In his book “Der Untergang von Kasch” (1983, German 1997) Roberto Calasso tells an anecdote from the report of the poet and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso about his “trip around the world with the Romanzoffischen discovery expedition in the years 1815-1818”. When the travelers dock at an island that is not shown on the maps, they believe they are the first Europeans to go ashore here. Chamisso receives permission from the residents to contemplate the idol they worship. He quickly recognizes that the framed etching is smiling at him from the portrait of a European beauty icon, the French Salonnière Juliette Récamier. Despite urgent inquiries, the residents did not want to say how the island had come about, “because they regarded statements about the origin of the gods as blasphemy”.
The world tour of the author and publisher Roberto Calasso led through the universal library, and wherever he invested he looked for and found ancient and modern gods and idols. The discomfort with the secular world drove him on. He considered believing in the message that God was dead to be a mistake, even if the message was true.
He was not pious, but his life was interested in radicalists of the faith, like Blaise Pascal. Calasso was born in Florence in 1941, became an obsessive cinema-goer as a pupil in Rome and immersed himself in the picture atlas of the art historian Aby Warburg as a student in London at the Warburg Institute. He had a passion for images that shaped all of his books, not only when, like “Das Rosa Tiepolos” (2006, German 2010), they were about painters.
Calasso’s authorship was linked to the editing work from the start
His older mentors Roberto Bazlen and Luciano Foà came from the Turin publishing house Einaudi, the publishing house Cesare Paveses and the murdered anti-fascist Leone Ginzburgs, who founded the publishing house Adelphi in Milan in 1962 and brought in the young Roberto Calasso. The publisher’s first major project was the critical Nietzsche edition by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, based on the manuscripts in Weimar, which became an intellectual event in post-war European history.
From the beginning, Calasso’s authorship was linked to the editing work at the publishing house, of which he became managing director in 1971 and to whose program – including outsiders of aesthetic modernism such as Lautréamont, Austrian literature around 1900, non-European and European mythology – he contributed famous laundry slips and blurbs. When Berlusconi wanted to get hold of Adelphi a few years ago, Calasso saved his publishing house with quickly obtained private capital.
He encountered the African legend of the Kingdom of Kasch early on, in which the king was ritually killed at a certain star position, and entered it into his cartography of the transgressions, metamorphoses, and transformations of the many gods as well as the one god. He traced the sacred origins of power, literature and the arts to India, whether he retold Hindu myths in “Ka” (1996) or the Vedic hymns, myths and rituals in “Die Glut” (2012, German 2015) Analyzed culture in the north of the Indian subcontinent.
He campaigned against a concept of society that only sociologists define
The end of this book is about the question of why the imbalance between gods and humans had to be balanced by killing. This question is the black thread in Calasso’s encyclopedic work. It leads to the connection between sacrifice and culture, which he pursues in his last work “Der himmlische Jäger” (2016, German 2020). Hunting and killing animals by humans are not archaic in origin. They only become possible through the culture process – the discovery of fire, the manufacture of tools – and allow the diet to be changed from roots, fruits, etc. to meat consumption.
Not unlike his anthropological debauchery, Calasso’s artist portraits – about Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire or Tiepolo – had a current vanishing point. They ran – for example in “Die Literatur und die Götter” (2001, German 2003) – towards the warning that literature and art will become impoverished if they make their peace with the secularized world. The myth paraphrase takes up so much space in his work not least because it is responsible for the afterlife of the gods. His retelling of the Greek gods in “The Wedding of Kadmos and Harmonia” (1988, German 1990) was his greatest public success.
With constantly renewable polemical energy, Roberto Calasso took to the field against the sole rule of a social term that only sociologists define. He had said goodbye to Marx at a young age (“The discoverer of historical laws will always have something of the insane inventor of useless patents.”). In “The Secret History of Senate President Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber” (1974, German 1980) he kidnapped Sigmund Freud one of his most prominent case histories, in constant opposition to the formula “Where it was, I shall become”.
He never proceeded systematically, always with anecdotes, similarities and analogies. From the fusion of the universal library and passion for images, he developed the form of his books, the learned kaleidoscope. Sometimes it spun really fast. Now it has come to a standstill. Roberto Calasso died on Thursday in Milan, just under two months after his eightieth birthday.