Leopardi's and Beckett's Dianoetic Laugh: The Intermediate Space of Desire in the <i>Operette Morali</i> and <i>Krapp's Last Tape</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The desire not to desire is crucial to Samuel Beckett's and Giacomo Leopardi's oeuvre. Beckett would delve at length into the ablation of desire in Proust, in which context Leopardi's poem “A Se Stesso” is quoted. Beckett catalogues Leopardi as one of the philosophers who proposed the only impossible solution — the removal of desire — to living. This apparently negative outlook in both authors has received critical attention. My contention, nonetheless, is that while both Leopardi and Beckett initially aspire to the nothingness that results out of the dissolution of desire, neither Leopardi nor Beckett are nihilists. It is through their humor that the two authors introduce a paradoxical intermediate space for desire, where the humorous moment simultaneously contains its repression and release. It is through the Leopardian and Beckettian dianoetic laugh, analyzed in the Operette Morali, Zibaldone di pensieri and Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape, that this paradoxical desire is expressed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".