Posthumanism, Nihilism and Midrash: the dissolution of all hopes in Giacomo Leopardi’s Canticle of the Sylvan Cock

In the Canticle of the Wild Cock (1824), one of his Moral Essays, Giacomo Leopardi portrays the possibility of a lifeless, post-biological and totally dehumanized world. Life itself and human self-consciousness are depicted as temporary anomalies within the economy of universal naked material existence. At this stage, not having yet at his disposal the conceptual instruments to give these conclusions a materialistic physical foundation, Leopardi reaches them through poetical and rhetorical strategies. In particular, he reverses the midrashic figure of a cosmic rooster: far from being a symbol of awakening and regeneration, this Cock proclaims a chilling message, according to the visual angle of a dehumanized universe, and invites us to dry up all hope. This paper analyses: (i) cultural substitutions and reversals in Leopardi’s discourse, (ii) his techniques of argumentation, and (iii) the relationship between the Canticle and Leopardi’s nihilism and materialism.