Roberto Calasso Orden de los libros

„Das Buch aller Bücher“ ist der zehnte Teil von Calassos monumentalem Werk, das sich mit der Bibel, insbesondere dem Alten Testament, beschäftigt. Der Autor bietet eine nüchterne Nacherzählung biblischer Geschichten und thematisiert das Opfer, während er die Rolle der Götter in der Kulturgeschichte des Nahen Ostens würdigt.

A beguiling new reimagining of one of the most ancient and mysterious origin myths of human civilization 'The Flood didn't come suddenly as a big surprise. It came at the end of a long, tormented story. Men just went on multiplying and the noise they made was ever more irksome . . . I remember days of desperation.' A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans and decided to send a flood to destroy them. But Ea, the god of fresh underground water, didn't agree. He advised one of his devotees, Utnapishtim, to build a quadrangular boat to house humans and animals, and saved these living creatures from the Flood. Rather than punish Utnapishtim for his disobedience, Enlil, King of the gods, granted the mortal eternal life and banished him to the island of Dilmun. Thousands of years later, when Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked and arrives on that very same island, the two begin a conversation about courage, loss, salvation and sacrifice. Following Calasso's masterful retelling of ancient Greek myths in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Indic myths in Ka, this richly imaginative work delves into the crucible of our collective consciousness to reimagine the origin stories of one of the earliest human civilizations.

Di Roberto Bazlen, universalmente noto come Bobi, non poco è stato scritto, ma il più rimane da dire e capire. Bazlen attraversò la prima parte del Novecento come un profilo di luce imprendibile. Nell’ultima fase della sua vita, fu l’ideatore di Adelphi, su cui riversò la sua sapienza, che non era solo quella – stupefacente – sui libri, ma investiva il tutto. L’idea e la fisionomia della casa editrice risalgono a lui. Quando Bazlen mi parlò per la prima volta di qualcosa che sarebbe stata Adelphi e non aveva ancora un nome mi disse: «Faremo solo i libri che ci piacciono molto».

A splendid reimagining of key stories from the Bible, by the author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. A man named Saul is sent to search for some lost donkeys and on the way is named king of his people. The queen of a remote African realm travels for three years with her multitudinous retinue to meet the king of Jerusalem and pose him a few riddles. A man named Abraham hears a divine voice speaking words that reverberate throughout the Bible: 'Go away from your land, from your kindred and from the house of your father toward the land that I will show you'. In The Book of All Books, Roberto Calasso weaves together stories of promise and separation from one of the founding texts of Western civilisation. These tales of grace and guilt, of the chosen and the damned, cast many Biblical figures and indeed the whole book in a light as astonishing as it is disquieting. The Book of All Books is part of a larger work which began with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and includes The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, and The Celestial Hunter.

'When hunting began, it was not a man who chased an animal. It was a being that chased another being. No one could say with certainty who each of them were.' Connecting Greek and Egyptian myth, the stories of poets, shamans and gods, Roberto Calasso takes us on a spellbinding voyage that traces the beginnings of our detachment from the animal world; from the landmark evolutionary moment in which humans became the hunter rather than the prey. Roaming through time and across cultures - from the Palaeolithic era to Turing's Machine - The Celestial Hunter delves into the crucible of all our stories- the source of human grief, guilt, resilience and redemption with which we have wrestled throughout history.

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians- in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. Yet once contrasted with the period between 1933 and 1945, when the world made a partially successful attempt at self-annihilation, the new millennium begins to take on an unprecedented form. What emerges is something illusory, ever-shifting and occasionally murderous- the unnamable present. This book, the ninth part of a work in progress,is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

Roberto Calassos Essay ist in drei Kapitel gegliedert. Das dritte Kapitel, zwei Seiten lang, beschreibt einen Traum Baudelaires als Vorahnung der zusammenstürzenden Zwillingstürme (9/11). Im zweiten Kapitel, »Die Wiener Gasgesellschaft«, werden die Jahre 1933 bis 1945 behandelt. Es präsentiert Zitate deutscher und internationaler Autoren, die ihre Eindrücke von Nazi-Deutschland festgehalten haben, darunter Louis-Ferdinand Céline, André Gide und Walter Benjamin. Der Autor führt durch ein Panoptikum, in dem Naivität zunehmend dem Entsetzen weicht, und bietet Perspektiven auf Deutschland jenseits der deutschen Erinnerungskultur, basierend auf unmittelbaren Erfahrungen. Das erste Kapitel, »Touristen und Terroristen«, greift gesellschaftskritische Motive aus Calassos letztem Buch auf und schärft sie. Gesellschaft wird als Gegner von metaphysischem Rang dargestellt, gegen den nur metaphysische Waffen wirksam sind. Diese Arsenale hat die säkularisierte Gesellschaft jedoch geplündert. Die Sorge, in der Immanenz zu ersticken, prägt das »unnennbare Heute«. Alles, was auf ein Anderes, Jenseitiges verweist, hat sich in pervertierter Form dienstbar gemacht: Ritus, Theologie, Metaphysik, selbst das Denken und die Sprache. Calasso interpretiert den Terrorismus, insbesondere den heutigen islamistischen und den historischen, als ein Symptom dieser Situation. »Nichts ist wahr, alles ist erlaubt.«

The Ruin of Kaschtakes up two subjects- "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien rUgimeand all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes.

Roberto Calasso transponiert Schrebers berühmte »Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken« (1903), deren Wahnsystem über alle Erklärungsversuche seit Freud hinweg seine Faszination behalten hat, in einen Roman, in dem Mythos und Ironie untrennbar verschmelzen – um Schrebers geheime Geschichte ans Licht zu bringen.

Mit dem Untergang von Kasch legt Roberto Calasso eine Kritik der Moderne vor, die sich nicht wissenschaftlich, nicht analytisch, sondern in Geschichten äußert: Das Zeitalter der Revolutionen erzählt - wie es Schiffbruch erlitt. Durch das Buch führt als »Zeremonienmeister« Talleyrand, der klarsichtigste und verruchteste, modernste und archaischste aller Politiker. Er stellt uns den Hof von Versailles vor und das Indien der Veden, die Abtei von Port-Royal und die Galerien des Palais-Royal, Marie-Antoinette, Bentham, Goethe, Fénelon, Baudelaire, Marx, Chateaubriand, Napoleon, Joseph de Maistre, Stirner, Sainte-Beuve... Jede dieser Figuren ist mit jeder anderen verbunden – und alle führen uns zu demselben Ursprung zurück, der Legende von Kasch.