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The paper proposes a thematic reading of Aldo Palazzeschi’s L’incendiario (1910) in light of two crucial paradigms of modernity: the figure of the prostitute, as Walter Benjamin depicts it in The Arcade Project, and the theory of eroticism formulated by Bataille in his L’erotisme (1930). In the first part of my paper, I spell out a detailed reading of those poems that depict the reality of prostitution in L’incendiario, while also drawing textual comparisons with works by Charles Baudelaire, Guido Gozzano, and Gian Pietro Lucini that deal with the same topic. In the second section, I adopt Bataille’s paradigm in order to frame the voyeuristic construct displayed in the early works by Palazzeschi (cf. Saccone 1987). From a linguistic and narrative standpoint, prostitution corresponds to a new kind of pornographic gaze, dissecting bodies in a series of unrelated fetishes. Palazzeschi’s graphic description of naked aging bodies can therefore be considered as a full-fledged act of pornography. At the same time, this new gaze violates fundamental interdicts such as the distinction between the human and the animal, the taboo of incest or the taboo of necrophilia. This results in a generalized regime of obscenity, revealed in a subversive coincidence of the opposites: the virginal prostitute and the bigoted old woman, the dead and the living, the human and the animal merge and overlap, bound by the laws of the same desire. The orgiastic laughter provoked by this grotesque imagery fully resonates with a deep and radical transgression of societal boundaries, far from the consolatory and infantilizing reading of Palazzeschi’s best-known divertissements.
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