Abstract
In La coscienza di Zeno (1923), Italo Svevo's protagonist, Zeno, engage in a determined battle with nicotine, smoking a repeated “last cigrette” that tastes, time and time again, of victory. I contend that the documentation of Zeno's addiction suggests an indictment of canonical literary Tuscan, tacitly invoked as an illusory regime of health. Countering the rigidity of linguistic form, the erratic force of Svevo's infamous “scrivere male” together with the incessant stop and start of Zeno's attempts to renounce nicotine emerge as an alternative regime founded on a principle of potentiality. Reiterating the central concern of “L'uomo e la teoria darwiniana,” an essay in which Svevo suggests that humanity's greatest strength lies in the fact that man remains a being devoid of formal finality, Zeno's decision to hober between the resolution and the renunciation, between the reality of sickness and the promise of health, constitutes the only ethics of subjectivity equipped to incarnate the infinite promise of potentiality.
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