• 1 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010, (...)
• 2 Ibid., p. viii.
• 3 Ibid., p. 10.
• 4 Bennett refers to Spinoza’s notion of affect, i.e. “the capacity of any body for activity and respo (...)
• 5 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Love of Images, Chicago, University of Chic (...)

1‘New Materialism’ is a term coined in the 1990s to describe a theoretical turn in critical studies, away from the binary opposition human/nonhuman and the concomitant hierarchy subject/object and towards the recognition that matter must be reconfigured as having an affective and active part in any process of interaction with the human. A key text of this new field is Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010). Bennett asks us to abandon our “habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)”1 and instead to conceive of the vitality of matter: “My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans.”2 “We must experience,” she argues, “the relationship between persons and other materialities more horizontally”,3 distributing agency across a wider range of ontological types rather than viewing it as the human subject’s prerogative. The inanimate can be reconfigured as having the ability to produce affects and effects.4 Bennett first quotes W. J. T. Mitchell: “Objects are the way things happen to the subject […] Things, on the other hand [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back […] when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls a metaphysics of the object.”5 To achieve this reconfiguration, Bennett therefore proposes to replace the term ‘object’ with ‘thing-power.’ In her first chapter, “The Force of Things”, she writes:

• 7 Ibid., p. 4.

2Thing-power materialism explores the less specifically human kind of materiality, i.e., things’ capacity to make a difference in the world and shape the web of interrelationships of which they are a part. As first example of thing-power, Bennett looks at the debris she inadvertently came across in her morning walk. She reflects on how the found objects gathered in the grate over a storm drain (a glove, pollen, a dead rat, a bottle cap and a stick of wood) exhibit a “thing-power”; they seem “to issue a call, even if [she] could not quite understand what [the stuff] was saying”.7 Her uneasy perception is that this apparently accidental assemblage is recalcitrant to human knowledge in spite of the sensuous enchantment she experiences. For the vital materialist that she is, however, this negative realization is a learning experience; it must teach us how to accentuate our discomfort, recognize human participation in a shared, vibrant materiality, and become perceptually open to it.

• 8 M. Moore, “Ezra Pound”, in Id., Predilections, New York, Viking Press, 1955, p. 83. Moore is rephra (...)

3What does Bennett’s theoretical writing have in common with the intense poetry and lyrical prose written by Cristina Campo and two of her favorite “imperdonabili” [“unforgivable”] poets, both of whom share her “zest for perfection”,8 Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972)? At first sight, they seem to be apples and oranges, too heterogeneous both in content and form to be compared, yet I would argue that these differences help to illuminate what attracted Cristina Campo to her two predecessors, and they suggest how she understood and translated their poetry into her own poetics.

• 9 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, op. cit., p. x.
• 10 C. Campo, “The Unforgivables: A Translation with Commentary”, translated and edited A. di Serego Al (...)
• 11 For the way Campo reconciles aesthetics and mysticism, see M. Farnetti, Cristina Campo, Ferrara, Lu (...)
• 12 G. Ceronetti, “Cristina Campo, o della perfezione”, in C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, Milano, Adelphi (...)
• 13 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., p. 167 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 73].
• 14 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., p. 193 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 87]. The l (...)

4Bennett is not a poet, but rather, a twenty-first century political science philosopher. As her book’s subtitle, “A Political Ecology of Things”, suggests, her work has a strong political goal and resonates with ecological sensibility; from the start, the author declares that she intends “to promote greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities”.9 Whereas Bennett is dedicated to politics, all-inclusiveness, immanence, horizontality, the unforgivables are, on the contrary, aloof aristocrats of the spirit, “trappists of perfection”10 who are constantly engaged in a vertical, uneven confrontation with the divine (Campo and Dickinson) or aesthetic transcendence (Campo, Dickinson and Moore).11 As Guido Ceronetti commented, in his postface to Gli imperdonabili, when confronted with the horror of the lie of the world, the unforgivables practice “un’ascesi del ribrezzo” [“an askesis of revulsion”].12 While Bennett is interested in distributing agency more comprehensively across materialities, the unforgivables, on the other hand, are cultivating individual heroism, an exceptionalism which runs à rebours of the way “the mass of humanity” behaves in this “age of purely horizontal progress”.13 “Style”, Campo writes, “is similar to a lily, all light, loftiness and renunciation”.14

• 15 D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC, Duke University Pr (...)
• 16 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., p. 195–196 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 88].
• 17 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., pp. 179, 180, 194, 196 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit (...)
• 18 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., p. 196 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 88].
• 19 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., p. 175 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 76].

