The pleasure of repetition: towards the foundations of the polemic with psychoanalysis in Italo Zvevo’s novel Zeno’s Conscience

Italo Zvevo’s novel Zeno’s Conscience embodies the experience of the disintegration of the consciousness of the modern subject, which splits in a situation of traumatic conflict between tradition and modernity. Written at a time of radical social transformation in early twentieth-century Europe, Zvevo’s novel offers an unexpected lens: its political-historical background is tinged with a polemic with the psychoanalytic tradition. The almost synchronous publication of Zvevo’s novel and the work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a turning point for psychoanalysis, as a result of a comparative analysis, allows us to speak not just of a chronological coincidence, but of a conceptual tension with regard to the issues that permeate both Zeno’s Conscience and Sigmund Freud’s treatise.

For Zvevo, the motif of pleasure in life becomes the horizon against which the story of the narrator’s healing is told, filled with an experience of self-criticism that can be extrapolated beyond the scope of the novel. Written as a direct polemic with the psychoanalytic movement of those years, Zvevo’s novel traces how tendencies of decay and destruction permeate not only traditional forms of life, pushed to the margins of history by modernist trends, but also affect the most progressive, including radically modernist practices. The paper argues that Zvevo bases his critique of psychoanalysis on a reconsideration of the role of compulsive repetition for the pleasure principle. It is shown that the narrator’s quest for cure is inextricably linked to an understanding of pleasure that must overcome the fragmentation of the modern subject’s sensory experience. In particular, the analysis of the novel’s protagonist’s relationships with women suggests that the opening of the horizon of the unconscious has an ambivalent character for the experience of pleasure.