Sulla scrittura di Ilse Aichinger. L’eloquenza di una parola a immagine del silenzio

The aesthetic analysis on the work of Ilse Aichinger consists of a triad formed by biography, writing and philosophy. If the nods to her life, at the beginning intimately connected to that of her twin Helga, need for understanding the choice of a writing that contracts until it dies, the word, in its training to disappear, is preparatory to the philosophy of non-existence. The historical context of Nazi barbarism is the framework within which the secret and hidden word is educated, in search of a form of living, perceived as foreign to the domestic and increases the inaccessible desire for safe living, mirror of a progressive distrust of language. The study delves into Aichinger's narrative experiments, which veer from the eloquence of the first novel towards the choice of a material silence, talented of giving shape to an unprecedented way of making memory: the confrontation with a pressing duty of testimony on the part of the survivors of an "ontological massacre" detonates into the desire to be silent, "until the depths burst painfully and inexorably and become word, testifying that behind all that has been said rests powerfully the unsaid". The individual is urged to prepare himself for an active forgetfulness that, while not removing evil acts, "heals memory, through the fulfillment of his mourning and through forgiveness, which accords a future to memory". The ethical gaze with which Aichinger exhorts readers to distrust their own voice proposes a reflection in rethinking the relationship with the other, stereotyped in the hostile foreigner: "experiencing illness" and becoming each the other of himself to experience distrust and suspicion, in an inner journey to discover the Other who lives in us and who worries us. The estrangement that is created appears as a dialectical territory of emotional tension, where antithetical elements coexist, ascribed to the concept of "places of longing, not topographically determinable, places without place", supported by the non-place of writing. Language thus loses the mimetic intention of translating the world and embodies the experience of the impossible: the materiality of the word clashes with its propensity to invisibility, giving rise to a writing that is less and less expressible, more and more resistant. Through the analysis of works identifying the poetological provocation as the only common thread, it is highlighted that silence is transferred from the word to life: the curtain opened in the cinema allows the childhood desire for disappearance to be realized and in the dark space, a new place to inhabit, the ego sinks in it to imagine itself elsewhere. The analysis leads to the conception of an existential exile, in which absentees, lost places and those who "remain in memories, with their ways of dying", participate in an almost oppressive way, in the heterotopia of counter-spaces, which know how to "juxtapose in a real place several normally incompatible spaces". Specularly the writing presses with a poetic and dialectical movement that is writing-silence-disappearing, capturing life in its finiteness and representing it through miniature forms. The encounter of these images with philosophy gives life to dry and marginal prose, which capture the meaning in the insignificant and are built by removing elements, rather than adding them. It is a style on the margins of every style, in which one stumbles with interest in aphorisms borrowed from Emil Cioran, which stands out as the only horizon of hope. The more mature discourse on existence, which reflects an exhaustive discourse on writing based on "Chance", "Existenz" and "Nicht Sein", possibility-existence-non-being, legitimizes the thought that not being born would be a perfect formula. Wr