5The New Materialists’ attention seems to be attracted to the unattractive, if not the repellent. As we have already seen, Bennett evokes the image of a dead rat and other debris as catalyzer of her philosophical awakening, while W. J. T. Mitchell argues that “the sardine can looks back to us”. Another thinker who is often associated with New Materialism, the historian of science Donna Haraway, offers compost and humus as her central metaphors for our relation with the nonhuman (we are both entangled in a network of becoming-with) and goes as far as to propose to change the name of “humanities” into “humusities”.15 The unforgivables are, on the contrary, poets who, in their search for perfection, learn how to recognize beauty and truth in the world. “They are heroic eyes. They gazed at beauty and did not flee. They have recognized its disappearance on earth, and by virtue of that have stored it up in their minds.”16 The images repeatedly evoked by Campo in her essay—flower, star, dance, death17—are all aesthetic subjects which have traditionally been the object of poetry. Caught in “an invisible circuit of resemblances”,18 they constitute emblematic signs pointing towards “the terrible Beauty”, “this plain and horrible weight” [“quell’aereo e terribile peso”]19 entrusted to the care of the elected few.

• 20 N. Fusini, Nomi. Dieci scritture femminili, Roma, Donzelli, 1996, p. 40.
• 21 G. Ceronetti, Cristina Campo, op. cit., p. 279.
• 22 Imaginary Possessions is the title of Bonnie Costello’s critical study of Marianne Moore’s poetry : (...)
• 23 G. Ceronetti, Cristina Campo, op. cit., p. 278.
• 24 C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 244. For the concept of viaticum, see A. Botta, “Campo, D (...)

6The comparison between the earthbound writings by New Materialists and the search for elevation and perfection by the three poets analyzed here, at first sight, appears to be incongruous if not irreverent yet we should take a moment to consider the place that the senses occupy in the poetry of the unforgivables. “Perfetta sensista”, the epithet given by the critic Nadia Fusini to Emily Dickinson, could be shared also by Cristina Campo and Marianne Moore.20 All three poets rely on an intense participation of the senses each time they focus their attention on animals, flowers, or cultural artifacts (rites, catalogs, dance, fencing, knives, carpets, etc.). Their poetry is born out of mundane experiences; it presents a search for the Ineffable that is firmly rooted in their obsession for smallness, surface, ornament, and oddity. Although they yearn to attain a “dazzling insubstantiality” [“un’abbagliante insostanzialità”]21 and to appropriate “imaginary possessions”,22 they nevertheless seem to have subscribed to Arthur Rimbaud’s poetics of “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” [“a long, immense, and deliberate derangement of all the senses”].23 The viaticum necessary to the soul in its metaphysical travel towards the transcendent are, in Campo’s words, “i sensi trasfigurati, divenuti abitazioni di sublimi ospiti” [“the transfigured senses, turned into the dwelling of sublime guests”].24

• 25 Ibid., p. 236. In the years that go from the death of her parents (1964–1965) to her own death (197 (...)

7Especially in the last decade of her brief life, Campo was passionately engaged in rescuing “l’antica sensualità transcendente” [“the ancient transcendent sensuality”] of pre-modern times25. Campo extols “the supranatural senses” as the only means that can free us from the entanglements of the antinomy natural/supranatural or profane/sacred, and lead us to the coveted intimacy with the divine. She writes:

• 27 Ibid., p. 232.
• 28 Ibid., p. 237.

8She believes that by insisting in opposing body and spirit, the moderns have ended up by losing both.27 Although for Campo the access to the sacred must per force go through a “corporalità raggiante” [“radiating corporality”],28 her senses are not the common ones, they have undergone a painstaking process of refinement. In “Diario bizantino” (1977) (the poem considered to be her spiritual testament), Campo’s experience of attending the mass celebrated according to the Byzantine liturgy at the Collegium Russicum in Rome is transfigured into a carnal ecstasy. In her quest for a “mondo celato al mondo, compenetrato al mondo, / inenarrabilmente ignoto al mondo” [“a world hidden to the world, interpenetrated into the world, impossible to narrate to the world”], the poet entrusts herself entirely to her senses (“panico centrifugo / e centripeto rapimento / dei cinque sensi nel turbine incandescente”) [“centrifugal panic / and centripetal rapture / of the five senses in the incandescent vortex”]. The synesthetic experience of the Byzantine liturgy (incense, Gregorian chants, silences, flames, icons) is reiterated in the essay “Sensi soprannaturali”:

• 30 The numbers of Dickinson’s poems given in square brackets refer to Thomas H. Johnson’s edition: E.  (...)
• 31 C. Campo, “Sensi soprannaturali”, in Id., Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 88.

