Il complesso di Esaù: lingue, culture, letterature e lenticchie

This essay engages in a conversation with the theories of contemporary philosophers (such as Bachtin, Benjamin, Tynjanov, Even-Zohar, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lotman e Uspenskij, Tullio De Mauro, Andrea Moro) who have reflected on the reciprocal relationship between cultures and on the creation of narratives informed by the hegemony/ subalternity major/minor, center/periphery binaries. Its purpose is to relativize these concepts, to highlight their flaws, and to show their limits and their interchangeability both on the synchronic and on the diachronic levels. The author argues that in human cultures the minor contains the major rather than the opposite, because the subsumption within the major entails that differences and diversities are erased or elided. While the minor implies one or more majors, the major only implies itself. The minor always lacks something. So, productively, it contaminates, sets in motion, generates differences. The major lacks nothing: as a result, it is always motionless and unproductive. In the final section of the article the author applies this model to the relation between Polish and Lithuanian culture, and to the relation, in Fryderyk Chopin’s oeuvre, between the ‘major’ tradition of European music and the ‘minor’ tradition of anonymous Eastern European popular dances.