Time and Festivity

Furio Jesi was a scholar who started publishing essays in academic journals at fifteen. By the time he died young in 1980, he had produced a large and varied body of work. Time and Festivity, edited by Andrea Cavalletti, gathers what he considers Jesi's best essays.

The selection runs from Jesi's pioneering work on myth and politics to his reflections on time, festivity and revolt. It looks at texts by Rimbaud, Rilke, Lukács and Pavese, and at the mythological language of the biblical story of Susanna. The essays are carefully annotated and referenced.

Cavalletti also contributes a first-person account of Jesi's intellectual life. Together, the essays and this account serve as a guide to the method and approach at the centre of Jesi's thought, and show how his intensely personal via negativa may trace back to his early declaration: 'All I have ever written is poetry.'