9Transmutation of the senses is also a requirement for Emily Dickinson in order to rise to her Occasion. We read: “I heard as if I had no Ear / I saw, as if my Eye were / on Another, / I dwelt as if Myself were out, / my Body but Within” [1039];30 and again: “not ‘Revelation’—‘tis—that waits, / But our unfurnished eyes—” [685]. Emily’s “unfurnished” eyes must learn how to retrain themselves to see Beauty in order to become “gli occhi consapevoli” (“knowing eyes”), those eyes which Campo considers to be the unforgivables’ prerogative.31 By adapting the expression “métaphore filée” [an extended metaphor, literally a “threaded metaphor”], a figure of style which denotes a series of semantically connected metaphors used in a text by a single author, we could say that this is a telling example of a “traduction filée” between two poets. Campo’s “knowing eyes” translate and incorporate Dickinson’s “unfurnished eyes” into her own poetics.

• 34 “Sensi gettati al largo” [“senses hurled into the distance”] (C. Campo, “Sensi soprannaturali”, in (...)

13Nature is experienced though the senses, starting from the haptic experience of the first line (“touch lightly”) to the acoustic (tune, guitar, song), and finally to the visual (accusatory birds). It is not clear who is issuing the command “touch” (another poet? God? Nature?), yet it is evident that nature is the one in charge of the how and when of the communication. The poet’s task is a more passive one; she ought to be patient and learn how to tune in. Her senses must be, paraphrasing Campo, as fishermen’s nets, thrown out to catch fish in unfathomable depths.34 It is as if Dickinson invites us to humility and openness before the mysteries and tempos of nature, in direct contrast with the hubristic attitude practiced by the moderns.

• 35 Max Weber, “The Disenchantement of Modern Life”, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and tran (...)
• 36 R. MacFarlane, Landmarks, Penguin Books, 2015, pp. 24–25.
• 37 “Con lievi mani” [“with gentle hands”] is the title of an essay by Campo on the moral attitude of “ (...)

14In his 1917 interpretation of the Enlightenment, the philosopher Max Weber had pointed at “disenchantment” (“Entzauberung”) as the distinctive injury of modernity;35 citing Weber, in his 2015 book Landmarks, the contemporary British writer Robert MacFarlane adds: “In modernity, mastery usurped mystery.”36 In Dickinson’s poem, the contrast between wonder and rationalism is rendered figuratively by the original opposition between lightness and heaviness; the lightness of enchantment must replace the heavy hand of reason and didacticism. We are reminded of Campo’s “lievi mani” and of Ceronetti’s comment: “La Campo ci insegna molte cose. Non le insegna con la ferula ma con ‘lievi mani’.” [“Campo teaches us many things. She doesn’t teach them with the ruler but with gentle hands.”]37 Dickinson’s poem could be easily adopted by today’s New Materialists and environmental activists. In Campo’s Italian translation, the verb “accuserà” refers to the birds, a verb which has stronger connotations than Dickinson’s “will point at” and gives an even more powerful agency to nature. The poem lets us guess the hidden presence of a vibrant nature, one which calls for our respectful and gentle touch in approaching its creatures.

• 38 Campo’s first book of poetry, Passo d’addio (1956), used verses from the “Little Gidding” section o (...)
• 39 For an interesting interpretation of Moore’s animiles, see D. Mason, “‘Another Armored Animal’: Mod (...)

15Wonder, humility and respect vis-à-vis nature is also what characterizes Marianne Moore’s poetry. Born in 1887, the year of Dickinson’s death, Moore shares with her contemporaries, the Modernists, a mistrust in the capacity of poetic language for grasping reality; to paraphrase Eliot’s 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”, language can at best shore up only fragments against the ruins of our world.38 Unlike many Modernists, however, Moore doesn’t retreat into abstract aloofness; her poetic interests are constantly directed towards the material, whether organic or inorganic. Animals, objects, plants, catalogs, and cultural practices are meticulously observed through a lens which is both magnifying and distorting; all her poetry can be viewed as an aberrant expansion and detailing of the surface that falls under her scrutiny. See, for instance, the poem “An Octopus”, where an octopus metamorphizes into a glacier, a spider, and graceful flowers such as cyclamens and periwinkles. Hypertrophic description is a tactic used by Moore to promote defamiliarization and avoid idées reçues as well commonplaces of language; instead, her grotesque distortions engage subject and object in a new, mutual relationship. In tracing the contours of her “animiles” (the term she uses to refer to “her” animals: the pangolin, the octopus, the snail, the whale, etc.), Moore excels in disorienting readers both visually and linguistically, a disorientation which becomes also an invitation to a new moral attitude.39 As the critic Nadia Fusini comments:

• 41 In the first edition of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems in 1951, there is a poem originally called (...)

