Undoubtedly one of the most widely read Italian essayists in the world, distinguished in May by the Princess of Asturias 2023 prize, under the heading of human sciences (Haruki Murakami, Meryl Streep and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse appearing on the same list), Nuccio Ordine will be able to collect his award this fall. Victim of a stroke, he died suddenly at the Annunziata hospital in Cosenza (Calabria), on June 10, at the age of 64.
As much as a scholar of impeccable rigor, this masterly scholar, with a clear verb and clear thought, was a pedagogue committed to the defense of the teaching profession, embodying a flamboyant ideal of humanism for the present time. Nothing predisposed him to it.
Born on July 18, 1958, in Diamante, a coastal town in the province of Cosenza, in the northwest of Calabria, he grew up in a neglected Mezzogiorno where the horizon is limited. If his parents only knew elementary school, his father dreams of being a lawyer. In a village without bookshops or libraries, the way is narrow, but the teacher, who teaches at home, gives little Nuccio the most precious gift: that of reading. An addiction that will never leave him. After high school – the teenager is a boarder there –, here he is studying in Cosenza. Just created (1972), the University of Calabria exempts locals from moving to Naples or Rome, and offers young unemployed teachers an unexpected springboard.
Flamme communicative
No doubt this gives the place an intellectual and political animation that marks the young Nuccio. This one soon militates in a collective student-worker, then with the organization of “left extraparliamentary” Lotta continued. But, refusing the armed struggle, he finds himself isolated. Like the Dominican monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), martyr of free thought, whose message deemed heretical (he was to be burned alive) seemed to him the most just and who, therefore, serves as a model.
As soon as he defended his thesis, “Asinus ad litteras. The literature of the donkey in the sixteenth century”, directed by Giulio Ferroni, Nuccio Ordine undertakes a doctorate in literary sciences: rhetoric and techniques of interpretation, still in Cosenza. If the pantheon of the young researcher is becoming clearer, as evidenced by his first publications, particularly on Giordano Bruno (La Cabala dell’asino, published in Naples in 1987), his future remains unclear. No positions in sight.
Everything changed when, in Paris, he met Alain-Philippe Segonds (1942-2011), director of the prestigious publishing house Les Belles Lettres, who was enthusiastic about the energy and the communicative flame of the young man. Hence the crazy project of offering for the first time a complete critical edition of the Italian and Latin texts of Giordano Bruno. Co-directed with Yves Hersant, the project, which aims to celebrate 400 years of the philosopher’s torment, delivers its real meaning from the first publications, in 1993: to affirm the presence of a thought and a commitment of an intact vitality.
Focus on the teacher-student bond
The three essays that Nuccio Ordine delivers on the heretical philosopher (Le Mystère de l’âne, translated from 1993, Le Seuil de l’ombre [Les Belles Lettres, 2003] and Giordano Bruno, Ronsard et la religion [Albin Michel, 2004] ), if they prepare Three Crowns for a King. The motto of Henri III and its mysteries (Les Belles Lettres, 2011), a tremendous immersion in the debates of the time, did not distract Ordine from his assiduous frequentation of the classics.
Like Vladimir Nabokov and George Steiner, his models in literary criticism, he is convinced that great texts always deliver an essential lesson. Nuccio Ordine dispenses a hymn to fraternity and a eulogy of the common good through reasoned anthologies which are so many manifestos to eradicate populism, thwart separatism, share the social place and universal knowledge: The Usefulness of the Useless ( 2013) to astounding success (twenty-four translations for thirty-five countries), A Year with the Classics (2015) and finally Men Are Not Islands (2018), whose title is borrowed from a meditation by the British poet John Given.
Because the militant humanist has never yielded anything of his requirement. He who, in the name of knowledge recognized as unique, was invited to teach in France (ENS, EHESS, Paris-IV and Institut universitaire de France in particular), in the United Kingdom (Institut Warburg), in Germany (Institut Max -Planck of Berlin), as in the United States (Yale, NYU) and in Latin America (Bogota, Mexico), never left Cosenza and the University of Calabria, preserving a semester to teach in the very place where his journey has begun.
Loyalty to the origin as to its vocation: to teach and to bet on the teacher-student bond which defines the university commitment. Hence his invigorating crusade for knowledge, the only viaticum to make man better, his solidarity with his friend Roberto Saviano confronting the “entrepreneurs of fear” and his defense of the teaching of culture against the utilitarian logic that entrusts to bankers the march of universities, managed like businesses.
For Yves Hersant, who shared the Calabrian scholar’s editorial commitment to the Belles Lettres for more than three decades, Nuccio Ordine “will have been the rare incarnation, in the academic world and in the world at large, of Stendhal’s virtù. That is to say, energy, both intellectual and physical, put at the service of the hunt for happiness.