather, we refer to his reflections on ethics, carried out in the essays which close the last section of the posthumous collection The Form and the Intelligible (1970) and especially in the large, unfinished and still unpublished Essai sur la Responsabilité.
The central thesis of the essay is that the “I” generates itself through an assumption of responsibility that only the “I” can accomplish. The responsible subject constitutes itself, that is, through the act of which it is preassumption (or, as Klein writes, is supposé par cela-même qu’il doit expliquer). A corollary of this theorem is therefore that ethics (and, in a sense, philosophy itself, given that for Klein consciousness has the form of an assumption of responsibility) is impossible. Simone Weil once wrote that the only adequate solution to a problem is the one that contemplates its impossibility. In a similar way, Klein conceives ethics as the coherent and irrenunciable attempt to live an impossibility, to ironically persist in being any times what it can only become.
It is not surprising, then, that, as both the tone and the scrupulous attention to details of the letter suggest, suicide, as it coincides with the subtraction of the “I”, might have appeared to him as the most accomplished and resolved assumption of responsibility. This has obviously nothing to do with the reasons that led him to take his own life, but only implies that, to his eyes, the act he was about to perform was somehow an extreme assumption of responsibility.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, June 3, 2022
Dear Federicis, posthumous letters are very hateful things in the epistolary genre, I know it well, but this is a business letter — written affectionately, though. I am very sorry to create this embarrassment, but I have many impelling and constraining reasons to get off the train — the whole thing was to find the time when it could be done with as less drama as possible and the time is now. I would have liked to leave chores and cares to less kind and friendly people, but I cannot. It’s not worth bothering the Carabinieri to look for me; when you read these instructions (I’m sorry) everything was already decided days before. I went to the hills so as not to leave the corpus delicti in the beautiful room of Abbondanza, and for not annoying innocent hoteliers. I pray Mrs. Meller to take care of clearing out my things, with the participation of the concierge. All MMS, typewritten or not, are to be thrown out; perhaps leaving the photographs and bibliographic records for the study of the Tarot, and also the marked playing cards redigées utilisables, if Chastel wants some for a student assigned to deal with that subject one day. I am so grateful to you, as I’m writing. But it’s not good to talk about it. Yours Klein.
This letter was sent by Robert Klein to his friends Renzo and Graziella Federici shortly before committing suicide on the hills of Settignano on April 22, 1967. We’re not interested here in the letter as a biographical document, but just because it gives full and complete expression to the thought and character of this genial scholar, who has not only revolutionised the history of Renaissance art in many ways, but, with the essay Pilgrim Spirit, shed new light on the poetry of Dante and of love poets and, with the study on The Eclipse of the Work of Art, he prophetically described the fate of the so-called contemporary art. It is not for this that we intend here to remember him. Rather, we refer to his reflections on ethics, carried out in the essays which close the last section of the posthumous collection The Form and the Intelligible (1970) and especially in the large, unfinished and still unpublished Essai sur la Responsabilité.
The central thesis of the essay is that the “I” generates itself through an assumption of responsibility that only the “I” can accomplish. The responsible subject constitutes itself, that is, through the act of which it is preassumption (or, as Klein writes, is supposé par cela-même qu’il doit expliquer). A corollary of this theorem is therefore that ethics (and, in a sense, philosophy itself, given that for Klein consciousness has the form of an assumption of responsibility) is impossible. Simone Weil once wrote that the only adequate solution to a problem is the one that contemplates its impossibility. In a similar way, Klein conceives ethics as the coherent and irrenunciable attempt to live an impossibility, to ironically persist in being any times what it can only become.
It is not surprising, then, that, as both the tone and the scrupulous attention to details of the letter suggest, suicide, as it coincides with the subtraction of the “I”, might have appeared to him as the most accomplished and resolved assumption of responsibility. This has obviously nothing to do with the reasons that led him to take his own life, but only implies that, to his eyes, the act he was about to perform was somehow an extreme assumption of responsibility.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Telemaco Signorini, Hills in Settignano, 1885. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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