16Rather than expressing the will to possess the Other, the relationship between the observer and the observed takes place through “efforts of affection”, to vary the title of one of Moore’s early collections.41 The poet strives to exercise a new type of perception, one which is based on restraint and humility rather than on a desire for controlling knowledge. Moore’s poetic world seems to belong to the nonhuman while we humans are only guests tolerated within it.

• 44 Ibid., p. 174.

18Such “enumerazione caotica” à la Borges highlights both how original and eclectic the poetic emblems created by Moore are and what attracted Campo to Moore’s poetry. The American poet calls on all five senses in order to evoke precise, clear‑cut, unforgettable images which exhibit the character of hallucinated visions. It is as if the different physical properties had detached themselves from the single object and, thanks to a metonymic network of analogies, succeed in merging with heterogeneous entities to create hybrid monsters. There are no monsters, so to speak, in Campo’s poetry, yet her predilection for paradoxes, heterotopias and metamorphoses achieves a similar effect. As in Moore’s case, Campo aims to show the invisible within the visible and to disrupt our common perception of reality. In Campo’s poetics, the teratologic qualities of Moore’s images get translated into the coexistence of paradoxical times and places: “Due mondi — e io vengo dall’altro” (“Two worlds—and I come from the other”) or in imperceptible century-long metamorphoses (“After millennia, one might say, the tree of paradise produced the lyrebird; joined hands, over the long course of time, became Gothic arches”).44

• 45 “Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autop (...)
• 46 Humility, Concentration, and Gusto is the title of an essay Moore wrote in 1949. See The Complete P (...)
• 47 D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, op. cit., p. 31.

19Moore shares with Campo and Dickinson an “unconscious fastidiousness”—they are each “meticulous, beautiful, and unyielding” to use Campo’s words. However, their compelling, maniacal attention to control the poetical form is born from the awareness of the resistance that the Other opposes to our language and intellect. In particular, in Moore’s case, Beauty is to be found in the mélange, not in bounded individuals. Her imaginary “animiles” could easily figure in the bestiary of Donna Haraway. The historian of science Haraway indulges in studying multispecies muddles and invites us to practice sympoiesis, a way of thinking collectively which looks at organisms as a series of interdependent and interrelated units and contexts.45 Sympoiesis and poetry share the same Greek root: “poiesis” to create, to make. For the activist Haraway, sympoiesis (making-with) stresses the communal effort (she wants to make everyone and everything a part of the Earth’s ecological community), while for the poet Moore poetry is born out of an individual effort. It is still a matter of creating a new language that strives to capture beauty, although only in “imaginary possessions”, i.e. fantastic inventions which can inhabit the space of poetry alone. What Haraway and Moore have in common is defiance of commonplaces and humility towards nature, together with a belief in the permeability of matter. They view our reality as a vital flow of porous matter where forms and boundaries constantly metamorphize. They also have in common a constant pleasure in their quests. For Moore, the resistance that reality opposes to language becomes a challenge to which she responds with gusto,46 whereas Haraway declares: “I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know of doing that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.”47

• 48 C. Campo, La tigre assenza, op. cit., pp. 45, 48. For a comment on “smallness” in Campo and Dickins (...)

20If hypervigilant senses and passion or gusto are the necessary viaticum in the journey towards the Other—be it the Divine, Beauty or Nature, the small and the mundane are the privileged site for the poetical quest. In Campo’s “Diario bizantino”, the access to “il mondo celato al mondo, compenetrato al mondo, / inenarrabilmente ignoto al mondo” [“the world hidden to the world, compenetrated into the world, impossible to narrate to the world”] is given through “minuscule doors” because, as she explains, “Dio non parla nel tuono: / parla in un piccolo alito” [“God doesn’t speak though the thunder: / He speaks in a small breath”].48 Dickinson famously lived the mundane experience of minimal domestic happenings with the intensity of mystical passions, although she never lost sight of the concrete aspect of their details. With insatiable curiosity and a sense of wonder, the American poet transforms those accidents into poetical gems only to realize that they have the magical power to swell into infinite horizons:

• 50 Countless are the poems where Dickinson laments not having an earthly Home. We read in poem 944, wh (...)

