“The Beast that – captured – remains perpetually distant”: considerations on word and death in Giorgio Caproni

Abstract

For the Italian poet Giorgio Caproni (1912–1990), language establishes a relationship with the object based on absence and lack. In other words, from a philosophical perspective tending toward nihilism, the word introduces emptiness in its attempt to grasp the being it designates—a task ultimately in vain. In his final book published during his lifetime—The Count of Kevenhüller—the poet embodies this reflection through the enigmatic image of the Beast, which, like the word itself, remains elusive and points to an unattainable referent. This essay, therefore, takes the Beast as a metaphor for the word itself to analyze selected poems from The Count of Kevenhüller (1998, 2011). The analysis draws primarily on Maurice Blanchot’s reflections in Literature and the Right to Death (2011) and on the discussions developed by Giorgio Agamben in Idea of Prose (1999) and Language and Death (2006), proposing an interpretation that views the effect of language as the displacement of its referent, erasing it or transforming it into another form of materiality, that of the sign.