Canfora to La7: “Meloni’s lawsuit? Mine was a metaphor that comes from Lucretius and Tocqueville, I wouldn’t dramatize it”

Guest of Half past eight (La7), the philologist and historian Luciano Canfora responds to Lilli Gruber on the meaning of the expression “neo-Nazi at heart”, for which he was sued by Giorgia Meloni in April 2022 during a debate on the war in Ukraine at the Enrico Fermi scientific high school in Bari, when the leader of Brothers of Italy he was not yet prime minister.
Canfora, who since the announcement of Meloni’s complaint has been keen to underline that his was a “political metaphor”, was yesterday sent to trial on charges of aggravated defamation against Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who in turn asked for a compensation of 20 thousand euros.

Professor emeritus of the Aldo Moro University of Bari recalls, first of all, the widespread revival of the far right in Europe: “In countries like Hungary, Finland, the Baltics, Croatia, Ukraine itself there are movements which explicitly refer to the fascist and in particular Nazi past. TO Budapest the ‘day of honor’ which celebrates the German SS who resisted the Red Army. The Baltics have recovered their collaborators of the time and celebrate them as national heroes, the Bandera Ukrainian falls into this category.”

Then he goes into the merits of the expression that cost him Meloni’s legal action: “The expression ‘in the soul’ comes from Lucretius and by a great liberal thinker, Tocqueville, who in an autobiographical page defines his profound feeling of aversion towards democracy as ‘the bottom of the soul’ – he explains – This is a cultured metaphor that writers of various eras, from the great Lucretius to the no less great Tocqueville, have used to talk about their remote feelings, what Freud would call Id. And, in my opinion, we could use Tocqueville’s expression, ‘the depths of the soul’, with good success”.

Canfora concludes: “Naturally each of us has a remote, cultural, historical, biographical starting point. So, I wouldn’t dramatize how someone makes this expression, which is part of a literary way of expressing in summary and in an aside from a discussion that has a much broader development, a detail that I would dare to place in the field of in-depth analysis. What scientists call psychology.”