21The Beautiful lends itself to Revelation by means of its domestication, i.e. made familiar by its tiniest manifestations in our everyday life. The more she feels estranged from her “Home”,50 the more Dickinson indulges in observing her domestic surroundings.

• 51 C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 49.
• 52 Ibid., p. 45.
• 53 Ibid., p. 81.
• 54 Ibid., p. 51.

22Campo too believes that small doesn’t mean diminutive; on the contrary, truth is often found when it contracts into the most minute form. She writes: “Ma soltanto la verità è più grande del vero, eppure il vero fa tremare quando si mostri: cosí piccolo, cosí toccabile, cosí corruttibile. Pure è il solo involucro concesso alla visione.” [“But truth alone is bigger than the true, yet the true makes us tremble whenever it shows itself; it is so small, touchable, corruptible. Nevertheless, it is the only appearance we are allowed to see.”]51 In the essay “Les sources de la Vivonne”, she criticizes Proust and the Moderns because, in her view, they are unable to see that the small is best fitted to induce reverence for the Sacred. The essay takes its clue from the episode when the adult protagonist of La recherche sees the headwaters of the Vivonne river for the first time. He is disappointed by how insignificant the spring is compared to the rippling effects the river has had in his imagination for years. Contrary to Proust, Campo believes that: “Infinitamente più delicata e tremenda è la presenza dell’immenso nel piccolo che non la dilatazione del piccolo nell’immenso.” [“The presence of the immense in the small is infinitely more delicate and awesome than the expansion of the small into the immense.”]52 For her, poetic style is born from the simultaneous and contradictory movement between rarefaction and intensification: the poet concentrates the feeling of life into an object, while the reader feels it multiplying ad infinitum within herself.53 The poet’s vision of infinity is therefore enhanced, not hindered, by circumscribed objects: “Sola garanzia del mistero è l’irrepetibile nitore dell’oggetto reale nel quale uno spirito prese dimora.” [“The only assurance of mystery is the unique sharpness of the real object where a spirit took its residence.”]54

• 55 B. Costello, Marianne Moore’s Wild Decorum, op. cit., p. 45.
• 56 Ibid.

23Marianne Moore’s “predilections” too side with the intricacies of the small. The critic Costello writes: “In art or nature, it is the compact, the modest, the elusive, the precise that Moore admires.”55 Whenever the American poet focuses on things, animals, or mundane materials, she delights in oddities and “the deviant detail, the particular that belies the generalization”, challenging us in turn “to suspend our aesthetical and conceptual biases, to embrace the genuine as necessarily particular”.56 It is as if the shadow would detach itself from the object and make apparent what we never saw before. Her metaphors are prompted by the quest for the aberrant, not for self-evident symmetries. Moore’s poetry is an act of devotion to the simple, an enchanted gaze directed toward the humblest subject matters who claim their own rebellious particularity.

• 57 D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, op. cit., p. 31.
• 58 A. Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species”, Environmental Humanities, vol. I, no. 1, (...)

24In order to celebrate the agency of the nonhuman, the New Materialists too have focused their attention on the tiniest creatures, making them the protagonists of our “humusities”. Whereas “humusities” is the new term suggested by Haraway to dethrone the human subject from its privileged position within humanities, the term she suggests to use instead of “Anthropocene”, “Chthulucene”, is equally indicative of her preferences for the small nonhuman. Haraway’s Chthulucene takes its name from a tiny eight-legged spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino counties. As an inhabitant of the dark recesses of the underworld, the spider reminds us of the invisible, chthonic powers that rule on our environment. Haraway proposes to make it into the emblem of our era. “Making a small change in the biologist’s taxonomic spelling,” she writes, “from cthulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I propose a name […] the Chtulucene […]. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chtulucene.”57 The neologism is meant to invite humans to an earthbound epistemological attitude, one which mimics the probing character of the spider’s feelers in the subterranean world. She adds: “Those who tell Gaia stories or geostories are the ‘Earthbound’, those who eschew the dubious pleasures of transcendent plots of modernity and the purifying division of society and nature.” In her article, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species”, another cultural critic associated with New Materialists, Anna Tsing, concentrates her attention on mushrooms and fungi as emblems of the most intriguing examples of interspecies solidarity networks. Like spiders for Haraway, mushrooms for Tsing become “indicator species for the human condition”.58 In these recent telluric approaches to the complex interdependency of the human and nonhuman, it is evident that matter, in its most insignificant formations, assumes a cutting-edge role. To paraphrase Haraway’s title (Staying with the Trouble), it is trifles that make most trouble.

