Carlo Michelstaedter

Carlo Michelstaedter (Gorizia, 1887 - Gorizia, 1910) was an Italian-speaking thinker born in a city that today lies on the Italian-Slovenian border and then belonged to Austria-Hungary. Although he is remembered mainly for his philosophy, he also drew, painted and wrote poetry. His main work, Persuasion and Rhetoric, grew out of his university thesis and remains one of the most distinctive texts of early twentieth-century Italian philosophy.

Born into an upper middle-class Jewish family, he studied in Florence, where he focused on Greek and Latin. His thesis examined persuasion and rhetoric in ancient philosophy, and drew on Hegel, Marx and Schopenhauer to describe an organised society that keeps the individual in a state of dependence. After returning to Gorizia in 1909, he finished the work in late 1910. On 17 October of that year he took his own life with a gunshot, at a moment of exhaustion and family conflict. The reasons for his suicide are still debated.

For Michelstaedter, ordinary life is a kind of absence of life, shaped by the pursuit of pleasure and the search for security. Persuasion means self-possession, reached by living in the present as if each moment were the last. His ideas were later recognised by Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, who saw him as a forerunner in their own fields.