Re-reading Manzoni at the time of COVID-19: Contagion, ethics and justice

Abstract

The article contributes to the rediscovery of the depth and complexity of Manzoni's thought, which too often has been reduced to an uncritical expression of Catholicism. Narrating the plague that struck Milan in 1630 in The Betrothed and the History of the Column of Infamy Manzoni reveals political, social, and cultural mechanisms remarkably similar to ours while struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic. The essay analyzes the apparatuses of contagion, the crucial importance of language, the devices of alienation favoring the loss of the sense of objectivity during the 1628 plague, and the pandemic of our time. For Manzoni, the recovery of reality in its bare complexity is possible, to a certain extent, by referring to the two fundamental lines of his thought. On the one hand, the philosophical irony with deep roots in Friedrich Schlegel, European Romanticism, and the reaction to Kantian philosophy. Romantic irony triggers the ethics of writing that runs through Manzoni's novel. On the other hand is the religious direction that Manzoni finds expressed in the Gospels, human conscience, and the idea of “eternal justice”. It emerges in crucial moments of the novel and its appendix, in what Emmanuel Levinas called the “epiphany of the face” which is considered in intersection with Paul Ricoeur's idea of “oneself as another”. Manzoni sees all the problems inherent in both reason and religion. In trying to keep them united, he participates in the most advanced Romantic view of religion and politics, what Frederick Beiser has defined as “one of the most creative and interesting attempts in the history of philosophy to surmount the classical dilemma between humanism and religion.”