• 59 E. Paroli, “Cristina Campo, una ‘filatrice d’inesprimibile’. Il valore simbolico della fiaba nel pr (...)
• 60 C. Campo, La tigre assenza, op. cit., p. 297.
• 61 E. Paroli, Cristina Campo, op. cit., p. 394.
• 62 The central place that fairy tales occupy in Campo’s poetics as both aesthetic and cognitive model (...)

25Paradoxically, in all the writings by the authors analyzed here, the small gains predominance precisely because it exceeds its concrete boundaries and reveals itself to be enmeshed in a complex network of either rhetorical analogies (in the case of the three poets) or in heterogeneous conglomerates (New Materialist sympoiesis). Cristina Campo conceives of the world as “una serie inesausta di analogie da disbrogliare” [“a ceaseless series of analogies to be disentangled”],59 analogies that transform the most concrete entity into “a numinous object”.60 In spite of the deep mystical substratum of her poetics, Campo’s numinous objects preserve all their materiality. As the critic Elena Paroli writes, Campo is engaged in a “strenua ricerca di analogie del mondo fisico capaci di ricondurre all’altrove, al mondo mistico-religioso agognato […], l’immanente materialità del mondo” [“a strenuous quest of analogies from the physical world, analogies capable of leading the immanent materiality of the world back to her coveted mystic-religious world”].61 Campo’s analogies work to resurrect the magic power that things had in fairy-tales or in rituals, a power that, in her opinion, is lost in today’s desacralized world.62 Here is how she describes Proust’s Recherche:

• 64 Ibid.

26Proust evokes his mana out of a vast circle of similitudes of “concretezza lampante” [“glaring concreteness”].64 Flowing smoothly from object to object, from present to past, those similitudes allow the French writer to weave a verbal network which captures all levels of our existence.

• 65 C. Campo, The Unforgivables, op. cit., p. 171 [C. Campo, Gli imperdonabili, op. cit. p. 75].

27Like Proust, the Italian poet believes that poetry isn’t limited to the aesthetic domain; poetic style is rather a pervasive attitude which also embraces an arduous modus vivendi. Perfection, she argues, is “a divine injury” which must be experienced in nature, art, and ethics. In praising Moore’s perfection, Campo writes: “Uno solo comunque, è l’affar suo [di Moore], la sua lode e il suo salmo: l’ardua e meravigliosa perfezione, quella divina ingiuria da venerare nella natura, da toccare nell’arte, da inventare gloriosamente nel quotidiano contegno.” [“Moore has but one concern, her praise and her psalm: that demanding and marvelous perfection, that divine offence which is to be venerated in nature, to be touched in art, discovered gloriously in everyday behavior.”]65

• 66 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univer (...)

28The shuttling among different domains as epistemological praxis is also central to the work of Bruno Latour, a French philosopher of science who is often referred to by the New Materialists. In his 1991 book, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour argues that whenever we interact with our reality we are caught up in intricately interwoven stories—what he calls imbroglios. If we want to understand our world, we should stop pretending that we can keep biology and society, or nature and culture, or nonhuman and human, separate. Reality cannot be explained by partitioning it into pure, self-standing categories; rather we should accept that we are ourselves hybrids, engaged in a constant work of crisscrossing and translation among hybrid others. For Campo and Moore as well as for Latour, such an epistemology translates into an ethical imperative: we owe it to the complex nature of our reality to make visible the delicate networks connecting the heterogeneous parts of those complex ensembles. The poets give us a luminous vision of an interpenetrated world, one where human relations with the nonhuman are grounded in respect and wonder, whereas Latour invites us to acknowledge the discrete fabric of the nature-culture continuum and hence to reject the illusion held by the Moderns of being able to control the world by parsing it into careful distinctions. “The less the moderns think they are blended, Latour writes, the more they blend.”66

• 67 N. Fusini, Nomi, op. cit., p. 37.

30Such an impression of unbridgeable otherness is typographically rendered by the dash, one of the most distinctive characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry. As Nadia Fusini comments: “Quella lineetta al posto dell’e preserva la solitudine; è la disciplina che Emily impone alle parole dopo averla imposta al proprio cuore.” [“That dash instead of and preserves her solitude; it is the discipline that Emily imposes on her words after having imposed it on her heart.”]67 Her idiosyncratic use of dashes—often replacing commas or the conjunction “and”—dots the continuum of her lines on the page with frequent visual gaps. By typographically separating the entities that are evoked in the poems precisely in name of their similarities, dashes expose their non-coincidence. The lack of conjunctions denounce the lack of logical explanations; dashes thus become material reminders of how irreconcilable the tenors and vehicles of Dickinson’s estranged metaphors remain. Dashes could also be viewed as signs of the recalcitrance of things, i.e., the single parts refusing to be subsumed by the whole (the Absolute Other) and declaring instead their independence. Fusini espouses this interpretation when she argues that, in a twist of extreme desperation, Dickinson turns her experience of lack into an act of rebellion:

• 69 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, op. cit., p. xvii.

