Silvia Ronchey 一 Elémire Zolla. Un pensatore profetico

Silvia Ronchey, interviewed on May 28, 2022, at the Vivarium Novum Academy, on the occasion of the international conference "The Knower of Secrets: The Intellectual Legacy of Elémire Zolla (1926-2002), discusses the thought and cultural legacy of Elémire Zolla. "Zolla was rejected by the Italian culture of the time, ever since his 1959 essay "Eclipse of the Intellectual," in which he foresaw and denounced the great risk that the figure of the intellectual would be obscured and lose its function. It was a book based on the philosophical direction from which Zolla had begun, which was anything but reactionary but stemmed from the Frankfurt School, from the thought of Adorno, from doubts about the possibility of mass freedom in an alienated consumer society." Zolla was an anti-progressive in the sense that he saw all the social risks of progress. He is still a popular author, one who anticipated the spirit of the times and was condemned for opposing conformism, a conformist thought that sought to produce a kind of Marxist scholasticism. He sensed that those collective utopias of secular redemption had become "churches" with dogmas suffocating individual freedom, and he understood that these hopes would be dashed, so he sought to offer the masses another path, an individual but not individualistic path. "He is a philosopher trained in existentialist philosophy with a solid philosophical education, a great expert in Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, and close to philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who had elaborated Eastern thought in Western terms. A single civilization that was seen in a totally secular way, without ever a creed, much less a faith in a world other than the one we live in." In this sense, Zolla was a prophetic thinker who understood the needs of future generations half a century ahead of time. He was always a liberal, a person of great tolerance and gentleness, who consistently continued his journey against the grain without being distracted by criticism and censorship. A thinker is always a collective gift, and I saw Zolla as a philosopher of late antiquity who, in the dissolution of political forms and hopes in the great political constructions of the classical period, taught an inner discipline that was also a social discipline—a discipline of coexistence, of kindness, but above all of resistance, of a person who loves culture and defends himself from simplistic propaganda. "Eugenio Montale had defined him as a stoic and had said that as long as there are men who want to remain open-minded before the truth, then all is not lost." Zolla was suspicious of technological progress but was also very curious and had grasped the importance of digital technology, even if he had not yet witnessed the true digital revolution and grasped its potential for individual and collective liberation. On the one hand, Zolla reflects on the risk for intellectuals of being overshadowed by the media (now by social media)—think of the word "complexity," which has become unpronounceable in our time. On the other, he grasped the potential of digital technology, aware that every renaissance stems from a media revolution, such as that of printing, and that the digital revolution, if used well, can lead to a rebirth of true culture. Silvia Ronchey is a full professor of Byzantine Civilization at the University of Roma Tre. For over twenty years, she has contributed regularly to La Stampa and its supplement Tuttolibri. She has authored and hosted television programs for RAI, including L'altra edicola (RaiDue, 1994-1999) and Fino alla fine del mondo (RaiDue, 1999). He conducted interviews with 20th-century figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Hillman, Ernst Jünger, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Elémire Zolla. His meeting with James Hillman, in particular, sparked a lasting collaboration that found expression not only in television interviews but also in the two book-dialogues "The Soul of the World" (Rizzoli, 1999) and "The Pleasure of Thinking" (Rizzoli, 2001), which continued until Hillman's death: their last book-dialogue ("The Last Image," Rizzoli 2021) was published posthumously on the tenth anniversary of his death. Among his radio programmes, noteworthy are the series on the fall of Constantinople in Alle 8 della Sera (RadioRaiDue), the series on ancient, medieval and Byzantine melodrama in Di tanti palpiti (RadioRaiTre) and the series Contaminazioni del sacro, Il buddhismo e l’occidente and Queste anime viventi: animali, anima, mondo (RadioRaiTre).