"There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing"
About this Quote
Leopardi is skewering the kind of cultural confidence that shows up precisely when a culture has lost the nerve, skill, or patience to build anything lasting. His jab is surgical: some centuries, “in the art and other disciplines,” announce a total remake of the world not because they’ve discovered new powers, but because they “know how to make nothing.” The insult isn’t just incompetence; it’s the compensatory swagger of people who substitute demolition for creation and call it progress.
The line works because it flips the heroic myth of modernity. “Remake everything” usually reads as liberation, a clean break from stale tradition. Leopardi reads it as a tell: when you can’t produce beauty, coherence, or truth, you produce manifestos. You declare the old dead, then treat the vacancy as achievement. The parenthetical “apart from everything else” is a cold aside, implying the century may have other sins too; this one is simply the most aesthetically revealing.
Context matters. Leopardi writes from early 19th-century Italy, amid Romantic fervor, revolutionary rhetoric, and a European culture intoxicated with novelty and system-building. He’s also personally allergic to easy consolation: his pessimism isn’t a pose so much as a method for detecting self-deception. Underneath the aphorism is a theory of cultural decline: a society can keep talking about reinvention long after it’s lost the craft conditions that make reinvention real. “Nothing” here isn’t empty space; it’s a void dressed up as a movement.
The line works because it flips the heroic myth of modernity. “Remake everything” usually reads as liberation, a clean break from stale tradition. Leopardi reads it as a tell: when you can’t produce beauty, coherence, or truth, you produce manifestos. You declare the old dead, then treat the vacancy as achievement. The parenthetical “apart from everything else” is a cold aside, implying the century may have other sins too; this one is simply the most aesthetically revealing.
Context matters. Leopardi writes from early 19th-century Italy, amid Romantic fervor, revolutionary rhetoric, and a European culture intoxicated with novelty and system-building. He’s also personally allergic to easy consolation: his pessimism isn’t a pose so much as a method for detecting self-deception. Underneath the aphorism is a theory of cultural decline: a society can keep talking about reinvention long after it’s lost the craft conditions that make reinvention real. “Nothing” here isn’t empty space; it’s a void dressed up as a movement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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