32While, for the poets under consideration, numinous objects, “animiles” and spiritual fragments are recurrent tropes evoked to highlight the heterogenous quality of the vital matter they encounter, Jane Bennett and New Materialists describe that same peculiarity with far less poetic terms, such as assemblages (Latour, Bennett), hybrids and imbroglios (Latour), sympoiesis (Haraway), and hyper-objects (Timothy Morton)—to name only a few of the most frequently cited neologisms. “Assemblages”, in particular, is a term that has encountered the scholars’ favor. Bennett, for instance, acknowledges that the concept of thing-power she had initially introduced risks presenting material agency in still too individualistic terms (i.e., the vitality of an object per se); she therefore decides to move from the vitality of a discrete thing to “the tendency of matter to conglomerate or form heterogeneous groupings”.69 She enriches the picture of material agency by borrowing the notion of “assemblages” (“agencements”) from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Assemblages are relational since they redistribute the capacity to act from an individual to a socio-material network of people, things, and narratives. Here is how Deleuze defines assemblages in his 1977 interview with Claire Parnet:

• 71 D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, op. cit., p. 37; Haraway and Tsing, “Tunneling in the Chthulu (...)

33Sympathy and symbiosis are also at the core of Donna Haraway’s process of sympoiesis which she discussed in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble. Sympoiesis too in effect relies on the recognition that those assemblages have their own capacity to act; it also requires adopting a practice of care towards the multispecies muddles which compose our environment. Hence Haraway’s predilection for “troubled” and “tunneling” stories as the best way to tell the earthlings’ “contaminated diversity”.71

• 72 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by B. Massumi, Minneapolis, University (...)

34In their 1980 treatise A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari continue using the concept, specifying that they will call an assemblage “every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow of matter-movement”.72 Thirty years later, in her 2010 book Vibrant Matter, Bennett too figures materiality as a Protean flow of matter-energy and the “thing-power” as a composed form within that flow, one where heterogeneous elements assume different forms of agency, each with their own trajectories, potentialities and tendencies. Deleuze, Guattari, and Bennett assume that bodies never act alone and an event is never solely determined by the intentions of a single body. In this Protean swarm, the categories of subject and object therefore cease to exist since any object is pulsing with life and has the power to shape the web of interrelationships of which they are part. As in Dickinson’s poetry, in Bennett’s philosophy there is an attempt to reconceptualize the relationship between the whole (the system) and the part. In organic traditional models, each member obediently serves the whole; assemblages, on the other hand, are volatile but functioning, ad hoc groupings endowed with their own rebellious agency. Like Dickinson’s recalcitrant fragments, assemblages are the centrifugal force that puts in question the cohesiveness of the whole and the omnipotence of its ruling center.

• 73 The poems were first published in 1963 in Mistici [Mystics], a collection of poems and texts edited (...)

35Finally, I would like to point out their different genealogies in order to show how, paradoxically, Campo’s unforgivables and today’s materialist philosophers end up adopting similar epistemological approaches, although they do so while coming from two opposite directions. The New Materialists place themselves in a line of Western philosophical thought which runs through Democritus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Vico, and, as we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari and Latour. They draw on this tradition to paint a positive ontology of matter, an ontology meant to rescue matter from brute mechanism and automatism. Campo, on the other hand, was close to mysticism and negative theology, first to the poetry written by the sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher and poet San Juan de la Cruz (in 1963, under the pseudonym of Giusto Cabianca, Campo translated “153 pages of his poetry”);73 later, thanks to the historian of religion Elémire Zolla, she became increasingly interested in the Eastern mystical tradition. This is how another translator of Juan de la Cruz, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes the paradoxes of mystical theology in his 1974 introduction “‘La notte oscura’ di San Juan de la Cruz” [“‘The dark night’ of Juan de la Cruz”]:

• 75 C. Campo, La tigre assenza, op. cit., pp. 183–185.

36Campo was particularly attracted to the oxymorons of knowing / not knowing and presence / absence as recurrent tropes in the poems by Juan de la Cruz she translated. We read: “Per arrivare a sapere quello che non sai / devi andare per dove non sai” (‘Modo per arrivare al tutto’); or “Per arrivare a sapere tutto / non voler sapere nulla in nulla”; or “Per arrivare a essere tutto / non voler essere nulla in nulla” (‘Modo per avere il tutto’). [“If you want to arrive at what you don’t know / you must go where you don’t know” (‘The Way to Arrive at Everything’); or “If you want to be able to know everything, don’t try to know anything about anything”; or “If you want to be everything / don’t try to be anything in anything” (‘The Way to Have Everything’).]75

• 76 G. Agamben, “The ‘Dark Night’ of Juan de la Cruz”, PMLA, op. cit., p. 494.
• 77 Ibid.
• 78 C. Campo, “Sensi soprannaturali”, in Id., Gli imperdonabili, op. cit., p. 246.

37Agamben goes to argue that the influence of negative dialectic extends from mystical theology to modern poetry (that is, poetry written after the first industrial revolution onward). The “dark night” of the mystical experience becomes even darker in modern times, since modern poetry espouses a negative theology of the absolute kind. According to Agamben, “Saint Juan’s mystical theology still presupposes the existence of a positive theology and of a Holy Scripture, from which it derives its own legitimacy and guarantee. Modern poetry instead does not recognize any other holy scripture but itself.”76 Modern poetry’s fleeting epiphanies dissolve themselves and lead to inevitable shipwrecks. Agamben writes: “Through this mystical tension [i.e. presence vs absence], modern poetry fatally found itself in the paradoxical situation of having a ritual but one which is split from any positive mythology, and of having a liturgy, but one to which no definite theology corresponds.”77 As modern and mystical poet, Campo partakes of both poetics. Although she shares the presupposition of a positive theology with San Juan de la Cruz, she also shares the Moderns’ obsession with the inadequacies of a language which has severed its link with reality. Hence her need to anchor her epiphanies in a language that is capable of communicating the vibrancy of matter, i.e. the presence of the spiritual where it is apparently absent. She reads Dickinson and Moore as fellow poets who are engaged in a similar moral quest, turning negative dialectics into a positive affirmation. Instead of lingering on the disappearance of the sacred, each are seen to celebrate the resistance of the nonhuman to be circumscribed by the human as well as the resistance of the human to be subsumed under the divine. Rather than a demoniac world, we are presented with a swirling vital flow to which we can gain access only through a “stato di veglia acuta” [“stance of sharp awareness”] of the senses and a precise, impeccable language.78

• 79 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, op. cit., p. 14.

38In spite of their alignment with the Western tradition of materialism, the New Materialists too have taken interest in the power of the negative, most specifically in the 1966 work, Negative Dialectics, by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno tells us that we are constantly haunted by the discomforting feeling of how inadequate the representation of any object is. Yet, according to Bennett’s interpretation, such considerations do not lead Adorno to reject all modes of apprehension. Negative dialectics is the name given to “the method Adorno designs to teach us to accentuate this discomforting experience and how to give it meaning. […] [Negative dialectics is] a powerful reminder that ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a reminder’ and thus that life will always exceed our knowledge and control”.79 New Materialists too, as Campo’s unforgivables, use the excess of vitality found in the nonhuman to turn the unbridgeable gap of negativity at the base of their thought into an uncontainable life-affirming force.

• 80 C. Campo, “Parco dei cervi”, in Id., Gli imperdonabili, op. cit. p. 146.
• 81 ”Parentele vibranti / come le porcellane” (C. Campo, La tigre assenza, cit., p. 88) is Campo’s tran (...)

39Bennett’s definition of thing-power, quoted at the beginning of this essay, appealed to the “strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness”. The recalcitrance of matter to fall into pre-established categories or to be recomposed into an ordered whole is also what allows Campo, Dickinson, and Moore to overcome the limitations of our knowledge and tap into a Protean flow of energy that had long been silenced. The unforgivables have learned how to listen to the spiritual voice which talks from the margins, the seams, and the minute and which can best be sung through what Campo calls “parole-corolle” (“corolla words”). “Parole-corolle” present a heterogeneous melange of culture and nature, human and nonhuman; they have “their maximum taste” (“il massimo sapore”) “whenever they are driven by the vital energy as if from a matrix and bloom flower-like into the clearness of the spirit” [“quando siano sospinte dalla forza vitale come da una matrice e sboccino nella chiarezza dello spirito come fiori”].80 Organic language is the tool used by each of the three poets in order to witness the fluidity of forms, to get in touch with vibrant matter, and to detect the “parentele vibranti / come le porcellane”81 which connect “sympoietically” the human and the nonhuman.